Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality (review)

How does a group of strangers with no common history to unite them and no formal rules to guide them develop the social bonds and the shared identity that form the basis of community? This is the basic question that drives Suzanne Keller's analysis of more than 30 years of data collected at Twin Rivers, New Jersey's first Planned Unit Development or PUD. The first residents of Twin Rivers arrived in 1970, settling into a brand new development that would come to consist of a mix of housing types, where townhouses outnumbered both single-family homes and apartments. The development was organized into four separate "quads" or neighborhoods, each with its own recreational facilities (including a pool and tennis courts). The new residents were largely young, middle-class families with little experience as home owners or as suburbanites. Racial and ethnic diversity was minimal. While many were drawn to Twin Rivers to enjoy the small-town life the developers advertised, others were attracted by the relatively affordable housing costs.

The process of creating a sense of community is a long and hard one, and, as we learn from the case of Twin Rivers, it is also characterized by fits and starts. The long-term nature of community building highlights a major strength of the book, namely Keller's perseverance in staying the course from before the first residents moved in to the present. Her presence at the "birth" of Twin Rivers enables us to see how challenges both large (such as a developer who does not provide all that is promised) and small (such as inappropriate behavior at the pool and irresponsible trash disposal) serve to bring people together and give rise to a smaller cadre of leaders to act on the group's behalf. Yet even as late as the 1990s, there seemed to be divides that were difficult to overcome, including differences between early settlers and more recent residents, and between owners and renters.

To tell the story of Twin Rivers, Keller collected an impressive amount of data using an array of complementary methods (participant observation, analysis of a variety of documents, intensive interviews and various surveys of residents). While the multi-method strategy would normally be a strength of this kind of work, the survey data presented seemed strangely limited and thus raised questions about their validity. Specifically, while Keller describes her three surveys as consisting of 350 cases (for the 1970s survey) and 1,000 cases for the 1980s and 1990s each, the univariate distributions presented had far fewer cases, typically about half the reported sample size and even as few as 71 for the 1980s. There is little discussion of the nature of the survey design and none as to why so many cases were apparently lost in the analysis. The story of Twin Rivers also suffers from a significant degree of repetition across the 10 chapters forming the heart of the book and from some confusion regarding the exact population being studied (i.e., at times the discussion appeared to refer to all residents of Twin Rivers, while at other times it appeared to focus on those living in the townhouses). The overall book, moreover, suffers from a disjointed structure. The three chapters that begin the book discuss the meaning of community, historical forms of community and theoretical and conceptual issues, but are not sufficiently integrated with the story of Twin Rivers; the final chapters also largely stand apart from the rest of the book. The summary of key findings that follows the chapters on Twin Rivers is superfluous, but might have served as a good outline to avoid the problem of repetition. Thus, while the story of Twin Rivers can tell us a great deal about the formation of community, the weaknesses of the overall package serve to distract the reader from all the story has to offer.