An introduction to community development
Community development has many varying 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. It is hard to imagine the American colonies being successfully established in the seventeenth century without some degree of community development, even if the term had not
yet come into existence.
Many scholars trace the origin of modern community development as a discipline to post World War II reconstruction efforts to improve less developed countries (Wise 1998). Others cite the American “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 2002). As the following box shows, the origins of community development are actually very old. A major contribution of community development was 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 myriad 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).
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