An Introduction to Community Development

Rhonda Phillips, Robert Pittman, Rhonda Phillips, Robert Pittman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134482320
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Beginning with the foundations of community development, An Introduction to Community Development offers a comprehensive and practical approach to planning for communities. Road-tested in the authors' own teaching, and through the training they provide for practicing planners, it enables students to begin making connections between academic study and practical know-how from both private and public sector contexts.

An Introduction to Community Development shows how planners can utilize local economic interests and integrate finance and marketing considerations into their strategy. Most importantly, the book is strongly focused on outcomes, encouraging students to ask: what is best practice when it comes to planning for communities, and how do we accurately measure the results of planning practice?

This newly revised and updated edition includes:

increased coverage of sustainability issues,

discussion of localism and its relation to community development,

quality of life, community well-being and public health considerations,

and content on local food systems.

Each chapter provides a range of reading materials for the student, supplemented with text boxes, a chapter outline, keywords, and reference lists, and new skills based exercises at the end of each chapter to help students turn their learning into action, making this the most user-friendly text for community development now available.

PART I

Foundations

1	A Framework for Community and Economic Development
	Rhonda Phillips and Robert H. Pittman

Overview

Community development has evolved into a recognized discipline of interest to both practitioners and academicians. Community development is defined in many different ways; some think of community development as an outcome—physical, social, and economic improvement in a community—while others think of community development as a process—the ability of communities to act collectively and enhancing the ability to do so. This chapter defines community development as both a process and an outcome and explains the relationship between the two. A related area, economic development, is also defined in different ways. This chapter offers a holistic definition that includes not only economic dimensions but vital other dimensions impacting community quality of life and well-being. The model of the community and economic development chain shows the links, causal relationships, and feedback loops between community and economic development.

Introduction

Community development has many different definitions. Unlike mathematics or physics where terms are scientifically derived and rigorously defined, community development has evolved with many different connotations. Community development has probably been practiced for as long as there have been communities. Many scholars trace the origin of community development as a discipline and known profession to post-World War II reconstruction efforts to improve less-developed countries (Wise 1998). In the US, some cite the “war on poverty” of the 1960s with its emphasis on solving neighborhood housing and social problems as a significant influence on contemporary community development (Green and Haines 2011). A major contribution of community development has been the recognition that a city or neighborhood is not just a collection of buildings but a “community” of people facing common problems with untapped capacities for self-improvement. Today community is defined in many different ways: in geographic terms, such as a neighborhood or town (place-based or communities of place definitions); or in social terms, such as a group of people sharing common chat rooms on the internet, a national professional association, or a labor union (communities of interest definitions).

BOX 1.1 EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Community development as a profession has deep roots, tracing its origins to social movements (it is, after all, about collective action) of earlier times throughout the globe. Activism such as the Sanitary Reform movement in the 1840s and housing reforms a bit later helped push forward positive changes at community levels. For example, in the 1880s, Jane Addams was among the first to respond to deplorable housing conditions in tenements by establishing Hull House in Chicago, a community center for poor immigrant workers. Beyond North America, community development may be called “civil society,” or “community regeneration,” and activities are conducted by both government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). There may or may not be regulation of organizations, depending on different countries’ policy frameworks (for a review of community development, see Hautekeur 2005). The Progressive movement of the 1890s through the first few decades of the twentieth century was all about community development (von Hoffman 2012), although the term itself did not arise until mid-century.

During the 1950s and 1960s, social change and collective action again garnered much attention due to the need to rectify dismal conditions within poverty-stricken rural and areas of urban decline. The civil rights and anti-poverty movements led to the recognition of community development as a practice and emerging profession, taking form as a means to elicit change in social, economic, political, and environmental aspects of communities. During the 1960s, literally thousands of community development corporations (CDCs) were formed, including many focusing on housing needs as prompted by U.S. Federal legislation providing funding for nonprofit community organizations. This reclaiming of citizen-based governing was also prompted in response to urban renewal approaches by government beginning with the U.S. Housing Act of 1949. The richness of the CDC experience is chronicled in the Community Development Corporation Oral History Project by the Pratt Center for Community Development. This includes one of the first CDCs in the US, the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in New York City.

Today, there are about 4,000 CDCs in the US, with most focusing on housing development as well as other related activities for improving community quality of life. However, many also include a full range of community development activities, with about 25% providing a comprehensive array of housing development, home ownership programs, commercial and business development, community facilities, open space/environmental, workforce, and youth programs, and planning and organizing activities (Walker 2002). Throughout the world, many organizations practice community development, including the public sector as well as the private, for-profit and other nonprofit groups. As the variety of topics in this book attests, community development continues to be built on social activism and housing to encompass a broad spectrum of processes and activities dealing with multiple dimensions of community including physical, environmental, social, and economic factors.

Sources

G. Hautekeur (2005) Community Development in Europe. Community Development Journal 40(4): 385–398.

A. von Hoffman (2012) The Past, Present, and Future of Community Development in the United States. In Andrews N.O Erickson D.J. (eds), Investing in What Works for America’s Communities. San Francisco: Federal Reserve Bank.

C. Walker (2002) Community Development Corporations and Their Changing Support Systems. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute.

For more details on the CDC Oral History Project, see w­w­w­.p­r­a­t­t­c­e­n­t­e­r­.n­e­t­/­c­d­c­o­r­a­l­h­i­s­t­o­r­y­.p­h­p­

To learn more details on the history of community development in the US, see Alexander von Hoffman’s, The Past, Present, and Future of Community Development in the United States, published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University, 2012. w­w­w­.j­c­h­s­.h­a­r­v­a­r­d­.e­d­u­/­s­i­t­e­s­/­j­c­h­s­.h­a­r­v­a­r­d­.e­d­u­/­f­i­l­e­s­/­w­1­2­-­6­_­v­o­n­_­h­o­f­f­m­a­n­.p­d­f­

Civil and social activism throughout the world has served as a basis for community development approaches, including those built upon works by Paulo Freire, a noted activist educator inspiring many with his classic 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed. See Margaret Ledwith’s 2005 Community Development: A Critical Approach for discussion of Freire’s ideas in community development theory and practice.

For a history of community development in the UK, see The Community Development Reader, History, Theory, and Issues, by Gary Craig, Marjorie Mayo, Keith Popple, Mae Shaw, and Marilyn Taylor (2011).

The rich and diverse history of community development has roots in many areas, evolving into a recognized discipline drawing from a wide variety of academic fields including urban and regional planning, sociology, economics, political science, geography, and many others. Today there is a variety of academic and professional journals focusing on community development. The interest of researchers and practitioners from many different disciplines has contributed greatly to the growth and development of the field. However, community development’s growth and interdisciplinary nature have led to the current situation where it is defined and approached in a great variety of ways. Given community development’s origins in social advocacy and calls to social action, the emphasis on equity is a common thread. The need for social reform and social justice has always been present, and continue to be critical across communities globally. See Box 1.2 for more information about some of the history of social equity.

This chapter takes a broad approach to community development. While it is impossible in one chapter (or book) to completely cover such a large field, many different aspects of community development are included. In particular, we have observed that the strong interrelationship between community and economic development is often overlooked in research and practice. This inter-relationship is one focus of this chapter and book. Economic development focuses predominately on the monetary aspects of the processes and outcomes—generating wealth in a community. It is, by default, often centered on issues of efficiency. This is counter to community development’s emphasis on equity, yet balance can be sought between these two elements. It is our intent to explore this balance, bringing together both community and economic development to explore ways to foster better outcomes or community well-being and improved quality of life for our towns, cities, regions, and beyond.

BOX 1.2 THE UNDERREPRESENTED

More than a century prior to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Upton Sinclair, in The Jungle (1906), described the horrible conditions of the meatpacking factories and the poverty and hopelessness prevalent in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago. Inspired by the work of Sinclair, the other Muckrakers, and the labor organizer John Lewis, Saul Alinsky became a community organizer and took it to the streets, convinced that the interests of workers and the poor were not being represented and protected by traditional political processes and institutions. Alinsky “walked the talk,” served many jail terms for nonviolent demonstrations and, shortly before his death, published his seminal work, Rules for Radicals in 1971. The book is a primer for community organizing and extols the importance and justification of using non-conventional means to close the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the early civil rights movement adopted Alinsky’s and other nonviolent protesters’ methods. In his eloquent “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King wrote:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

The Mavis Staples video (w­w­w­.y­o­u­t­u­b­e­.c­o­m­/­w­a­t­c­h­?­v­=­0­Z­W­d­D­I­_­f­k­n­s­) dramatically captures the bravery of the civil rights protesters.

Why has there been a long tradition of community activism in the United States? The reason is that traditional institutions and political processes have not always given sufficient voice and a “seat at the table,” for the nation’s poor and minorities. As the urban planning theorist and activist for social justice and equity Paul Davidoff has written:

the “great issues” in economic organization, those resolving around the central issue of the nature of distributive justice, have yet to be settled. The world is still in turmoil over the way in which the resources of the nations are to be distributed.

(1965: 50)

These issues are as relevant today as when first written by Davidoff 50 years ago. Although economic growth and development can bring many benefits, those benefits are not evenly distributed and the costs are often paid by the poorest members of our society. One noteworthy attempt at the local level to address these issues is the Cleveland experiment from late 1969–1979 in the practice of equity planning. Norman Krumholz and his staff of professional planners instituted progressive programs and policies that resulted in property law changes, improvements in public service delivery, protection of transit services for the most transit-dependent, and the rescue of city parklands an...