This should be interesting. Thessy (pronounced Tessie) is creating a start-from-scratch community based not just on proximity, but shared values. Somewhere between a commune and a New York City co-op, Thessy is planning a ‘co-housing’ community where membership is predicated on alignment with a set of value enshrined in a Manifesto. A key element of this is engagement with your neighbors beyond a nod on the way to the trash chute (this is radical for New York City).

Utopian Communities

This is not without precedent. There were several start-from-scratch communities in nineteenth century America built around progressive ideals. Known as the Utopian Movement, they were social experiments, many with the mission to counter the social disintegration that their members believed accompanied industrialization

Arguably neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s infamous Park Slope, packed with champagne socialists and Militant Mothers (a friend of mine was hissed at in a playground for bottle-feeding her baby) are also places where people share proximity and pretty explicit progressive values.

But this is going to be much more. It’s going to be an “intentional community”: a term used to describe the Utopian Movement and their modern equivalents, with a bit of commune thrown in. Each apartment will be self-contained but their will be shared spaces such as kitchens.

The degree of interaction will be much higher than the dreadful Park Slope where arguing over a sausage’s degree of organic-ness in the Park Slope Food Coop constitutes community!

Purpose/Vision

Interaction is mandated in Thessy’s Manifesto. Residents will share their skills by giving lectures about their passions and interests in shared spaces. There will be voting, bartering with an alternative community currency, and “engaging with the community in the common spaces for cooking & meals, music, painting, play, gardening and yoga”.

And residents will be selected not just on the basis of their robust tax return, but their robust values:

“Eco, sustainable, green, multi-cultural, ‘ yes we can’ attitude, living with kids & elderly, learning/teaching/sharing as a core value, participatory, efficient use of resources, mind & body fitness, gay/bi/trans/hetero, political activism, secular, individual freedom, consensus process to arrive at decisions, techno-hippy, intelligent, fun, warm, loving, edgy, unique.

Not: scared, timid, rigid, righteous, pretentious”

(By the way, I don’t know why New Yorkers tolerate the humiliating ordeal of sharing their personal financial details with their neighbors to be granted permission to buy an expensive apartment and then see those same neighbors every day knowing that they know how much you do or don’t earn. Bizarre).

Thessy is starting off with the two most important glue ingredients:

Number One. She’s laying the bedrock of a tight and stable community by writing a Manifesto that is explicit about the values to be shared. Values are the foundation of a robust community because they’re things we use to define ourselves as individuals, and by extension, the community. It’s a profound identification that’s hard to dismantle.

Number Two: She’s predisposing the community to have elevated levels of interaction by making it a condition of membership. The increased frequency of people rubbing together, around shared interests, needs and support, and especially values leads to the formation of sticky things like partnerships and friendships.

In other words, she’s starting with the two key ingredients of Social Glue: Purpose/Vision and Rubbing People Together.

So we have an interesting opportunity to see the birthing and growth of something approaching a Utopian community in a city not known for its love of intimacy and ideals. All Thessy has now is the Manifesto. It’s a pretty good one, and being explicit about the mission, shared values and expectations of members’ behavior, is a recipe for a pretty tight community.

Actually she has more. She is pulling together fifteen people to help refine the Manifesto, and recruit like-minded members “based on values, interests and fit”. And she has the confidence borne of seeing it work before. She part of her life in a squat-like community in Dusseldorf characterized not by dingy mattresses and meth, but fiscal responsibility, liberal values, an artistic environment and skill-sharing.

A social experiment

Stand by for more on how Thessy takes this from Manifesto to bricks and mortar; from idealism to reality with all the attendant obstacles and triumphs that this ambitious attempt at glue-creation will encounter.

I’m especially interested in a key principle she is employing. She hopes that the values she articulates in the Manifesto will attract those who align with them, and repel those who don’t. She does not plan to enforce these values. She’s prepared to see how the community evolves from this solid, values-based start. From what I have observed of community, lack of enforcement of values can lead to abuse and/or dilution of those values, which can alienate members for whom they are important.

This is clearly an interesting social experiment and I can’t wait to see what transpires.