Communities and Nature Bond - Boundary Creation in Bali
A Quest for Better Living Place
Fransiska Prihadi

When the term community is used, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a place in which people know and care for one another. The word community it self means a mixture of living things that share an environment. The individual living beings can be plant or animal; any species; any size.1 Sharing interaction in various ways is the character of a community. The best force of community is that all individual subjects in the mix have something in common.

All human beings generally are instinctively connected to a certain community after having identified their specific kind of social interaction need. People often have a misconception that modern urban development works better just because they have been designed by architects or urban planners. A better living place does not only refer to those things that we can see or feel such as infrastructure, road, buildings, public place, but also depends on the unseen factors which involve things beyond culture, class, and religion. Through a process of socialization people start to create relations with each other and within the context of community they start to think about doing things which can improve their quality of life, which can or can not be depending on a certain distance boundary.

Community lays claims on their members. The interesting situation that occurs in Bali is that actually the local and international community works in contradictory claims for their members. The local community (the Village – Desa Adat) has a tight but yet democratic rules that control the members. Meanwhile the international community (of which I took the Bali Hash House Harriers as the role model) has a very loose rules and yet still maintain their boundary.