Community: what does it mean?

The word community is bandied about a lot: faith community, community spirit, community engagement, local community, European Economic Community, community development are examples which spring to mind.  But what is community?  At best it is a chameleon word, at worst it can be used as shorthand and be meaningless.

My opinion is that there are two major usages: community of geography and community of interest, although there is a third usage gaining traction to which reference will be made .

Community of geography is quite straightforward, isn't it?  The village in which I live is a community of geography in the sense that we share a physical location.  It is a small area.  Would the town I live close to be regarded as a community of geography, or a county, or a nation?  The test surely must be: do the people within a geographic area feel they have a common belonging?  Credit unions have a defined geographic area within which there is a common bond (subject to a caveat: see later) which binds them together, or at least that is the theory.

Communities of interest covers a multitude of things. Members of a church have a common interest, as do supporters of a football club and members of a lunch club.  Indeed any membership organisation is a community of interest. A credit union can be formed for members of the co-operative: the common bond being that of membership of the co-op.  It strikes me that in order to belong to a community of interest requires an individual to take a positive step to join and belong to that community.

The third use of the word community relates to status or condition. There is the gay community, ethic community, disability community, feminist community. It is really a form of categorisation or labelling and I am not sure the word community is appropriate.

Our lives are spent as members of a number of communities determined by where we live, work and play, by our interests and if one accepts the third category by what we are.  During our lives we will join and leave communities.  We leave the school community, we go to college or university and become part of the academic community and a new community of geography.  Our interests change and our inter-actions with other people change.

Before Mrs Thatcher destroyed the mining industry there was the mining community.   At one level this referred to miners, but it referred also to the tight-knit communities in which they lived and included their families and people in other jobs who lived and/or worked in the area.  People working in the post office, the co-op, the miners' welfare were part of the mining community.

Most community development and engagement is around communities of geography, but not exclusively. Working with ethic communities and hard-to-reach groups involves community development and engagement.  Within a community of geography there are a number of communities if one applies the third use of the term community.

The danger is that the term community can be used to lump people in a geographic area together even though they have little in common except living in the same area.

In the final analysis community is a label and the danger is that community development and community engagement presupposes a commonality which does not exist.  The relative failure of community development and community engagement initiatives is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the complexity of  peoples' diverse attitudes, needs and concerns within a given geographic area.

NB: Interesting article on communities - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8693558/Immigrants-love-this-country-more-than-we-do.html#.TkPeY3519JQ.facebook