劉可強 Prof. John KC Liu – June 15, 2025 – Taiwan, ROC
Re. This assignment
Friendship and Community
A real, live and healthy community is most often not always harmonious and peaceful. There are fights and differences as in any family, competition for scarce resources such as bickering over funding for school lunches vs. elderly meals, spatial disputes among neighbors over parking spots and garbage disposal, presence of strangers and troublemakers requiring official intervention, etc. All these are normal aspects of a community. So, what is the role of friendship in a community? Resolving disputes requires mutual trust, arbitrating over limited resources requires reciprocity, mediating among different characters requires empathy.
Story:
An empty neighborhood site surrounded by various groups of residents with different cultural backgrounds became a garbage dump since the community was unable to agree on a plan for a neighborhood park. Something had gone wrong, and this community had become stagnant and unhealthy.
The source of the problem was that different factions of the community were not speaking to each other. Older people, because they came from different cultural backgrounds, were set in their ways and reluctant to engage other people in the community. Young people, while they do make friends with fellow classmates of different backgrounds, most often they keep to their own cultural circle away from school. The issue is how to transcend cultural boundaries and encourage interaction and friendship among both adults and young people in order to jointly face the problem with the garbage dump site.
A neighborhood participatory design workshop was conducted wherein young people of the community played a key role in bringing different factions of the community together. Two particular activities are notable. The first is to find common values about the environment. When people of different backgrounds were asked about what they liked and what they disliked about the neighborhood, most of them pretty much agreed on what’s good and what’s not so good. By presenting the results of this survey back to them, they were surprised by how much they have in common. That is, about the environment, they shared the same values. This was an important first step in engaging the different factions in speaking to each other and to appreciating each other’s values. This was the beginning of friendship among neighbors who had not talked to each other before.
The second activity was to engage young people in planning a new park for the site. Design teams composed of young people from different backgrounds came up with designs for the park and one was chosen by all those who participated to be implemented. For the first time young people of this community felt they could come together and collaborated on a common project and see it through to completion. In the process they formed strong bonds with each other. This helped enormously with the community self-management of the park, including resolving disputes, mediating conflicts, organizing maintenance, etc… in short, through bonding and the friendships that were developed over the course of jointly facing the issue of the garbage site, the community has reversed its stagnancy and began to return to a healthy and vibrant neighborhood.
This is a story of a concrete example of how friendship building is central to making healthy communities,
John
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