Rethinking Community Quality of Life in Latin American Countries

Abstract

The community is a totality which is meaningful to the people that form part of it. In this sense community is more than a geographic concentration; it is a concept that implies the inclusion of diversities and their being allowed to share within it. It is related to social support, intersubjective, participation, consensus, common beliefs, and a joint effort which aims at a major objective: intense and extensive relationships. Quality of life is a multidimensional concept (Bramston 2002) and comprises objective and subjective components (Cummins and Cahill 2000). Quality of life in the community is a specificity of quality of life in general, and community well-being is also a predictor of general well-being (Sirgy et al. 2008). Community implies the existence of social cohabitation which is constructed by society in itself as a foundation of democracy and, in this sense, according to Lechner (2002) politics should also take care of people’s subjective experiences. Collective space in communities has become essential to citizens’ rights, as it should guarantee, in terms of equality, the appropriation of neighborhood space by different social and cultural collectives, genders, and age groups; it is the space of representation in which a society becomes visible and at the same time constitutes a physical, symbolic, and political space. The beginning of this century presents us with new models of community which imply that the traditional concept has changed, together with the way people participate in community spaces. Today, the place of residence is not necessarily the space people identify themselves with, and where they participate. The present social transformations have affected the community’s distinctive traditional characteristic as contained within space limits, to the idea of being formed by a few members that daily meet each other face to face. On the other hand, it is necessary to acknowledge the advent of the digital era and the construction of virtual communities; thus, we should nowadays make reference to communities rather than community. The aim of this chapter is to rethink the concepts of community and community quality of life in Latin American countries, reflected by the voices of actual persons; considering the importance of conversation in the intersubjective relations among people in the community and the construction of a collective scenario for the building of a common ground.