In this open access publication, the social cohesion of urban neighborhoods and their residents is examined, which is often viewed as vulnerable since increased mobility, individualization, wider socio-economic and demographic changes have fundamentally altered the basis for everyday social interaction in urban neighborhoods. Anna Steigemann gives scholarly attention to the concrete places where neighborly interactions still take place and to how these interactions affect local community building. She illuminates and explores the ordinary everyday interactions and social practices in and around shops and gastronomic facilities on a shopping street in Berlin-Neukölln, revealing how these businesses are important places where community is practiced, but also why they are increasingly threatened by commercial and residential gentrification.

In this open access publication, the social cohesion of urban neighborhoods and their residents is examined, which is often viewed as vulnerable since increased mobility, individualization, wider socio-economic and demographic changes have fundamentally altered the basis for everyday social interaction in urban neighborhoods. Anna Steigemann gives scholarly attention to the concrete places where neighborly interactions still take place and to how these interactions affect local community building. She illuminates and explores the ordinary everyday interactions and social practices in and around shops and gastronomic facilities on a shopping street in Berlin-Neukölln, revealing how these businesses are important places where community is practiced, but also why they are increasingly threatened by commercial and residential gentrification.

Cincinnati's East End river community has been home to generations of working-class people. This racially mixed community has roots that reach back as far as seven generations. But the community is vulnerable. Developers bulldoze "raggedy" but affordable housing to build upscale condos, even as East Enders fight to preserve the community by participating in urban development planning controlled by powerful outsiders. This book portrays how East Enders practice the preservation of community. Drawing on more than six years of anthropological research and advocacy in the East End, Rhoda Halperin argues for redefining community not merely as a place, but as a set of culturally embedded and class-marked practices that give priority to caring for children and the elderly, procuring livelihood, and providing support for family, friends, and neighbors. These practices create the structures of community within the larger urban power structure. Halperin uses different genres to weave the voices of East Enders throughout the book. Poems and narratives offer poignant insights into the daily struggles against impersonal market forces that work against the struggle for livelihood. This firsthand account questions commonly held assumptions about working-class people. In a fresh way, it reveals the cultural construction of marginality, from the viewpoints of both "real East Enders" and the urban power structure.

Community is a central idea in urban studies but remains conceptually vague and empirically difficult to work with. Building on existing theories of community, Talja Blokland offers an important contribution to defining and understanding this key theme. Blokland argues that there has been too much focus on community as a stable construct, formed by durable relationships with kin, friends, social groups or neighbours. She draws attention to the non-durable, fluid encounters that constitute community, theorizing communities as shared urban practices in a globalizing world. The book proposes two core ways of thinking about community: the dimension of familiarity, defined by our ability to construct identities, and the dimension of access, defined by our freedom to enter and leave urban spaces. These dimensions form various urban configurations which enable us to experience and practise community in diverse ways. As this book maintains, community is after all an urban practice, not a fixed state of affairs.

Here is the only book that gives you a comparison of model frameworks and a critique of multiple perspectives. Community Practice: Conceptual Models (along with its companion volume, Community Practice: Models in Action) illustrates the diverse ways that community practice is conceived and delineates both the central and subtle differences among models to guide community assessment, action planning, and practice. By knitting together the complex ideas from the social sciences and community practice, this book shows how to combine these ideas to improve teaching, practice, analysis, and research for social work faculty; social work students; practitioners in community work, administration, and social planning; and faculty of related disciplines. The scope of Community Practice: Conceptual Models is broad, providing the first historical report on model development and implementation since 1965. Its chapters present diverse views on community practice approaches and provide the compilation, critique, and analysis of current models --while illustrating how these approaches developed over time. Included is Rothman’s long-awaited revision and elaboration of his 1970s classic, three models conceptual framework. Other vital topics you learn about include: collaborative community development social planning, reform movements, and social action ecological theory in community practice a feminist response and critique to Rothman’s approaches to community intervention a comparison of community practice in the U.S. and U.K., with an emphasis on nonracist practice and community-based service development Community Practice: Conceptual Models offers challenges and indicates directions for practice, theory elaboration, testing, and research and shows community practice in relation to characteristics such as goals and desired outcomes, change strategies, targets of change, primary constituencies, and focus or scope of concern. This book provides the strongest perspectives on community practice to help you improve your practice, assessments, action plans, and research.

Encompassing community development, organizing, planning, & social change, as well as globalisation, this book is grounded in participatory & empowerment practice. The 36 chapters assess practice, theory & research methods.

As local communities and public services reel under the impact of global economic turmoil, it is vital to find more creative ways for the services to work together with those who depend on them and who also, as citizens, ultimately govern them. Community practice is the name for that growing part of the relationship by which service providers and local residents collaborate flexibly and economically to meet needs, boost community strengths and service effectiveness, and link participative and representative democracy. Combining re-examination of theory with practical tools and approaches, Chanan and Miller provide a new framework for local involvement strategy, for policy-makers and practitioners alike. They show how this innovative but still amorphous movement can become more coherent, both on the ground and in public policy: reforming community development, building new kinds of neighbourhood partnership, measuring outcomes objectively, and combining the best innovations of the past three decades into a new synthesis. This is an important new perspective for all local public service agencies, all practitioners working in communities, and academics and students concerned with these fields.