THE TERM COMMUNITY AND DEVELOPMENT

THE TERM COMMUNITY AND DEVELOPMENT

COMMUNITY

A community is a small or large social unit (a group of living things) that has something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity. Communities often share a sense of placethat is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community. People tend to define those social ties as important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions (such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at-large). Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties (micro-level), “community” may also refer to large group affiliations (or macro-level), such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.

Sense of community

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis identify four elements of “sense of community”:

1. membership,

2. influence,

3. integration and fulfillment of needs,

4. shared emotional connection.

Community building and organizing

In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, Scott Peck argues that the almost accidental sense of community that exists at times of crisis can be consciously built. Peck believes that conscious community building is a process of deliberate design based on the knowledge and application of certain rules. He states that this process goes through four stages:

1. Pseudocommunity: The beginning stage when people first come together. This is the stage where people try to be nice, and present what they feel are their most personable and friendly characteristics.

2. Chaos: When people move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their “shadow” selves. This stage places great demands upon the facilitator for greater leadership and organization, but Peck believes that “organizations are not communities”, and this pressure should be resisted.

3. Emptiness: This stage moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to us all as human beings. Out of this emptiness comes…

4. True community: the process of deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community. This stage Peck believes can only be described as “glory” and reflects a deep yearning in every human soul for compassionate understanding from one’s fellows.

More recently Peck remarked that building a sense of community is easy but maintaining this sense of community is difficult in the modern world.

Types of Community

A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed. One such breakdown is as follows:

1. Location-based Communities: range from the local neighbourhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole. These are also called communities of place.

2. Identity-based Communities: range from the local clique, sub-culture, ethnic group, religious, multicultural or pluralistic civilisation, or the global community cultures of today. They may be included as communities of need or identity, such as disabled persons, or frail aged people.

3. Organizationally based Communities: range from communities organized informally around family or network-based guilds and associations to more formal incorporated associations, political decision making structures, economic enterprises, or professional associations at a small, national or international scale.

DEVELOPMENT

Development means “improvement in country’s economic and social conditions”. More specially, it refers to improvements in way of managing an area’s natural and human resources. In order to create wealth and improve people’s lives.

Dudley Seers while elaborating on the meaning of development suggests that while there can be value judgements on what is development and what is not, it should be a universally acceptable aim of development to make for conditions that lead to a realisation of the potentials of human personality.

Seers outlined several conditions that can make for achievement of this aim:

i. The capacity to obtain physical necessities, particularly food;

ii. A job (not necessarily paid employment) but including studying, working on a family farm or keeping house;

iii. Equality, which should be considered an objective in its own right;

iv. Participation in government;

v. Belonging to a nation that is truly independent, both economically and politically; and

vi. Adequate educational levels (especially literacy).

The people are held to be the principal actors in human scale development. Respecting the diversity of the people as well as the autonomy of the spaces in which they must act converts the present day object person to a subject person in the human scale development. Development of the variety that we have experienced has largely been a top-down approach where there is little possibility of popular participation and decision making.

REFERNCE

“Community” Oxford Dictionaries. May 2014. Oxford Dictionaries

Canuto, Marcello A. and Jason Yaeger (editors) (2000) The Archaeology of Communities. Routledge, New York. Hegmon, Michelle (2002) Concepts of Community in Archaeological Research. In Seeking the Center: Archaeology and Ancient Communities in the Mesa Verde Region, edited by Mark D. Varien and Richard H. Wilshusen, pp. 263–279. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Stuart Corbridge. Development Studies. (Oxford University Press, 1997)

World Bank. World Bank Development Report. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1993.