Thinking of community as an aspirational and contestable idea: A role for the arts in creating community

Community-based arts have had a clear influence on public arts and culture policies in countries such as Australia, United Kingdom and the United States and yet the word ‘community’ tends to be used in such policy discourses in shallow and ambiguous ways. This article notes that the very idea of community has divided western scholars for over a century, with recurring suggestions that industrialization, urbanization and/or globalization have made it largely irrelevant. However, some have noted that the search for community is both ancient and enduring and that the idea of community has perennial symbolic importance. Against predictions that attachment to community would fade away it has been noted that the desire for belonging to community has gathered force in a world of increasing global flows. New communication technologies enable most people in the world to belong to a greater array of real and virtual communities. While virtual communities will often have specific membership criteria, problems emerge when particular people or groups of people feel excluded from participation in local or place-based communities because such exclusions can have devastating consequences in a world of great flux and uncertainty. Gerard Delanty has explained that communities only come into existence in the contemporary world to the extent that they are ‘wilfully constructed’. This article argues that community-based arts have a significant role to play in the creation and projection of communities. It argues that we should engage with the complexities embedded in the word community rather than turn to alternative terminology, such as ‘social capital’. However, the word community needs to be used thoughtfully and carefully rather then loosely and divisively.