Arcade Fire, the recent rock band phenomenon, has wowed the online world with its HTML5 video called "The Wilderness Downtown". It's a unique experience in which you program in the address of your childhood home and then watch a customized music video that puts you right back there, running, searching, trying to find yourself in the neighbourhood that shaped you. It is an emotional thrill to watch (hint...don't move the pop-up windows...they'll keep changing as they need to).
Watching the video made me think about the power of our connections and all that they bring. When I research resilience, themes that keep emerging are the protective power of a sense of belonging, attachment to our culture, and our sense of place in this world (sometimes that takes the form of nationalism, or xenophobia, but it can also be expressed as enduring ties with one's cultural and historical roots). A recent study by a colleague of mine, Orit Nuttman-Shwartz, living in an Israeli border town on the front lines of the war with Gaza, has shown that a sense of belonging to where one lives actually protects against the post-traumatic stress that occurs when bombs beginning falling on you. My own research with Palestinian youth suggests a very similar experience for people on the other side of the conflict.
Arcade Fire may not be proposing anything so grand, but the message is the same: an attachment to where we grew up is a foundation stone for our capacity to live well in the future, especially when that place brings with it a sense of belonging, cultural continuity, and values that underpin a productive purpose to our lives.
Of course, those places we grow up are not always benign forces for good. The recent release of Ben Afflect's movie The Town tells the story of bank robbers who come from the same Boston neighbourhood. That idea that a community can pass along values related to crime is not necessarily fiction. In fact, human geographers and criminologists are using what is called geomapping to identify the home addresses of people in prison. Not surprisingly, there is a remarkable predictability to where they come from. In other words, there are city blocks and rural communities that are much more likely than other places to produce criminals. While many police forces use geomapping to target gang activity, it is also helpful to those of us concerned with building resilience to know which communities lack the resources they need to prevent their kids from drifting into crime.
The factors are plentiful. To simply blame individuals for becoming criminals misses an important truth: where we live does matter and does shape our trajectories through life. This is no liberal excuse to deny people personal responsibility. It acknowledges, instead, that once we are shuffled to the margins of our communities, denied access to good education, given less police protection, and suffer the consequences of a smaller tax base, the results are predictable for many. People must adapt as best they can with the stigma they suffer. A few will always make it, but building more prisons isn't going to stem the flow of delinquents who grow up to be adult offenders. Just as Arcade Fire's flirt with our emotions reminds us, where we grow up shapes who we are, our values, and beliefs about ourselves.
Of course, communities that look disadvantaged from the outside may not be as bad as they look either. Academics like Delbert S. Elliott and his colleagues at the University of Colorado have shown that poverty is in itself not a clear predictor of delinquency. Even privileged communities can have high rates of delinquency and drug abuse. Communities with what is called "high context," places where people know each other and create a web of supports, seem to be the communities that raise the healthiest children. Indeed, the sterile suburb may not produce as happy or healthy a child as a poorer inner-city community which has the social capital to create a sense of belonging for everyone.
This is even more profoundly shown in a recent book called Arrival Cities by Doug Saunders. Instead of asking what's wrong with slums and all the transitional places where newly arrived urban dwellers reside, Saunders asks "What's working?" Turns out a great deal. Those communities past the end of the subway line are actually desirable places where people move to get a hand hold on the dream of prosperity. Often choosing to live there rather than remain isolated on farms, people in these communities are able to swap information and teach each other about how to succeed in the city. There can be a strong sense of community and values of hard work and the motivation to succeed. People are of course desperately poor, and some arrival cities are more likely to be full of those traumatized by war or forced displacement than those seeking economic migration. But when these communities are chosen (if there can be choice between rural poverty and an urban slum), then there may also be strengths unseen by outsiders.
Those living in these slums may not have street addresses like the urban poor in The Town, or the millions who have watched Arcade Fire's video, but where they live can still be a vital place that sustains them just as the suburban street where I grew up sustains my sense of well-being today and into the future.
(For more thoughts on this, please follow me on Twitter @MichaelungarPhD)
