ABSTRACT
A useful approach to crime and community is long overdue in sociology. The growing importance of territory-free networks gives a ring of truth to the claim that the age of the local community has ended. In particular the interactional approach holds that community occurs in a specific territorial setting, albeit one with fuzzy and transient borders, and requires a more or less comprehensive array of local institutions and associations—a local society—as its base. The change to which Warren attributes the shift from the concrete collectivity to the field approach in theories of community also contains forces which challenge the idea of the community as an integral ecological unit. The natural emergence of community certainly is possible in a locality where people share a common life. Community development reaches its highest degree of articulation with interactional concepts of community and social well-being when it directly addresses social, economic, political, or other barriers to authentic, unrestrained community interaction.
