Community is entering a highly transformative period.

Research has indicated that people need to be connected to one another to be healthy and happy, and society is beginning to appreciate that social cohesion and connectedness is vitally important for society as well as individuals.

Our perceptions of what community involvement is, no longer fits within the traditional models and boundaries that we are used to. The emergence of more collaborative ways of thinking encourage community building formats and projects where people don’t simple feel invited to participate in a project, but are instead integral to designing the project themselves.

Social Spaces has evolved out of the need to identify the underlying mechanisms for new models of citizen initiation and participation in communities, and aims to encourage fresh approaches that keep pace with the change around us.

Social Spaces works with the belief that a transformative new set of expertise and knowledge is emerging, with which to develop new community building skills, that needs to be understood, valued and spread.

Happiness and Wellbeing
In the relatively new branch of Positive Psychology, researchers have focused less on mental illness and have instead examined the patterns and behaviours of happy, healthy, successful people. Their research shows that good connections and relationships with other people is integral to personal happiness and physical wellbeing.

Self-efficacy
Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy (Bandura, 1986) has highlighted that although environment influences people enormously, that people are also able to change and shape their environment. The experiences that result from a person impacting on their environment through their own actions leads to an increased sense of agency, a confidence to bring about change.

Social Capital
Social capital is the stock of personal connections and co-operation, and spirit of goodwill and reciprocity, available as a resource individuals and communities – the network that can be drawn upon to make things happen in a community.

Social capital is one of the resources which an actor can use, alongside others such as their own skills and expertise (human capital), tools (physical capital), or money (economic capital). It is more powerful than any of these, as it is not ‘owned’ by any one person – but that also means that it can be more fragile.

In a report published in December 2008, Changing UK (Dorling et al, 2008) the BBC reported that community life in Britain has weakened substantially over the past 30 years, with people becoming more lonely and isolated due to factors including professional mobility, student influence, and communities which are diverse but not integrated.

At the same time, there is a growing focus on this problem, and a groundswell of interest in ways in which we can foster better communities.

Active Optimism
Personal optimism is largely viewed as an attitude of mind, or a cultivated way of managing our cognitive responses to our thoughts and experiences. External input such as listening to the news, colours our perspective and makes us feel more or less positive about the future.

These perspectives are vitally important, because overly pessimistic mindsets result in inactivity and passivity. Phrases such as “what’s the point” encapsulate this paradigm. Psychology has studied the relationship between pessimism and inactivity in detail.

However, until recently there has been minimal study into how our own actions affect our attitudes. There are now a number of new studies that suggest that our actions effect our perceptions of society and its future.

The Cambridge Primary Report (Alexander, 2006-2009) described that young children feel less pessimistic about the future of the environment in schools where they were given opportunities to take part in environmental activities.

In a research paper More to Give (Bridgeland et al, 2008) only 20% believed they were leaving the world in a better condition. Those most actively engaged in volunteer work feel less pessimistic and are more likely to increase their service than those not engaged. 

These studies suggest that engaging in positive social activities can make us feel more positive about society and optimistic about the future.

Loneliness
In a new book on the effects of loneliness, the authors John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, show that loneliness can lead not only to depression, but ill health. Further, their research shows that loneliness can initiate a debilitating negative spiral of social difficulty and isolation.

Resilience and Networks
Resilience is often viewed as a personal trait. Increasingly however, we are developing a deeper understanding of how resilience works. Currently resilience is discussed more often in the context of ‘protective factors’, a set of internal and environmental elements, which work together to bolster our ability to cope with change and adversity.

A significant longitudinal study on resiliency followed 698 infants born in 1955, from Kauai, an island of Hawaii, over a 30 period (Werner, 1989). The study was designed to discover if some individuals were more resilient than others to developmental difficulties such as birth complications or poverty.

The researchers made many individual observations on resilient individuals, but nearly all these observations concerned their personal relationships with other people: adults during childhood and adolescence, and later with friends and spouses. Resilient people engaged other people in relationships that they found supportive and helpful.

More recent research on happiness in networks shows that our happiness is connected to the happiness of our friends. One additional ‘happy friend’ can boost our personal happiness by 9% according to the report by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. C (Fowler & Christakis, 2008)