ABSTRACT
Community captures the idea of social interaction, connection, and mutual reliance among a group of people. It may seem mostly a sociological concept – that is, ‘community’ identifies social ties and engagement. Yet in being social, it is necessarily also geographical, because communities occur in and across space, in particular ways that are important for understanding social life. Communities may express group identity based on a shared set of concerns or practices – the relationship of a factory manager to workers, where to send kids to run around, or how best to worship together – and thus expresses both social and geographical dimensions. ‘Community’ has been at the root of over a century of urban theorizing, from concerns expressed by philosophers such as Georg Simmel (1903) and Ferdinand Tönnies (1887) that city life created radically different forms of community from agrarian towns, to debates of the last decades about the possibilities for inclusive urban politics based on community (Young 1990; Green 1999; Joseph 2002). In this chapter, I trace some of the ways urban and political theorists have defined and imagined community for urban studies and urban life, pointing to its conflation with neighbourhood and the need to uncover the multiple sociospatialities inherent in both terms.
