Can We Still Talk About a Community?

Since the nineteenth century the word community has been associated with warmer, closer and more harmonious relations between people due to their relations in the past. (Hoggett 1997) Before the early 20th century there was very little literature concerning the community and the first real definition came in 1915 by C.J. Galpin in relation to defining communities in terms of the trade and service areas surrounding a village. (Harper and Dunham 1959) Soon after this theory, which broke the ice, many different theories on community emerged. Some talking about community as a geographical phenomenon and others looked at community as a common lifestyle.

Beyond this community can mean many different things to different people, especially in political terms. To some it many mean nothing more than a glorified networking channel, but to others it may be a very powerful ideological basis for the existence of civilization (e.g. the ideology behind communism).

While some have argued that communities do not exist in this individualistic day and age whereby we live in a state of individualism. As the former Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher put it “There is no such thing as society….only individuals and their families”. (Marget Thatcher Foundation, accessed 2008) If one is to look at the definition of the word society in the oxford dictionary, the definition of the word means a community. (Oxford Dictionary, 2008) So one can understand Mrs Thatcher to be talking about the community rather the society, as society can even be taken to mean civilization or the entire nation. This idea can be backed up by the fact that she was an anti-unionist meaning she was against collectivization, thus she had the idea that the individual should try to obtain economic and personal growth on their own and not through collectivization.

On the other had liberals view community to be an essential part of live and some have interoperated it to be a set of values. (Frazer 2000) It may be used to bring together a number of elements such as solidarity, mutuality, trust and commitment.

In order to carry out this study of community we shall be looking at the different interpretations of the word community and then link it with examples from the real world We shall mainly focus on the community in Bradford which is a cosmopolitan community consisting of different cultures, traditions and religions.

One idea is that the community refers to a geographical location such as neighborhood or a planned community. (Willmott 1986) By this it is meant that there is a sense f belonging and the people located in the area have their locations in common thus a community arises. This in Bradford can be seen in the fact that there is a growth of neighborhood watch schemes, whereby the security of the whole neighborhood as a whole is in concern rather than just the security of a individual or an individual household.