Community

The Structure of Belonging

By: Peter Block

Narrated by: Tamberla Perry

Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

Community: The Structure of Belonging, Second Edition

As a response to the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, there is greater awareness that a deeper sense of community is desperately needed. But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the dominant on-the-ground practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged. We still believe community is built with better messaging, more persuasion, and social events for people to get to know each other better. All of which is naïve.

This is why Peter Block was moved to create an updated edition of his classic book on restoring a sense of common purpose to our neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. Block helps us see how we can change the existing context of community from one of deficiencies, interests, and entitlement to one of possibility, generosity, and gifts. As he explores the nature of community and the dynamics of transformation, he outlines six kinds of conversation that will create communal accountability and commitment and even describes how we can design physical spaces and structures that will themselves foster a sense of belonging.

In this new edition, Block draws on a decade of putting these ideas into practice to emphasize what has worked and extract those thoughts that were nice but had no durability. He explores how technology, instead of bringing us together, has driven us into more isolation. New examples show that community building can be a more powerful way to address social problems than more traditional policies and programs. And encouragingly, Block insists this is really simple, once we decide it is essential. He offers a way of thinking that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

©2018 Peter Block (P)2018 Peter Block

Useful, Novel, Worthwhile Read.

The narration might as well have been read by Siri, and personally I found this tone detracted from enjoyment and engagement of the content especially in subsequent relistens when the lacking novelty frankly makes it more difficult to give the thought narrative sustained attention.
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When Block encourages the reader to rethink and be critical of norms for commuting, the text can be enlightening and illuminating.
He is most excellent in providing ways to reorient conversations from less legitimate forms of individual dissent —cynicism, blame and othering, obstinance into more pro-social or productive community centered directions.
When however, Block turns to prescribing solutions, he has a hard time pretending to hide his religious zeal for social engineering and interior design- don't get him started on tables.
Only the last 4 or 5 Chapters are... particularly annoying to this point (That sounds like a lot, but it's a big text).
The author intends to construct a more natural frame (context) for beuracratic civics while fundamentally devaluing the natural eminence of community in order to strike a balance betweening pleasing those with interest in power, capital, creature comforts and those with interest in, well, people.
It seems in effect he believes we simply need to create more 𝒉𝒖𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒆 ways of manipulating people and their environment into behaving and interacting in the way we want them to.
One should expect as much from a consultant, but, in short —No.
Beyond that, the text itself on whole is a delightful glossary for rethinking contexts where we may too often get stuck.

For many, this book will challenge their tried-and-true modes of thinking about and facilitating the production of social cohesion. The influence of Buddhist thought is fairly prescient across different subjects, but only in a clearly American pragmatist/behaviorist style of interpretation.
Many good ideas to test in your own life or social/meeting spaces.
Community was a worthwhile read if only for its relative monopoly with respect to available texts to consume which cover the topics it does.
I'll likely want to listen over it again or buy a physical copy to come to a more whole conclusion, but I'd still recommend it.

Important and Powerful

Peter lays out the status quo and a better possibility for community in a way that is effective and engaging. An important and powerful book.

a whole new world has opened up

so many ideas for how problems are solved have been turned on their head in the very best way. opening up possibility and trusting in our neighbors to accomplish it. this is a must read for anyone who gathers people or deals with problems.

Important book, Monotonous performance

Love the book, horrible audible!!
The performer sounds like Siri. It gets boring and hard to listen to for more than one paragraph at a time.
Don’t waste your money on it

Worthless babble

I really tried, but couldn’t get through this book. It was full of wandering generalities. Deleted it