ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the transformation of ‘community’ into ‘area-based initiatives’ over the last 50 years using the lens of the preschool policy developments of the Educational Priority Area Projects in the 1960s and the National Childcare Strategy of the 1990s as examples. The intention of this chapter is to review the definition and use of ‘community’ over the last 40 years as both the locus of the problem and the target for intervention. It focuses on two questions. First, what do we mean by ‘community’ and why is the idea so stubbornly persistent? Is it a myth, or a trick of political ‘aerosol’ (as Benington suggested with ‘community school’ or ‘community policing’, and others have suggested for ‘community care’2), or does it have any substance? Second, does ‘geographical community’ continue to have importance as the locus for intervention, or has it been replaced by ‘virtual community’ (Macdonald and Grieco 2007)? Are neighbourhoods targeted because of the evidence on ‘community as context’ for people’s life chances and life trajectories? Does where people live or work affect their educational outcomes, health, or earning potential, for example (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1997)? Is the neighbourhood the target because aspects of disadvantage are spatially distributed (a cost-effective strategy for reaching the largest number of disadvantaged families)?3
