I've been trying to follow the conversation here about community and urban/ rural divide here. I think there have been some good points made.
I also think that so many of the perspectives people have around this stuff is driven and influenced by their political affiliations and their expectations they have for life based on where they choose to live and their personal values. I've mostly lived in cities for my adult life. I've spent some periods of time, months at a time, in rural to off the grid places living and working.
Community exists in a lot of different forms and those forms manifest for a lot of different reasons. I've experienced both friendly community oriented neighbors and others who want to be left alone. In cities I think community takes several forms because they tend to be more culturally heterogeneous and there are just more people in the jurisdictions (in-general). So the community interaction may take place in the form of an HOA or a neighborhood association or a club or a cultural activity. Some of these activities may not exist or exist differently in rural communities.
I think these perceptions that people have about people in the city or people in the country acting, behaving, or living in certain ways are almost always the sorts of generalizations that don't reflect the reality for most, and often more about personal expectations than any kind of truth. I guess what I'm getting at is that there isn't one way to define community and it's pretty useless to expect that anyone else, certainly those that live culturally different lives than us, share our expectations for community, and these expectations are what the culture war narratives pray on.
