Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This Bachelor Thesis within the subject of Rural Development aims at exploring a specific community and how it works as alternative way of living. The community, Brazier’s Park, is located in the Southern countryside of England, near Oxford. Here there is a group of people living and working together in a community. This qualitative study is based on six semi-structured interviews with long and short time members, in aims to understand what community means for them. All took places during one sunny week in April. To live with other people and share much of waking life may be considered alternative compared to the more individualized lifestyle predominant today, since our beginnings man has lived a majority of the time in groups as a necessity for survival. To live this way today for survival is perhaps an outdated concept, and even though we interact daily with society we come home to solitary living, possibly without ever wondering why. However people in communities choose to live together, why? What is it that drives these people to continue living this way and what have they learnt?