Community at the scale of a political community is the institutional and infrastructural form mutual recognition takes once the people who must coordinate number in millions. Morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) grounded recognition in subjects who persist, occupy distinct positions, and meet across asymmetric exchange; Belonging ([§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>)) carries that mechanism to the base layer of political life. Belonging makes two structural demands, not one. The first is what the substrate-extension obligation [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) derives requires in order to be *dischargeable* as the obligation it is; the second is what the face-to-face base requires in order to *function*. The membership-axis conditions come first, because the base is the infrastructure through which, at the domestic register, the extension is in part discharged.

*The extension crosses with capacity, not content.* The obligation is dischargeable only as the floor (the conditions for life-as-agency the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derivation tracks) and not as content (governance form, culture, religious practice, the receiving population’s institutional architecture), which stays under communal self-determination. An extension that crosses with content is not a fuller discharge but a different act substituted for the one owed: imposition, not extension.

*The extension reaches member-bodies, not regimes.* The obligation runs to the bodies whose [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) conditions obtain, never to the apparatus that governs them, so it discharges only through channels that actually reach those bodies. Resources captured by, or routed as subsidy to, an origin regime that sits between the extending community and the member-bodies do not discharge it: they fund the apparatus while the conditions owed go unmet. Where a hostile regime is itself the obstacle to delivery, the obligation is not thereby voided: the delivery problem (channel, pace, division of labor) is routed to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>), and the protective question a rights-violating regime raises is routed to Defense ([§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>)) and Enforcement ([§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>)), not absorbed into the substrate obligation here. Where the instability that produced the scarcity is itself downstream of prior intervention by the extending community, the substrate owed is the discharge of accumulated arrears rather than beneficence; this does not reground the extension ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds it whatever the causal history) but it defeats the framing of the extension as charity and sets its priority at the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) register (the empirical record on this is at [§9.2.4](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>)).

*The obligation concedes communal self-determination and parts at the substrate.* Against Walzer and Miller, the requirement grants the community genuine self-determination over the meaning of membership and the public culture that carries it (content does not cross, so nothing in the extension touches it) and parts only on whether that discretion reaches the substrate, which the recognition [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds does not exempt from extension whatever the boundary. Against Carens, it reaches the conclusion that the drawn boundary cannot by itself justify withholding the substrate, but on the structural ground of [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) rather than the arbitrariness-of-birth premise, and parts on pacing: the extension is bound by the productive-contact conditions the base requires to function (inventoried below; the hardening dynamic at [§9.2.4](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>)), not by a discretion the framework has already denied.

Turning to the base itself: what the face-to-face base structurally requires resolves into an inventory specific to it (the conditions community-architecture has to deliver to function as a population’s mutual-recognition mechanism rather than as a substitute for one). No one of them is dispensable; only in conjunction do they make a base a base.

*A functioning face-to-face base.* The load-bearing requirement is a maintained register of embodied, repeated, face-to-face encounter between particular people. Recognition is grounded at [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) in two jointly required conditions: that the other appears as genuinely other, bringing a position the recognizing subject does not already hold, and that the exchange is asymmetric, with something at stake across it the encounter has not pre-selected. The face-to-face encounter preserves both: the neighbor brings their full social position into the room, and the exchange runs across it without a filtering layer. The base is not a richer form of mediated connection; it is what mediated connection requires in order to carry recognition at all (the mediation layer is developed at [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>)). Its non-substitutability is structural in the same sense the framework treats other constitutive floors.

*Productive-contact conditions.* The base does not update recognition merely by co-locating bodies. The mechanism is modal-field updating ([§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>)): sustained, equal-status, cooperative contact installs into a body’s modal field the actual variety of others’ conditions, so that the body’s simulation of the other fires on installed evidence rather than on stereotype-derived placeholders; brief, unequal, or conflict-laden contact updates the field in the opposite direction. The base must therefore satisfy the productive-contact conditions the contact-hypothesis literature specifies (Allport 1954; Pettigrew and Tropp 2006), not merely deliver proximity. Civic infrastructure that throws unequal-status populations into friction without the productive-contact structure reinforces the prior it was meant to update.

*Civic-infrastructure provision.* The face-to-face base is held by concrete institutions: libraries, community centers, neighborhood-scale civic associations, physical third places, in-person deliberative venues. These constitute collective investment in the same register as the legal system or the public-health system (Putnam 2000; Klinenberg 2018), not a discretionary subsidy the rest of the system can compensate for. Where they are dismantled, the base erodes; where they are sustained, it is available for representation ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) and for the mediation layer ([§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>)) to answer to.

*Distributional equity of the base.* The base performs its structural function only if access to it is distributionally equitable. Differential access to libraries, community centers, and third places across populations is structural-inequality reinforcement at the belonging register, and historical disinvestment has been racially stratified (library-hour reductions in Black-majority neighborhoods, public-pool closures during desegregation, third-place loss in deindustrialized formerly-segregated neighborhoods). ADA-compliant venues, interpretation, childcare-friendly design, and transit access are structural conditions of the base, not accommodations added on top of it.

*Sufficient local-institution density.* The base requires the neighborhood-scale institutions through which face-to-face encounter is actually held (congregations, school boards, library boards, community councils, mutual-aid associations, parent-teacher organizations, and the like) at sufficient density to do the recognition work. The condition is not that any particular institutional form be preserved but that the structural conditions for face-to-face civic life be maintained densely enough for the base to function.

*Jointness with the mediation layer.* The base is required alongside the mediation layer, not in place of it. Recognition at population scale needs the wider system the base scales into (the system [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) (Information) develops) but that system carries recognition only on the ground-truth the base supplies. A political community that runs only on the base fails to scale; one that runs only on the mediation layer loses the tether to actual conditions the base maintains. The two registers are jointly constitutive, and the requirement on the base is that it remain intact enough to ground the layer built on it.

*What is required.* The substrate-extension obligation requires three conditions jointly: that the extension cross with capacity and not content, that it reach member-bodies rather than the regimes that govern them, and that it concede communal self-determination over content while parting at the substrate. Community as the face-to-face base requires six more, jointly: a functioning face-to-face register, productive-contact conditions, civic-infrastructure provision, distributional equity, sufficient local-institution density, and jointness with the mediation layer. Drop any one of the nine and the corresponding demand fails: the extension degrades into imposition or regime-subsidy, or the base no longer tethers recognition at population scale to the actual conditions of actual people. Those conditions are what [§9.2.3](<9.2.3 What is Predicted.md>) turns into predictions.


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← [9.2.1 What is Disputed](<9.2.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.2.3 What is Predicted](<9.2.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
