PrincetonUniversity
 

Sociologist Suzanne Keller explores community and its role in daily life in her newest book.

photo: Denise Applewhite

Keller chronicles the growth of a community over 25 years

by Karin Dienst
Likening herself to a naturalist exploring a previously unmapped terrain, sociologist Suzanne Keller has spent 25 years researching how residents of a planned development labored to translate their aspirations for community into the give and take of life in a real community.

Keller is the author of the book, "Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality," published this year by Princeton University Press. Using as her case study Twin Rivers, New Jersey's first "planned unit development," she depicts the difficult path its residents traveled to learn to live together.

Built in 1970, Twin Rivers is home to 10,000 residents and is located in nearby East Windsor. Keller monitored how residents in this complex of townhouses, apartments and common spaces for recreation forged the political and social institutions to meet the diverse needs of a middle-class population. By means of "participant observation" at town meetings and common recreational sites, hundreds of interviews and ongoing surveys of collective records, Keller's research reveals how the residents learned to share, relate to neighbors, cope with social conflict and develop ideas for the common good.

Inspired by the legacy of social and political theorists from Plato to de Tocqueville and on to the present day, Keller sought to discover principles of a life in common for contemporary citizens eager to obtain their share of the American Dream. She grappled with timeless questions, such as: How can community be generated in a society that stresses self-advancement? How can it be maintained over time? And what makes community of continued salience in the era of cyberspace? Above all, Keller was interested to learn how an aggregate of strangers creates an identity of place, with shared goals, viable institutions and a spirit of community.

Keller joined the sociology faculty in 1968 and was the first woman to receive tenure at the University. Her teaching and writing focuses on leadership and elites, family systems and community. She next plans to study retirement communities.

In an interview, Keller discussed her book and the need to continually resurrect questions about community and its role in daily life.

Why write a book about community?

Because community is so difficult to attain and yet so essential. I believe that people need community, both for roots and as a place where they feel a sense of identity and belonging. Too many people today are lonely and disconnected as the scale of contemporary life dwarfs them. It is not a lack of a partner or a family. It is an existential loneliness.

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