Both theory and empirical evidences indicate that the existence of communities-in-place is the precondition for every possible resilient society (where the expression “community in place” stands for a network of people who collaborate being connected with their physical context).
In the highly connected societies (at least the most modernized part of them), both communities and places are progressively melting in loose networks of individualized, delocalized people. The result is a growing social desertification, (intended as the dramatic reduction of the quantity and diversity of social forms) with a parallel increase in social fragility (intended as the reduction in the ability for a society to face unforeseen events).
Facing this trend, a contra-trend has emerged: driven by different motivations, a growing number of people leave mainstream ways of thinking and doing and choose to adopt new ones. That is, to re-build collaborative relationships among them and with their context. Doing so, they produce a new kind of community in place, the nature of which must be better understood.