Communities Are Not Fungible
Summary
JA Westenberg argues that communities are not interchangeable and cannot be treated as fungible assets, unlike dollars or oil. Through urban planning history and social science concepts, the piece contends that the value of a community lies in unique, time-bound relationships and social capital, which are fragile and rarely recover when communities are displaced or migrated to new platforms. The article critiques the tendency to engineer or migrate communities like products, emphasizing the irreversibility of social ties and the high cost of displacement.