The Glue
Subculture and cultural competence as contributors to strengthening our urban communities
A community is a system formulated by a group of people who live in the same area. For this group of people to call themselves a community they tend to have similar backgrounds or work towards common goals that benefit them as a group. A strong community (especially an urban community as diverse as my own) needs cultural competence, intercultural communication, willingness, generosity, protection, consistency, and a united front to gather and spread resources. Urban communities must fragment together as many common values and common history as possible to become one with each other despite their cultural and geographic differences. These common backgrounds and goals ideally shape a subculture that helps bind this community’s identity with pride and protection.
Some strengths in Urban communities come from being hardworking and resourceful. Government, medical and food resources are more abundant. This could be because of the higher population of the working class/taxpayers. The urban community is responsible for the rapid growth of tech and education. Innovation and job opportunities are the result of the pressure of the overpopulated city trying to make great things happen. I think we have earned ourselves the titles “The City that Never Sleeps” and “The City of Dreams” for these reasons.
The weaknesses of a culturally diverse and crowded community struggling to thrive, commonly lie in cultural incompetence and lack of intercultural communication. Cultural barriers make it difficult for this community to cover the needs of everyone in it. Resulting in a lack of empathy, willingness, generosity, and consistency. Combine these weaknesses with a community that overworks itself to pay for high rent, other bills, and expensive groceries. And you have a community full of lonely people suffering from a large variety of mental and physical health-related issues. This issue causes the next generation to be even more disconnected from its community.
Living in an Urban environment makes my community’s strengths and weaknesses polar to each other. We rely so much on our strengths that it is difficult to reach and amend our weaknesses. Innovation vs tradition: Seeing it from a scale perspective, the common values and interests my community has grasped are being hard-working and working many hours. The rest of the common values that go hand in hand with the concept of community have been sacrificed for the sake of innovation. Making my community’s balance inconceivably harder to adjust.
Like community, subculture is formed through the process of collecting common values and goals to help create a group’s identity and purpose. In an urban community, it is easy for families to see their neighbors as isolated or unprioritized contributions to our family’s or individual well-being. Exploring what we have in common can be the window to connecting a community.
Community events welcoming different cultural activities can help create better cultural competence among community members. Exploring and supporting local restaurants and other local businesses from different cultures. Dependency among each other can help the group empathize and bond with each other. Our perception when our neighbors express concern for an issue or personal problem can help us empathize. For instance, empathizing with a neighbor’s day-to-day struggles as a real issue instead of a burden to hear can help our perception. In an urban community, in the same way, you can’t choose your siblings, you can’t always choose who can be your neighbors. After all, an undeniably familiar concept we all have is that we are all human.
Reference
Chen, L. (Ed.). (2017). Intercultural communication. De Gruyter, Inc.. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/citytech-ebooks/reader.action?docID=4843210&ppg=13
Delanty, G. (2003). Community. Taylor & Francis Group. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/citytech-ebooks/reader.action?docID=1395365&ppg=39
Knowledge, Economy,Creativity, and Urban Regions. (2008). In T. Yigitcanlar, K. Velibeyoglu, & S. Baum (Eds.), Creative Urban Regions: Harnessing Urban Technologies to Support Knowledge City Initiatives. Information Science Reference. https://link-gale-com.central.ezproxy.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CX2860500009/GVRL?u=cuny_centraloff&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=de20c174
Poole, S. (1970, January 1). An exploration of the tension between tradition and Innovation. SpringerLink. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-77350-6_3#citeas
