Dwelling in Expanded Biotic Communities: Steps Toward Reconstructive Postmodern Communities - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 324

community. Respect for persons is balanced against members taking a collective interest
in the well-being of the community in which they cannot help but to live and to dwell. This
allows us to value communities in terms of how this balance is struck. Diverse, tolerant,
open communities that respect the intrinsic worth of individuals will result in greater
amounts of complex, intense, harmonious, and novel satisfactions of the entities that
make up the community. Plus, the harmony between the individuals will contribute to
the overall harmony and balance of the community. Postmodern communities will seek to
embody various community features and structures, moral as well as physical that strike
a balance between the need for harmony and the importance of the individual.* There
will be different degrees in the ways communities will reflect this attempt to balance the
individual and the community. But it will be possible to rank communities to the degree
that individuals live and act as persons-in-a-community, as described here.
The principles presented here, on features of reconstructing postmodern communities,
may seem idealistic or difficult to achieve comprehensively in these modern times; how-
ever, the need to move in a direction of creating communities that can sustain and grow
responsibly is unprecedented for growing Southwest cities. Many cities have continued to
grow endlessly without ever attempting to address the disconnect between people and the
environment or communities in nature. The next section will discuss real-life examples of
communities in the Las Vegas, Nevada, region and how the principles of reconstructing
postmodern communities apply in these examples.
18.4 My Critique of Two Existing Las Vegas Communities
In this paper I have presented five features that I consider essential for any new recon-
structive postmodern community. This new view of community provides a theoretical
foundation for those models of communities that seek to cross the boundaries between
human and nonhuman worlds. This view also allows me to understand some of the prob-
lems that face my own city of Las Vegas. With this basis of understanding, I will discuss
two existing planned communities in the Las Vegas area and comment on areas where
these projects fall short of these ideals for this type of community by default, design, or
disaster (Figure 18.1).
18.4.1 Green Valley
Many residents of Las Vegas live part of the postwar American dream of suburban living
in communities of individual homes. One such “community” is known as Green Valley, a
slight misnomer since it is neither green nor a valley. This master-planned community is
subdivided into more than 30 “neighborhoods,” many with tall walls surrounding them
and security gates limiting access and fostering isolation. This isolation of the individual
is encouraged by other community features. There is little public transportation, forcing
residents to use personal automobiles, which in turn requires wide highways and few
pedestrian sidewalks. There is no physical or spiritual center of the community, only strip
malls at major intersections. The architecture of many of the homes places the garage in the
* See Whitehead's discussion in Adventures of Ideas , pp. 290-292 of “order” and “love” as principles that reflect
this fundamental balance.