Tools for building community : An Examination of 13 Hypotheses

The move toward defining “best practice” in urban development, a search which is central to the preparations for the Habitat II conference, is encouraging and represents a new paradigm in the quest for improvement. This paper examines a number of propositions, hypotheses if you will, related to that change. These propositions focus particularly on the implications of the shift on the meaning of community, the need for transferable tools, the limitation of state-based and market-based housing solutions within this context, the essential nature of networks, particularly the overlapping networks of neighbours, relatives and friends with networks of locally-based production and trading, labour and service providers, and the implications of all of these elements on sustainability.