Copyright © 2015 Bert N. Langford (Images may be subject to copyright. Please send feedback)
Welcome to Our Generation USA!

Under this Page,
Our Community
we cover what everyone seeks: a sense of community and involvement wherever we  live, whether a neighborhood, on a farm, or in a metropolitan city or suburb.

See Also:
Architecture
Environment
Education
Agriculture
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Community Pictured below: Building A Community
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.

Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.

​The English-language word "community" derives from the Old French comuneté (currently "Communauté"), which comes from the Latin communitas "community", "public spirit" (from Latin communis, "common").

Human communities may have intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, and risks in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

Perspectives of various disciplines:

Archaeology:

Archaeological studies of social communities use the term "community" in two ways, paralleling usage in other areas.

The first is an informal definition of community as a place where people used to live. In this sense it is synonymous with the concept of an ancient settlement - whether a hamlet, village, town, or city.

The second meaning resembles the usage of the term in other social sciences: a community is a group of people living near one another who interact socially. 

Social interaction on a small scale can be difficult to identify with archaeological data. Most reconstructions of social communities by archaeologists rely on the principle that social interaction in the past was conditioned by physical distance. Therefore, a small village settlement likely constituted a social community and spatial subdivisions of cities and other large settlements may have formed communities.

Archaeologists typically use similarities in material culture—from house types to styles of pottery—to reconstruct communities in the past. This classification method relies on the assumption that people or households will share more similarities in the types and styles of their material goods with other members of a social community than they will with outsiders.

Sociology:

Ecology:
Main article: Community (ecology)

In ecology, a community is an assemblage of populations - potentially of different species - interacting with one another. Community ecology is the branch of ecology that studies interactions between and among species. It considers how such interactions, along with interactions between species and the abiotic environment, affect social structure and species richness, diversity and patterns of abundance.

Species interact in three ways: competition, predation and mutualism:
  • Competition typically results in a double negative—that is both species lose in the interaction.
  • Predation involves a win/lose situation, with one species winning.
  • Mutualism sees both species co-operating in some way, with both winning.

The two main types of ecological communities are major communities, which are self-sustaining and self-regulating (such as a forest or a lake), and minor communities, which rely on other communities (like fungi decomposing a log) and are the building blocks of major communities.

​Semantics:

The concept of "community" often has a positive semantic connotation, exploited rhetorically by populist politicians and by advertisers to promote feelings and associations of mutual well-being, happiness and togetherness - veering towards an almost-achievable utopian community, in fact.

In contrast, the epidemiological term "community transmission" can have negative implications; and instead of a "criminal community" one often speaks of a "criminal underworld" or of the "criminal fraternity".

Key concepts:

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft:
Main article: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described two types of human association: Gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and Gesellschaft ("society" or "association").

Tönnies proposed the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy as a way to think about social ties. No group is exclusively one or the other. Gemeinschaft stress personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions. Gesellschaft stress indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs based on such interactions.

Sense of community:
Main article: Sense of community

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis identify four elements of "sense of community":
  1. membership: feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness,
  2. influence: mattering, making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members
  3. reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs,
  4. shared emotional connection.

A "sense of community index (SCI) was developed by Chavis and colleagues, and revised and adapted by others. Although originally designed to assess sense of community in neighborhoods, the index has been adapted for use in schools, the workplace, and a variety of types of communities.

Studies conducted by the APPA indicate that young adults who feel a sense of belonging in a community, particularly small communities, develop fewer psychiatric and depressive disorders than those who do not have the feeling of love and belonging.

Socialization:
Main article: Socialization

​The process of learning to adopt the behavior patterns of the community is called socialization. The most fertile time of socialization is usually the early stages of life, during which individuals develop the skills and knowledge and learn the roles necessary to function within their culture and social environment. 

For some psychologists, especially those in the psychodynamic tradition, the most important period of socialization is between the ages of one and ten. But socialization also includes adults moving into a significantly different environment where they must learn a new set of behaviors.

Socialization is influenced primarily by the family, through which children first learn community norms. Other important influences include schools, peer groups, people, mass media, the workplace, and government. The degree to which the norms of a particular society or community are adopted determines one's willingness to engage with others. The norms of tolerance, reciprocity, and trust are important "habits of the heart," as de Tocqueville put it, in an individual's involvement in community.

Community development:
Main article: Community development

Community development is often linked with community work or community planning, and may involve stakeholders, foundations, governments, or contracted entities including non-government organizations (NGOs), universities or government agencies to progress the social well-being of local, regional and, sometimes, national communities.

More grassroots efforts, called community building or community organizing, seek to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities. These skills often assist in building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda.

Community development practitioners must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions. Public administrators, in contrast, need to understand community development in the context of rural and urban development, housing and economic development, and community, organizational and business development.

Formal accredited programs conducted by universities, as part of degree granting institutions, are often used to build a knowledge base to drive curricula in public administration, sociology and community studies. The General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the Saguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University are examples of national community development in the United States.

The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York State offers core courses in community and economic development, and in areas ranging from non-profit development to US budgeting (federal to local, community funds).

In the United Kingdom, the University of Oxford has led in providing extensive research in the field through its Community Development Journal, used worldwide by sociologists and community development practitioners.

At the intersection between community development and community building are a number of programs and organizations with community development tools. One example of this is the program of the Asset Based Community Development Institute of Northwestern University.

The institute makes available downloadable tools to assess community assets and make connections between non-profit groups and other organizations that can help in community building. The Institute focuses on helping communities develop by "mobilizing neighborhood assets" – building from the inside out rather than the outside in. In the disability field, community building was prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s with roots in John McKnight's approaches.

Community building and organizing:
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In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (1987) Scott Peck argues that the almost accidental sense of community that exists at times of crisis can be consciously built. Peck believes that conscious community building is a process of deliberate design based on the knowledge and application of certain rules. He states that this process goes through four stages:

  1. Pseudocommunity: When people first come together, they try to be "nice" and present what they feel are their most personable and friendly characteristics.
  2. Chaos: People move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their "shadow" selves.
  3. Emptiness: Moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to human beings.
  4. True community: Deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community.

In 1991, Peck remarked that building a sense of community is easy but maintaining this sense of community is difficult in the modern world.

The three basic types of community organizing are grassroots organizing, coalition building, and "institution-based community organizing," (also called "broad-based community organizing," an example of which is faith-based community organizing, or Congregation-based Community Organizing).

Community building can use a wide variety of practices, ranging from simple events (e.g., potlucks, small book clubs) to larger-scale efforts (e.g., mass festivals, construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors).

Community building that is geared toward citizen action is usually termed "community organizing." In these cases, organized community groups seek accountability from elected officials and increased direct representation within decision-making bodies. Where good-faith negotiations fail, these constituency-led organizations seek to pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics.

Community organizing can focus on more than just resolving specific issues. Organizing often means building a widely accessible power structure, often with the end goal of distributing power equally throughout the community. Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are open and democratic in governance. Such groups facilitate and encourage consensus decision-making with a focus on the general health of the community rather than a specific interest group.

If communities are developed based on something they share in common, whether location or values, then one challenge for developing communities is how to incorporate individuality and differences. Rebekah Nathan suggests in her book, My Freshman Year, we are drawn to developing communities totally based on sameness, despite stated commitments to diversity, such as those found on university websites.

​Types of community:
​
​A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed. One such breakdown is as follows:
  1. Location-based Communities: range from the local neighborhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole. These are also called communities of place.
  2. Identity-based Communities: range from the local clique, sub-culture, ethnic group, religious, multicultural or pluralistic civilization, or the global community cultures of today. They may be included as communities of need or identity, such as disabled persons, or frail aged people.
  3. Organizationally-based Communities: range from communities organized informally around family or network-based guilds and associations to more formal incorporated associations, political decision making structures, economic enterprises, or professional associations at a small, national or international scale.

The usual categorizations of community relations have a number of problems: 

(1) they tend to give the impression that a particular community can be defined as just this kind or another;
(2) they tend to conflate modern and customary community relations;
(3) they tend to take sociological categories such as ethnicity or race as given, forgetting that different ethnically defined persons live in different kinds of communities —grounded, interest-based, diasporic, etc.

In response to these problems, Paul James and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy that maps community relations, and recognizes that actual communities can be characterized by different kinds of relations at the same time:
  1. Grounded community relations. This involves enduring attachment to particular places and particular people. It is the dominant form taken by customary and tribal communities. In these kinds of communities, the land is fundamental to identity.
  2. Life-style community relations. This involves giving primacy to communities coming together around particular chosen ways of life, such as morally charged or interest-based relations or just living or working in the same location. Hence the following sub-forms:
    1. community-life as morally bounded, a form taken by many traditional faith-based communities.
    2. community-life as proximately-related, where neighborhood or commonality of association forms a community of convenience, or a community of place (see below).
    3. community-life as interest-based, including sporting, leisure-based and business communities which come together for regular moments of engagement.
  3. Projected community relations. This is where a community is self-consciously treated as an entity to be projected and re-created. It can be projected as through thin advertising slogan, for example gated community, or can take the form of ongoing associations of people who seek political integration, communities of practice based on professional projects, associative communities which seek to enhance and support individual creativity, autonomy and mutuality. A nation is one of the largest forms of projected or imagined community.

In these terms, communities can be nested and/or intersecting; one community can contain another—for example a location-based community may contain a number of ethnic communities. Both lists above can used in a cross-cutting matrix in relation to each other.

Internet communities:

In general, virtual communities value knowledge and information as currency or social resource. What differentiates virtual communities from their physical counterparts is the extent and impact of "weak ties", which are the relationships acquaintances or strangers form to acquire information through online networks.

Relationships among members in a virtual community tend to focus on information exchange about specific topics. A survey conducted by Pew Internet and The American Life Project in 2001 found those involved in entertainment, professional, and sports virtual-groups focused their activities on obtaining information.

An epidemic of bullying and harassment has arisen from the exchange of information between strangers, especially among teenagers, in virtual communities. Despite attempts to implement anti-bullying policies, Sheri Bauman, professor of counselling at the University of Arizona, claims the "most effective strategies to prevent bullying" may cost companies revenue.

Virtual Internet-mediated communities can interact with offline real-life activity, potentially forming strong and tight-knit groups such as QAnon.

See also:







Sense of CommunityPictured below: Neighborhood and Sense of Community
Sense of community (or psychological sense of community) is a concept in community psychology, social psychology, and community social work, as well as in several other research disciplines, such as urban sociology, which focuses on the experience of community rather than its structure, formation, setting, or other features. The latter is the province of public administration or community services administration which needs to understand how structures influence this feeling and psychological sense of community. 

Sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and others have theorized about and carried out empirical research on community, but the psychological approach asks questions about the individual's perception, understanding, attitudes, feelings, etc. about community and his or her relationship to it and to others' participation—indeed to the complete, multifaceted community experience.

In his seminal 1974 book, psychologist Seymour B. Sarason proposed that psychological sense of community become the conceptual center for the psychology of community, asserting that it "is one of the major bases for self-definition." By 1986 it was regarded as a central overarching concept for community psychology (Sarason, 1986; Chavis & Pretty, 1999).In addition, the theoretical concept entered the other applied academic disciplines as part of "communities for all" initiatives in the US.

Among theories of sense of community proposed by psychologists, McMillan & Chavis's (1986) is by far the most influential, and is the starting point for most of the recent research in the field. It is discussed in detail below.

Definitions:

For Sarason, psychological sense of community is "the perception of similarity to others, an acknowledged interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them, and the feeling that one is part of a larger dependable and stable structure" (1974, p. 157).

McMillan & Chavis (1986) define a sense of community as "a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together."

Gusfield (1975) identified two dimensions of community: territorial and relational. The relational dimension of community has to do with the nature and quality of relationships in that community, and some communities may even have no discernible territorial demarcation, as in the case of a community of scholars working in a particular specialty, who have some kind of contact and quality of relationship, but may live and work in disparate locations, perhaps even throughout the world.

Other communities may seem to be defined primarily according to territory, as in the case of neighbourhoods, but even in such cases, proximity or shared territory cannot by itself constitute a community; the relational dimension is also essential.

Factor analysis of their urban neighbourhoods questionnaire yielded two distinct factors that Riger and Lavrakas (1981) characterized as "social bonding" and "physical rootedness", very similar to the two dimensions proposed by Gusfield.

Early work on psychological sense of community was based on neighborhoods as the referent, and found a relationship between psychological sense of community and greater participation (Hunter, 1975; Wandersman & Giamartino, 1980)
  • perceived safety (Doolittle & McDonald, 1978), 
  • ability to function competently in the community (Glynn, 1981), 
  • social bonding (Riger & Lavrakas, 1981), 
  • social fabric (strengths of interpersonal relationship) (Ahlbrandt & Cunningham, 1979), 
  • greater sense of purpose and perceived control (Bachrach & Zautra, 1985),
  • and greater civic contributions (charitable contributions and civic involvement) (Davidson & Cotter, 1986).

These initial studies lacked a clearly articulated conceptual framework, however, and none of the measures developed were based on a theoretical definition of psychological sense of community.

Primary theoretical foundation: McMillan and Chavis:

McMillan & Chavis's (1986) theory (and instrument) are the most broadly validated and widely utilized in this area in the psychological literature. They prefer the abbreviated label "sense of community", and propose that sense of community is composed of four elements.

Four elements of sense of community:

There are four elements of "sense of community" according to the McMillan & Chavis theory:

1) Membership: Membership includes five attributes:
  • boundaries
  • emotional safety
  • a sense of belonging and identification
  • personal investment
  • a common symbol system

2) Influence: Influence works both ways: members need to feel that they have some influence in the group, and some influence by the group on its members is needed for group cohesion. Current researches (e.g. Chigbu, 2013) on rural and urban communities have found that sense of community is a major factor.

3) Integration and fulfillment of needs: Members feel rewarded in some way for their participation in the community.

4) Shared emotional connection: The "definitive element for true community" (1986, p. 14), it includes shared history and shared participation (or at least identification with the history).

Dynamics within and between the elements:

McMillan & Chavis (1986) give the following example to illustrate the dynamics within and between these four elements (p. 16): Someone puts an announcement on the dormitory bulletin board about the formation of an intramural dormitory basketball team. People attend the organizational meeting as strangers out of their individual needs (integration and fulfillment of needs).

The team is bound by place of residence (membership boundaries are set) and spends time together in practice (the contact hypothesis). They play a game and win (successful shared valent event). While playing, members exert energy on behalf of the team (personal investment in the group).

As the team continues to win, team members become recognized and congratulated (gaining honor and status for being members). Someone suggests that they all buy matching shirts and shoes (common symbols) and they do so (influence).

​Current research:

In their 2002 study of a community of interest, specifically the science fiction fandom community, Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith suggest Conscious Identification as the fifth dimension (Obst, 2002).

Empirical assessment:

Chavis et al.'s Sense of Community Index (SCI) (see Chipuer & Pretty, 1999; Long & Perkins, 2003), originally designed primarily in reference to neighborhoods, can be adapted to study other communities as well, including the workplace, schools, religious communities, communities of interest, etc.

See also:







The NeighborhoodPictured below: Amazon to Stream ‘Mr. Rogers Neighborhood’ in Twitch Marathon
A neighbourhood (British English, Australian English and Canadian English) or neighborhood (American English; see spelling differences) is a geographically localized community within a larger city, town, suburb or rural area. Neighborhoods are often social communities with considerable face-to-face interaction among members.

Researchers have not agreed on an exact definition, but the following may serve as a starting point: "Neighborhood is generally defined spatially as a specific geographic area and functionally as a set of social networks. Neighborhoods, then, are the spatial units in which face-to-face social interactions occur—the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realize common values, socialize youth, and maintain effective social control."

Preindustrial cities:

In the words of the urban scholar Lewis Mumford, “Neighborhoods, in some annoying, inchoate fashion exist wherever human beings congregate, in permanent family dwellings; and many of the functions of the city tend to be distributed naturally—that is, without any theoretical preoccupation or political direction—into neighborhoods.” Most of the earliest cities around the world as excavated by archaeologists have evidence for the presence of social neighborhoods. Historical documents shed light on neighborhood life in numerous historical preindustrial or nonwestern cities.

Neighborhoods are typically generated by social interaction among people living near one another. In this sense they are local social units larger than households not directly under the control of city or state officials. In some preindustrial urban traditions, basic municipal functions such as protection, social regulation of births and marriages, cleaning and upkeep are handled informally by neighborhoods and not by urban governments; this pattern is well documented for historical Islamic cities.

In addition to social neighborhoods, most ancient and historical cities also had administrative districts used by officials for taxation, record-keeping, and social control.

Administrative districts are typically larger than neighborhoods and their boundaries may cut across neighborhood divisions. In some cases, however, administrative districts coincided with neighborhoods, leading to a high level of regulation of social life by officials. For example, in the T’ang period Chinese capital city Chang’an, neighborhoods were districts and there were state officials who carefully controlled life and activity at the neighbouhood level.

Neighborhoods in preindustrial cities often had some degree of social specialization or differentiation. Ethnic neighborhoods were important in many past cities and remain common in cities today. Economic specialists, including craft producers, merchants, and others, could be concentrated in neighborhoods, and in societies with religious pluralism neighborhoods were often specialized by religion.

One factor contributing to neighborhood distinctiveness and social cohesion in past cities was the role of rural to urban migration. This was a continual process in preindustrial cities, and migrants tended to move in with relatives and acquaintances from their rural past.

Sociology:

Neighborhood sociology is a subfield of urban sociology which studies local communities Neighborhoods are also used in research studies from postal codes and health disparities, to correlations with school drop out rates or use of drugs. Some attention has also been devoted to viewing the neighborhood as a small-scale democracy, regulated primarily by ideas of reciprocity among neighbors.

Improvement:
​
Neighbourhoods have been the site of service delivery or "service interventions" in part as efforts to provide local, quality services, and to increase the degree of local control and ownership. Alfred Kahn, as early as the mid-1970s, described the "experience, theory and fads" of neighborhood service delivery over the prior decade, including discussion of income transfers and poverty. 

Neighborhoods, as a core aspect of community, also are the site of services for youth, including children with disabilities and coordinated approaches to low-income populations. While the term neighborhood organization is not as common in 2015, these organizations often are non-profit, sometimes grassroots or even core funded community development centers or branches.

Community and economic development activists have pressured for reinvestment in local communities and neighborhoods. In the early 2000s, Community Development Corporations, Rehabilitation Networks, Neighborhood Development Corporations, and Economic Development organizations would work together to address the housing stock and the infrastructures of communities and neighborhoods (e.g., community centers).

Community and Economic Development may be understood in different ways, and may involve "faith-based" groups and congregations in cities.

As a unit in urban design:

In the 1900s, Clarence Perry described the idea of a neighborhood unit as a self-contained residential area within a city. The concept is still influential in New Urbanism. Practitioners seek to revive traditional sociability in planned suburban housing based on a set of principles. At the same time, the neighbourhood is a site of interventions to create Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) as many older adults tend to have narrower life space. Urban design studies thus use neighborhood as a unit of analysis.
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Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Neighborhoods:







Community DevelopmentPictured below:  SDG 11 Target and Indicators:  Scaling Community Development
​The United Nations defines community development as "a process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems." It is a broad concept, applied to the practices of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens, and professionals to improve various aspects of communities, typically aiming to build stronger and more resilient local communities.

Community development is also understood as a professional discipline, and is defined by the International Association for Community Development as "a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, economic opportunity, equality and social justice, through the organization, education and empowerment of people within their communities, whether these be of locality, identity or interest, in urban and rural settings".

Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people with the skills they need to effect change within their communities. These skills are often created through the formation of social groups working for a common agenda. Community developers must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions.

Community development as a term has taken off widely in anglophone countries, i.e. the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, as well as other countries in the Commonwealth of Nations. It is also used in some countries in Eastern Europe with active community development associations in Hungary and Romania.

The Community Development Journal, published by Oxford University Press, since 1966 has aimed to be the major forum for research and dissemination of international community development theory and practice.

Community development approaches are recognized internationally. These methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social, economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such organizations as the UN, WHO, OECD, World Bank, Council of Europe and EU.

There are a number of institutions of higher education offer community development as an area of study and research such as the University of Toronto, Leiden University, SOAS University of London, and the Balsillie School of International Affairs, among others.
​
Definitions:

There are complementary definitions of community development.

The United Nations defines community development broadly as "a process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems." and the International Association for Community Development defines it as both a practice based profession and an academic discipline.

Following the adoption of the IACD definition in 2016, the association has gone on to produce International Standards for Community Development Practice. The values and ethos that should underpin practice can be expressed as: Commitment to rights, solidarity, democracy, equality, environmental and social justice.

The purpose of community development is understood by IACD as being to work with communities to achieve participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, economic opportunity, equality and social justice.

This practice is carried out by people in different roles and contexts, including people explicitly called professional community workers (and people taking on essentially the same role but with a different job title), together with professionals in other occupations ranging from:  to: 
Community development practice also encompasses a range of occupational settings and levels from development roles working with communities, through to managerial and strategic community planning roles.

The Community Development Challenge report, which was produced by a working party comprising leading UK organizations in the field including the (now defunct) Community Development Foundation, the (now defunct) Community Development Exchange and the (now defunct) Federation for Community Development Learning defines community development as:

A set of values and practices which plays a special role in overcoming poverty and disadvantage, knitting society together at the grass roots and deepening democracy. There is a community development profession, defined by national occupational standards and a body of theory and experience going back the best part of a century.

There are active citizens who use community development techniques on a voluntary basis, and there are also other professions and agencies which use a community development approach or some aspects of it.

​Community Development Exchange defines community development as:
both an occupation (such as a community development worker in a local authority) and a way of working with communities. Its key purpose is to build communities based on justice, equality and mutual respect.

Community development involves changing the relationships between ordinary people and people in positions of power, so that everyone can take part in the issues that affect their lives. It starts from the principle that within any community there is a wealth of knowledge and experience which, if used in creative ways, can be channeled into collective action to achieve the communities' desired goals.

Community development practitioners work alongside people in communities to help build relationships with key people and organizations and to identify common concerns. They create opportunities for :the community to learn new skills and, by enabling people to act together, community development practitioners help to foster social inclusion and equality.

Different approaches:

There are numerous overlapping approaches to community development. Some focus on the processes, some on the outcomes/ objectives. They include:
  • Community Engagement; focuses on relationships at the core of facilitating "understanding and evaluation, involvement, exchange of information and opinions, about a concept, issue or project, with the aim of building social capital and enhancing social outcomes through decision-making” (p. 173).
  • Women Self-help Group; focusing on the contribution of women in settlement groups.
  • Community capacity building; focusing on helping communities obtain, strengthen, and maintain the ability to set and achieve their own development objectives.
  • Large Group Capacitation; an adult education and social psychology approach grounded in the activity of the individual and the social psychology of the large group focusing on large groups of unemployed or semi-employed participants, many of whom with Lower Levels of Literacy (LLLs).
  • Social capital formation; focusing on benefits derived from the cooperation between individuals and groups.
  • Nonviolent direct action; when a group of people take action to reveal an existing problem, highlight an alternative, or demonstrate a possible solution to a social issue which is not being addressed through traditional societal institutions (governments, religious organizations or established trade unions) to the satisfaction of the direct action participants.
  • Economic development, focusing on the "development" of developing countries as measured by their economies, although it includes the processes and policies by which a nation improves the economic, political, and social well-being of its people.
  • Community economic development (CED); an alternative to conventional economic development which encourages using local resources in a way that enhances economic outcomes while improving social conditions. For example, CED involves strategies which aim to improve access to affordable housing, medical, and child care.
    • A worker cooperative is a progressive CED strategy that operates as businesses both managed and owned by their employees. They are beneficial due to their potential to create jobs and providing a route for grassroots political action. Some challenges that the worker cooperative faces include the mending of the cooperative’s identity as both business and as a democratic humanitarian organization. They are limited in resources and scale.
  • Sustainable development; which seeks to achieve, in a balanced manner, economic development, social development and environmental protection outcomes.
  • Community-driven development (CDD), an economic development model which shifts overreliance on central governments to local communities.
  • Asset-based community development (ABCD); is a methodology that seeks to uncover and use the strengths within communities as a means for sustainable development.
  • Faith-based community development; which utilizes faith-based organizations to bring about community development outcomes.
  • Community-based participatory research (CBPR); a partnership approach to research that equitably involves, for example, community members, organizational representatives, and researchers in all aspects of the research process and in which all partners contribute expertise and share decision making and ownership, which aims to integrate this knowledge with community development outcomes.
  • Community organizing; an approach that generally assumes that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless.
  • Participatory planning including community-based planning (CBP); involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural.
  • Town-making; or machizukuri (まちづくり) refers to a Japanese concept which is "an umbrella term generally understood as citizen participation in the planning and management of a living environment". It can include redevelopment, revitalization, and post-disaster reconstruction, and usually emphasizes the importance of local citizen participation. In recent years, cooperation between local communities and contents tourism (such as video games, anime, and manga) has also become a key driver of machizukuri in some local communities, such as the tie-up between CAPCOM's Sengoku Basara and the city of Shiroishi.
  • Language revitalization focuses on the use of a language so that it serves the needs of a community. This may involve the creation of books, films and other media in the language. These actions help a small language community to preserve their language and culture.
  • Methodologies focusing on the educational component of community development, including the community-wide empowerment that increased educational opportunity creates.
  • Methodologies addressing the issues and challenges of the Digital divide, making affordable training and access to computers and the Internet, addressing the marginalization of local communities that cannot connect and participate in the global Online community. In the United States, nonprofit organizations such as Per Scholas seek to “break the cycle of poverty by providing education, technology and economic opportunities to individuals, families and communities” as a path to development for the communities they serve.

There are a myriad of job titles for community development workers and their employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental organisations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies. Since the nineteen seventies the prefix word 'community' has also been adopted by several other occupations from the police and health workers to planners and architects, who have been influenced by community development approaches.

History:

Amongst the earliest community development approaches were those developed in Kenya and British East Africa during the 1930s. Community development practitioners have over many years developed a range of approaches for working within local communities and in particular with disadvantaged people.

Since the nineteen sixties and seventies through the various anti poverty programmes in both developed and developing countries, community development practitioners have been influenced by structural analyses as to the causes of disadvantage and poverty i.e. inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, land, etc. and especially political power and the need to mobilize people power to affect social change.

Thus the influence of such educators as Paulo Freire and his focus upon this work. Other key people who have influenced this field are Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) and E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful).

There are a number of international organizations that support community development, for example, Oxfam, UNICEF, The Hunger Project and Freedom from Hunger, run community development programs based upon community development initiatives for relief and prevention of malnutrition. Since 2006 the Dragon Dreaming Project Management techniques have spread to 37 different countries and are engaged in an estimated 3,250 projects worldwide.

In the global North:

In the 19th century, the work of the Welsh early socialist thinker Robert Owen (1771–1851), sought to create a more perfect community. At New Lanark and at later communities such as Oneida in the USA and the New Australia Movement in Australia, groups of people came together to create utopian or intentional communities, with mixed success.

United States: In the United States in the 1960s, the term "community development" began to complement and generally replace the idea of urban renewal, which typically focused on physical development projects often at the expense of working-class communities.

One of the earliest proponents of the term in the United States was social scientist William W. Biddle In the late 1960s, philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and government officials such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy took an interest in local nonprofit organizations.

A pioneer was the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn, which attempted to apply business and management skills to the social mission of uplifting low-income residents and their neighborhoods. Eventually such groups became known as "Community development corporations" or CDCs. Federal laws beginning with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act provided a way for state and municipal governments to channel funds to CDCs and other nonprofit organizations.

National organizations such as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (founded in 1978 and now known as NeighborWorks America), the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) (founded in 1980), and the Enterprise Foundation (founded in 1981) have built extensive networks of affiliated local nonprofit organizations to which they help provide financing for countless physical and social development programs in urban and rural communities.

The CDCs and similar organizations have been credited with starting the process that stabilized and revived seemingly hopeless inner city areas such as the South Bronx in New York City.

United Kingdom: In the UK, community development has had two main traditions. The first was as an approach for preparing for the independence of countries from the former British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s. Domestically it first came into public prominence with the Labour Government's anti deprivation programs of the latter sixties and seventies.

The main example of this being the CDP (Community Development Programme), which piloted local area based community development. This influenced a number of largely urban local authorities, in particular in Scotland with Strathclyde Region's major community development programme (the largest at the time in Europe).

The Gulbenkian Foundation was a key funder of commissions and reports which influenced the development of community development in the UK from the latter sixties to the 80's. This included recommending that there be a national institute or centre for community development, able to support practice and to advise government and local authorities on policy.

This was formally set up in 1991 as the Community Development Foundation. In 2004 the Carnegie UK Trust established a Commission of Inquiry into the future of rural community development examining such issues as land reform and climate change. Carnegie funded over sixty rural community development action research projects across the UK and Ireland and national and international communities of practice to exchange experiences. This included the International Association for Community Development.

In 1999 a UK wide organization responsible for setting professional training standards for all education and development practitioners working within local communities was established and recognized by the Labour Government. This organization was called PAULO – the National Training Organization for Community Learning and Development. (It was named after Paulo Freire). It was formally recognized by David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment.

Its first chair was Charlie McConnell, the Chief Executive of the Scottish Community Education Council, who had played a lead role in bringing together a range of occupational interests under a single national training standards body, including community education, community development and development education.

The inclusion of community development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would join the NTO for Social Care. The Community Learning and Development NTO represented all the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and national development agencies working in this area across the four nations of the UK.

The term 'community learning and development' was adopted to acknowledge that all of these occupations worked primarily within local communities, and that this work encompassed not just providing less formal learning support but also a concern for the wider holistic development of those communities – socio-economically, environmentally, culturally and politically.

By bringing together these occupational groups this created for the first time a single recognised employment sector of nearly 300,000 full and part-time paid staff within the UK, approximately 10% of these staff being full-time. The NTO continued to recognise the range of different occupations within it, for example specialists who work primarily with young people, but all agreed that they shared a core set of professional approaches to their work. In 2002 the NTO became part of a wider Sector Skills Council for lifelong learning.

The UK currently hosts the only global network of practitioners and activists working towards social justice through community development approach, the International Association for Community Development (IACD). IACD was formed in the USA in 1953, moved to Belgium in 1978 and was restructured and relaunched in Scotland in 1999.

Canada: Community development in Canada has roots in the development of co-operatives, credit unions and caisses populaires. The Antigonish Movement which started in the 1920s in Nova Scotia, through the work of Doctor Moses Coady and Father James Tompkins, has been particularly influential in the subsequent expansion of community economic development work across Canada.

Australia: Community development in Australia have often been focussed upon Aboriginal Australian communities, and during the period of the 1980s to the early 21st century were funded through the Community Employment Development Program, where Aboriginal people could be employed in "a work for the dole" scheme, which gave the chance for non-government organisations to apply for a full or part-time worker funded by the Department for Social Security. Dr Jim Ife, formerly of Curtin University, organized a ground breaking text-book on community development

In the "Global South":

Community planning techniques drawing on the history of utopian movements became important in the 1920s and 1930s in East Africa, where community development proposals were seen as a way of helping local people improve their own lives with indirect assistance from colonial authorities.

Mohandas K. Gandhi adopted African community development ideals as a basis of his South African Ashram, and then introduced it as a part of the Indian Swaraj movement, aiming at establishing economic interdependence at village level throughout India. With Indian independence, despite the continuing work of Vinoba Bhave in encouraging grassroots land reform, India under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru adopted a mixed-economy approach, mixing elements of socialism and capitalism.

During the fifties and sixties, India ran a massive community development programme with focus on rural development activities through government support. This was later expanded in scope and was called integrated rural development scheme [IRDP]. A large number of initiatives that can come under the community development umbrella have come up in recent years.

The main objective of community development in India remains to develop the villages and to help the villagers help themselves to fight against poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, etc. The beauty of Indian model of community development lies in the homogeneity of villagers and high level of participation.

Community development became a part of the Ujamaa Villages established in Tanzania by Julius Nyerere, where it had some success in assisting with the delivery of education services throughout rural areas, but has elsewhere met with mixed success.

In the 1970s and 1980s, community development became a part of "Integrated Rural Development", a strategy promoted by United Nations Agencies and the World Bank. Central to these policies of community development were:
In the 1990s, following critiques of the mixed success of "top down" government programs, and drawing on the work of Robert Putnam, in the rediscovery of social capital, community development internationally became concerned with social capital formation. In particular the outstanding success of the work of Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank from its inception in 1976, has led to the attempts to spread microenterprise credit schemes around the world.

Yunus saw that social problems like poverty and disease were not being solved by the market system on its own. Thus, he established a banking system which lends to the poor with very little interest, allowing them access to entrepreneurship. This work was honored by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Another alternative to "top down" government programs is the participatory government institution. Participatory governance institutions are organizations which aim to facilitate the participation of citizens within larger decision making and action implementing processes in society. A case study done on municipal councils and social housing programs in Brazil found that the presence of participatory governance institutions supports the implementation of poverty alleviation programs by local governments.

The "human scale development" work of Right Livelihood Award-winning Chilean economist Manfred Max Neef promotes the idea of development based upon fundamental human needs, which are considered to be limited, universal and invariant to all human beings (being a part of our human condition). He considers that poverty results from the failure to satisfy a particular human need, it is not just an absence of money.

Whilst human needs are limited, Max Neef shows that the ways of satisfying human needs is potentially unlimited. Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers.

Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: e.g., the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity. 

Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are:
India: Community development in India was initiated by Government of India through Community Development Programme (CDP) in 1952. The focus of CDP was on rural communities. But, professionally trained social workers concentrated their practice in urban areas. Thus, although the focus of community organization was rural, the major thrust of Social Work gave an urban character which gave a balance in service for the program.

Vietnam: International organizations apply the term community in Vietnam to the local administrative unit, each with a traditional identity based on traditional, cultural, and kinship relations. Community development strategies in Vietnam aim to organize communities in ways that increase their capacities to partner with institutions, the participation of local people, transparency and equality, and unity within local communities.

Social and economic development planning (SDEP) in Vietnam uses top-down centralized planning methods and decision-making processes which do not consider local context and local participation. The plans created by SDEP are ineffective and serve mainly for administrative purposes. Local people are not informed of these development plans.

The participatory rural appraisal (PRA) approach, a research methodology that allows local people to share and evaluate their own life conditions, was introduced to Vietnam in the early 1990s to help reform the way that government approaches local communities and development. PRA was used as a tool for mostly outsiders to learn about the local community, which did not effect substantial change.

The village/commune development (VDP/CDP) approach was developed as a more fitting approach than PRA to analyze local context and address the needs of rural communities.[29] VDP/CDP participatory planning is centered around Ho Chi Minh's saying that "People know, people discuss and people supervise." VDP/CDP is often useful in Vietnam for shifting centralized management to more decentralization, helping develop local governance at the grassroots level. 

Local people use their knowledge to solve local issues. They create mid-term and yearly plans that help improve existing community development plans with the support of government organizations. Although VDP/CDP has been tested in many regions in Vietnam, it has not been fully implemented for a couple reasons. The methods applied in VDP/CDP are human resource and capacity building intensive, especially at the early stages.

It also requires the local people to have an "initiative-taking" attitude. People in the remote areas where VDP/CDP has been tested have mostly passive attitudes because they already receive assistance from outsiders. There also are no sufficient monitoring practices to ensure effective plan implementation. Integrating VDP/CDP into the governmental system is difficult because the Communist Party and Central government's policies on decentralization are not enforced in reality.

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) in Vietnam, legalized in 1991, have claimed goals to develop civil society, which was essentially nonexistent prior to the Đổi Mới economic reforms. NGO operations in Vietnam do not exactly live up to their claimed goals to expand civil society. This is mainly due to the fact that NGOs in Vietnam are mostly donor-driven, urban, and elite-based organizations that employ staff with ties to the Communist Party and Central government. 

NGOs are also overlooked by the Vietnam Fatherland Front, an umbrella organization that reports observations directly to the Party and Central government. Since NGOs in Vietnam are not entirely non-governmental, they have been coined instead as 'VNGOs.' Most VNGOs have originated from either the state, hospital or university groups, or individuals not previously associated with any groups. VNGOs have not yet reached those most in need, such as the rural poor, due to the entrenched power networks' opposition to lobbying for issues such the rural poor's land rights. 

Authoritarianism is prevalent in nearly all Vietnamese civic organizations. Authoritarian practices are more present in inner-organizational functions than in organization leaders' worldviews. These leaders often reveal both authoritarian and libertarian values in contradiction. Representatives of Vietnam's NGO's stated that disagreements are normal, but conflicts within an organization should be avoided, demonstrating the one-party "sameness" mentality of authoritarian rule.

See also:







Community-driven DevelopmentPictured below: General logical framework for community driven development (CDD)
Community-driven development (CDD) is a development initiative that provides control of the development process, resources and decision making authority directly to groups in the community.

The underlying assumption of CDD projects are that communities are the best judges of how their lives and livelihoods can be improved and, if provided with adequate resources and information, they can organize themselves to provide for their immediate needs.

CDD projects work by providing poor communities with direct funding for development with the communities then deciding how to spend the money. Lastly, the community plans and builds the project and takes responsibility for monitoring its progress.

Characteristics of CDD:

CDD programs are motivated by their trust in people (Naidoo and Finn, 2001) and hence it advocates people changing their own environment as a powerful force for development.

By treating poor people as assets and partners in the development process, studies have shown that CDD is responsive to local demands, inclusive, and more cost-effective compared to centrally-led NGO-based programs. CDD can also be supported by strengthening and financing community groups, facilitating community access to information, and promoting an enabling environment through policy and institutional reform (Dongier, 2002).

Following from this description, field practitioners at the World Bank have denoted five key characteristics of CDD projects:
  1. A CDD operation primarily targets a community-based organization or a representative local council of a community. This community focus means that the essential defining characteristic of a CDD project is that the beneficiaries or grantees of implementations are agents of the community. Since the focus on small communities is so large the CDD normally targets small scale subprojects in the community.
  2. In CDD operations, community- or locally based representation is responsible for designing and planning the subprojects in a participatory manner. Since the concentration on participatory planning is considerable in CDD operations, often the possible types of subproject investment options are very large with only a small list of subprojects that cannot be carried out.
  3. The defining characteristic of CDD projects is that a transfer of resources to the community occurs and control of the resources is delegated to the community. The amount of transfer and control of resources will depend on the CDD implementations.
  4. The community is directly involved in the implementation of the subproject. Often the participation of the community comes directly in the form of labour or funds. However, the community may also contribute to the subproject indirectly in the form of management and supervision of contractors or the operation and maintenance of the infrastructure when complete.
  5. An element of community-based monitoring and evaluation has become a characteristic of CDD subprojects. Most often it is social accountability tools such as participatory monitoring, community scorecards and grievance redress systems which allow for the community to ensure accountability of the CDD implementation.

CDD vs. CBD:

Community-driven development is derived from community-based development (CBD) which can include a much broader range of projects. For example, CBD projects can include everything from simple information sharing to social, economic and political empowerment of community groups.

However, CDD projects fit on the empowerment end of CBD by actively engaging beneficiaries in the design, management and implementation of projects. The stress on actual control of decision-making and project resources at nearly all stages of a subproject cycle distinguishes CDD from the previous generation of CBD projects. In this continuum of community participation covered by CBD, new-generation CDD projects are located at the extreme right (Tanaka, 2006).

Since community-driven development has only recently diverged from the broad community-based development there are a few contrasts visible in the five characteristics of CDD programs. In essence, all five properties of CDD projects exist together only in the newer generation of CDD implementations.

Nevertheless, the first attribute of community focus would apply to all CDD projects and CBD projects. In contrast, the second characteristic of participatory planning and design and the fourth property of community involvement are often visible among all CDD projects but very rarely in CBD projects.

Moreover, community-based monitoring and evaluation which is the fifth aspect of CDD projects is only found in some of the newer projects. The fifth characteristic is what positions many of the newer CDD projects in the extreme right of the CDD cluster as diagrammatically demonstrated in Figure 1.

As mentioned above, the third characteristic of community control of resources seems to be the key factor to conceptually distinguish between CDD and CBD projects. However, many of the early NGOs implementing CDD projects did not always interpret this factor rigorously (Tanaka, 2006). Thus, the distinction between CDD projects and CBD projects with CDD components was not always clear; however, this would be expected since there was a gradual evolution of CDD out of CBD.

To alleviate the earlier problems of over-reliance on central governments as the main service provider, CDD programs were launched by the World Bank to improve the accountability and services in key areas. However, NGOs quickly learned that well designed and implemented CDD programs had ripple effects of promoting equity and inclusiveness, efficiency and good governance.

By effectively targeting and including the vulnerable and excluded groups, as well as allowing communities to manage and control resources directly it was evident that CDD programs could allow poverty reduction projects to scale up quickly.

Efficiency is gained through demand responsive allocation of resources, reduced corruption and misuse of resources, lower costs and better cost recovery, better quality and maintenance, greater utilization of resources, and the community‘s willingness to pay for goods and services.

Good governance is promoted by greater transparency, accountability in allocation and use of resources because the community participates in project decision-making processes. Some of the principles of CDD—such as participation, empowerment, accountability, and nondiscrimination—are also worthy ends in themselves (Asian Development Bank, 2008).

It was as early as 1881 when T.H. Green who wrote about the maximum power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves (Zakaria, 1999). However, it was not until the 1970s with John Rawls’ book ―A Theory of Justice and in the 1990s with Amartya Sen‘s book ―Development as Freedom where the notions of substantive freedom and the multidimensional nature of poverty were made explicit to the multilateral development banks.

This recognition of the multidimensional nature of poverty as well as the combined failures of both markets and governments and the socio-political complexity of ground level realities has made it clear that relying on traditional top-down, state-led, ―big development‖ strategies would not be effective to combat poverty.

Moreover, this resurgence in participatory development and bottom-up approaches in the NGO and development sector has come in only the last two decades as explained above.

Expansion of community-driven development:

Since the mid-1990s, community-driven development has emerged as one of the fastest-growing investments by NGOs, aid organizations and multilateral developments banks. This continued investment in CDD has been driven mostly by a demand from donor agencies and developing countries for large-scale, bottom-up and demand-driven, poverty reduction subprojects that can increase the institutional capacity of small communities for self-development. 

The success and scale of some CDD projects in the World Bank are especially notable. The World Bank supported approximately 190 lending projects amounting to $9.3 billion in 2000–2005 (Tanaka, 2006). Initiated by the International Development Association (IDA) at the World Bank, CDD projects have been instrumental in harnessing the energy and capacity of communities for poverty reduction. Since the start of this decade, IDA lending for CDD has averaged annually just over 50 operations, for an average total of US$1.3 billion per year (International Development Association, 2009).

Even the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has funded 57 projects worth about $2.5 billion between 2001-2007 that included community-driven development approaches to enhance deliver of inputs and beneficiary participation. They constituted 14% of the total loans approved by the Asian Development Bank during this period.

Over one-third of the projects were in the agriculture and natural resources sector, followed by a smaller proportion of water supply and sanitation, waste management, education and health projects. The projects were primarily in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central and West Asia, where the developing country governments were investing in rural development programs (Asian Development Bank, 2008).

In the last few years the International Fund for Agricultural Development has been working with the following to create a platform for learning and sharing knowledge on community-driven development (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2010):
Intensive forms of community participation have been attempted in projects of several donors for many years. Bilateral donors, such as the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), have used CDD-type approaches for a long time as part of their sustainable livelihoods and integrated basic needs development assistance in developing countries.

The Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and Danish International Development Agency have used CDD principles in the mandate of a rights-based approach to the development projects they fund (FAO, 2010).

More than 80 countries have now implemented CDD projects. The breadth and activities funded by the CDD programs at the World Bank can be explained by providing a brief overview of a few of them.

The Second National Fadama Development Project II (NFDP-II) targets the development of small scale irrigation, especially in the low-lying alluvial floodplains or "Fadama‖". NFDP-II increased the productivity, living standards and development capacity of the economically active rural communities while increasing the efficiency in delivering implementation services to an estimated four million rural beneficiary households and raising the real incomes of households by 45 percent (African Development Bank, 2003).

The Social Fund for Development in Yemen provided support 7 million people of which 49 percent were female and generated 8,000 permanent jobs. It also increased the number of girls‘ schools from 502 to 554 and basic education enrollment rates from 63 percent to 68 percent.

The program focuses on helping the poor to help themselves through providing income-generating activities and building community infrastructure rather than making cash transfers (El-Gammal, 2004). The Social Investment Fund Project V in Honduras benefited 2.5 million people with the implementation of 2,888 projects (1,446 rehabilitated schools, about 700 new schools, 163 new health centers, 347 small water/sanitation systems, and 461 latrines) resulting in all children in the targeted areas attending primary school.

In addition the project communities were provided with better access to health care assistance and access to running water (Perez de Castillo, 1998). The Andhra Pradesh Rural Poverty Reduction Project (APRPRP) in India has help to organize 10.1 million rural poor women into community-based organizations that collectively save over US$770 million and leverage credit over $2.7 billion from commercial banks (World Bank, 2003).

The Kecamatan Development Program (KDP) in Indonesia which is what the National Solidarity Program in Afghanistan is based on has benefitted 18 million people by providing better services which include more than 37,000 kilometers of local roads and 8,500 bridges, 9,200 clean water supply units, and 3,000 new or improved health posts.

In addition, more than 1.3 million people obtained loans to start or complement local businesses through microfinancing (Guggenheim, 2004). Lastly, the National Solidarity Program (NSP) in Afghanistan will be the focus of this research. In this implementation elected village-level community development councils, which include women, use grants and local labor to rebuild bridges and roads, fix schools and install water pumps to benefit 13 million people across Afghanistan thereby building state credibility and strengthening local democracy.

Effect of CDD programs on conflict:

Governments and international organizations persist to address large amounts of development aid to conflict affected areas throughout the world by community-driven development programs, some of it in order to abate conflict by decreasing popular support for insurgent activities.

Despite that, the effect of development aid on civil conflict remains unclear. The Philippines’ Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahiripan - Comprehensive Integrated Delivery of Social Services (KALAHI-CIDSS) — a large-scale community-driven development program from 2003 through 2008 implemented by the Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development.

The program intends to improve local infrastructure, governance, participation, and social cohesion. More than 4000 villages in 184 municipalities across 40 provinces had received aid through KALAHI-CIDSS. (Crost and Johnston , 2010) investigate the effect of a KALAHI-CIDSS development program in the Philippines, and conclude that the program actually intensify violence in the short term.

There are at least two possible reasons through which aid could intensify conflict. The first is that an inflow of aid will increase the amount of resources, which in turn increases the incentive to fight. The second is that aid increases short-term conflict because it has the potential to weaken insurgents in the long-run, perhaps because it increases peaceful economic opportunities or popular support for the government.

If insurgents expect a successful aid program to weaken their position, they have an incentive to sabotage its implementation by violent means. The National Solidarity Program (NSP), which began in June 2003, is the largest development program in Afghanistan. The program is focused on infrastructure, such as drinking water facilities, irrigation canals and roads, and services, such as training and literacy courses.

NSP is executed by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) of the Government of Afghanistan, funded by the World Bank and a consortium of bilateral donors, and implemented by around25 NGOs. By mid 2010NSP had already been implemented in over 29,000 villages across 361 of Afghanistan‘s 398 districts at a cost of nearly $1 billion.

The results of NSP show that the program has a significant positive effect on the sense of economic wellbeing among the villagers and their support for the central and local governments. There is also evidence that NSP has positive effect on the perception of security situation by the villagers, but no evidence that this has led to a decrease in insurgent attacks there (Beath, 2011).

See also:







Asset-based community developmentPictured below: ​Catalytic Communities engages in Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD).
Asset-based community development (ABCD) is a methodology for the sustainable development of communities based on their strengths and potentials. It involves assessing the resources, skills, and experience available in a community; organizing the community around issues that move its members into action; and then determining and taking appropriate action This method uses the community's own assets and resources as the basis for development; it empowers the people of the community by encouraging them to utilize what they already possess.

The ABCD approach was developed by John L. McKnight and John P. Kretzmann at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. They co-authored a book in 1993, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing A Community’s Assets, which outlined their asset-based approach to community development. 

The Community Development Program at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research established the Asset-Based Community Development Institute based on three decades of research and community work by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight.

Principles:

Needs-based community development emphasizes local deficits and looks to outside agencies for resources. In contrast, asset-based community development focuses on honing and leveraging existing strengths within the community. Related to tenets of empowerment, it postulates that solutions to community problems already exist within a community’s assets.

Principles that guide ABCD include:
  • Everyone has gifts: Each person in a community has something to contribute.
  • Relationships build a community: People must be connected in order for sustainable community development to take place.
  • Citizens at the center: Citizens should be viewed as actors—not recipients—in development.
  • Leaders involve others: Community development is strongest when it involves a broad base of community action.
  • People care: Challenge notions of "apathy" by listening to people's interests.
  • Listen: Decisions should come from conversations where people are heard.
  • Ask: Asking for ideas is more sustainable than giving solutions.
  • Inside-out organization: Local community members are in control.
  • Institutions serve the community: Institutional leaders should create opportunities for community-member involvement, then "step back."

Tools:

The ABCD approach utilizes several tools to assess and mobilize communities:

Capacity inventory:
  1. Skills Information: lists the many skills that a person has gained at home, work, in the community, or elsewhere. Examples of these skills can include internet knowledge, hair-cutting, listening, wallpapering, carpentry, sewing, babysitting, etc.
  2. Community Skills: lists the community work in which a person has participated to determine future work they may be interested in.
  3. Enterprising Interests and Experience: lists past experience in business and determines interest in starting a business.
  4. Personal Information: lists minimum information for follow-up.

Asset mapping:

There are five key assets in any given community:
  1. individuals,
  2. associations,
  3. institutions,
  4. physical assets,
  5. and connections. 

These assets are broken down into three categories: Gifts of individuals, Citizens’ Associations, and Local Institutions.

Asset maps are used in lieu of needs maps which focus solely on negative aspects of communities. Asset maps, on the other hand, focus on community assets, abilities, skills, and strengths in order to build its future:
​Time banks:

Time banks are an example of using community assets to connect individuals' assets to one another Neighbors and local organizations share skills with one another and earn and spend ‘TimeBank Hours’ or ‘credits’ in the process, allowing an hour of child care to equal an hour of home repair or tax preparation.

Ethics:

Since ABCD relies on existing community assets to create change, it has been criticized for implying that disadvantaged communities have all the resources they need to solve community problems.

According to the ABCD Institute, however, ABCD methodology recognizes that systemic injustice may require disadvantaged communities to seek assistance from outside the community. ABCD maintains that interventions from exterior sources will be most effective when a community’s assets are leveraged at full capacity.

ABCD is described as a more sustainable model of community development than needs-based community development, because needs-based approaches may perpetuate community problems by emphasizing deficiencies and the necessity for reliance on outside assistance.

By contrast, ABCD aims to build capacity within communities by expanding their social capital. By working with outside resources and simultaneously building trust within the community, more members can make use of a wider array of strengths.

See also:






​
Community-based Participatory ResearchPictured below: VOICE OF THE STAKEHOLDERS: PRINCIPLES OF
COMMUNITY-BASED PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH (PDF)
​Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a partnership approach to research that equitably involves community members, organizational representatives, researchers, and others in all aspects of the research process, with all partners in the process contributing expertise and sharing in the decision-making and ownership.

The aim of CBPR is to increase knowledge and understanding of a given phenomenon and to integrate the knowledge gained with interventions for policy or social change benefiting the community members.

There are many ways CBPR can be used to engage in the public sphere and a range of approaches that can encompass the process of engagement. There is some consensus in the way in which practitioners engage communities. This can range from initial engagement of the public to the empowering of communities that can lead to collective goals and social change. Engagement can include lower to higher levels of inclusion. CBPR emphasizes the public engagement end of this spectrum in many cases.

​History:

The historical roots of CBPR generally trace back to the development of participatory action research by Kurt Lewin and Orlando Fals Borda, and the popular education movement in Latin America associated with Paulo Freire.

A CBPR project starts with the community, which participates fully in all aspects of the research process. Community is often self-defined, but general categories of community include geographic community, community of individuals with a common problem or issue, or a community of individuals with a common interest or goal.

CBPR encourages collaboration of “formally trained research” partners from any area of expertise, provided that the researcher provides expertise that is seen as useful to the investigation by the community, and be fully committed to a partnership of equals and producing outcomes usable to the community.

Equitable partnerships require sharing power, resources, credit, results, and knowledge, as well as a reciprocal appreciation of each partner's knowledge and skills at each stage of the project, including problem definition/issue selection, research design, conducting research, interpreting the results, and determining how the results should be used for action. CBPR differs from traditional research in many ways.

One of the principal ways in which it is different is that instead of creating knowledge for the advancement of a field or for knowledge's sake, CBPR is an iterative process, incorporating research, reflection, and action in a cyclical process.

Research:

Scholarship in the area of CBPR is vast and spells out various approaches which consider multiple theoretical and methodological approaches. The content areas include health, ethnic studies, bullying, and indigenous communities.

There is a lot of scholarship exploring how to teach students about CBPR or community based research (CBR). Some have taken what could be called a critical approach to this by emphasizing the “institutional power inequalities” in community based organization-university relationship building.

There are successes and failures in using CBPR approaches in teaching which practitioners can consider. Others have argued that community based work can provide several learning benefits with pros and cons to the various approaches. Scholars continue to problematize approaches that can engage instructors and students in imagining ways to work with communities.

Research challenges:

Scholarship has explored the potential barriers to collecting community-based participatory research data. The CBPR approach is in line with the body of sociological work that advocates for “protagonist driven ethnography". The approach provides for and demands that researchers collaborate with communities throughout the research process. However, challenges can surface given the power relationship between researcher and communities.

The CBPR approach proposes that researchers be mindful of this possibility. The researcher can expect to spend a lot of time navigating and building the researcher-community relationship. Additionally, through CBPR researchers enable communities to hold them accountable to addressing ethical concerns inherent to collecting information from what are often marginalized communities.

Sociologists have entered the discussion from the point of view of the ethnographer or participant observer where some have argued against "exoticizing the ghetto" or "cowboy ethnography". These works could be read as a check on the scholar centered work that can emerge when collecting ethnographic or participant observation data.

The perception of researchers is something to weigh when considering this approach or other forms of field work. One researcher stated that "Researchers are like mosquitoes; they suck your blood and leave.” Through this lens a focus on a CBPR project at the exclusion of the community could harm the goals of co-learning and shared goal accomplishment.

Applications:

Applications of community-based participatory research are more common in health promotions than other areas of research. Prevention, management, and awareness building about diabetes, HIV/AIDS, asthma, cancer, mental health, obesity, and HPV vaccination are a few applications of CBPR studies.

Research with the population from ethnic minorities and marginalized groups are often used CBPR approach for its strength in building trust, acceptance, and engagement of the community members.

Resources:

There are a number of institutions that provide funding and other resources for conducting CBPR work. Organizations and institutions explore CBPR by focusing on youth, communities, and social justice. There are networks of professionals, researchers, and activists that present and collaborate on CBPR projects.





​


Community ServicePictured below: 70 COMMUNITY SERVICE PROJECT IDEAS
Community service is unpaid work performed by a person or group of people for the benefit and betterment of their community without any form of compensation. 

Community service can be distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis and may be compulsory per situation. Although personal benefits may be realized, it may be performed for a variety of reasons including citizenship requirements, a substitution of criminal justice sanctions, requirements of a school or class, and requisites for the receipt of certain benefits.

​Background:

Community service is a non-paying job performed by one person or a group of people for the benefit of their community or its institutions. Community service is distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis. It may be performed for a variety of reasons.
  • It may be required by a government as a part of citizenship requirements, like the mandatory "Hand and hitch-up services" for some municipalities in Germany, or generally in lieu of military service or for civil conscription services.
  • It may be required as a substitution of, or in addition to, other criminal justice sanctions – when performed for this reason it may also be referred to as community payback.
  • It may be mandated by schools to meet the requirements of a class, such as in the case of service-learning or to meet the requirements of graduating as class valedictorian.
  • In the UK, it has been made a condition of the receipt of certain benefits. (see Workfare in the United Kingdom)
  • In Sweden it is a suspended sentence called "samhällstjänst" ("society service").

Reasons:

Some educational jurisdictions in the United States require students to perform community service hours to graduate from high school. In some high schools in Washington, for example, students must finish 200 hours of community service to get a diploma. Some school districts in Washington, including Seattle Public Schools, differentiate between community service and "service learning," requiring students to demonstrate that their work has contributed to their education] 

If a student in high school is taking an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) course, community service is often needed. Whether American public schools could require volunteer hours for high school graduation was challenged in Immediato v. Rye Neck School District, but the court found no violation.

Many other high schools do not require community service hours for graduation, but still see an impressive number of students get involved in their communities. For example, in Palo Alto, California, students at Palo Alto High School log about 45,000 hours of community service every year. As a result, the school's College and Career Center awards 250–300 students the President's Volunteer Service Award every year for their hard work.

Colleges:

Though not technically considered a requirement, many colleges include community service as an unofficial requirement for acceptance. However, some colleges prefer work experience over community service, and some require that their students also continue community service for some specific number of hours to graduate.

Some schools also offer unique "community service" courses, awarding credit to students who complete a certain number of community service hours. Some academic honor societies, along with some fraternities and sororities in North America, require community service to join and others require each member to continue doing community service.

Many student organizations exist for the purpose of community service, the largest of which is Alpha Phi Omega. Community service projects are also done by sororities and fraternities.

Beginning in the 1980s, colleges began using service-learning as a pedagogy. A partnership of college presidents began in 1985 with the initiative of boosting community service in their colleges. This alliance called Campus Compact, led the way for many other schools to adopt service-learning courses and activities.

Service-learning courses vary widely in time span, quality, and in the balance of "service" and "learning" stressed in the course. A typical service-learning course, however, has these factors in common:
  • A service component where the student spends time serving in the community meeting actual needs
  • A learning component where students seek out or are taught information—often both interpersonal and academic—that they integrate into their service
  • A reflection component that ties service and learning together

Reflection is sometimes symbolized by the hyphen in the term "service-learning" to indicate that it has a central role in learning by serving. Reflection is simply a scheduled consideration of one's own experiences and thoughts. This can take many forms, including journals, blogs, and discussions.

Service-learning courses present learning the material in context, meaning that students often learn effectively and tend to apply what was learned. As the book Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? notes, "Students engaged in service-learning are engaged in authentic situations; they get to know real people whose lives are affected by these issues… As a result, they have lots of questions—real questions that they want to have answered." Thus, students become interested and motivated to learn the materials to resolve their questions.

Community service learning strives to connect or re-connect students with serving their community after they finish their course. It creates a bridge for the lack of community service found among college-age people in the United States.

Community service-learning:

The one serving may be able to take something away from the experience and be able to use any newfound knowledge or interpersonal discoveries to improve their future servitude and the people around them. To gain the most from community service requires balancing learning with serving. Learning and serving at the same time improves a student's community while teaching life lessons and building character.

Community service-learning is "about leadership development as well as traditional information and skill acquisition". Therefore, the combination of people doing service and learning at the same time teaches them how to be effective and how to be effective regarding what is important to them. It can improve their overall experience and application opportunities they gain from it.

By adding service to learning, and balancing the two, community service can become more than just the act of serving. The goal of service-learning is to achieve large change through small actions. By being a classroom, a hands-on learning experience, and an opportunity to change the community, people are able to not only serve, but impact themselves as well.

Definition:

According to Fayetteville State University, "service learning is a process of involving students in community service activities combined with facilitated means for applying the experience to their academic and personal development. It is a form of experiential education aimed at enhancing and enriching student learning in course material. When compared to other forms of experiential learning like internships and cooperative education, it is similar in that it is student-centered, hands-on and directly applicable to the curriculum."

Professor Freddy Cardoza defines community service-Learning as "a pedogogy (or a specific teaching-learning approach) that has few lectures, and is a more interactive hands on educational strategy which provides students with instruction while leading them through meaningful community service experiences and engaging them in personal reflection on those experiences in order to build character and to teach problem-solving skills and civic responsibility." 

Cardoza stressed that it was important for a student take some time and reflect on what they are experiencing, seeing, doing, and what problems they are encountering and how they are going to apply what they have been learning to solve these problems.

In other words, service-learning aims to link the personal and interpersonal development with cognitive development, as well as equipping the student with critical knowledge to help them understand the world.

Character.org defines service-learning as "different than community service in several key ways. Service learning includes student leadership, reflective and academic components, and chances for celebration once the service activity has been successfully completed. Students reflect on community needs, ways to help, and once their service has been completed, they can internalize how their efforts have helped, while learning more about academics such as geography, math, or science."

Court ordered service:
See also: Penal labor in the United States
​
People convicted of a crime may be required to perform community service or to work for agencies in the sentencing jurisdiction either entirely or partially as a substitution of other judicial remedies and sanctions, such as incarceration or fines. For instance, a fine may be reduced in exchange for a prescribed number of hours of community service. The court may allow the defendant to choose their community service, which must then be documented by "credible agencies", such as non-profit organizations, or may mandate a specific service.

Sometimes the sentencing is specifically targeted to the defendant's crime, for example, a litterer may have to clean a park or roadside, or a drunk driver might appear before school groups to explain why drunk driving is a crime. Also, a sentence allowing for a broader choice may prohibit certain services that the offender would reasonably be expected to perform anyway.

Corporate social responsibility:

Some employers involve their staff in some kind of community service programming, such as with the United Way of America. This may be completely voluntary or a condition of employment, or anything in between.

In addition, approximately 40% of Fortune 500 companies offer volunteer grant programs where companies provide monetary donations to nonprofit organizations in recognition of their employee's volunteerism (e.g. $500 volunteer grant after 25 hours of community service).

Worldwide examples:

Community service in the United States is often similar to that in Canada. In Europe and Australia, community service is an option for many criminal sentences as an alternative to incarceration.

In the United Kingdom, community service is now officially referred to by the Home Office as more straightforward compulsory unpaid work. Compulsory unpaid work includes up to 300 hours of activities, such as conservation work, cleaning up graffiti, or working with a charity. The Howard League for Penal Reform (the world's oldest prison reform organization) is a prominent advocate for increased community sentencing to reduce prison population and improve rehabilitation.

Starting in 2010, Danish high school students receive a special diploma if they complete at least 20 hours of voluntary work.

The International Baccalaureate program formerly required 50 hours of community service, together with a written reflection on the service performed, to fulfill the requirement of 150 hours of CAS (creativity, action, and service) and receive an IB Diploma.

Florence Nightingale organized fundraisers to raise money for the hospital and arrange more stable living conditions to improve the health of the soldiers in the hospital. Florence Nightingale served a specific group of people and benefited the public—which is an example of community service.

Community service for institutions:

Many institutions require and/or give incentive to students or employees alike to volunteer their time to community service programs. From volunteering to participating in such charity events like walks or runs, institutes continue the practice or requiring their employees or students to grow in camaraderie while giving back to various communities.

Many institutions also provide opportunities for employees and students to work together, and most student groups participate in their own form of community service. Each is unique in its own right; all are incredibly popular with employees; and in all of these programs, human resources plays an integral role.

One such program, Johns Hopkins University, under the leadership of Johns Hopkins University president Ronald J. Daniels and the chief executive officer of Baltimore City Schools, the university's human resources and community affairs departments worked with the school system to develop the Johns Hopkins Takes Time for Schools program in 2009, launching it on March 3, 2010.

The program is a service partnership aimed at providing support and assistance to Baltimore City Schools (BCS) while providing faculty and staff an avenue for community service, offering their talents to the city's youth and improving the administrative and educational capacities of the area's school system.

Some institutes even give their students or employees a guaranteed number of days or weeks of leave for certain acceptable community service programs. One example is East Carolina University, which gives 24 hours of community service leave for full-time employees per year as an incentive and compensation for community service.

Religious reasons for serving:

Beyond required community service, some religious groups emphasize serving one's community. These groups and churches reach out by holding Vacation Bible Schools for children, hosting Red Cross blood drives, having fall carnivals, or offering free meals.

Through these services, churches are able to benefit neighborhoods and families. Some churches create non-profit organizations that can help the public. Crisis pregnancy centers are often run by religious groups to promote pro-life values in local families. To meet impoverished people's needs, some churches provide a food pantry or start a homeless shelter. Also, certain churches provide day care so that busy parents can work.

Christian service:

Christianity promotes community service. According to Freddy Cardoza, a teacher at biblical Biola University, Christians are called to serve people because Christians see the importance of community service to show God's love and to further spread the Gospel.

Some non-governmental (NGO) community service organizations were founded by Christians seeking to put their beliefs into practice. Three prominent examples are Samaritan's Purse, Salvation Army, and Habitat for Humanity.

Samaritan's Purse was inspired by a prayer of evangelist Robert Pierce, "Let my heart be broken for the things which break the heart of God." After traveling through Asia and seeing first-hand the suffering of impoverished children, lepers, and orphans—in 1970, Pierce founded Samaritan's Purse. Today, Samaritan's Purse reaches millions of people across the globe by providing aid such as disaster relief, medical assistance, and child care. A notable Samaritan's Purse project is Operation Christmas Child headed by Franklin Graham.

The Salvation Army was founded by William Booth and his wife Catherine Booth in 1865. Booth was a Methodist minister and preacher on the streets of London. His tent meetings gathered crowds of drunkards, prostitutes and thieves who eventually became the first "soldiers" in the army, which has grown to 1,442,388 members in 126 countries. The Salvation Army's motto is "Doing the Most Good" and does so by providing aid such as shelter, food, clothing, spiritual training and disaster relief.

Habitat for Humanity provides housing for people in need. Founded by Millard Fuller, its vision is to "...put God’s love into action by bringing people together to build homes, communities and hope". Habitat for Humanity has built or repaired over 800,000 homes and served more than 4 million people worldwide since its creation in 1976. They describe their vision as "...a world where everyone has a decent place to live".

Personal benefits of serving:

Community service also allows those participating to reflect on the difference they are making in society. Some participants of a community service project may find themselves gaining a greater understanding of their roles in the community, as well as the impact of their contributions towards those in need of service.

Because community service outlets vary, those who serve are exposed to many different kinds of people, environments, and situations.

With each new community service project, some participants may gain insightful experience in a variety of areas. Participants may also internalize the information that they found personally insightful for future use. While simply performing community service is valuable to the recipients, those serving often find it beneficial to pause and reflect on how they are changing society for the better.

Schools often take students on community service projects so they can learn how their individual actions affect the well-being of the public. Participants may find that serving the public fosters a more solidified view of self and purpose.

Those involved in community service learning may also find that after serving the community for an extended period of time, they have an advantage in real-world experience. Eventually, the skills and knowledge obtained while working with the community may be applied in future areas of work. Community service may also increase a participant's social connectivity.

Because most community service opportunities allow others to interact and work with other individuals, this service may help volunteers network and connect with others towards a common goal.

People gain the most from their community service projects when they volunteer their time to help people that they have never interacted with before. This direct contact allows people to see life from a different perspective and reevaluate their opinions of others. Many young people who get involved in community service come out with a more well-rounded worldview.

Another benefit in participating in community service is a greater understanding and appreciation for diversity. Appreciating other cultures and breaking down stereotypes is important to becoming a responsible citizen and better person. By participating in a community service project where interaction is required, personal relationships can begin to grow.

These personal relationships help people have informal and consistent interactions that through time, often breakdown negative stereotypes.

These relationships can also facilitate more opinions and viewpoints surrounding various topics that help participants to grow in diversity. 

Stereotypes can be defined as, "believing unfairly that all people or things with a specific characteristic are the same." Stereotypes often reveal themselves in quick judgments based solely off of visible characteristics. These judgments move into a biased opinion when you believe that these judgments are always true. These stereotypes can be harmful to both personal relationships and relationships within the work place.

Community Service helps people to realize that everyone does not fall into these preconceived ideas.

Along with breaking down stereotypes, community service work can assist people in realizing that those they are helping and working with are no different from themselves. 

This realization can lead to empathizing with others. Learning to understand the needs and motivations of others, especially those who live different lives from our own, is an important part of living a productive life. This leads to a view of humanity that can help a person stay free of biased opinions of others and can lead to a more diverse and ultimately more productive and thought provoking life.

Choosing the right strategy:

Civilians have a desire and aptitude to organize themselves apart from government to address the needs in their communities. However, making sure an effort has a positive effect on society requires clear analysis and a strategy. Analysis identifies root causes of problems that project implementation must address.

Individuals, like neighborhoods, enjoy permanent change only if it is an inner one—and the greatest form of community service is encouraging that inner change.

Abraham Kuyper advocates sphere sovereignty, which honors the independence and autonomy of the "intermediate bodies" in society, such as schools, press, business, and the arts. He champions the right of every community to operate its own organizations and manage its own groups, with the foundational belief that parents know what their child really needs, and that local people are more capable of helping fellow locals.

Those who agree with his views perceive community service as a tool of empowerment that can help people achieve better employment and lifestyle, avoiding what they see as destructive decision making for mal-established goals by poorly developed community service efforts.

Amy L. Sherman, in her book Restorers of Hope, suggests that community service planning should be made with the valuable opinion of the local residents, since they have firsthand knowledge of the inside realities of their community's current state. Making them a part of the movement, change or project creates in the members of the community a sense of belonging and hope.

​See also:







Community ProjectPictured below: Teaching Through Community-Based Projects*
* -- Teaching Through Community-Based Projects
By: Mario Guerrero

"In my teaching experience I have come to the conclusion that many college students are unaware of the cultural differences and social issues in their communities. I have also realized that some teachers are often limited in delivering academic content inside the classroom, which might prevent learners from contextualizing the knowledge in real-life situations.

Therefore, helping students understand that there is a relevant relationship between their professional skills and their role as citizens within their communities is important. The purpose of including community-based projects in your syllabi is to instill in students a sense of social responsibility and cultural awareness at an early stage in their professional life.

To accomplish this, it is important to understand the meaning of contextualization, field trips and community-based instruction. Mazzeo et al (Perin, 2011, p. 6) define contextualization as instructional strategies intended to link academic content with its application in a specific context relevant to the students. Additionally, community-based instruction is defined as systematic instruction that integrates community settings with meaningful learning and it is age-appropriate to the skills of the students.

Implementing community-based projects in our classes does not mean organizing sporadic field trips. A field trip does not involve the “doing” because it is generally limited to observation. (CBI Handbook, 2005) Field trips are useful as they help enhance learning outside the classroom. However, they generally lack the possibility for students to learn from social interaction.

GETTING STUDENTS INTO THE COMMUNITY:

One of the goals for my Spanish class was to teach students how to interact at a restaurant using the target language. In addition, students had to learn popular recipes and regional ingredients used in the different Latin American countries. Each group visited different Latino restaurants in their neighborhoods, conducted interviews with cooks, and learned about the differences of ingredients.

It would have been easier to have each group bring a different dish to the classroom and explain its ingredients, but that approach would provide little interaction with their communities. Their evaluation consisted of a lunch at a Cuban restaurant in which students had to discuss their experiences with the cooks, interact with Spanish-speaking waiters, and try the traditional Caribbean dishes.

At the end, students mentioned that this experience not only helped them practice real-life Spanish but they also learned about real Latin American food and people living and working in the city.

The final project for my English class was a theory-based presentation that would improve students’ academic speaking skills. The students are future language teachers who are required to intern in their last two semesters. Therefore, I implemented a community-based project. My students had to compare the theory with the practice and report back to the class.

Each group chose a public school from their own community. Students interacted with school administrators, teachers, and students. They observed the teaching conditions in which a second language is taught. Their final presentations included a reflective analysis about the language theories. Students were aware of the realities of the schools and understood that not all of the proposed theories were applicable in their communities.

SKILLS THAT STUDENTS CAN GAIN FROM A COMMUNITY-BASED PROJECT:

Altruism and Social Awareness – Altruism in education should help students develop a sense of belonging to their communities. In addition, the main objective of these experiences should not only be the improvement of the students’ professional skills but it should raise awareness about the realities of others. As a result, these activities might instill in students a sense of inclusiveness, diversity, belonging, and respect for others.

Teamwork – Using teamwork in your community-based projects will help students improve their interpersonal relationships by empowering them with their own decision-making and problem solving.

Critical Thinking – It is very important to teach students to become critical thinkers. It allows them to make decisions through their own reflection and judgment. Community-based projects give students an opportunity to observe and analyze real-world situations while improving their professional skills and learning from the realities of their community.

Interpersonal Skills – When students work in groups in community-based projects, they learn to move beyond their comfort zone to interact with people from diverse backgrounds to find collective solutions. These activities foster enhanced student interaction, which implies communication, peer-assessment, and continuous feedback.

Mario Guerrero is an assistant professor at the University of Nariño in Colombia and former adjunct professor at Fordham University.
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​Community project From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A community project is a term applied to any community-based project. This covers a wide variety of different areas within a community or a group of networking entities. Projects can cover almost anything, including the most obvious section of concern to any community, the welfare element.

Welfare community projects would for example be, a locally run and locally funded orphanage; a Christmas dinner kitchen for the homeless. Another important sector of importance to the community would be charity. Charitable projects in the community can include, but are not limited to, ecological charities concerned with either the maintenance of green spaces, or in some cases, the prevention of the reduction/removal of green spaces.

An old clothes collection service would also be a community-based charity project. One important subdivision of community projects, and at times overlooked, is those of an economic nature such as LETS. The highlight of economic community projects is what is known as Transition Towns. Most economic community projects are designed at creating some sort of economic autonomy.

It begins when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of peak oil and climate change?

Scope and size:

All community projects are different in some way; the size and scope of these projects is determined firstly by the community they cater to.

According to the definition of a community, a community could be the entire human race or parts of it anywhere on the planet. However, because of phenomena like distance decay or demographic factors such as age group, gender and income that determine social identity of groups, the extent of community-based projects is usually much more limited.








Community Advisory BoardPictured below: Best Practices for Convening a Community Advisory Board*
* - Best Practices for Convening a Community Advisory Board

Funder: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
December 2019 | Infographic

Getting meaningful input from people receiving care is crucial for health care organizations in improving services to better support the needs of patients within the community. A consumer advisory board (CAB) is an effective method for encouraging community members to have a more active role in their health care while enhancing care delivery methods for health systems.

This infographic highlights key considerations for health care systems on how to successfully convene and maintain a consumer advisory board. It was created as a part of the Community Partnership Pilot project, which is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and coordinated through the Complex Care Innovation Lab. See the related blog post, Convening a Consumer Advisory Board: Key Considerations, for more details.

___________________________________________________________________________

A community advisory board (often called a CAB) is a type of advisory board consisting of representatives of the general public who meet with representatives of an institution to relay information between the two groups. CABs are especially associated with clinical research, in which case they review the clinical research ethics associated with the human subject research which a medical research institution conducts. CABs are an aspect of community-based participatory research.

Purpose:

Community advisory boards (CABs) benefit research institutions by providing advice about the efficacy of the informed consent process and the implementation of research protocols. The CAB composition is representative of the community participating in the research being reviewed.

Researchers who consult with CABs get information which they would not otherwise get about the target community demographic which they are researching.

Ethics:

The CAB is intended to be a way to respect the rights of research participants. Research in a community has the potential for group harm, which is distinct from the individual harm which can happen to individuals who participate. 

Because of the risk to communities, researchers have an obligation to community stakeholders to seek community feedback about the research.

Duties of CABs:

CABs and researchers must continually decide which powers to invest in a CAB. Here are some common questions which must be decided:
  1. What interaction should CABs have with institutional review boards?
  2. What education and training should the research institution give to the CAB members to enable them to perform their duties?
  3. To what extent should CABs participate in the development of informed consent processes?
  4. To what extent should CABs participate in developing guidelines to determine whether research participants give sufficient consent?
  5. In emergency situations, to what extent can CABs provide consultation on what response researchers should have to the emergency?
  6. When study participants have ethical problems with the research, to what extent should the CAB directly receive those participants' concerns?
  7. When CABs perceive the inevitable lapses in sufficient protection for research participants which occasionally and naturally occur in any study, what power should the CAB have to direct rectification of this lapse?
  8. To what extent should CABs direct the empowerment of their communities to more fully and beneficially participate in research?

Guidelines:

A community advisory board has whatever duties the members invest in it, but various organizations have suggested that they have certain responsibilities. Besides not knowing what CABs should do, it is difficult to determine what CABs should not do.

Some of the perennial problems with CABs are determining the following: who in a community can serve on a CAB, the extent to which the CAB directs research, and the extent to which the community directs the execution of the research. 

Researchers find that research is more productive and ethical when researchers train, recruit, and integrate members from the population targeted by the research into the research team. In consulting with the community, researchers have to meet with individuals who represent a common culture, have a communication network with the community they represent, and have a system for voicing the community's priorities.

Overseeing genetic research:

In 2000 the National Institute of General Medical Sciences held a conference which defined some CAB duties. Those duties are as follows:
  1. Define community in appropriate and meaningful ways.
  2. Understand the potential benefits and risks of research for communities and community members.
  3. Obtain broad community input for all phases of research.
  4. Respect communities as full partners in research.
  5. Resolve all issues pertaining to tissue samples.
  6. Establish appropriate review mechanisms and procedures.
  7. Facilitate the return of benefits to communities.
  8. Foster education and training in community-based research.
  9. Ensure dissemination of accurate information to the media and the public.
  10. Provide sufficient funds for research and encourage community–researcher partnerships.

Challenges in developing countries:

As part of international development many research institutions conduct medical research in developing countries. When this happens, they often opt to get advice from the local community through a CAB. The process of setting up CABs in developing countries has its own problems.








Building a Better CommunityPictured below: Building Community As If People Mattered* (Forbes)
* ​-  Building Community As If People Mattered

“What kind of America would you like to have?

Instead of the usual electoral horserace questions, a recent focus group of citizens was simply asked about their vision for a better nation. Peggy Noonan, the WSJ columnist who reported the story, reprised the group’s answers--“a solid education system,” “no more war,” “people with joy in their work,” “our country leading again, including in morals"—and then reflected that the respondents were looking back to “when things seemed assumptive of progress.” She noted the comments, unexpectedly, emphasized not individual desires, but rather “hopes [that] were communal, societal.”

In Search Of Hope

I was less surprised than Ms. Noonan. Amidst rapid global economic and social change, as institutions and hierarchies erode, people everywhere are trying to find—or rebuild—communal values, to restore some collective optimism to their lives. It’s happening throughout society: in neighborhoods, towns, businesses, churches.

And they are searching for a new kind of leadership to help with that. Many Americans, looking beyond this toxic election, are wondering about something more universal: how do the best leaders actually succeed in “building community”—whatever the would-be community might be?

The 'How' Of Community Leadership:
That question began my recent conversation with Richard Harwood, a practitioner and thinker who since 1988 has devoted himself to such inquiry. His Harwood Institute for Public Innovation has helped transform thousands of communities around the world, strengthening collective progress among people who share some common purpose.

​Though renewing American rust-belt cities first put his Institute on the map, Rich’s experience has since grown to include  lessons for leaders of many kinds of communities, whether geographical, regional, or virtual; whether the relationships are political, economic, or business strategic.

It Begins—And Ends—With The People:

What unifies it all for Rich Harwood is people: building a community always comes back to the core, its human members. As he explained, unless a leader lives that truth, no progress can ever be sustained.

“But ironically, the more ‘community’ has become important to leaders—as it has in recent years—the more they’ve squeezed out the human element as they try to ‘fix the problems.’

They gloss over what people really care about. A new generation of technocrats has turned community building into a Gantt chart, endless initiatives following a schedule. Even worse, they often frame challenges around their own good—not the common good.”

Turning Outward:

Rich went on to describe how would-be community leaders must “turn outward”—away from themselves, instead focusing horizontally on members, their relationships, and their collective yearnings for progress. “Great leaders build community from the outside in, talking and listening to people in their real lives. They abandon the heroic ego of directing top down.”

As we spoke further, a deeper conceptual infrastructure of Harwood’s accumulated experience emerged--about leadership mindset and skills, how to diagnose the state of a community, establishing the right context (creating “public capital”), and promoting a “ripple effect” that encourages other leaders, groups and citizens to join in.

Six lessons for community leaders seemed particularly distinctive:

Hope And Understanding:

1.Your most important job is to help people have hope, and believe in the possibility of progress.

“Members of a struggling community may talk about problems, but what motivates them is hope for a better life, and belief that they might somehow get there. Great leaders will acknowledge challenges—but they rapidly pivot to summon a ‘can-do’ spirit among as many members as possible. Nothing’s more important than sparking a sense that if people work together, they will succeed.”

2. You earn credibility as a leader through authentic understanding of the community itself.

Instead of raw power, Harwood’s approach stresses leadership credibility: becoming trusted as someone who truly understands the opportunities, traditions, networks and relationships which give life to a community. A good leader doesn’t mandate; he or she co-creates.

“Regrettably,” Rich explained, “’community understanding’ often gets defined as data—a poverty rate, school drop-out statistics, etc. Of course data is useful—but it can crowd out what’s really on people’s minds. A leader must combine data with ‘public knowledge’: what people are feeling, talking about, and aspiring to, even if those collective feelings are out of sight.”

“A few years ago, we worked in Mobile County, Alabama, to help accelerate school reform that had been bogged down ever since the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown vs Board of Education. Polarizing race issues stymied progress: many whites blamed bad schools on unwillingness of blacks to improve their lives, while many blacks felt the root cause was an implicit effort to maintain local segregation. The data highlighted the stagnant student test results, low graduation rates, declining spending, etc.”

“But when we brought together the various community and civic groups, a steering committee formed to engage citizens about their shared aspirations. Local leaders were surprised to learn that white rural people felt just as neglected educationally as members of the black community.

The conversations sparked interest for more people, both black and white, to get involved, working together to improve the schools. This new ‘public knowledge’ stimulated critical collaboration that ultimately led to increased educational funding, new math and science programs, and improved teaching and test results.”

Does Political Identity Matter?

“How important is political identity?” I asked. “Do leaders have to be ‘the right color’ or ethnic origin, or have deep personal experience in a community?”

“Of course those things help—but they’re not required. Most important is that you have the trust and right relationships—and achieve real understanding of people involved. You also need courage to face what will be tough challenges from some of those same people—and demonstrate back to them you really care about helping the community build itself up.

Leadership can’t be about you; it has to be about everybody else.”

Building Momentum:

3. Build momentum by first getting people to work together and then helping others see their progress.

Harwood prioritizes “getting people on the right trajectory”—starting and then building momentum with achievable, hope-inspiring collective work.

“Another misunderstood community leadership practice is ‘creating vision.’ Those exercises can become blue-sky, untethered from reality. People get discouraged when there’s no forward movement. Great leaders start by leading community conversations, and then guide members towards valuable but near-term achievable goals. They build on that progress over time.”

“Mobile County again serves to illustrate. The leaders there laid the foundation for measurable school reform, beginning with local discussions about people’s shared aspirations. Those first steps mobilized a sense of common purpose and public support for more educational funding; that in turn allowed the leaders to involve the broader community in making concrete reforms. As more people worked together, and saw initial success, still others joined in.

​4. Foster “can-do” narratives,” not disconnected storytelling.

Storytelling has become a new pillar of leadership, but Rich Harwood explained how it can sometimes be counter-productive. “People don’t need isolated tales of nostalgia or stories that don’t lead to action. Much more energizing is when leaders encourage what I call “can-do narratives”—accounts collaboratively constructed by members that are coherent, positive and forward-looking.

The best of these evolve organically—laying out the trajectory people see themselves following to achieve longer-term success together.”

“I saw the power of such narratives years ago, in Battle Creek Michigan. Teams collaborating on an initial pilot project constructed a story for one of their retreats, like a Dr. Seuss kids’ book.

This ‘Battle Creek Fable,’ as it came to be called, confessed why they had been struggling, and what they now wanted to achieve to improve local education, healthcare, and social services.”

“They actually acted it out as a little play at the retreat, and then later shared it more widely, as a public document. As they updated the narrative every few months, it became a chronicle about themselves--how they overcame initial barriers, and then began to succeed—and where they next wanted to go. It successfully engaged others to become part of the movement.”

Everyone At The Table?

5. Lead with “pragmatic selectivity”

Another community-building myth Harwood explodes is “always getting everyone around the table.”

​“If you pursue that too literally, it can kill momentum-- and people lose hope. An effective community leader is ruthless about making choices—who to ‘run with’ (the right partners, citizens most committed to real change, etc.), where to productively start collective efforts, how fast to move, etc.”

“The right balance is to be ‘opportunistically inclusive’—work with whoever is authentically willing to collaborate on goals most people agree on. In the Bible, Abraham had a tent that was open on all sides—so that travelers from everywhere could come in.

The good community leader, like Abraham, must be ready to accept new travelers once they are ready to join the collective effort. You should never exclude anyone who legitimately wants to help make progress—but the leader must avoid getting drawn into arguments with naysayers who harp on problems instead of solutions.”

Virtual Or Not:

6. Lead even more intentionally if the community is virtual.

Over the years Harwood’s practice has expanded into helping leaders of regional networks, extended virtual partnerships, and larger, technology-enabled communities. He emphasizes that community-building leadership, whatever the setting, follows most of the same principles that work in smaller towns and cities.

“Building hope, creating momentum for progress, being selective in where and how you work to create initial trust—the practices are essentially the same. But at greater scale, or in virtual situations, the leader does have to be even more intentional, almost exaggerated at times--to help people work together when they don’t know one another or even see one another.”

“With virtual, the typical pitfall is over-emphasizing technology, instead of people’s hopes and aspirations. Remember, virtual communities will likely not be people’s primary source of relationships—and it’s easier for them to opt out.”

“Larger, and virtual community-building calls for particularly focused leadership: to really understand the public knowledge across members, and being clever in packaging it so people understand one another’s deeper aspirations.

The leader must also take extra care to nourish the broader context that fosters collective action—opportunities for people to collaborate on something winnable, encouraging face-to-face relationships whenever possible, creating more easily understood narratives when members are online."

Why All This Now?

I closed by asking Rich why building better communities today really mattered—and why it mattered so much to him.

“Everywhere I look, people are losing hope. They see a status quo that isn’t working. We’ve come to an inflection point, too many people sensing we can’t go on like this."

"But at whatever level or in whatever domain you’re living and working, the greatest source of progress through history has always been ‘the community.’ Tomorrow’s best leaders must do whatever they can to rekindle the can-do spirit of that fundamentally human invention. It’s the challenge that still wakes me up every morning.”

​Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. 

Brook Manville

Brook Manville is Principal of Brook Manville LLC, consulting on strategy and organization, with special interest in networks, learning, and leadership.
​___________________________________________________________________________

​​Community building (Wikipedia):

Community building is a field of practices directed toward the creation or enhancement of community among individuals within a regional area (such as a neighborhood) or with a common need or interest. It is often encompassed under the fields of community organizing, community organization, community work, and community development.

A wide variety of practices can be utilized for community building, ranging from simple events like potlucks and small book clubs, to larger–scale efforts such as mass festivals and building construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.

Activists and community workers engaged in community building efforts in industrialized nations see the apparent loss of community in these societies as a key cause of social disintegration and the emergence of many harmful behaviors. They may see building community as a means to address perceived social inequality and injustice, individual and collective well-being, and the negative impacts of otherwise disconnected and/or marginalized individuals.

​Re-Building:

Leadership, geography, history, socio-economic status all are traditionally used to explain success of community and its well-being. 

Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone finds that a community's well-being is dependent on the quality of relationships among the citizens of that community. He refers to this as social capital. Social capital creates a sense of belonging thus enhancing the overall health of a community. Putnam goes on to identify and examine the decline of social capital in America. Pressures of time and money, suburbanization, the effect of electronic entertainment, and perhaps most importantly the generational change appear to have all been contributing factors in the decline of social capital.

"We must learn to view the world through a social capital lens," said Lew Feldstein of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and co-chair of the Saguaro Seminar. "We need to look at front porches as crime fighting tools, treat picnics as public health efforts and see choral groups as occasions of democracy. We will become a better place when assessing social capital impact becomes a standard part of decision-making."...

Peter Block in the book Community: The Structure of Belonging (pg. 29) states "The context that restores community is one of possibility, generosity, and gifts, rather than one of problem solving, fear, and retribution."

This context allows a new conversation to take place. It requires its citizens to act authentic by choosing to own and exercise their power rather than delegating to others what is in the best interest of that community. Focus must be inclusive for all, not just the leaders but each and every citizen of that community.

While building a community, beliefs are at the base of that community. Some foundational beliefs are: 
Sense of Community:
Main article: Sense of Community

"Community is something we do together. It's not just a container," said sociologist David Brain. Infrastructure, roads, water, sewer, electricity and housing provides the shell within which people live. It is within this shell that people do the things together that allow them to sustain livelihoods. These include but are not limited to education, health care, business, recreation, and spiritual celebration. People working together with shared understandings and expectations are what provide a place of strong community.

Defining Community:

There are several ways that people may form a community, which subsequently influence the way a community may be strengthened:
  1. Locus, a sense of place, referred to a geographic entity ranging from neighborhood to city size, or a particular milieu around which people gathered (such as a church or recreation center).
  2. Sharing common interests and perspectives, referred to common interests and values that could cross-geographic boundaries.
  3. Joint action, a sense of coherence and identity, included informal common activities such as sharing tasks and helping neighbors, but these were not necessarily intentionally designed to create community cohesion.
  4. Social ties involved relationships that created the ongoing sense of cohesion.
  5. Diversity referring not primarily to ethnic groupings, but to the social complexity within communities in which a multiplicity of communities co-exist.[5]

Regardless of the type of community that’s formed, it’s possible to perform community-building and make a difference. The way that community-building takes place varies and depends on the factors listed above. There are many activities that communities use to strengthen themselves.

Community Building Activities:

Community Gardening:
Main article: Community gardening

Community gardening helps to improve neighborhood, build a sense of community, and connect to the environment by planting and harvesting fresh produce and plants.

Community Technology Centers:
Main article: Community Technology Center

Community Technology Centers (CTCs), such as those modeled under the Free Geek franchise activist model, have proven to be loci of support and organization for communities.

Much like community gardens and other functional communities, CTCs have been found to:
CTCs have also fostered connections between glocalized eco-social issues such as environmental destruction and public health and welfare through the re-use of technology and ethical electronic waste (e-waste) stewardship.

Sharing of Gifts:

Music, dance, gardening, craftsmanship, mechanics, any skills or knowledge shared provide excellent opportunities for community-building. Service oriented activities invite individuals to strengthen relationships and build rapport as they help one another. The sharing of gifts strengthens the community as a whole and lays a foundation for future successes in the community’s endeavors due to the overall well-being and unity produced.

Activism:

Activism (different than community organizing) is taking action to produce social change.
 The uniting of communities with an activist perspective may produce a social movement.

Community Organizing:

Organizing is a major way that communities unite. When the term “organizing” is used, it usually means that a group of less powerful people is banding together to solve a problem.

There are several means by which communities are organizing. The most recent is through social media. 

Community organizing is distinguishable from activism if activists engage in social protest without a strategy for building power or for making specific social changes. According to Phil Brown, community organizing is the vehicle that brings the social cohesion and broad coherence to neighborhoods and municipalities, which in turn produces successful environmental justice actions.

Community-Building and the Environment:

Community building efforts may lay the groundwork for larger organizing efforts around issues, such as the negative environmental and health effects of toxic waste pollution, eco-social justice, ecological justice, environmental justice, and the unequal burden and impacts of such effects on oppressed and marginalized communities.

Prior emphases on conservation, preservation, endangered species, rainforest destruction, ozone layer depletion, acid rain—as well as other national global concerns—often had no perceived relevance to individuals and communities with privileged immunity to such effects. These emphases kept the environmental movement a largely middle class and upper middle class movement.

However, due to the spread of negative eco-social problems and burdens to privileged areas within the Global North, glocalized perspectives have emerged, as well as organizing practices in line with these ideas (see alter-globalization). Groups may be as influential as the United Nations  or as small and local as neighborhoods.

The Natural Resources Defense Council lists many publicly organized community-building groups created to decrease the ecological footprint and reduce the environmental impact of humans.

See also:







Sustainable CommunitiesPictured below: Enhancing Sustainable Communities With Green Infrastructure (EPA)
Enhancing Sustainable Communities With Green Infrastructure (see image above: BY the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency).

This Guide Can Help Communities Better Manage Storm water While Achieving Other Environmental, Public Health, Social, and Economic Benefits

Communities across the country want to protect their water quality while also getting the greatest possible benefit from every investment they make.

Many are conserving, restoring, or enhancing natural areas while incorporating trees, rain gardens, vegetated roofs, and other practices that mimic natural systems into developed areas to manage rainwater where it falls.

These types of approaches, known as "green infrastructure," are an integral component of sustainable communities because they can help communities protect the environment and human health while providing other social and economic benefits, allowing communities to achieve more for their money.

Enhancing Sustainable Communities With Green Infrastructure: A Guide to Help Communities Better Manage Stormwater While Achieving Other Environmental, Public Health, Social, and Economic Benefits (2014) aims to help local governments, water utilities, nonprofit organizations, neighborhood groups, and other stakeholders integrate green infrastructure strategies into plans that can transform their communities.

Many communities that want to use green infrastructure approaches face technical, regulatory, financial, and institutional obstacles that limit widespread implementation.

​This report is a guide to develop a plan that can overcome these obstacles for neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions of all sizes. It helps stakeholders create a vision for how green infrastructure can enhance their communities—a vision that engages residents and inspires them to take action. It also directs readers to resources that provide more detailed information that can be tailored to communities' particular climate, goals, and circumstances.

This document covers:
  • Strategies that support both sustainable communities and green infrastructure.
  • How to organize stakeholders to develop a sustainable communities and green infrastructure plan.
  • The different components of a sustainable communities and green infrastructure plan.

Learn more: You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA’s About PDF page to learn more. ___________________________________________________________________________

Sustainable community (Wikipedia)

The term "sustainable communities" has various definitions, but in essence refers to communities planned, built, or modified to promote sustainable living. Sustainable communities tend to focus on environmental and economic sustainability, urban infrastructure, social equity, and municipal government. The term is sometimes used synonymously with "green cities," "eco-communities," "livable cities" and "sustainable cities."

Different organizations have various understandings of sustainable communities; the term's definition is contested and still under construction.

For example, Burlington, Vermont's Principles of Sustainable Community Development  stress the importance of local control of natural resources and a thriving non-profit sector to a sustainable community.

The Institute for Sustainable Communities outlines how political empowerment and social well-being are also part of the definition. 

Additionally, referring to communities in Shanghai and Singapore, geographer Lily Kong has paired concepts of cultural sustainability and social sustainability alongside environmental sustainability as aspects of sustainable communities. 

Meanwhile, the UK's 2003 Sustainable Communities Plan often abbreviates its definition of sustainable communities as "places where people want to live and work, now and in the future". Addressing the scale of sustainable communities, political scientist Kent Portney points out that the term sustainable communities has been used to refer to a broad variety of places, ranging from neighborhoods to watersheds to cities to multi-state regions.

Etymologically, the term "sustainable community" grew out of the related discourses of "sustainability" and "sustainable development" that gained widespread use among local, national, and international politicians and policymakers in NGOs starting in the late 1980s.

The term originally referred to environmental concerns and was later applied to cities.

​Examples of Sustainable Community initiatives:

The best example of a real Sustainable Community is Saint Michael's Sustainable Community in Costa Rica. The community produces far more food and water then it needs. It uses regenerative agriculture as a base to live in harmony with nature.

Sustainable community initiatives have emerged in neighborhoods, cities, counties, metropolitan planning districts, and watershed districts at different scales pertaining to community needs. These initiatives are driven by various actor groups that have different methods of effectively planning out ways to create sustainable communities. Most often they are implemented by governments and non-profit organizations, but they also involve community members, academics, and create partnerships and coalitions.

Nonprofit organizations help to cultivate local talents and skills, empowering people to become more powerful and more involved in their own communities. Many also offer plans and guidance on improving the sustainability of various practices, such as land use and community design, transportation, energy efficiency, waste reduction, and climate friendly purchasing.

Some government groups will create partnerships where departments will work together using grants to provide resources to communities like clean air and water, community planning, economic development, equity and environmental justice, as well as housing and transportation choices.

Social movements have gathered momentum, spreading sustainable community ideas around the world, not only through example, but also by offering classes and training on sustainable living, permaculture, and local economics.

International initiatives:

United Kingdom:

The Sustainable Communities Plan was launched in 2003 through the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Lacking an official national spatial development plan, the UK employed the Sustainable Communities Plan as a regional development plan targeted at the South East of England. 

Additionally, the plan created the Academy for Sustainable Communities. The £38 billion plan identifies four key growth areas for development and regeneration:
  1. the Thames Gateway, 
  2. Ashford,
  3. Kent, 
  4. London-Stansted-Cambridge-Peterborough (LSCP) and Milton Keynes/South Midlands (MKSM).

Designed during a period that projected sustained economic growth into the future, the plan's implementation has been slowed and disjointed, particularly since the 2008 economic recession. An affordable housing shortage in the UK has also challenged the Plan's implementation.

National initiatives:

The Partnership for Sustainable Communities is an interagency partnership between the Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

These departments work together with a mission to “improve access to affordable housing, increase transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment”. 

All three bureaus offer funding opportunities to support communities in areas of clean air and water, community planning, economic development, energy efficiency, equity and environmental justice, as well as housing and transportation choices. The partnership incorporates six principles of livability into its grant-making and program development:
  • Provide more transportation choices
  • Promote equitable, affordable housing
  • Enhance economic competitiveness
  • Support existing communities
  • Coordinate policies and leverage investment
  • Value communities and neighborhoods

Along with working collaboratively, these government agencies also have their own initiatives. The Department of Housing and Development has an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities which features a Sustainable Housing Initiative, aiming at “supporting the construction and rehabilitation of green affordable housing” and does this through programs that retrofit or construct energy efficient homes.

They also work to standardize energy efficiency standards across federal agencies, as well as expand the availability of financing for home energy improvements and multifamily housing.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a Smart Growth Program which conducts research, publishes reports, showcases outstanding communities, and works with communities through grants and technical assistance. 

They also have a Green Communities Program which provides communities with a tool kit of information to help them reach sustainable goals. The tool kit is arranged in a five-step program which allows communities to:
  • Develop community assessments of their current conditions
  • Formulate trend analyses that answers the question “Where are we going?” in the face of no intervention
  • Create vision statements of where the community sees itself in the future
  • Establish action plans about what programs and initiatives will help the community reach its goals
  • Access tools to implement action plans

The Department of Transportation has a Livability Initiative which issues “grants to eligible recipients for planning, vehicle purchases, facility construction, operations, and other purposes”, with numerous goals, including the improvement of surface transportation, providing public transit on Indian reservations, providing access to disadvantaged communities, etc.

Case Studies from the Partnership for Sustainable Communities:

The Euclid Corridor in Cleveland:

Once a thriving place of business and home to the wealthy and elite, Euclid Avenue in Cleveland had seen a decline in commerce following the Great Depression. During this economic downturn, Cleveland became a shrinking city as many of its residents moved and homes were turned into boarding houses or abandoned altogether.

After decades of work by city leaders and residents to revitalize this part of the city, the bus line HealthLine debuted in 2008. This bus line increased ridership and helped The Euclid Corridor begin to see the redevelopment of abandoned properties as well as investment in development of commerce, to the tune of $4.3 billion. This created thousands of square feet of retail space and thousands of jobs.

The success of the revitalization of the Euclid Corridor is due in large part to engaged community leaders, community members, and NGO's like MidTown Cleveland who worked on ensuring that there was a variety of housing investments. EPA assisted with the redevelopment of abandoned space through their brownfield assessment grants and HUD provided mortgage insurance on properties to aid in the development of Euclid Avenue.

Greenville, South Carolina's Westside:

Following a shift from the cotton production that once thrived in the west end of Greenville, South Carolina, this part of the city began to see a flight of its residents and with it the abandonment and decay of its buildings and facilities, higher crime rates, and more low-income households.

In 2010, HUD and DOT awarded the city $1.8 million to support a three-year planning initiative which sought to improve affordable housing, transportation, and increase economic development. The HUD provided a loan to encourage economic growth, specifically through the conversion of an old cotton warehouse into an area of retail shops, offices, and restaurants known as West End Market.

The success of West End Market led to 230 building permits being issued around the area in a three-year period, resulting in a successful arts district that created jobs as well as drew tourists and locals. EPA assisted with the redevelopment of abandoned space through $200,000 in brownfield assessment grants which allowed for the city to facilitate clean up, or initiate redevelopment.

The city also worked with the Federal Highway Administration in demolishing an unnecessary bridge which allowed for the development of a recreational area with a cross bridge, waterfalls, and walking paths, known as Falls Park on the Reedy.

In 2005, a mixed-use development was constructed across from Falls Park with a hotel, apartments, restaurants, and retail and office spaces to help further spark economic growth in the area

Seattle's South Lake Union Neighborhood:

With investments in transportation, affordable housing, and green space, Seattle's South Lake Union has transformed from a place of freeway traffic, abandoned warehouses, and parking lots to an economically flourishing neighborhood.

An integral part to this transformation was the creation of a street car service, partially funded by the Federal Transit Administration. The streetcar encouraged both Amazon.com and Microsoft to locate campuses in the South Lake Union neighborhood, bringing with it jobs and investment in residential space.

The City of Seattle is proposing a zoning change to promote affordable housing and attract market rate development. HUD provided grants to fund building and support services for the chronically homeless, adults and veterans recovering from addiction, and homeless with mental health issues and substance abuse problems.

HUD also supplied $5.7 million towards the construction of a senior housing facility. To address the problems with the neighborhoods freeways and lack of sidewalks and crosswalks, a $30 million grant was issued by the DOT to help build crosswalks over 12 intersections, widen sidewalks, add bicycle lanes, as well as beautify the space through the addition of landscaping and trees,

State initiatives:

Maryland:

The state of Maryland passed a Sustainable Communities Act in 2010 with the goal of revitalizing and promoting reinvestment in Maryland's older communities as well working to promote “equitable, affordable housing by expanding energy-efficient housing choices for people of all ages, incomes, races, and ethnicity to increase mobility and lower the combined cost of housing and transportation”.

The law also created the Sustainable Communities Tax Credit Program which promotes private investment in the restoration and development of historic sites. Thanks in part to the Sustainable Communities Tax Credit Program, the neighborhood of Remington, Baltimore was able to refurbish an old tin factory into a space for offices and residences, which led to the development of other properties as well as homes, which increased use and population for the neighborhood.
​
In 2013 the Maryland General Assembly passed the Sustainable Communities Tax Increment Financing Designation and Financing Law. This law allows for Maryland counties and municipalities to use funds generated from increased property tax values to fund improvement projects in sustainable communities. Sample projects include expanding sidewalks, the development of tree planting on streets and parks, as well as improvements to water and sewer infrastructure to help encourage economic growth and improve quality of life.

California:

The state of California passed the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, also known as SB 375. The law aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through transportation, housing, and land use planning.

Under the SB 375, the state is broken up into Metropolitan Planning Organizations which are each responsible for developing Sustainable Community Strategies that will help the state reach its goal of reduced emissions.

These strategies are then evaluated by the California Environmental Protection Agency's Air Resources Board. 

Under the Sustainable Community Strategy, the city of Sacramento plans to double transit service and increase bike lanes, offering more transportation choices and reducing vehicle emissions.

The city of San Diego also plans to increase funding towards more transportation choices as well as promote more multi-family housing near high transit areas.

The Southern California Strategies include transit expansion, developing housing closer to public transportation, increasing funding for biking and pedestrians, and the creation of jobs, with most being near public transit.

City government initiatives:

Cities are defined as jurisdictional units that have small divisions of government within them.

These divisions of government have the authority to affect environmental and ecological results Cities are especially important in initiating sustainable communities because they have local authorities that “have political power and credibility to take initiatives to access and deploy resources in ways reflecting local conditions that allows them the capacity to manage and lead urban development for the good of the environment.”

It is also necessary to implement sustainable communities in countries that are industrialized because cities are where most environmental and social problems dwell.

When looking at and comparing sustainable cities certain indicators may be used:
​ The 34 elements inside “Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously" can also be used to determine whether a city is considered sustainable or not.

City examples:

The city of San Francisco uses the Precautionary Principal as a framework to develop laws for a healthier and more just city. The precautionary principal gives more power to community members by allowing them to stand up against corporations in their neighborhoods and leaves the burden of proof to corporations instead of community members.

Companies must prove that their endeavors are harmless to the community instead of the community having to prove they have been harmed by company endeavors. This allows for a sustainable community as environmental justice and social justice are created.

The city of Quebec: to create a sustainable community through political involvement has dedicated studies to discovering why citizens are or are not politically active. Studies from Quebec have shown that citizens’ internal and external efficacy is a large part in determining participation in politics.

When citizens lack the internal belief that one can make change in government and the external belief that the government will make changes according to citizen concerns, political participation dwindles as citizens believe no change will occur. When becoming politically active, a citizen takes into account the history of the city government, the government's actions, and government interactions with other citizens.

After noting the city's sustainability level it is important to note what kinds of communities are targeted and how they are affected through these programs and what kinds of strategies are being used to try to create and transform sustainable communities.

Non-Profit and NGO sector:

The Institute for Sustainable Communities created by former Vermont Governor, Madeleine M. Kunin, leads community based projects around the globe that address environmental, economic, and social issues. Many of these groups help to cultivate local talents and skills, empowering people to become more powerful and involved in their own communities.

​Many also offer plans and guidance on improving the sustainability of various practices, such as land use and community design, green transportation, energy efficiency, waste reduction, and climate friendly purchasing.

The Global Integrity Project is focused on bringing together top scientists and thinkers from around the world in order to analyze the problems of inequality among humankind. These thinkers examine economic and ethical issues faced in protecting and enhancing our environments and make recommendations on restoration techniques that aid in promoting social justice. They also call for a major and imperative paradigm shift in order to ensure good quality of life for many future generations.

Sustainable Seattle is a non-profit organization which has created regional indicators for sustainability through grassroots activism and has become a world leader in these sustainability indicators.

Sustainable Seattle has printed newsletters on a wide range of sustainable community topics, from building to recycling and more, and they are believed to be the first “sustainable community” organization, founded in 1991. There are now hundreds of “sustainable community” organizations across the USA 

Social movement initiatives:

The Take Back Your Time Movement, led by John de Graaf, focuses on the concept of working fewer hours and devoting more time to living a healthy lifestyle. The movement suggests that allowing shorter work days and longer vacations would in turn help better distribute work, while also reducing stress and making for healthier living. Additionally, people would have more free time to make more rewarding and sustainable choices for themselves.

The Voluntary Simplicity Movement or Simple Living movement emphasizes reducing one's material possessions and desires and increasing self-sufficiency through skills such as gardening and DIY.

The Voluntary Simplicity Movement suggests that one should focus on cultivating their own best inner being rather than focus on making material gains and wealth. It also promotes activism within the community to create engaged, educated citizens.

The Degrowth movement is based on anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas, focusing on reducing consumption and promoting happy, healthy lifestyles in non-consumptive fashions. Main aspects of Degrowth include more equal distribution of workload and sharing work, consuming less, and setting aside time for personal and cultural growth through the arts and creativity 

​Movements such as ecovillages are gathering momentum, spreading sustainable community ideas around the world, teaching through example and also offering classes and training on sustainable living, permaculture, and local economics.

Ecovillages seek to integrate themselves harmlessly into the ecosystem surrounding them, so as to live and interact in a way that is sustainable and supportive of the natural world 

Challenges and critiques:

Sustainable communities, both as individual projects and as a whole, have faced challenges impeding their development and have been met with criticism.

Sustainable communities projects have struggled to take hold for:
  • poor economic conditions and inaccessible housing markets: in the UK's Sustainable Communities Plan, the economic downturn of 2008 has led to a general shortage of housing and affordable housing in particular, which run contrary to the plan's premises of livable communities.

Projects have been critiqued for:
  • lacking a well-developed environmental justice framework: urban and environmental policy planner Julian Agyeman has written about the "narrow focus" of civic environmentalism that does not take "social justice" into account, and the need for sustainable communities to be democratic and collaborate with the environmental justice movement.
  • promoting a securitization agenda: British geographer Mike Raco argues that the UK's Sustainable Communities Plan employs the discourse of sustainability as "a series of potentially repressive and counter-productive policy measures.".
  • accommodating to neoliberal economic systems instead of confronting them: while some rationales for sustainable communities conflict with market-driven agendas, economic growth characterizes the means and ends of some initiatives. Additionally, sustainable communities reject the notion that development itself is fundamentally socially divisive or environmentally destructive.

Education:

While there are a variety of graduate degrees at universities that touch on sustainability as it related to urban planning and environmental resources, only a few degree program programs exist that train students in the theory and practice of sustainable communities. The most notable examples are:
See also:







Community-based Education Pictured below: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, Exploratory P20 Research Center grant
Community education, also known as community-based education or community learning & development, is an organization's programs to promote learning and social development work with individuals and groups in their communities using a range of formal and informal methods.

A common defining feature is that programs and activities are developed in dialogue with communities and participants. The purpose of community learning and development is to develop the capacity of individuals and groups of all ages through their actions, the capacity of communities, to improve their quality of life. Central to this is their ability to participate in democratic processes.

Community education encompasses all those occupations and approaches that are concerned with running education and development programmes within local communities, rather than within educational institutions such as schools, colleges and universities.

The latter is known as the formal education system, whereas community education is sometimes called informal education. It has long been critical of aspects of the formal education system for failing large sections of the population in all countries and had a particular concern for taking learning and development opportunities out to poorer areas, although it can be provided more broadly.

There are a myriad of job titles and employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental organizations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies. Schools, colleges and universities may also support community learning and development through outreach work within communities.

The community schools movement has been a strong proponent of this since the sixties. Some universities and colleges have run outreach adult education programs within local communities for decades. Since the seventies the prefix word ‘community’ has also been adopted by several other occupations from youth workers and health workers to planners and architects, who work with more disadvantaged groups and communities and have been influenced by community education and community development approaches.

Community educators have over many years developed a range of skills and approaches for working within local communities and in particular with disadvantaged people. These include less formal educational methods, community organizing and group work skills.

Since the 1960s and 1970s through the various anti poverty programs in both developed and developing countries, practitioners have been influenced by structural analyses as to the causes of disadvantage and poverty i.e. inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, land etc. and especially political power and the need to mobilize people power to effect social change.

Thus the influence of such educators as Paulo Friere and his focus upon this work also being about politicizing the poor.

In the history of community education and community learning and development, the UK has played a significant role in hosting the two main international bodies representing community education and community development. These being the International Community Education Association, which was for many years based at the Community Education Development Centre based in Coventry UK.

ICEA and CEDC have now closed, and the International Association for Community Development, which still has its HQ in Scotland.

In the 1990s there was some thought as to whether these two bodies might merge. The term community learning and development has not taken off widely in other countries. Although community learning and development approaches are recognized internationally.

These methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social, economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such organizations as the UN, WHO, OECD, World Bank, Council of Europe and EU.

In the UK:

In the UK, the term community learning and development has now been widely adopted as describing a discrete employment sector of occupations concerned with outreach education and development work in local communities. In 1999, a UK-wide organization responsible for setting professional training standards for education and development practitioners working within local communities was established.

This organization was called PAULO – the National Training Organisation for Community Learning and Development. (It was named after Paulo Freire.) It was formally recognized by David Blunket, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment in the New Labour Government in January 1999. It brought together a range of occupational interests under a single national training standards body, these being, adult education, youth work, community development and development education.

The inclusion of community development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would join the NTO for Social Care.

The Community Learning and Development NTO represented all the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and national development agencies working in this area across the four nations of the UK. This was the first time that the informal education occupations across the UK had ever come together with the common purpose of creating a publicly recognized occupational sector, in the way that school teachers or college lecturers had long been publicly and officially recognised.

The term 'community learning and development' was adopted to acknowledge that all of these occupations worked primarily within local communities, and that this work encompassed not just providing less formal learning support but also a concern for the wider holistic development of those communities – socio-economically, environmentally, culturally and politically. In effect this brought together for the first time two traditions.

The former group of occupations – adult educators, youth workers and community education workers had tended to focus upon the provision of informal education support for individuals and groups within communities. They had always seen their work as being educational. The latter group – community workers, community development workers and development educators had tended to focus upon the socio-economic and environmental development of those communities.

Both sets of occupations recognized that they shared very similar values, knowledge base and skill sets and that what brought them together was a common commitment to supporting learning and social action.

By bringing together these occupational groups this created for the first time a single recognised employment sector of nearly 300,000 full and part-time paid staff within the UK, approximately 10% of these staff being full-time. The NTO continued to recognise the range of different occupations within it, for example specialists who work primarily with young people, but all agreed that they shared a core set of professional approaches to their work.

In 2002 the New Labour Government announced that it wished to cluster NTOs, of which there were over 50 covering a wide range of occupations across the UK labor market, under a smaller number of what they called Sector Skills Councils. A Sector Skills Council was formed called the Lifelong Learning UK Sector Skills Council. PAULO became one of five discrete pillars within LLUK, the others being the former NTOs for Further Education, for Universities, for Library and information Services and for Work Based Education.

Over nearly a decade LLUK did a large amount of labour market mapping, as well as setting standards for the professional training of people working in the CLD area and generally promoted the identity of this sector across wider UK public policies and the public, non governmental and private sector employers.

All Sector Skills Councils in the UK including LLUK were abolished by the Conservative/Liberal coalition Government in 2011 and at the time of writing it is uncertain as to whether a single body representing the professional community learning and development sector will be sustained. The Community and Youth Workers Union which is part of the Unite Union in the UK played the lead role in improving employee’s conditions across the sector but never succeeded in representing all employees within the CLD sector and is not widely represented across all parts of the UK.

The Scottish Government has continued to recognize community learning and development as a discrete employment sector, and has for over a decade supported CLD training for people wishing to work professionally in this area. There is a team of HMI (Her Majesties Inspectors) to inspect the quality of delivery by employers.

In 2007 the Scottish Government established a Scottish Standards Council for Community Learning and Development. This organization oversees quality standards in the professional training of staff working in this field, including the validation and endorsement of professional training courses and is introducing a professional registration scheme for such qualified practitioners. It has continued much of the work of the former LLUK as it operated in Scotland.

At the present time similar CLD Standards Councils have not been set up in other parts of the UK and it does appear that the sector outside Scotland is once again becoming more fragmented. Unlike the formal education sector there is virtually no legislation in the UK underpinning the need to provide and fund community learning and development.

Consequently, it has been vulnerable to cuts in public expenditure due to the recession, particularly projects that were seen as too radical.

National priorities:

Three national priorities have been developed for community learning and development in Scotland:

Achievement through learning for adults: Raising standards of achievement in learning for adults through community-based lifelong learning opportunities incorporating the core skills of literacy, numeracy, communications, working with others, problem solving and information communications technology (ICT).

Achievement through learning for young people Engaging with young people to facilitate their personal, social and educational development and enable them to gain a voice, influence and place in society.

Achievement through building community capacity: Building community capacity and influence by enabling people to develop the confidence, understanding and skills required to influence decision making and service delivery.

Principles and competences:

Competent CLD workers will ensure that their work supports social change and social justice and is based on the values of CLD. Their approach is collaborative, anti-discriminatory and equalities-focused and they work with diverse individuals, communities of place or interest when this is or is not appropriate.

Central to their practice is challenging discrimination and its consequences and working with individuals and communities to shape learning and development activities that enhance quality of life and sphere of influence. They have good interpersonal and listening skills and their practice demonstrates that they value and respect the knowledge, experience and aspirations of those involved.

The Scottish Government have introduced the following set of principles of which community learning and development related activities should be based on:
  1. Empowerment – increasing the ability of individuals and groups to influence issues that affect them and their communities;
  2. Participation – supporting people to take part in decision making;
  3. Inclusion, equality of opportunity and anti-discrimination – recognising that some people may need additional support to overcome the barriers they face;
  4. Self-determination – supporting the right of people to make their own choices; and
  5. Partnership – recognising that many agencies can contribute to CLD to ensure resources are used effectively.

Wisconsin Model:

A philosophical base for developing Community Education programs is provided through the five components of the Wisconsin Model of Community Education. The model provides a process framework for local school districts to implement or strengthen community education. 

A set of Community Education Principles was developed by Larry Horyna and Larry Decker for the National Coalition for Community Education in 1991  These include:
  1. Self-determination: Local people are in the best position to identify community needs and wants. Parents, as children's first and most important teachers, have both a right and a responsibility to be involved in their children's education.
  2. Self-help: People are best served when their capacity to help themselves is encouraged and enhanced. When people assume ever-increasing responsibility for their own well being, they acquire independence rather than dependence.
  3. Leadership Development: The identification, development, and use of the leadership capacities of local citizens are prerequisites for ongoing self-help and community improvement efforts.
  4. Localization: Services, programs, events, and other community involvement opportunities that are brought closest to where people live have the greatest potential for a high level of public participation. Whenever possible, these activities should be decentralized to locations of easy public access.
  5. Integrated Delivery of Services: Organizations and agencies that operate for the public good can use their limited resources, meet their own goals, and better serve the public by establishing close working relationships with other organizations and agencies with related purposes.
  6. Maximum Use of Resources: The physical, financial, and human resources of every community should be interconnected and used to their fullest if the diverse needs and interests of the community are to be met.
  7. Inclusiveness: The segregation or isolation of people by age, income, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or other factors inhibits the full development of the community. Community programs, activities, and services, should involve the broadest possible cross section of community residents.
  8. Responsiveness: Public institutions have a responsibility to develop programs and services that respond to the continually changing needs and interests of their constituents.
  9. Lifelong Learning: Learning begins at our birth and continues until death. Formal and informal learning opportunities should be available to residents of all ages in a wide variety of community settings.

Role of the professional:

The role of a community learning and development professional depends somewhat on the career path followed. For example, someone working with young people may have different priorities than someone working with adults; however, the outcomes are very similar in a sense that both will be aiming to promote a more socially just and equal society.

Community learning and development is a vast field of work and the range of job categories is wide and may include the following: Youth Information Worker, Detached Youth Worker, Community Arts Worker, Community Capacity Worker, Local Authority Community Planning Officer, etc.

Community learning and development workers should see themselves as working with people, rather than for them. Empathy is crucial to understanding the issues faced by those they work with and it is important that they engage in a way that does not intimidate people or place the worker in a position of looking down on those they work with.

The role of a Community learning and development worker is largely different from the role of a formal educator such as a teacher. Community learning and development workers do not follow a curriculum, as they allow the people they work with to form their own way of learning and each individual is believed to have the ability to reach their full potential in life.

A community learning and development approach is arguably a more effective way of learning as every individual has their own unique way to learn and community learning and development workers look for the best possible method that suits the individual. Community learning and development approaches are gradually being adopted in schools to some extent and many other agencies and using a community learning and development approach in their work.

In Canada, a university in Alberta has created a Community-based Bachelor of Education program to prepare teachers for rural community education, making it the first university program in Canada that aims at preparing teachers for rural community education.

Qualifications:

Professional community educators or community learning and development workers usually hold a professional degree in community education or community learning and development, depending on the course offered at the university from which they graduate.

In Scotland, qualifications may be Approved by the Standards Council for Community Learning and Development. This means that the course has been assessed by a group of peers - an Approval Panel. The course must have a practice element totalling 40% of the course to gain Approval. More details on the Approval Process and a list of Approved qualifications are available on the Standards Council website www.cldstandardscouncil.org.uk In order to gain entrance to this course, a history of voluntary work is usually desirable.

Many of those working in the field of community learning and development will be doing so voluntarily. These people are usually encouraged to complete a work-place based alternative to the full-time degree course. Others in paid positions may hold qualifications relevant to the field. These people will also be encouraged to study for a degree in community education.

Some university institutions offer post-graduate degrees in community education such as MA, MSc, PGDip, PGCert, etc.

Participatory democracy:

Youth participation:

In countries where democratic governments exist, people are encouraged to vote for someone to represent them. In today's society there is a dwindling interest in politics from our younger generation and this could have a negative effect on our democracy and political system in years to come. Community learning and development has the potential to encourage young people to become more interested in politics and helping them influence decisions that affect their lives.

In many parts of the world, youth parliament-style organizations have been set up to allow young people to debate issues that affect them and others in their community. Young people engage with these organizations voluntarily and are sometimes elected using a democratic system of voting. Young people are at the heart of these organizations and are usually involved in the management and development. The majority of these organizations are facilitated and staffed by workers trained in community learning and development; however, staff role is mainly to facilitate and be supportive but not intrusive.

These organizations allow young people to gain a voice, influence decision makers who affect their lives and provide them with a sense of self-worth and a place in society.

In the United Kingdom, examples of these organizations include the United Kingdom Youth Parliament (UKYP); in Scotland, the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP); in Wales the Children & Young People's Assembly for Wales; and in Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Youth Forum. In Canada, examples include Youth Parliament of Manitoba (YPM), Saskatchewan Youth Parliament (SYP), TUXIS Parliament of Alberta (TUXIS), and British Columbia Youth Parliament (BCYP).

​Parental participation:

Cultural divides and deficit thinking creates mutual distrust between marginalized parents and schools which in turn creates barriers to active parental involvement of marginalized parents in the education of their children. 

Researches also show that parents of high socio-economic status play active and direct role in the education of their children and are more likely to influence school policies that affects their children's schooling whereas parents of low socio-economic status play indirect roles in the education of their children and are less likely to influence school policies that affects their children's schooling. 

The gap between parents' educational involvement among parents from higher socio-economic status and parents from lower socio-economic status results in a more personalized education that caters for the needs of children from higher socio-economic backgrounds and more alienating and generic education systems/policies for students from low socio-economic backgrounds.

The following practices are necessary for parent and community participation in the education of their wards to be effective; students come to school healthy and ready to learn, parents assist schools with financial and or material support, there are frequent communications between parents and school authorities, parents have meaningful authorities in the schools and they also assist in the teaching of their children.

Parents' home based educational involvement such as creating an enabling learning environment at home, helping their children with their assignments, helping their children develop cognitive skills and other school skills and motivating their children to do well in school supports student success.

Researches show that multimodal and effective migrant parental involvement in the education of their children increases the test scores of such students and also shows strong student success even after academic abilities and socio-economic status are taken into consideration.

School officials' racial stereotypes , class stereotypes, biases and attitudes regarding parental involvement in the education of their children hinders school officials from involving parents as partners in the education of their children.

Also, bureaucracies in the public education systems hinders parents from advocating for changes that would benefit their children. Formally organized parental associations in schools that seeks to increase parental involvement, ignore the cultural and socio-economic needs of minorities, thereby contributing to the barriers of parental involvement, especially for marginalized parents.

Research shows that high number of marginalized parents do not actively engage in their children's schooling. There is also a wide gap between the rhetoric of best parental involvement practices and actual parental involvement practices. 

Effective parental involvement in the education of their children involves; parenting, communication, volunteering, home tutoring, involvement in decision-making, and collaboration with the community. Effective parental involvement treats and or makes school officials and parents partners in the education of their children.

See also:






​
Communities of InnovationPictured below: Your Digital Lab Awaits: Why You Should Check Out the Innovation Community Center (Department of Energy)
Communities that support innovation have been referred to as communities of innovation (CoI), communities for innovation, innovation communities, open innovation communities, and communities of creation.

​Definitions:

Lim and Ong (2019) define a community of innovation (CoI) as a group of people with a sense of comaradie, belonging and a collective identity who are jointly facilitating innovation.

CoIs are groups made up of motivated individuals working together towards a common goal because they are convinced of their common cause.

Coakes and Smith (2007) define communities of innovation (CoIs) as a form of communities of practice dedicated to the support of innovation.

Sawhney and Prandelli (2000) proposed the model of communities of creation as a new governance mechanism for managing knowledge found in different companies for the purpose of innovation. In CoIs, intellectual property rights are considered to be owned by the entire community although the community is governed by a central firm which acts as the sponsor and defines the ground rules for participation. This model lies between the closed hierarchical model and the open market-based model.

Role of communities in organizations:

Quoting Mintzberg (2009), Lim and Ong (2019) points out that managers need to re-discover the essence of communities in the organizations in order to appropriately manage people within the organizations, who are not simply an organizational resource to be exploited, but who are the very organization itself.

In other words, employees who feel they are valued and fairly treated by their organizations will usually work generously and in times of need, sacrificially for the success of the organization of which they feel they are a part of. However, employees who perceive themselves as being exploited, or possibly next on the retrenchment list, will more often than not put in only minimal work for the organization.

Relationship between communities and innovation:

Stacey (1969) observed that the term ‘community’ has been used by some to connote social relations in a defined geographical area, and by others to stress the feeling of belonging to a group.

Innovation is the development and implementation of a new idea (Van de Ven, 1986).
Collaboration contributes to innovation (Pouwels and Koster, 2017). 

Macro-processes of communities of innovation:

Lim and Ong (2019) observed three macro-processes, the first macro-process pertaining to having a relax and conducive environment for interaction and innovation, a second macro-process centering on the need for recognition and organizational resources to sustain the innovation process and a third macro-process of narrowing down the choices and implementation of the innovation.

Building on the literature on innovation, they termed the first and third macro-processes the divergence (knowledge sharing, search activities, exploratory, and idea generation) and convergence (elimination of alternatives and narrowing down towards a choice, implementation, exploitation, and commercialization of ideas) macro-processes of community innovation.

They termed the second macro-process the gateway macro-process (evaluation of new knowledge creation, selection, prioritization, control, idea screening and advocacy) as they observed that it consists of the critical processes which the organization uses to choose ideas to endorse for further development. It is the gateway through which informal communities of innovation may enter to become formal communities of innovation within the organization.

The macro-process of divergence management begins with individuals within the community of innovation building trust, sharing and discussing ideas, agreeing to develop ideas together and to seek recognition or funding from their organization. The macro-process of gateway management then evaluates the preliminary results for recognition or funding with the outcome as either funding approved or not approved for the development of the new products or services.

Finally, if the funding is approved, the group dynamics of the community of innovation then becomes formalized within the organization, bringing about the development and implementation of new products or services within the macro-process of convergence management.

​​Communities of innovation compared to communities of practice:

Lim and Ong (2019) observed that in contrast to communities of practice, communities of innovation:
  • may emerge by themselves or be cultivated;
  • they usually exist for a narrower purpose of producing a new service or product over a shorter life span;
  • they are made up of participants from either one or more functions;
  • they require a higher level of trust between participants to be effective;
  • there is a higher cost to their participants; and the potential benefit to the organization may be greater when they are successfully implemented.

They also noted that a community of innovation (COI) may be specialized in one function like a community of practice (COP). An example is an innovation project which involves only staff from the engineering department. It is also possible for communities of innovation to be cross-functional (e.g. involving 2-3 functions).

An example is an innovation project which involves staff from two functions, the business department and the environmental science department. In their research, they observed that cross-functional communities of innovation were able to consider problems from more perspectives and come up with more varied solutions.

​However, cross-functional communities of innovation usually require more time for discussions due to the difference in the members’ level of knowledge concerning different topics and their associated jargons:
​According to Etienne Wenger, a community of practice (CoP) is a group composed of people who are interested in the same topic and often interact with each other in order to increase their knowledge in this topic. CoPs are very similar to CoIs; however, the two differ in a number of critical ways. They can be easily confused between.
​
A CoP is able to connect the attitudes and values of dissimilar organizations. For example, a researcher may have a similar skill-set as someone working at a corporation; however, they may have very different tacit knowledge and motivation.

The formation of a CoP can bring these separate groups with different motivations to form a beneficial partnership.

CoPs and CoIs share many traits and are closely related – so much so that a CoI can be deemed to be a type of CoP.

CoIs are, however, different in certain critical ways not routinely addressed by CoPs, ways that are vital in the process of innovation. CoIs are focused on innovation, and while skills and processes can be transplanted across organizations, innovation processes and methods cannot, without significant customization and adaptation.

Another element that separates a CoI is "inspiration to action", which refers to the relationships formed between kindred spirits – relationships providing support and inspiration for taking on the uphill battle of creating significant change and embarking on new possibilities. In contrast, this process of innovation and bringing about significant change – is not well integrated with corporate strategy.

Drivers of collaborative innovation:

Drivers of organizational innovativeness include team processes and external knowledge (Rose et al., 2016) and networking (Lewis et al., 2018).

Communities of innovation and organizational ambidexterity:

Successful COIs increase innovations within an organization. They, therefore, have the potential to contribute to organizational ambidexterity, which refers to the organization's dual capabilities of managing the current business and being flexible and adaptable to meet future changes and demands.

Examples:

Examples of communities of innovation in history include the communities behind steam engines, iron and steel production, and textile machinery. The Pig Iron industry of Cleveland in the UK during 1850–1870 is a prime example of it.

​In recent decades, the software industry has exhibited the most significant presence of CoIs. 96% of software products developed in 2016 used open source software. Particularly, in software that runs the computing infrastructure of the internet, open source is ubiquitous.

Prime examples of open source software created through communities of innovation include OpenOffice, Python, Blender, GIMP, GNOME, Apache, PostgresQL and PHP, besides Linux.

The CoI that developed Linux:

Traditionally, the company is the most efficient means of managing knowledge belonging to different people. The primary motivation is job security, career advancement, and recognition.

Lee and Cole (2003) argue for a community structure for knowledge creation that crosses firms boundaries. To substantiate their argument they put forth the case of how "thousands of talented volunteers, dispersed across organizational and geographical boundaries, collaborate via the Internet to produce a knowledge-intensive, innovative product of high quality": the Linux kernel (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633).

​The Linux community has proved to be a very efficient mean of managing knowledge belonging to different people. The primary motivation is a value system, recognition, and potential career advancement or hop. Lee and Cole (2003) argue that research on knowledge management has to date focused on hierarchy and therefore has not adequately addressed the mobilization of distributed knowledge, the knowledge that is dispersed among many people.

They note that, as illustrated by the Linux case, "the advent of the Internet and Web-based technologies has enabled specialized communities to convene, interact, and share resources extensively via electronic interfaces," even across firms' boundaries (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633).

People are able to contribute effectively outside their working hours. Coordination of the work (including feedback) is possible even when people are working from different locations. The catchment area is therefore much larger and the critical mass of software engineers required to develop and maintain the Linux project was therefore achievable.

Benefits and disadvantages:

According to Henry Chesbrough, over the twentieth century, the closed innovation paradigm was overtaken by the theory of open innovation, which emphasizes the significantly higher importance of external resources – thanks to an increasing trend towards globalization, new market participants, and simultaneously shorter product life cycles with correspondingly increasing R&D costs.

Innovation through CoIs has many benefits when compared to proprietary or closed-off product development. Particularly, individual innovators and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are expected to gain most from open innovation collaborations due to their inherently limited capabilities.

When the most popular Open Source tools and applications – developed through collaboration among their respective communities of innovation (such as software like Linux, Apache Web Server, PostgresSQL and PHP) were compared with similar proprietary software, Gartner found that open source bested or equaled the quality of their proprietary cousins and that many open source developers and advocates are gainfully employed and at very little risk of losing future work prospects.

Open source products development has proven to be an efficient way of exhibiting skills.
According to the Technology and Innovation Management Review, open innovation generally provides the following benefits: Broader base of ideas, Technological synergy, Improvement of the internal learning capacity through the transfer of external knowledge and learning routines and Use of intellectual property as strategic assets.

However, open innovation is also associated with a slow or delayed development Pace.
Also, over time it has been proven – especially in the case of communities of innovation in the software industry – that due to the nature of patent and intellectual property law, the dream of open source software as advanced by its advocates – has failed. It was believed that democratization of software would result in shared ownership of its intellectual property, but that hasn't happened.

Software built using open source software – is then patented and closed to external collaboration by wealthy companies, who profit much more from the results than the communities of innovation involved in developing the underlying technologies. This leads to greater wealth inequality, as opposed to social good.

According to an article in Technology and Innovation Management Review, open innovation generally suffers from the following disadvantages: strong dependence on external knowledge; loss of key knowledge control; loss of flexibility, creativity, and strategic power.

History:

There is evidence that, contrary to the popular belief, communities of innovation such as those in open source software, are not a recent development. There are many examples in history in which innovators have used collective invention as in the cases of textile machinery, steam engines, and the production of iron and steel.

In these cases, the innovators' behavior was largely dependent on public policy that accommodated knowledge sharing to foster cumulative innovation. Sometimes, knowledge sharing coexisted with patenting.

Despite the historical precedent, today knowledge sharing among innovators is generally regarded as a modern development. The cost for information exchange has drastically decreased due, in a large part, to breakthroughs within the information and communication fields.

According to Henry Chesborough (2003), modern open innovation is often seen as, "a sharp break from the paradigm of the early twentieth century when research labs were largely self sufficient – only occasionally receiving outside visitors, and researchers would seldom venture out to visit universities or scientific expositions". In history, the "heroic inventor" is shown greater consideration than the cooperation of innovators.

Stories of innovative heroes were believed to be more fascinating than other narratives, such as the stories of often nameless farmers, who created and shared new types of wheat on the Great Plains. This demonstrates the cultural shift that caused the "heroic inventor" to be nationally celebrated in Britain and all Western countries.

Knowledge sharing often occurred in the past, though there is not enough evidence to prove whether or not it occurs more frequently today. However, it is known that tension has existed for some time between the depth and scope of open knowledge sharing and the patent system.

Among the foremost examples of collective innovation in the past is Cleveland's Pig Iron industry in the UK during 1850–1870. This industry experienced a "free exchange of information about new techniques and plant designs among firms in an industry".

According to economic historian Robert Allen, the proliferation of knowledge sharing in the iron district had two plausible reasons. First, afterword traveled of a prosperous blast furnace design, the reputations of engineers grew to be more positive. This only increased profits and allowed engineers to improve their careers. Second, such disclosures could cause the value of the revealing party's assets to decrease.

Improving the blast furnace designs, in turn, led to an increase in the values of iron ore deposits, because these Cleveland ore mines were often owned by the blast furnace firms.

This possibly made revealing technical information freely a profitable activity from the individual firm's point of view. Similarities can be drawn to today's communities of innovation, where the primary motivation for participants is recognition and potential career advancement, and for participating firms is related profit.

It is yet to be understood how the rivalry between firms and innovators (that caused knowledge sharing to exist) came to be, while which conditions actually lead to aggressive rivalry and patenting. Bessen and Nuvolari (2011) mention that "... as the technology matures, the nature of firms rivalry, their willingness to share knowledge and their use of patents correspondingly change.

In particular, knowledge sharing is more likely to occur during the early phases of technology or where local innovation has little effect on worldwide prices."

See also:







Community Engagement including Community Emergency Response TeamPictured below: Planning for Community Engagement in Urban Planning
Community engagement is involvement and participation in an organization for the welfare of the community.

​Defining characteristics:

Volunteers actions, which involves giving personal time to projects in humanitarian NGOs or religious groups, are forms of community involvement. The engagement is generally motivated by values and ideals of social justice. 

Community engagement can be volunteering at food banks, homeless shelters, emergency assistance programs, neighborhood cleanup programs, etc.

It is also defined as "a dynamic relational process that facilitates communication, interaction, involvement, and exchange between an organization and a community for a range of social and organizational outcomes". 

As a concept, engagement features attributes of connection, interaction, participation, and involvement, designed to achieve or elicit an outcome at individual, organization, or social levels. 

Current research acknowledges engagement’s socially-situated nature. Community engagement therefore offers an ethical, reflexive, and socially responsive approach to community-organizational relationships with engagement practices that aim to both understand and be responsive to community needs, views, and expectations.

Community engagement is a community-centered orientation based in dialogue. Community engagement enables a more contextualized understanding of community members’ perceptions of the topics and contexts, and facilitates stronger relationships among and between community members. The outcome of community engagement is ultimately social capital and stronger relational networks. 

While community organizing involves the process of building a grassroots movement involving communities, community engagement primarily deals with the practice of moving communities toward change, usually from a stalled or similarly suspended position.
___________________________________________________________________________

Community emergency response team

In the United States, community emergency response team (CERT) can refer to
  • one of five federal programs promoted under Citizen Corps;
  • an implementation of FEMA's National CERT Program, administered by a local sponsoring agency, which provides a standardized training and implementation framework to community members;
  • an organization of volunteer emergency workers who have received specific training in basic disaster response skills, and who agree to supplement existing emergency responders in the event of a major disaster.

Sometimes programs and organizations take different names, such as Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT), or Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET).

The concept of civilian auxiliaries is similar to civil defense, which has a longer history. The CERT concept differs because it includes nonmilitary emergencies, and is coordinated with all levels of emergency authorities, local to national, via an overarching incident command system.
​
Organization:

A local government agency, often a fire department, police department, or emergency management agency, agrees to sponsor CERT within its jurisdiction. The sponsoring agency liaises with, deploys and may train or supervise the training of CERT members. Many sponsoring agencies employ a full-time community-service person as liaison to the CERT members. In some communities, the liaison is a volunteer and CERT member.

As people are trained and agree to join the community emergency response effort, a CERT is formed. Initial efforts may result in a team with only a few members from across the community.

As the number of members grow, a single community-wide team may subdivide.

Multiple CERTs are organized into a hierarchy of teams consistent with ICS principles. This follows the Incident Command System (ICS) principle of Span of control until the ideal distribution is achieved: one or more teams are formed at each neighborhood within a community.

A Teen Community Emergency Response Team (TEEN CERT), or Student Emergency Response Team (SERT), can be formed from any group of teens. A Teen CERT can be formed as a school club, service organization, Venturing Crew, Explorer Post, or the training can be added to a school's graduation curriculum. Some CERTs form a club or service corporation, and recruit volunteers to perform training on behalf of the sponsoring agency.

​This reduces the financial and human resource burden on the sponsoring agency.

​When not responding to disasters or large emergencies, CERTs may
  • raise funds for emergency response equipment in their community;
  • provide first-aid, crowd control or other services at community events;
  • hold planning, training, or recruitment meetings; and
  • conduct or participate in disaster response exercises.

Some sponsoring agencies use state and federal grants to purchase response tools and equipment for their members and team(s) (subject to Stafford Act limitations). Most CERTs also acquire their own supplies, tools, and equipment. As community members, CERTs are aware of the specific needs of their community and equip the teams accordingly.

Response:

The basic idea is to use CERT to perform the large number of tasks needed in emergencies. This frees highly trained professional responders for more technical tasks. Much of CERT training concerns the Incident Command System and organization, so CERT members fit easily into larger command structures.

A team may self-activate (self-deploy) when their own neighborhood is affected by disaster. An effort is made to report their response status to the sponsoring agency.

A self-activated team will size-up the loss in their neighborhood and begin performing the skills they have learned to minimize further loss of life, property, and environment. They will continue to respond safely until redirected or relieved by the sponsoring agency or professional responders on-scene.

Teams in neighborhoods not affected by disaster may be deployed or activated by the sponsoring agency. The sponsoring agency may communicate with neighborhood CERT leaders through an organic communication team. In some areas the communications may be by amateur radio, FRS, GMRS or MURS radio, dedicated telephone or fire-alarm networks.

​In other areas, relays of bicycle-equipped runners can effectively carry messages between the teams and the local emergency operations center.

​The sponsoring agency may activate and dispatch teams in order to gather or respond to intelligence about an incident. Teams may be dispatched to affected neighborhoods, or organized to support operations. CERT members may augment support staff at an Incident Command Post or Emergency Operations Center.

Additional teams may also be created to guard a morgue, locate supplies and food, convey messages to and from other CERTs and local authorities, and other duties on an as-needed basis as identified by the team leader.

In the short term, CERTs perform data gathering, especially to locate mass-casualties requiring professional response, or situations requiring professional rescues, simple fire-fighting tasks (for example, small fires, turning off gas), light search and rescue, damage evaluation of structures, triage and first aid.

In the longer term, CERTs may assist in the evacuation of residents, or assist with setting up a neighborhood shelter.

While responding, CERT members are temporary volunteer government workers. In some areas, (such as California, Hawaii and Kansas) registered, activated CERT members are eligible for worker's compensation for on-the-job injuries during declared disasters.

Member roles:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends that the standard, ten-person team be comprised as follows:
  • CERT Leader/Incident Commander. Generally, the first CERT team member arriving on the scene is the designated Incident Commander (IC) until the arrival of someone more competent. This person makes the IC initial assessment of the scene and determines the appropriate course of action for team members; assumes role of Safety Officer until assigned to another team member; assigns team member roles if not already assigned; designates triage area, treatment area, morgue, and vehicle traffic routes; coordinates and directs team operations; determines logistical needs (water, food, medical supplies, transportation, equipment, and so on.) and determines ways to meet those needs through team members or citizen volunteers on the scene; collects and writes reports on the operation and victims; and communicates and coordinates with the incident commander, local authorities, and other CERT team leaders. The team leader is identified by two pieces of crossed tape on the hard hat.
  • Safety Officer/ Dispatch. Checks team members prior to deployment to ensure they are safe and equipped for the operation; determines safe or unsafe working environments; ensures team accountability; supervises operations (when possible) where team members and victims are at direct physical risk, and alerts team members when unsafe conditions arise. Advises team members of any updates on the situation. Keeps tabs on the situation as it unfolds
  • Fire Suppression Team (2 people). Work under the supervision of a Team Leader to suppress small fires in designated work areas or as needed; when not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the search and rescue team or triage team; assist in evacuation and transport as needed; assist in the triage or treatment area as needed, other duties as assigned; communicate with Team Leader.
  • Search and Rescue Team/Extraction (2). Work under the supervision of a Team Leader, searching for and providing rescue of victims as is prudent under the conditions, also bringing injured people to triage or the hospital for medical treatment ; when not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team, assist in the triage or treatment area as needed; other duties as assigned; communicate with Team Leader.
  • Medical Triage Team/Field Medic (2). Work under the supervision of a Team Leader, providing START triage for victims found at the scene; marking victims with category of injury per the standard operating procedures; when not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team if needed, assist the Search and Rescue Team if needed, assist in the Medical Triage Area if needed, assist in the Treatment Area if needed, other duties as assigned; communicate with Team Leader.​
  • Medical Treatment Team (2). Work under the supervision of the Team Leader, providing medical treatment to victims within the scope of their training. This task is normally accomplished in the Treatment Area, however, it may take place in the affected area as well. When not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team as needed, assist the Medical Triage Team as needed; other duties as assigned; communicate with the Team Leader.

Because every CERT member in a community receives the same core instruction, any team member has the training necessary to assume any of these roles. This is important during a disaster response because not all members of a regular team may be available to respond.

Hasty teams may be formed by whichever members are responding at the time. Additionally, members may need to adjust team roles due to stress, fatigue, injury, or other circumstances.

  • Medical Treatment Team (2). Work under the supervision of the Team Leader, providing medical treatment to victims within the scope of their training. This task is normally accomplished in the Treatment Area, however, it may take place in the affected area as well. When not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team as needed, assist the Medical Triage Team as needed; other duties as assigned; communicate with the Team Leader.

Because every CERT member in a community receives the same core instruction, any team member has the training necessary to assume any of these roles. This is important during a disaster response because not all members of a regular team may be available to respond.

Hasty teams may be formed by whichever members are responding at the time. Additionally, members may need to adjust team roles due to stress, fatigue, injury, or other circumstaces.

Training:

​While state and local jurisdictions will implement training in the manner that best suits the community, FEMA's National CERT Program has an established curriculum. Jurisdictions may augment the training, but are strongly encouraged to deliver the entire core content. The CERT core curriculum for the basic course is composed of the following nine units (time is instructional hours):
  • Unit 1: Disaster Preparedness (2.5 hrs). Topics include (in part) identifying local disaster threats, disaster impact, mitigation and preparedness concepts, and an overview of Citizen Corps and CERT. Hands on skills include team-building exercises, and shutting off utilities.
  • Unit 2: Fire Safety (2.5 hrs). Students learn about fire chemistry, mitigation practices, hazardous materials identification, suppression options, and are introduced to the concept of size-up. Hands-on skills include using a fire extinguisher to suppress a live flame, and wearing basic protective gear. Firefighting standpipes as well as unconventional firefighting methods are also covered.
  • Unit 3: Disaster Medical Operations part 1 (2.5 hrs). Students learn to identify and treat certain life-threatening conditions in a disaster setting, as well as START triage. Hands-on skills include performing head-tilt/chin-lift, practicing bleeding control techniques, and performing triage as an exercise.
  • Unit 4: Disaster Medical Operations part 2 (2.5 hrs). Topics cover mass casualty operations, public health, assessing patients, and treating injuries. Students practice patient assessment, and various treatment techniques.
  • Unit 5: Light Search and Rescue Operations (2.5 hrs). Size-up is expanded as students learn about assessing structural damage, marking structures that have been searched, search techniques, as well as rescue techniques and cribbing. Hands-on activities include lifting and cribbing an object, and practicing rescue carries.
  • Unit 6: CERT Organization (1.5 hrs). Students are introduced to several concepts from the Incident Command System, and local team organization and communication is explained. Hands-on skills include a table-top exercise focusing on incident command and control.
  • Unit 7: Disaster Psychology (1 hr). Responder well-being and dealing with victim trauma are the topics of this unit.
  • Unit 8: Terrorism and CERT (2.5 hrs). Students learn how terrorists may choose targets, what weapons they may use, and identifying when chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive weapons may have been deployed. Students learn about CERT roles in preparing for and responding to terrorist attacks. A table-top exercise highlights topics covered.
  • Unit 9: Course Review and Disaster Simulation (2.5 hrs). Students take a written exam, then participate in a real-time practical disaster simulation where the different skill areas are put to the test. A critique follows the exercise where students and instructors have an opportunity to learn from mistakes and highlight exemplary actions. Students may be given a certificate of completion at the conclusion of the course.

​CERT training emphasizes safely "doing the most good for the most people as quickly as possible" when responding to a disaster. For this reason, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training is not included in the core curriculum, as it is time and responder intensive in a mass-casualty incident.

However, many jurisdictions encourage or require CERT members to obtain CPR training. Many CERT programs provide or encourage members to take additional first aid training. Some CERT members may also take training to become a certified first responder or emergency medical technician.

​Many CERT programs also provide training in amateur radio operation, shelter operations, flood response, community relations, mass care, the incident command system (ICS), and the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Each unit of CERT training is ideally delivered by professional responders or other experts in the field addressed by the unit. This is done to help build unity between CERT members and responders, keep the attention of students, and help the professional response organizations be comfortable with the training which CERT members receive.

Each course of instruction is ideally facilitated by one or more instructors certified in the CERT curriculum by the state or sponsoring agency. Facilitating instructors provide continuity between units, and help ensure that the CERT core curriculum is being delivered successfully.

Facilitating instructors also perform set-up and tear-down of the classroom, provide instructional materials for the course, record student attendance and other tasks which assist the professional responder in delivering their unit as efficiently as possible.

CERT training is provided free to interested members of the community, and is delivered in a group classroom setting. People may complete the training without obligation to join a CERT. Citizen Corps grant funds can be used to print and provide each student with a printed manual. Some sponsoring agencies use Citizen Corps grant funds to purchase disaster response tool kits. These kits are offered as an incentive to join a CERT, and must be returned to the sponsoring agency when members resign from CERT.

Some sponsoring agencies require a criminal background-check of all trainees before allowing them to participate on a CERT. For example, the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico require all volunteers to pass a background check, while the city of Austin, Texas does not require a background check to take part in training classes but requires members to undergo a background check in order to receive a CERT badge and directly assist first responders during an activation of the Emergency Operations Center. 

​However, most programs do not require a criminal background check in order to participate.

See also:







Community GardeningPictured below: World's largest urban farm to open – on a Paris rooftop! (The Guardian)
A community garden is a single piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people. Community gardens utilize either individual or shared plots on private or public land while producing fruit, vegetables, and/or plants grown for their attractive appearance. Around the world, community gardens can fulfill a variety of purposes such as aesthetic and community improvement, physical or mental well-being, or land conservation.

Background:
​
According to Marin Master Gardeners, "a community garden is any piece of land gardened by a group of people, utilizing either individual or shared plots on private or public land". 

Community gardens provide fresh products and plants as well as contributing to a sense of community and connection to the environment and an opportunity for satisfying labor and neighborhood improvement. They are publicly functioning in terms of ownership, access, and management, as well as typically owned in trust by local governments or not for profit associations.

Community gardens vary widely throughout the world. In North America, community gardens range from familiar "victory garden" areas where people grow small plots of vegetables, to large "greening" projects to preserve natural areas, to tiny street beautification planters on urban street corners. Some grow only flowers, others are nurtured communally and their bounty shared.

There are even non-profits in many major cities that offer assistance to low-income families, children groups, and community organizations by helping them develop and grow their own gardens.

In the UK and the rest of Europe, closely related "allotment gardens" can have dozens of plots, each measuring hundreds of square meters and rented by the same family for generations.

In the developing world, commonly held land for small gardens is a familiar part of the landscape, even in urban areas, where they may function as market gardens. They also practice crop rotations with versatile plants such as peanuts, tomatoes and much more.

Community gardens are often used in urban neighborhoods to alleviate the food desert effect.

Food accessibility described in urban areas refers to residents who have limited access to fresh produce such as fruits and vegetables. Food deserts often serve lower-income neighborhoods usually in which residents are forced to rely on unhealthy food options such as expensive processed foods from convenience stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants.

Community gardens provide accessibility for fresh food to be in closer proximity located in local neighborhoods. Community gardens can help expand the realm for ensuring residents’ access to healthy and affordable food in a community.

Community gardens may help alleviate one effect of climate change, which is expected to cause a global decline in agricultural output, making fresh produce increasingly unaffordable.

Community gardens are also an increasingly popular method of changing the built environment in order to promote health and wellness in the face of urbanization. The built environment has a wide range of positive and negative effects on the people who work, live, and play in a given area, including a person's chance of developing obesity  

Community gardens encourage an urban community's food security, allowing citizens to grow their own food or for others to donate what they have grown. Advocates say locally grown food decreases a community's reliance on fossil fuels for transport of food from large agricultural areas and reduces a society's overall use of fossil fuels to drive in agricultural machinery. 

A 2012 op-ed by community garden advocate Les Kishler examines how community gardening can reinforce the so-called "positive" ideas and activities of the Occupy movement.

Community gardens improve users’ health through increased fresh vegetable consumption and providing a venue for exercise. A fundamental part of good health is a diet rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, and other plant based foods. Community gardens provide access to such foods for the communities in which they are located. Community gardens are especially important in communities with large concentrations of low socioeconomic populations, as a lack fresh fruit and vegetable availability plagues these communities at disproportionate rates.

​The gardens also combat two forms of alienation that plague modern urban life, by bringing urban gardeners closer in touch with the source of their food, and by breaking down isolation by creating a social community. Community gardens provide other social benefits, such as the sharing of food production knowledge with the wider community and safer living spaces. Active communities experience less crime and vandalism.

Ownership:
​
Land for a community garden can be publicly or privately held. One strong tradition in North American community gardening in urban areas is cleaning up abandoned vacant lots and turning them into productive gardens. Alternatively, community gardens can be seen as a health or recreational amenity and included in public parks, similar to ball fields or playgrounds.

Historically, community gardens have also served to provide food during wartime or periods of economic depression. Access to land and security of land tenure remains a major challenge for community gardeners and their supporters throughout the world, since in most cases the gardeners themselves do not own or control the land directly.

Some gardens are grown collectively, with everyone working together; others are split into clearly divided plots, each managed by a different gardener (or group or family). Many community gardens have both "common areas" with shared upkeep and individual/family plots.

Though communal areas are successful in some cases, in others there is a tragedy of the commons, which results in uneven workload on participants, and sometimes demoralization, neglect, and abandonment of the communal model. Some relate this to the largely unsuccessful history of collective farming.

Unlike public parks, whether community gardens are open to the general public is dependent upon the lease agreements with the management body of the park and the community garden membership. Open or closed-gate policies vary from garden to garden. However, in a key difference, community gardens are managed and maintained with the active participation of the gardeners themselves, rather than tended only by a professional staff.

A second difference is food production: Unlike parks, where plantings are ornamental (or more recently ecological), community gardens often encourage food production by providing gardeners a place to grow vegetables and other crops. To facilitate this, a community garden may be divided into individual plots or tended in a communal fashion, depending on the size and quality of a garden and the members involved.

Types of gardens:

There are multiple types of community gardens with distinct varieties in which the community can participate in:
  • Neighborhood gardens are the most common type that is normally defined as a garden where a group of people come together to grow fruits, vegetables and ornamentals. They are identifiable as a parcel of private or public land where individual plots are rented by gardeners at a nominal annual fee.
  • Residential Gardens are typically shared among residents in apartment communities, assisted living, and affordable housing units. These gardens are organized and maintained by residents living on the premise.
  • Institutional Gardens are attached to either public or private organizations and offer numerous beneficial services for residents. Benefits include mental or physical rehabilitation and therapy, as well as teaching a set of skills for job-related placement.
  • Demonstration Gardens are used for educational and recreational purposes in mind. They often offer short seminars or presentations about gardening, and provide the necessary tools to operate a community garden.

​Plot size:

In Britain, the 1922 Allotment act specifies "an allotment not exceeding 40 [square] poles in extent"; since a rod, pole or perch is 5.5 yards in length, 40 square rods is 1210 square yards or 10890 square feet (equivalent to a large plot of 90 ft x 121 ft). 

In practice, plot sizes vary; Lewisham offers plots with an "average size" of "125 meters square".
​
In America there is no standardized plot size. For example, plots of 3 m × 6 m (10 ft × 20 ft = 200 square feet) and 3 m x 4.5 m (10 ft x 15 ft) are listed in Alaska. Montgomery Parks in Maryland lists plots of 200, 300, 400 and 625 square feet In Canada, plots of 20 ft x 20 ft and 10 ft x 10 ft, as well as smaller "raised beds", are listed in Vancouver.

Location:

Community gardens may be found in neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, and on residential housing grounds. The location of a community garden is a critical factor in how often the community garden is used and who visits it. Exposure to a community garden is much more likely for an individual if they are able to walk or drive to the location, as opposed to public transportation.

The length of travel time is also a factor. Those who live within a 15-minute or less travel distance are more likely to visit a community garden as compared to those with a longer travel time.

Such statistics should be taken into consideration when choosing a location for a community garden for a target population.

The site location should also be considered for its soil conditions as well as sun conditions. Solar conditions are of paramount importance, as above ground gardening is always possible. An area with a fair amount of morning sunlight and shade in the afternoon is most ideal.

While specifics vary from plant to plant, most do well with 6 to 8 full hours of sunlight.

When considering a location, areas near industrial zones may require soil testing for contaminants. If soil is safe, the composition should be loose and well-draining. However, if the soil at the location is unable to be used, synthetic soil may also be used in raised gardens beds or containers.

​Rushall Garden in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia is situated on land that was formerly a minor railway junction, now repurposed.

​Plant choice and physical layout:

While food production is central to many community and allotment gardens, not all have vegetables as a main focus. Restoration of natural areas and native plant gardens are also popular, as are "art" gardens. Many gardens have several different planting elements, and combine plots with such projects as small orchards, herbs and butterfly gardens. Individual plots can become "virtual" backyards, each highly diverse, creating a "quilt" of flowers, vegetables and folk art.

Regardless of plant choice, planning out the garden layout beforehand will help avoid problems down the line. According to the Arizona Master Gardener Manual, taking measurements of the garden size, sunlight locations and planted crops vs. yield quantity, will ensure a detailed record that helps when making decisions for the coming years.

Other consideration to garden layout would be efficient use of space by using trellises for climbing crops, being mindful of taller plants blocking sunlight to shorter plants and plants that have similar life cycles close together.

Group and leadership selection:

The community gardening movement in North America is inclusive, diverse, pro-democracy, and supportive of community involvement. Gardeners may be of any cultural background, young or old, new gardeners or seasoned growers, rich or poor. A garden may have only a few people active, or hundreds.

Some community gardens “self-support” through membership dues, and others require a sponsor for tools, seeds, or money donations. Churches, schools, private businesses or parks and recreation departments supporters and community leaders.

Finally, all community gardens have a structure. The organization depends in part on whether the garden is "top down" or "grassroots". There are many different organizational models in use for community gardens. Some elect boards in a democratic fashion, while others can be run by appointed officials. Some are managed by non-profit organizations, such as a community gardening association, a community association, a church, or other land-owner; others by a city's recreation or parks department, a school or University.

Gardeners may form a grassroots group to initiate the garden, such as the Green Guerrillas of New York City, or a garden may be organized "top down" by a municipal agency. In Santa Clara, California there is a non-profit by the name of Appleseeds that offers free assistance in starting up new community gardens around the world.

Membership rules and fees:

In most cases, gardeners are expected to pay annual dues to help with garden upkeep, and the organization must manage these fees. The tasks in a community garden are many, including upkeep, mulching paths, recruiting members, and fund raising. Rules and an 'operations manual' are both invaluable tools, and ideas for both are available at the ACGA.

Health effects of community gardens:

Community gardens have been shown to have positive health effects on those who participate in the programs, particularly in the areas of decreasing body mass index and lower rates of obesity. Studies have found that community gardens in schools have been found to improve average body mass index in children.

A 2013 study found that 17% of obese or overweight children improved their body mass index over seven weeks. Specifically, 13% of the obese children achieved a lower body mass index in the overweight range, while 23% of overweight children achieved a normal body mass index. 

Many studies have been performed largely in low-income, Hispanic/Latino communities in the United States. In these programs, gardening lessons were accompanied by nutrition and cooking classes and optional parent engagement. Successful programs highlighted the necessity of culturally tailored programming.

There is some evidence to suggest that community gardens have a similar effect in adults. A study found that community gardeners in Utah had a lower body mass index than their non-gardening siblings and unrelated neighbors. Administrative records were used to compare body mass indexes of community gardeners to that of unrelated neighbors, siblings, and spouses.

Gardeners were less likely to be overweight or obese than their neighbors, and gardeners had lower body mass indexes than their siblings. However, there was no difference in body mass index between gardeners and their spouses which may suggest that community gardening creates healthy habits for the entire household.

Participation in a community garden has been shown to increase both availability and consumption of fruits and vegetables in households. A study showed an average increase in availability of 2.55 fruits and 4.3 vegetables with participation in a community garden. It also showed that children in participating households consumed an average of two additional servings per week of fruits and 4.9 additional servings per week of vegetables.

Policy implications:

There is strong support among American adults for local and state policies and policy changes that support community gardens. A study found that 47.2% of American adults supported such policies. 

However, community gardens compete with the interests of developers. Community gardens are largely impacted and governed by policies at the city level. In particular, zoning laws strongly impact the possibility of community gardens. The momentum for rezoning often comes from the public need for access to fruits and vegetables. Rezoning is necessary in many cities for a parcel of land to be designated a community garden, but rezoning doesn't guarantee garden will not be developed in the future.

Further policies can be enacted to protect community gardens from future development. For example, New York State reached a settlement in 2002 which protected hundreds of community gardens which had been established by the Parks and Recreation Department GreenThumb Program from future development.

At times, zoning policy lags behind the development of community gardens. In these cases, community gardens may exist illegally. Such was the case in Detroit when hundreds of community gardens were created in abandoned spaces around the city. The city of Detroit created agricultural zones in 2013 in the middle of urban areas to legitimize the over 355 “illegal” community gardens.

​Examples:

Australia:

​The first Australian community garden was established in 1977 in Nunawading, Victoria followed soon after by Ringwood Community Garden in March 1980.

Czech Republic (CR):

The trend of community gardening in the Czech Republic is increasing. The first community garden was founded in 2002 and in 2020 you can find at the map of community garden named mapko.cz more than 116. If you are interested in more details, have a look at organization Kokoza.cz, social enterprise promoting community gardening in CR.

Japan:

In Japan, rooftops on some train stations have been transformed into community gardens. Plots are rented to local residents for $980 per year. These community gardens have become active open spaces now.

Mali:

Often externally supported, community gardens become increasingly important in developing countries, such as West African Mali to bridge the gap between supply and requirements for micro-nutrients and at the same time strengthen an inclusive development.

Spain:
​
Most older Spaniards grew up in the countryside and moved to the city to find work. Strong family ties often keep them from retiring to the countryside, and so urban community gardens are in great demand. Potlucks and paellas are common, as well as regular meetings to manage the affairs of the garden.

Taiwan:

There is an extensive network of community gardens and collective urban farms in Taipei City often occupying areas of the city that are waiting for development. Flood-prone river banks and other areas unsuitable for urban construction often become legal or illegal community gardens. The network of the community gardens of Taipei are referred to as Taipei organic acupuncture of the industrial city.

United Kingdom:

In the United Kingdom, community gardening is generally distinct from allotment gardening, though the distinction is sometimes blurred. Allotments are generally plots of land let to individuals for their cultivation by local authorities or other public bodies—the upkeep of the land is usually the responsibility of the individual plot owners.

Allotments tend (but not invariably) to be situated around the outskirts of built-up areas. Use of allotment areas as open space or play areas is generally discouraged. However, there are an increasing number of community-managed allotments, which may include allotment plots and a community garden area, many of them overseen by the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens (a registered charity).

The community garden movement is of more recent provenance than allotment gardening, with many such gardens built on patches of derelict land, waste ground or land owned by the local authority or a private landlord that is not being used for any purpose.

A community garden in the United Kingdom tends to be situated in a built-up area and is typically run by people from the local community as an independent, non-profit organization (though this may be wholly or partly funded by public money). For example, Norwich's Fifth Quarter Community Garden.

It is also likely to perform a dual function as an open space or play area (in which role it may also be known as a 'city park') and—while it may offer plots to individual cultivators—the organization that administers the garden will normally have a great deal of the responsibility for its planting, landscaping and upkeep.

An example inner-city garden of this sort is Islington's Culpeper Community Garden, which is a registered charity, or Camden's Phoenix Garden.

United States:

Community gardening in the United States functions as ecological green space, a gathering place for neighbors, a positive contribution to the reduction of food insecurity, promotes healthier eating through education programs, and provides access to gardening gardening to those who otherwise could not have a garden, such as the elderly, recent immigrants, urban dwellers, or the homeless.

Some gardens are worked as community farms with no individual plots at all, similar to urban farms. Other gardens resemble European "allotment" gardens, with plots where individuals and families can grow vegetables and flowers; including a number which began as "victory gardens" during World War II.

​Community gardens can vary in shape, size, and function, but the goal of bridging the gap between people and nature is central to their creation. Some of the largest community gardens in the nation are reported to be Shiloh Field Community Garden in Denton, TX, measuring at 14.5 acres of land, and DeKalb County Community Gardens in DeKalb, Illinois, measuring over 15 acres of land.

Overview:

​A community garden is any piece of land gardened by a group of people. The majority of gardens in community gardening programs are collections of individual garden plots, frequently between 3 m × 3 m (9.8 ft × 9.8 ft) and 6 m × 6 m (20 ft × 20 ft). This holds true whether they are sponsored by public agencies, city departments, large non-profits, or (most commonly) a coalition of different entities and groups.

Whether the garden is run as a co-op by the gardeners themselves (common in New York City, Boston and other East Coast cities) or managed by a public or non-profit agency, plot holders typically are asked to pay a modest fee each year and to abide by a set of rules. Many gardens encourage activities such as work days, fundraisers, and social gatherings.

Community garden organizers typically say that "growing community" is as important as growing vegetables; or, as the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) puts it: "In community gardening, 'community' comes first."

Community gardening in the United States overlaps to some extent with the related but distinct movement to encourage local food production, local farmers' markets and community supported agriculture farms (CSAs). Leases and rules prevent some, though not all, community gardeners from selling their produce commercially, although their gardens may donate fresh fruits and vegetables to local food pantries, cooperatives, and homeless members of their community.

However, community gardens offer ideal sites for local farmers markets, and gardeners often seek farmers to provide space-intensive crops such as corn or potatoes. They also can hire farmers to provide services such as plowing and providing mulch and manure. In turn, small farmers can reach a wider audience and consumer base by drawing on community gardeners and their contacts.

Although the two approaches are distinct, both can be effective ways to produce local food in urban areas, safeguard green space, and contribute to food security. Community gardens also increase environmental aesthetics, promote neighborhood attachment and social involvement.

In an interesting variant on the practice of reclaiming bombed-out areas for community gardens (also practiced during WWII in the ghettos of Eastern Europe), in American inner-cities, community groups have reclaimed abandoned or vacant lots for garden plots. In these cases, groups have subsequently leased from a municipality that claims the property or claimed squatter's rights or a right to subsistence not currently recognized by the legal system.

Community gardens often face pressure due to economic development, rising land values, and decreased city government budgets. In some cases they have responded to the changes by forming nonprofit organizations to provide assistance and by building gardens on city park spaces and school yards.

History:

The European history of community gardening in the US dates back to the early 18th century, when Moravians created a community garden as part of the community of Bethabara, near modern Winston-Salem, North Carolina – a garden still active and open for visitors today. 

First Nations peoples also gardened with a community approach (Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden paints a picture of gardens among the Hidatsa), likely for generations before the arrival of waves of immigrants.

In the 1890s, Detroit became the first city to use vacant lots for a municipally sponsored urban gardening program. This program, known as “Pingree’s Potato Patches” after Mayor Hazen Pingree, was in response to the 1893 economic recession which left the city's industrial laborers unemployed.

Boston and San Francisco later adopted similar programs due to the success of Detroit's but in general viewed as a temporary program to help the poor.

As adult interest in gardens began to wane, there was a renewed interest in children's gardening with the advocacy of Fannie Griscom Parsons in New York City. In DeWitt Clinton Park, Parsons created a large educational garden in the early 1900s as a way to "show how willing and anxious children are to work, and to teach them in their work some necessary civic virtues:
  • private care of public property,
  • economy,
  • honesty,
  • application concentration,
  • self-government,
  • civic pride,
  • justice,
  • the dignity of labor,
  • and the love of nature by opening to their minds the little we know of her mysteries, more wonderful than any fairy tale.”

During World War I and World War II, Victory gardens were planted on public land to meet some of the domestic need for food, and making gardening patriotic. The term "community garden" came into use to describe collectively grown gardens and gardens with individual plots during World War I.

In the 1960s and 70s, community gardening have been a result of grassroots organizations who promote environmental stewardship and revitalize urban neighborhoods. In 1978, the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was formed to share information and resources and to form a nationwide network of gardeners.

From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, community gardening in a select number of major American cities enjoyed Federal financial support, though many programs struggled to find funding. The loss of the Federal program increased the challenge of finding funding to support programs. Funding remains a key challenge, along with secure land tenure for garden sites, finding insurance, and helping gardeners develop ways to work together smoothly.

Impact:

Community gardens play a part in a larger food systems movements such as food justice, food sovereignty, food security, urban farming, and more. These movements are not only happening in the United States, but transnationally in the Global North and the Global South.

Cultural:

Community gardens are a way for a variety of cultures to come together and create a stronger community. Focusing on creating equitable and respectful spaces where farming knowledge can be shared is crucial to creating a just food system for all community members.

Communities hold specific knowledge and expertise about their local environment, and therefore, community members have the power to play a central role in the creation of their local food system. Partnerships between academic researchers, farmers/practitioners, advocates, and community members will filter knowledge of healthy foods and farming techniques throughout the community as a whole.

All of these benefits will lead, in researcher Montenegro de Wit's opinion, to "a more egalitarian food system" that "will likely emerge from participation by those traditionally excluded from it."

Economic:

As the majority of the United States' farmers reach retirement age, community gardens play an active role in informing and perhaps inspiring a new generation to become involved with and passionate about growing food. Diversifying the food system with community gardens and other methods of urban agriculture will benefit the economy and create competition between product quality and value.

Green spaces in cities often increase the land value of an area and contribute to gentrification. The perception of organic foods being for an affluent population, plus the perceived notion of privilege that comes from organic-based market chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's work against the goals of most urban agricultural initiatives by creating exclusive spaces. 

Community gardens based on crop sharing, knowledge sharing, and community building help to promote access to healthy foods by creating accessible spaces.

One issue faced by lower-income citizens is that they do not have the time or energy needed for becoming active in a community garden, and therefore struggle to receive the benefits they offer. Community gardens that are working for high crop yields are labor-intensive, and some community members may work multiple jobs and have little to no extra time to commit. 

One way that lower-income citizens can gain access to healthy food is through the SNAP program, which is increasingly being accepted at farmer's markets.

Environmental:

Food composting positively impacts our environment and is growing in popularity with community gardens.  A case study conducted in 2019 by the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and the University of Illinois at Chicago determined the impact from decentralized food composting in the City of Chicago. 

In 2015, the City of Chicago implemented an ordinance allowing acceptance and processing of food scraps at community gardens and urban farms.  Approximately 16% of the food waste was processed at 86 registered compost facilities in 2019.  The study estimates capacity for food composting could reach 27% of the city’s residential food waste resulting in an estimated savings of over $4 million dollars per year. 

In addition to the financial cost savings, other benefits include reduced greenhouse gases because of reduced refuse pickup, compost as energy filled fertilizer for community gardens
and urban farms, and waste reduction into landfills.

Community gardens have the potential to positively impact the areas around them. If gardeners employ organic and environmentally conscious techniques, the community gardens can be a step away from chemically dependent and wasteful food systems. Gardens that produce crops and vegetables act to reduce the need for fossil-fuel intensive storage of delivery of food to local community members. 

As researcher Montenegro de Wit states, sustainable agriculture should not be "contained to the countryside." By bringing these techniques into communities, learning opportunities arise as well as the chance of converting land from an "emissions-source" to a "carbon sink" as Robert Biel writes.

In addition to the possible environmental benefits community gardening brings, there are unintended consequences that can result from poor planning and lack of ecological consideration. For example, if most community members have to drive a considerate distance to reach their community garden or farmer's market, the benefits of locally sourced food evens out. The carbon emissions of travel to the community garden, step closer to those of commercial packaging and transportation costs.

Health:

Community gardens benefit community food access by enhancing nutrition and physical activity as well as promoting the role of public health. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends eating more dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, legumes, and fruits; eating less refined grains, fat, and calories; and obtaining 60 minutes of physical activity on most days. 

Recent public health evaluations show community gardens as a promising approach to promote healthy behaviors. This is particularly important in establishing healthy behaviors among children given the rise of childhood obesity. One recent pilot study in Los Angeles showed a gardening and nutrition intervention improved dietary intake in children and reduced body mass index.

Community gardens also benefit community food security by providing residents with safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice. 

Community garden initiatives have inspired cities to enact policies for water use, improved access to produce, strengthened community building skills, and created culturally appropriate education programs that help elevate the community's collective consciousness about public health. In impoverished urban areas especially, produce harvested from community gardens provides a nutritious alternative to what Nancy Janovicek calls "the industrial diet," which consists of cheap and accessible options like fast-food chains.

Professor Jill Litt and colleagues at University of Colorado School of Public Health evaluated the effects on community gardening in the Denver metro area on social environment, community building and fruit and vegetable intake.

Community gardeners were more likely than home gardeners and non-gardeners to meet the national recommendations of fruit and vegetable intake. Semi structured interviews carried out by Teig et al. revealed that Denver community gardeners felt a high level of trust between members of the garden and a strong sense of community. 

Furthermore, gardeners were involved in community voluntary efforts and donated surplus produce to populations without access to fresh produce.

Social:

Agricultural activity in communities is a way of promoting self-sufficiency, as well as community empowerment and involvement. Additionally, producing food, helping the environment, and creating green spaces in cities contributes to an overall increase in happiness by helping community members accomplish fundamental human tasks such as growing food. 

Space in cities and communities reserved for growing vegetables and flowers promotes well-being, neighborliness, and the protection of nature.

Resources:

Resources are available when considering the addition of a community garden for your local neighborhood including startup guides, financial support, volunteers and training.

The American Community Gardening Association is a non-profit organization promoting community gardens in the United States and Canada through various support programs including advocacy, training, conferences and events, and resources.

The University of Illinois Extension provides resources for Cook County, Illinois and a video series Community Gardens - 10 Steps to Successful Community Gardens to assist organizations or groups who are researching the opportunity of starting their own community garden. 

The University of Missouri Extension created a Community Gardening Tool Kit that includes a step by step guide, forms, and a list of resources.

In addition, the National Agricultural Library of the United States Department of Agriculture provides numerous resources on their website for community gardens including financial resources.

Author and community garden advocate, Ms. LaManda Joy, wrote several books including Start a Community Food Garden, The Essential Handbook which offers all the information needed to start a community garden (available in print and audio books).

Grants provide additional financial resources for starting and maintaining community gardens. State and local governments may offer financial assistance or programs to support your community garden.

Implementation:

To find a community garden in your area, visit the communitygarden.org website

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Community Gardening:

​





Community Mobilization Pictured below: Ten Essential Public Health Services
Community mobilization is an attempt to bring both human and non-human resources together to undertake developmental activities in order to achieve sustainable development.

Process:

Community mobilization is a process through which action is stimulated by a community itself, or by others, that is planned, carried out, and evaluated by a community's individuals, groups, and organizations on a participatory and sustained basis to improve the health, hygiene and education levels so as to enhance the overall standard of living in the community.

A group of people have transcended their differences to meet on equal terms in order to facilitate a participatory decision-making process. In other words, it can be viewed as a process which begins a dialogue among members of the community to determine who, what, and how issues are decided, and also to provide an avenue for everyone to participate in decisions that affect their lives.

Requirements:

Community mobilization needs many analytical and supportive resources which are internal (inside the community) and external (outside the community) as well. Resources include:
Strategies:

The Centre for Disease Control envisions that strong healthcare initiatives will be readily owned by a community if the leaders ("grass tops"), the citizens ("grass roots"), and youth are fully engaged in mobilizing the community, educating stakeholders, and implementing evidence-based interventions. To this respect, 14 strategies guided by best practice have been reported (Huberman 2014):

1. Secure strong leadership
2. Establish a formal structure
3. Engage diverse organizations, community leaders, and residents
4. Ensure authentic participation and shared decision making
5.ensure authentic and productive roles for young people
6. Develop a shared vision
7. Conduct a needs assessment
8. Create a strategic plan
9. Implement mutually reinforcing strategies
10. Create a fundraising strategy
11. Establish effective channels for internal communication
12. Educate the community
13. Conduct process and outcome evaluations
14. Evaluate the community mobilization effort separately

Implications:

"Community mobilization" is a frequently used term in developmental sector. Recently, community mobilization has been proved to be a valuable and effective concept which has various implications in dealing with basic problems like health and hygiene, population, pollution and gender bias.



​



​
Complete CommunitiesPictured below: Are We There Yet? Creating Complete Communities for 21st Century America
Complete communities is an urban and rural planning concept that aims to meet the basic needs of all residents in a community, regardless of income, culture, or political ideologies through integrated land use planning, transportation planning, and community design. 

While the concept is used by many communities as part of their community plan, each plan interprets what complete community means in their own way. The idea of the complete community has roots in early planning theory, beginning with 

The Garden City Movement, and is a component of contemporary planning methods including Smart Growth.

History:

The Garden City Movement was one of the first proponents for creating communities that accommodate a wide range of community members through a mix in housing types and uses.

Increasing urban sprawl, and its associated negative social, environmental, and health effects, prompted a turn in theory towards increasing density in urban areas. This idea has been brought into contemporary theoretical movements including Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and Sustainable Development, which all advocate high-density 'compact' communities, and also increase the mix of activities and land uses that contribute to a complete community. 

The move toward compact and complete communities in modern planning is summarized in the first two Ahwahnee Principles, a landmark document created by the California Local Government Commission that provided the foundation for Smart Growth and New Urbanism: (1) "all planning should be in the form of complete and integrated communities including housing, shops, workplaces, schools, parks and civic facilities essential to the daily life of the residents" and (2) "community size should be designed so that housing, jobs, daily needs, and other activities are within easy walking distance of each other."

Since the 1970s, Canadian planning policy has aimed to make communities more attractive and efficient through compact form, mixed-use, higher densities and a range of housing types. 

Households in North America are becoming smaller, have a different form than previous generations and are more socially and economically diverse; while housing costs have increased dramatically in some parts of the country, resulting in smaller lot sizes and an increase in multi-family housing options and suburban density.

One of the typical critiques of past suburban growth patterns is that they replicate trends of a homogeneous landscape consisting mainly of white, middle class, nuclear families.

Social diversity and affordability looked to be addressed through the creation of a different form, through the design of new communities that look to promote diversity. When measured on a scale looking at four elements of complete communities - living, working, moving, thriving - New York City and San Francisco rank at the top, while Atlanta and Dallas ranked quite low.

Defining elements:

The 'complete community' is seen as a way to deal with issues of social isolation, address inefficient land uses and meet the needs of diverse households.

A common definition of a complete community is one where people live, work and play, and where the automobile is left at home in favor of walking and public transport. This is supported by a diverse housing mix. While each community applies the term in its own way as part of its community plans, there are several defining elements.

Densification:

A benchmark for complete communities is access to services within a five-minute walk, which contrasts the typical sprawl associated with the suburbs.

Diverse housing mix:

In Canada, many municipalities have focused on providing a mix of housing types as the key component of creating a complete community based on directives from provincial and regional policies.

Diverse land use mix:

Complete communities advocate for densification within existing neighborhoods to provide services to users which sometimes run in contrast to zoning regulations currently there. Barriers to complete communities include zoning and bylaws that do not promote building with diverse uses and design in mind.

Employment options:

One central goal of developing complete communities involves promoting a concentration of employment opportunities, with a labor force both working and living within the geographic boundaries of the community. This is believed to be a response to the negative effects associated with commuter towns.

Transportation options:

As the suburbs grew, roadways that prioritized the automobile grew with them. Especially in the United States, widened and expanded metropolitan areas led to poor inner-suburb communities, which worked to destroy the connection to neighborhoods, institutions, parks and town centers.

Planners began to advocate for a community plan where a mix of housing types and uses in compact form would be centered around transportation nodes for ease of mobility of residents. Additionally, some transportation planners take planning for a connected community one step further by pushing for inclusive multi-modal and equitable transportation systems that work for people of all ages, ability, income and racial demography.

Debate/Critique:

Although there is a general definition for complete communities, the term sometimes has differing meanings within certain contexts. Within many municipal plans the term complete community is used to describe a city mandate, without a given description of how the community defines the term. This leads to the term being used for a number of different objectives, depending on the goals of the specific community.

While many planners look to use urban policy as a way of creating a diverse housing mix, some critics argue that it is actually market pressures rather than planners and policy makers who are actually creating the increase in the share of multi-family housing in suburban areas. 

Most developers will not actually use the term ‘complete communities,’ however, many larger master-planning developers will talk about providing a range of housing types as a way of remaining competitive and selling community.

Examples:

The following are examples of places that have been described as complete communities:
  • Kirkland, Washington

The following are examples of places that have gone through, or are currently undergoing, a planning process that is informed by the concept of a complete community:
  • Metro Vancouver, British Columbia
  • City of North Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Winnipeg, Manitoba
  • Greater Golden Horseshoe, Ontario
  • Austin, Texas
  • Vancouver Campus of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia
  • City of Nanaimo, British Columbia
  • Town of Gibsons, British Columbia
  • City of St. Albert, Alberta

See also:







Communities that CarePictured below: Five Phases of CTC
Communities That Care (CTC) is a program of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) in the office of the United States Government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). CTC is a coalition-based prevention operating system that uses a public health approach to prevent youth problem behaviors such as violence, delinquency, school drop out and substance abuse. 

Using strategic consultation, training, and research-based tools, CTC is designed to help community stakeholders and decision makers understand and apply information about risk and protective factors, and programs that are proven to make a difference in promoting healthy youth development, in order to most effectively address the specific issues facing their community's youth.

Research base:

Public health understanding of risk and protective factors:

The field of public health has developed a systematic methodology for understanding and effectively preventing health problems. Through rigorous research, the etiology of diseases has been documented, and the factors contributing to those diseases have been identified.

Once these contributing factors are understood, careful study and application of approaches to amend those factors have demonstrated reductions in the disease burden. For example, heart disease has been one of the primary causes of death among American adults.

Research shows, however, that adequate exercise, a healthy diet, and avoidance of smoking can help to prevent heart disease. These behaviors are considered protective factors, just as smoking, high blood pressure, and a family history of heart disease are considered risk factors for poor heart health.

Since the late 1970s, researchers in a variety of disciplines (for example, criminology, sociology, social work, psychology, community psychology, education) have been applying this public health approach to the study of the healthy development of young people. This work has created a field called prevention science,  which identifies the factors that contribute to the healthy development of children and youth (protective factors) and the factors that impede that development (risk factors).

Cause: Longitudinal studies of youth development:

Protective Factors and the Social Development Model. The prevention of health and behavior problems in young people requires, at its foundation, the promotion of the factors required for positive development.

Research shows that five basic factors promote positive social development:
  1. opportunities for developmentally appropriate involvement,
  2. skills,
  3. recognition for effort, improvement and achievement,
  4. strong social bonds,
  5. and clear, consistent standards for behavior.

All children need opportunities to be actively involved with positive adults and peers, the skills to participate and succeed in social, school, and civic settings, and recognition for their efforts, improvements, and accomplishments. When young people are provided with opportunities, skills, and recognition, they develop strong social bonds, that is connections with and commitment to the families, schools, and communities that provided them.

When families, schools, and communities communicate to young people clear standards for behavior, those who feel bonded, emotionally connected, invested in the group, will follow those standards that promote health and success.

​These five factors are protective factors that promote positive development in young people (Hawkins & Weis, 1985), and form the basis for the Social Development Model.

​Risk Factors. Research has also identified risk factors that can interrupt the process of positive social development. High quality longitudinal studies have identified risk factors in neighborhoods and communities, families, schools, and peer groups, as well as in individuals themselves. 

These factors increase the probability of delinquency, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, and other behavioral problems in young people. The risk factors shown in the risk factor chart (right) have been found in at least two high-quality studies to predict later health and behavior problems in young people. Many of these risk factors predict multiple problems.

For example, the risk factor of “Poor Family Management” has been shown to predict five youth problem behaviors: substance abuse, delinquency, teen pregnancy, school drop-out, and violence. Providing effective parent training programs in a community, therefore, could potentially impact all five of these undesirable outcomes.

Intervention: Testing effectiveness of interventions:

The identification of risk and protective factors provides the foundation for advances in preventing adolescent health and behavior problems. Prevention scientists have rigorously tested programs and policies that address these risk and protective factors in studies funded largely by the National Institutes of Health, and an increasing number and range of effective prevention approaches have now been identified.

By 2004, 56 tested and effective programs were available in the United States that have been demonstrated to reduce involvement in problem behaviors and/or increase positive outcomes for youth. 
​
Sixteen of these programs have been tested at least twice with replicated findings and have been designated as Blueprint model programs, which, if rigorously followed, will significantly reduce youth violence and substance abuse.

Programs range from prenatal (for example, Olds, 1997) and early childhood interventions (for example, Reid et al., 2001), to community policies related to alcohol (e.g. Holder et al., 2000), to school-based curricula that teach youth social and emotional skills that will help them navigate life (e.g. Botvin at al, 2003, Eisen at al., 2002, and Grossman et al., 1997).

Systems: Researching systems change in states and communities:

Prevention scientists understand that the final task arising from these research findings is the application of proven prevention programs, policies and strategies in the real world in order to enhance youth development on the ground in communities. In collaboration with communities and state and federal governments, researchers are studying the impact that prevention science can have on the effectiveness of prevention efforts within those systems. 

Description:

Five Phases:
​
Communities That Care guides the community's prevention efforts through a five-phase process which includes:
  1. Get Started—assessing community readiness to undertake collaborative prevention efforts;
  2. Get Organized—getting a commitment to the CTC process from community leaders and forming a diverse and representative prevention coalition;
  3. Develop a Profile—using epidemiologic data to assess prevention needs;
  4. Create a Plan—choosing tested and effective prevention policies, practices, and programs based on assessment data;
  5. Implement and Evaluate—implementing the new strategies with fidelity, in a manner congruent with the programs' theory, content, and methods of delivery, and evaluating progress over time.

CTC activities are planned and carried out by the CTC Community Board, a prevention coalition of community stakeholders who work together to promote positive youth outcomes.

Board members participate in a series of six CTC training workshops in which they build their coalition and learn the skills needed to install the CTC system.

Working through the five phases of CTC provides the opportunity to increase communication, collaboration, and ownership among community members and service providers invested in healthy youth development.

Phase One: Getting Started. With technical assistance provided by a CTC trainer, a community catalyst and small group of advisors assess community readiness to undertake collaborative prevention efforts, and identify the stakeholders who need to be involved. Key activities in this phase include recruiting key leaders to serve as champions of the effort, obtaining school district support to conduct a youth survey to provide epidemiological data on risk, protection, and youth behaviors, and hiring a coordinator to manage CTC activities.

Phase Two: Organizing, Introducing, Involving. In Phase Two a diverse and representative prevention coalition is formed. Specific tasks for this phase include involving and educating stakeholders who were identified in Phase One; developing a vision for the future of the community's children, and putting an organizational structure in place to help the community move toward the vision. The first two CTC trainings are implemented in this phase: the Key Leader Orientation (KLO) and the Community Board Orientation (CBO). These trainings introduce prevention science to community stakeholders, and help community members create an appropriate structure for the Community Board.

Phase Three: Developing a Community Profile. This is the data collection phase, including a comprehensive community assessment of adolescent behaviors and current prevention services. This phase usually requires administration of the CTC Youth Survey.

Members of the Risk and Protective Factor Assessment Work Group participate in the Community Assessment Training, in which they learn about key data sources for risk and protective factors (such as the student survey) and how to analyze the data. In communities already using the CTC Youth Survey, this training is tailored to help the work group interpret survey results and identify elevated risk factors, depressed protective factors, and problem behaviors prevalent among youth in the community. From this analysis, the work group recommends priority risk and protective factors for focused attention by the CTC Board.

The second component of the community profile is an assessment of current community programs, policies, and resources that address the prioritized risk and protective factors. The Resource Assessment workgroup is trained in assessment procedures during the Community Resource Assessment Training. The goals of the resource assessment are to identify existing evidence-based programs that address the priority factors, discern the gaps in existing program delivery, and recommend where new programs or policies are needed.

Phase Four: Creating a Community Action Plan. During the fourth phase of CTC, the results of the assessment process are reviewed by the full Community Board, and a community action plan is developed. The Community Plan Training (CPT) is provided to Community Boards during this phase. During this training, Board members select prevention policies and programs that target their prioritized risk factors to fill gaps in current prevention services. The CTC Prevention Strategies Guide is a tool used during this process. It describes prevention programs that have been demonstrated in at least one high quality research trial to be effective in changing risk, protection, and problem behaviors.

Once program choices are made, CPT participants are trained to write an action plan that sets clear, measurable goals regarding anticipated outcomes, and also develop an evaluation plan.

Phase Five: Implementing and Evaluating the Community Action Plan. In this phase, the CTC Board implements selected strategies, and evaluates progress over time. Board members and staff for the selected preventive programs attend the final CTC training workshop, the Community Plan Implementation Training (CPIT), which emphasizes the importance of implementing prevention programs with fidelity; that is, ensuring that the programs' content, dosage, and manner of delivery adhere to the protocols identified by program developers.

Participants also learn methods for tracking implementation progress, assessing desired changes in participants, and using this information to adjust implementation as needed to fulfill program objectives.

CTC is intended as an ongoing process. The process of monitoring implementation progress and community level changes in risk, protection and youth outcomes is repeated every two years. Based on a review of these data, CTC boards revise their action plans as needed.

Essential components:

The CTC system is collaborative, proactive, science-based, and data driven, and provides structure, tools, training and technical assistance for coalitions.

Collaborative. CTC uses a coalition approach to address issues at the community level. The coalition will include a diverse group of stakeholders concerned with youth development (youth-serving agency staff, school representatives, health professionals, city leaders, law enforcement, United Way, other funding entities, neighborhood groups, business people, parents, media representatives, faith community members, youth, etc.) in applying prevention science principles to decisions affecting the community's youth.

By providing a setting and common language for all stakeholders to discuss prevention, the model ensures that all voices in the community are heard and respected.

Proactive. Rather than reacting to problems once they have already occurred, CTC focuses on strengthening protections and decreasing risks in order to promote healthy youth development and decrease the likelihood of problem behaviors.

Science based. CTC is grounded in rigorous research from a variety of disciplines, including public health, sociology, psychology, criminology, and community psychology. This research has identified the predictors of youth problem behaviors, developed epidemiologic assessment tools for measuring those predictors in a community, and tested programs that work in addressing those predictors.

Data driven. The CTC system ensures local control of decisions based on local data and needs assessments, and flexibility to implement actions specific to the priorities identified by community members. The CTC system provides tools for measuring levels of risk and protective factors, selecting priority factors on which to focus a strategic plan, selecting appropriate prevention responses, and tracking progress toward desired changes in priority risk factors.

a. The CTC Youth Survey is the primary tool for needs assessment and monitoring. This is a confidential, schoolwide survey for students appropriate for Grades 6-12, that measures a majority of the risk and protective factors identified to predict youth problem behaviors. Coalition members use survey results from students in their community as well as community archival data to prioritize risk and protective factors for attention. The survey is re-administered every 2 years in order to monitor progress over time.

b. Effective program selection is another element of the data-driven process. Coalition members review policies and programs that have been tested and proven effective in addressing their priority factors. They consider the suitability of each program to the community's circumstances, and select prevention responses most likely to be successful in that environment. Information on program effectiveness is summarized in menus of effective programs, for example CTC's Prevention Strategies Guide and The Blueprint for Violence Prevention list of effective programs.

c. Monitoring of program implementation is the third element of the data-driven process. Throughout the implementation cycle of each prevention program or strategy, coalitions collect data to ensure that the program is delivered with fidelity to the original program design.

This monitoring information is important, because without close replication, the effectiveness of these programs can be compromised (see, for example, Elliot & Mihalic, 2004).

Monitoring implementation is also a management tool for identifying challenges that can be addressed before they lead to program failure.

Structure and tools. The CTC structure includes six training workshops and additional tools that help walk community members through each stage of the process. Training manuals are composed of modules that provide comprehensive information, exercises, and guidelines for each stage of the process.

The Milestones and Benchmarks checklist functions as a roadmap for the entire effort. Milestones are major tasks that must be accomplished in each phase of CTC, and benchmarks provide essential steps toward achieving each of these major tasks. Booklets are available to help local leaders evaluate and address community readiness issues before initiating the process, and to explain the system to key leaders and potential board members.

Training and technical assistance. Successful CTC efforts include high-quality training and technical assistance from experienced and certified facilitators. Feinberg et al. (2004), Gomez et al. (2005) and Greenberg et al. (2005) studied the functioning and sustainability of CTC coalitions in Pennsylvania, and found three factors strongly related to effective coalition function: community organizational and motivational readiness, initial training, and ongoing technical assistance (TA). The Pennsylvania study also documented that the sustainability of the effort was predicted by the prevention knowledge of coalition members, the quality of coalition functioning, and their fidelity to the CTC model.

Online CTC materials:

The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention provides all CTC materials free of charge at www.communitiesthatcare.net. Materials include:
  • Introductory booklets for community members
    • Investing in Your Community's Youth: an Introduction to the Communities That Care System
    • Tools for Community Leaders: a Guidebook for Getting Started
  • Training manuals and PowerPoint presentations for all 6 CTC training workshops
    • Key Leader Orientation
    • Community Board Orientation
    • Community Assessment Training
    • Community Resource Assessment Training
    • Community Plan Training
    • Community Plan Implementation Training
  • CTC Youth Survey questionnaire and a scale construction dictionary. This is the primary tool for needs assessment and monitoring.
  • Milestones and Benchmarks checklist tool which itemizes the steps needed to complete each phase of CTC.
  • The Prevention Strategies Guide which provides detailed information on 56 prevention programs that have been tested and proven effective in addressing risk and protective factors and reducing youth problem behaviors.

Tested and effective programs:

A cornerstone of effective community-level prevention involves the implementation of appropriate responses to the priority needs identified during the assessment phase of the process. The CTC system guides community groups to choose and implement appropriate tested and effective programs, policies, and practices in families, schools, and communities (see the CTC Prevention Strategies Guide and the Blueprints for Violence Prevention website). These programs have shown significant effects on minimizing youths' risky behaviors and enhancing positive choices.

Evaluation results:

​Evaluation of implementation:

The CYDS evaluated community efforts to faithfully implement (1) the core principles of the CTC prevention system, and (2) tested and effective prevention programs with respect to content and delivery specifications. The study found that CTC communities achieved high implementation fidelity at the system and program levels when supported by training and technical assistance in CTC.

Control communities did not achieve these things. At the start of the CYDS, CTC and control communities did not differ in their use of a science-based approach to prevention. By the third year of the intervention, key leaders in CTC communities reported a higher stage of adoption of science-based prevention, relative to control communities. They also were willing to provide greater funding for prevention.

Differences were sustained one year after the implementation phase of the trial ended. At this point, key leaders in CTC communities also reported significantly stronger community norms against adolescent drug use. The CTC Milestones and Benchmarks Survey was used to track progress in the implementation of core components of the CTC prevention system.

In each year of the intervention, CTC communities enacted an average of 90% of the key features of the CTC prevention system, including developing a community board, prioritizing risk and protective factors, selecting tested and effective preventive interventions from the Communities That Care Prevention Strategies Guide, implementing selected implementation programs with fidelity, and periodically assessing risk and protective factors and child and adolescent well-being through surveys of students. 

One year after the implementation phase of the trial had ended, eleven of 12 CTC coalitions continued to operate in CTC communities. These coalitions continued to implement key CTC milestones and benchmarks to a significantly greater degree than coalitions in control communities, even without ongoing study-provided support.

Control communities did not make this progress over time in completing CTC milestones and benchmarks, implementing scientifically proven prevention programs, and monitoring program impacts. Over the course of the trial, the 12 CTC communities demonstrated faithful implementation of 17 different school-based, after-school, and parenting interventions selected from a menu of 39 possible tested and effective programs for 5th through 9th grade students contained in the Communities That Care Prevention Strategies Guide.

On average, CTC communities implemented 2.75 tested and effective prevention programs per year (range: 1-5). High rates of fidelity were achieved consistently over time with respect to adherence to program objectives and core components (average = 91-94% per year) and dosage (number, length, and frequency of intervention sessions; average = 93-95% per year).

Faithful implementation continued two years after study support ended. CTC coalitions still offered significantly more tested and effective intervention programs, implemented them with high quality, monitored implementation to a significantly greater degree, and reached significantly more children and parents, compared to control coalitions.

Impact evaluations for Pennsylvania: 

The Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University has been studying the process and impact of the statewide CTC system since its inception in the early 1990s. Summaries of their findings will be posted here soon.

Community Youth Development Study:

The Community Youth Development Study (CYDS) is the first controlled experimental trial of the Communities That Care system. Twenty-four communities in 7 states agreed to participate in the study. These communities consisted of 12 matched pairs which had equivalent demographics and equivalent levels of youth risks and problem behaviors at the start of the study. 

Communities were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. The intervention communities received funding to hire a full-time community coordinator, who formed a community coalition that subsequently participated in the full cycle of CTC trainings. These communities then created community action plans, and were awarded up to $75,000 per year for the next four years to implement the tested, effective prevention strategies selected as part of the action planning process. ​Control communities continued prevention business as usual.

Hawkins et al. 2008, reported finding no significant differences between CTC and control communities in average levels of community-targeted risks among students in fifth grade, prior to the start of the CTC programs.

By the third year of the intervention, key leaders in CTC communities reported a higher stage of adoption of science-based prevention, relative to control communities. They also were willing to provide greater funding for prevention.

Differences were sustained one year after the implementation phase of the trial ended. At this point, key leaders in CTC communities also reported significantly stronger community norms against adolescent drug use. The longitudinal panel youth in CTC and control communities reported similar levels of targeted risk in Grade 5, when the intervention began, but targeted risk exposure grew more slowly for youth in CTC communities between Grade 5 and Grade 10. 

Significantly lower levels of targeted risk were first reported by CTC panel youth 1.67 years into the intervention, in Grade 7, and have continued to be reported by CTC panel youth through Grade 10.

Panel youth from CTC and control communities also reported similar levels of delinquency, alcohol use, and cigarette smoking at Grade 5 baseline. However, between Grades 5 and 10, CTC had significant effects on the initiation of these behaviors by youth. Significant differences in the initiation of delinquency were first observed in the spring of Grade 7. Panel youth from CTC communities were 25% less likely than panel youth from control communities to initiate delinquent behavior, and they remained so in Grade 8.

Significantly lower delinquency initiation rates were sustained through Grade 10, when panel youth from CTC communities were 17% less likely to initiate delinquency than panel youth from control communities.

Preventive effects on alcohol use and cigarette use were first observed in the spring of Grade 8, 2.67 years after intervention programs were implemented. Grade 8 youth from CTC communities were 32% less likely to initiate alcohol use, and 33% less likely to initiate cigarette smoking than Grade 8 youth from control communities (Hawkins et al., 2009).

Preventive effects were again sustained through Grade 10 when CTC panel youth were 29% less likely to initiate alcohol use and 28% less likely to initiate cigarette smoking than panel youth from control communities.

Differences in the initiation of delinquency, alcohol use, and cigarette smoking from Grade 5 through Grade 10 led to cumulatively lower rates of initiation over time: 62% of 10th-grade youth in the panel from CTC communities had engaged in delinquent behavior compared with 70% of 10th-grade youth in the panel from control communities; 67% vs. 75% had initiated alcohol use; and 44% vs. 52% had smoked cigarettes.

CTC also significantly reduced the prevalence of youth problem behaviors in Grade 8 and Grade 10. In Grade 8, the prevalence of alcohol use in the past month, binge drinking (five or more drinks in a row) in the past two weeks, and the variety of delinquent behaviors committed in the past year were all significantly lower in CTC panel youth compared to control community panel youth. 

The CYDS also found significant effects of CTC in reducing the prevalence of cigarette use in the past month and delinquent behavior and violence in the past year in the spring of Grade 10.

Child Trends Research Brief: An overview of the Communities That Care system and up to date research information is available from Child Trends with an in depth research brief that can be found here . Other research is also available through the Child Trends Website.

Conclusions: CTC's theory of change hypothesizes that it takes from 2 to 5 years to observe community-level effects on risk factors, and 5 or more years to observe effects on adolescent delinquency or substance use.

These early findings from the first randomized community trial of CTC are promising, suggesting that CTC is slowing the usual developmental increase in adolescents' risk exposure. Longer follow-up measurements are needed to determine if CTC can significantly reduce community levels of delinquency and drug use as hypothesized. The Community Youth Development Study will collect additional data from these students in 2007 and 2008.

​These data will allow tests of CTC's effects on community rates of delinquency and substance use initiation among young people through the spring of grade 9, almost 5 years after CTC was introduced in the intervention communities and approximately 3+1⁄2 years after communities began implementing tested and effective prevention programs chosen through the CTC system.


​





Community TelecentresPictured below: A Guidebook for Managing Telecentre Networks
A telecentre is a public place where people can access computers, the Internet, and other digital technologies that enable them to gather information, create, learn, and communicate with others while they develop essential digital skills.

Telecentres exist in almost every country, although they sometimes go by a different names including:
  • public internet access center (PIAP),
  • village knowledge center,
  • infocenter,
  • Telecottage,
  • Electronic Village Hall, 
  • community technology center (CTC),
  • community multimedia center (CMC),
  • multipurpose community telecentre (MCT),
  • Common/Citizen Service Centre (CSC)
  • and school-based telecentre.

While each telecentre is different, their common focus is on the use of digital technologies to support community, economic, educational, and social development—reducing isolation, bridging the digital divide, promoting health issues, creating economic opportunities, and reaching out to youth for example.

Evolution of the telecentre movement:

The telecentre movement's origins can be traced to Europe's telecottage and Electronic Village Halls (originally in Denmark) and Community Technology Centers (CTCs) in the United States, both of which emerged in the 1980s as a result of advances in computing. At a time when computers were available but not yet a common household good, public access to computers emerged as a solution.

Today, although home ownership of computers is widespread in the United States and other industrialized countries, there remains a need for free public access to computing, whether it is in CTCs, tele-cottages or public libraries to ensure that everyone has access to technologies that have become essential.

​There are also CTCs located in the state of New South Wales, Australia, that provide technology, resources, training and educational programs to communities in regional, rural and remote areas.

Types:

Beyond the differences in names, public ICT access centers are diverse, varying in the clientele they serve, the services they provide, as well as their business or organizational model. Around the world, some telecentres include NGO-sponsored, local government, commercial, school-based, and university-related.

In the United States and other countries, public access to the Internet in libraries may also be considered within the “telecentre concept”, especially when the range of services offered is not limited to pure access but also includes training end-users. Each type has advantages and disadvantages when considering attempts to link communities with ICTs and to bridge the digital divide.

Among the various types:
  • NGO-sponsored telecentres are hosted by an NGO, which manages the center and integrates it, to one degree or another, into the organization's core business
  • Local government telecentres seek to further local development; they often aim to disseminate information, decentralize services, and encourage civic participation, in addition to providing public ICT access.
  • Commercial telecentres, launched by entrepreneurs for profit, range from the purely commercial cybercafé to the social enterprise, where profit and social good objectives are combined.
  • School-based telecentres can be structured to involve community members during off-school hours, but costs need to be shared by the school system and the community.
  • University-related telecentres can offer social outreach to disadvantaged and community groups, provide training, develop locally relevant content, and establish and facilitate virtual networks.
  • Internet access in public libraries.

Need for telecentres:

It is estimated that 40% of the world's population has less than US$20 per year available to spend on ICT.

In Brazil, the poorest 20% of the population counts with merely US$9 per year to spend on ICT (US$0.75 per month). 

In Mexico, the poorest 20% of the society counts with an estimated US$35 per year (US$3 per month).

For Latin America it is estimated that the borderline between ICT as a necessity good and ICT as a luxury good is roughly around the "magical number" of US$10 per person per month, or US$120 per year.

Telecentres and international development institutions:

In the 1990s, international development institutions such as Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and UNESCO, sponsored the deployment of many telecentres in developing countries. Both IDRC and UNESCO are still very involved in the telecentre movement.

The former telecentre.org program at IDRC was transferred to the telecentre.org Foundation in the Philippines in March 2010 and continues to support networks of telecentres around the world.

Within the Philippines, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has rolled-out Tech4ED (Technology for Education, to gain Employment, train Entrepreneurs towards Economic Development). This telecenter program has implemented over 42,000 centers throughout the countryside to promote citizen participation in e-Government services and provide IT education to the masses, specifically, the underserved and marginalized citizens within the country. 

UNESCO continues to support the growth of community multimedia centers (CMCs), which, unlike most other telecentres, have a local community radio, television or other media component.

Sustainability considerations:

In light of the rapidly evolving technologies that support telecentres and in light of the increased penetration of mobile technologies (i.e., cell phones), the telecentre model needs to continuously evolve in order to remain relevant and to continue to address the changing needs of the communities they serve.

As mobile communication technologies become more pervasive around the world, including in rural areas, the telecentres may no longer need to provide phone services, yet they may still be very relevant in terms of access to web-enabled e-government services, e-Learning, and basic Internet communication needs (email and web browsing).

Among the various sustainability considerations:

Evolving models — since the local demand for information and communication services is evolving, the telecentre models need to evolve as well. Franchises and other approaches to linking and networking telecentres are proving to be popular.

Evolving technologies — wireless connectivity technologies, beyond VSAT (known to be expensive) are being explored in many communities around the world. These technologies provide new opportunities for connecting communities through telecentres and eventually at the individual household level.

Evolving services — the types of services that telecentres can and should provide is also rapidly evolving. As the fields of eGovernment, eHealth, e-Learning, eCommerce are evolving and maturing in many countries, telecentres need to take advantage of opportunities to extend the benefits to the community at large, through their public access. Some governments are pursuing the deployment of telecentres precisely as a means of ensuring that larger segments of the population are able to access government services and information through electronic channels.

Community stakeholders - identifying leaders among the community who champion the concept of shared services through telecentre mode, play a crucial role as a bridge between the telecentre operator and hesitant villagers. Indeed, There is a maturing period during which community leaders have to invest constant efforts to drive changes of behaviour in the adoption of innovations.

Community involvement is required however, at the initial phase of the telecentre set up, starting with the site selection and creating a sort of empathy and feeling of empowerment.

Furthermore, the telecentre should be well rooted in the socio-cultural context of the community.

​Networks:

The telecentres of today and of the future are networked telecentres, or telecentres of the 2.0 generation. Increasingly, telecentres are not operating as independent, isolated entities but as members of a network. At times, the network takes the form of a franchise. In other circumstances, the network is much more informal.

One such regional network targeted towards Asia-Pacific is, the Asia-Pacific Telecentre Network.

In the United States, more than 1,000 community technology centers were organized under the leadership of CTCnet, a nonprofit association headquartered in Washington, D.C..

CTCs are also organized under the banner of state organizations, such as the Ohio Community Computing Network, or city programs such the City of Seattle Community Technology Program. and Austin FreeNet.

Further information:

For more information on telecentre networks, visit telecentre.org. An overview of telecentre networks can also be found in Chapter 7 of Making the Connection: Scaling Telecentres for Development.

Additional information about concept of community telecentres can also be found in the online book From the Ground Up: the evolution of the telecentre movement.

Additional information about the practice of building and sustaining telecentres can be found in this page on Telecentre Sustainability.

Additional information about the social, political, economic, and technical problems and challenges facing the development and sustainability of telecentres can be found at Telecenters.

There is a growing research and analytical literature on telecentres and other community based technology initiatives and approaches particularly within the context of Community informatics as an academic discipline and through the Journal of Community Informatics.

See also:







Planned Communities Pictured below: What Is a Master-Planned Community? The Top 5 Benefits
​Planned Community:

An intentionally planned community is a voluntary residential community designed from the start to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. 

The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision, often follow an alternative lifestyle and typically share responsibilities and property. Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or also communal experiments. 

The multitude of intentional communities include:
Ashrams are likely the earliest intentional communities founded around 1500 BCE, while buddhist monasteries appeared around 500 BCE. Pythagoras founded an intellectual vegetarian commune in about 525 BCE in southern Italy. Hundreds of modern intentional communities were formed across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand out of the intellectual foment of utopianism. 

Intentional communities exhibit the utopian ambition to create a better, more sustainable world for living. Nevertheless, the term utopian community as a synonym for an intentional community is considered to be of pejorative nature and many intentional communities do not consider themselves to be utopian. 

Also the alternative term commune is considered to be non-neutral or even linked to leftist politics or hippies.

Additional terms referring to an intentional community can be: 
  • alternative lifestyle, 
  • intentional society, 
  • cooperative community, 
  • withdrawn community, 
  • enacted community, 
  • socialist colony, 
  • communistic society, 
  • collective settlement, 
  • communal society, 
  • mutualistic community, 
  • communitarian experiment, 
  • experimental community, 
  • utopian experiment, 
  • practical utopia,
  • and utopian society.

Variety:

The purposes of intentional communities vary in different communities. They may include such as a feminist, spiritual, economic, or environmental purposes. In addition to spiritual communities, secular communities also exist. One common practice, particularly in spiritual communities, is communal meals. Typically, there is a focus on egalitarian values. Benjamin Zablocki categorized communities this way:
Many communal ventures encompass more than one of these categorizations. Some communes, such as the ashrams of the Vedanta Society or the Theosophical commune Lomaland, formed around spiritual leaders, while others formed around political ideologies.

For others, the "glue" is simply the desire for a more shared, sociable lifestyle. Other themes are voluntary simplicity, interpersonal growth, and self-sufficiency. Some intentional communities are also micronations, such as Freetown Christiania.

Membership:

Many communities have different types or levels of membership. Typically, intentional communities have a selection process which starts with someone interested in the community coming for a visit. Often prospective community members are interviewed by a selection committee of the community or in some cases by everyone in the community.

Many communities have a "provisional membership" period. After a visitor has been accepted, a new member is "provisional" until they have stayed for some period (often six months or a year) and then the community re-evaluates their membership. Generally, after the provisional member has been accepted, they become a full member.

In many communities, the voting privileges or community benefits for provisional members are less than those for full members.

Christian intentional communities are usually composed of those wanting to emulate the practices of the earliest believers. Using the biblical book of Acts (and, often, the Sermon on the Mount) as a model, members of these communities strive for a practical working out of their individual faith in a corporate context. These Christian intentional communities try to live out the teachings of the New Testament and practice lives of compassion and hospitality. 

Communities such as the Simple Way, the Bruderhof and Rutba House would fall into this category. These communities, despite strict membership criteria, are open to visitors and not reclusive in the way that certain intentional communities are.

A survey in the 1995 edition of the "Communities Directory", published by Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), reported that 54 percent of the communities choosing to list themselves were rural, 28 percent were urban, 10 percent had both rural and urban sites, and 8 percent did not specify.

Governance:

The most common form of governance in intentional communities is democratic (64 percent), with decisions made by some form of consensus decision-making or voting.

A hierarchical or authoritarian structure governs 9 percent of communities, 11 percent are a combination of democratic and hierarchical structure, and 16 percent do not specify. Many communities which were initially led by an individual or small group have changed in recent years to a more democratic form of governance.

Core principles:

The central characteristics of communes, or core principles that define communes, have been expressed in various forms over the years. The term "communitarian" was invented by the Suffolk-born radical John Goodwyn Barmby, subsequently a Unitarian minister.

At the start of the 1970s, The New Communes author Ron E. Roberts classified communes as a subclass of a larger category of Utopias. He listed three main characteristics: first, egalitarianism – that communes specifically rejected hierarchy or graduations of social status as being necessary to social order. Second, human scale – that members of some communes saw the scale of society as it was then organized as being too industrialized (or factory sized) and therefore unsympathetic to human dimensions. And third, that communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic.

Twenty five years later, Dr. Bill Metcalf, in his edited book Shared Visions, Shared Lives defined communes as having the following core principles: the importance of the group as opposed to the nuclear family unit, a "common purse", a collective household, group decision making in general and intimate affairs. Sharing everyday life and facilities, a commune is an idealized form of family, being a new sort of "primary group" (generally with fewer than 20 people although there are examples of much larger communes).

Commune members have emotional bonds to the whole group rather than to any sub-group, and the commune is experienced with emotions which go beyond just social collectivity.

In the United States, there is a long history of communes in America (see this short discussion of Utopian communities) which led to the rise in the communes of the hippie movement—the "back-to-the-land" ventures of the 1960s and 1970s. 

One commune that played a large role in the hippie movement was Kaliflower, a utopian living cooperative that existed in San Francisco between 1967 and 1973 built on values of free love and anti-capitalism.

Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times wrote that "after decades of contraction, the American commune movement has been expanding since the mid-1990s, spurred by the growth of settlements that seek to marry the utopian-minded commune of the 1960s with the American predilection for privacy and capital appreciation." (See Intentional community).

The Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) is the best source for listings of and more information about communes in the United States.

While many American communes are short lived, some have been in operation for over 50 years. The Bruderhof was established in the US in 1954, Twin Oaks in 1967 and Koinonia Farm in 1942. Twin Oaks is a rare example of a non-religious commune surviving for longer than 30 years.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Planned Communities:







Our Community and Neighborhoods Pictured below Creating Communities that are both (Top) Healthy and (Bottom) Safe
A community is a small or large social unit (a group of living things) that has something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity.

Communities often share a sense of place that is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.

Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community. People tend to define those social ties as important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions (such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at-large).

Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties (micro-level), "community" may also refer to large group affiliations (or macro-level), such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.

Human communities may share intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, and risks in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Communities: ___________________________________________________________________________

A neighborhood is a geographically local community within a larger city, town, suburb or rural area.

Neighborhoods are often social communities with considerable face-to-face interaction among members. Researchers have not agreed on an exact definition, but the following may serve as a starting point:

"Neighborhood is generally defined spatially as a specific geographic area and functionally as a set of social networks. Neighborhoods, then, are the spatial units in which face-to-face social interactions occur—the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realise common values, socialize youth, and maintain effective social control."

Click on any of the following for more  about Neighborhoods:






​
Online CommunityPictured below: What Are the Most Important Characteristics of a Successful Online Community?
​An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests.

For many, online communities may feel like home, consisting of a "family of invisible friends". Additionally, these "friends" can be connected through gaming communities and gaming companies. Those who wish to be a part of an online community usually have to become a member via a specific site and thereby gain access to specific content or links.

An online community can act as an information system where members can post, comment on discussions, give advice or collaborate, and includes medical advice or specific health care research as well.

Commonly, people communicate through social networking sites, chat rooms, forums, email lists, and discussion boards, and have advanced into daily social media platforms as well. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, etc. People may also join online communities through video games, blogs, and virtual worlds, and could potentially meet new significant others in dating sites or dating virtual worlds.

The rise in popularity of Web 2.0 websites has allowed for easier real-time communication and connection to others and facilitated the introduction of new ways for information to be exchanged.

Yet, these interactions may also lead to a downfall of social interactions or deposit more negative and derogatory forms of speaking to others, in connection, surfaced forms of racism, bullying, sexist comments, etc. may also be investigated and linked to online communities.

One scholarly definition of an online community is this: "a virtual and community is defined as an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported or mediated by technology (or both) and guided by some protocols or norms"

Purpose:

Digital communities (web communities but also communities that are formed over, e.g., Xbox and PlayStation) provide a platform for a range of services to users. It has been argued that they can fulfill Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They allow for social interaction across the world between people of different cultures who might not otherwise have met with offline meetings also becoming more common.

Another key use of web communities is access to and the exchange of information. With communities for even very small niches it is possible to find people also interested in a topic and to seek and share information on a subject where there are not such people available in the immediate area offline.

This has led to a range of popular sites based on areas such as health, employment, finances and education. Online communities can be vital for companies for marketing and outreach.

Unexpected and innovative uses of web communities have also emerged with social networks being used in conflicts to alert citizens of impending attacks. 

The UN sees the web and specifically social networks as an important tool in conflicts and emergencies.

Web communities have grown in popularity; as of 2014, 6 of the 20 most-trafficked websites were community-based sites. The amount of traffic to such websites is expected to increase as a growing proportion of the world's population attains Internet access.

Categorization:

The idea of a community is not a new concept. On the telephone, in ham radio and in the online world, social interactions no longer have to be based on proximity; instead they can literally be with anyone anywhere. The study of communities has had to adapt along with the new technologies.

Many researchers have used ethnography to attempt to understand what people do in online spaces, how they express themselves, what motivates them, how they govern themselves, what attracts them, and why some people prefer to observe rather than participate. 

Online communities can congregate around a shared interest and can be spread across multiple websites.

Some features of online communities include:
  • Content: articles, information, and news about a topic of interest to a group of people.
  • Forums or newsgroups and email: so that community members can communicate in delayed fashion.
  • Chat and instant messaging: so that community members can communicate more immediately.

Development:

Online communities typically establish a set of values, sometimes known collectively as netiquette or Internet etiquette, as they grow. These values may include: opportunity, education, culture, democracy, human services, equality within the economy, information, sustainability, and communication. 

An online community's purpose is to serve as a common ground for people who share the same interests.

Online communities may be used as calendars to keep up with events such as upcoming gatherings or sporting events. They also form around activities and hobbies. Many online communities relating to health care help inform, advise, and support patients and their families.

Students can take classes online and they may communicate with their professors and peers online. Businesses have also started using online communities to communicate with their customers about their products and services as well as to share information about the business.

Other online communities allow a wide variety of professionals to come together to share thoughts, ideas and theories.

Fandom is an example of what online communities can evolve into. Online communities have grown in influence in "shaping the phenomena around which they organize" according to Nancy K. Baym's work. She says that: "More than any other commercial sector, the popular culture industry relies on online communities to publicize and provide testimonials for their products."

The strength of the online community's power is displayed through the season 3 premiere of BBC's Sherlock. Online activity by fans seem to have had a noticeable influence on the plot and direction of the season opening episode.

Mark Lawson of The Guardian recounts how fans have, to a degree, directed the outcome of the events of the episode. He says that "Sherlock has always been one of the most web-aware shows, among the first to find a satisfying way of representing electronic chatter on-screen."

Fan communities in platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit around sports, actors, and musicians have become powerful communities both culturally and politically.

Discussions where members may post their feedback are essential in the development of an online community. Online communities may encourage individuals to come together to teach and learn from one another. They may encourage learners to discuss and learn about real-world problems and situations, as well as to focus on such things as teamwork, collaborative thinking and personal experiences.

Blogs:

Blogs are among the major platforms on which online communities form. Blogging practices include microblogging, where the amount of information in a single element is smaller, and liveblogging, in which an ongoing event is blogged about in real time.

The ease and convenience of blogging has allowed for its growth. Major blogging platforms include Twitter and Tumblr, which combine social media and blogging, as well as platforms such as WordPress, which allow content to be hosted on their own servers but also permit users to download, install, and modify the software on their own servers.

As of October 2014, 23.1% of the top 10 million websites are either hosted on or run WordPress.

Forums:

Internet forums, sometimes called bulletin boards, are websites which allow users to post topics also known as threads for discussion with other users able to reply creating a conversation. Forums follow a hierarchical structure of categories, with many popular forum software platforms categorising forums depending on their purpose, and allowing forum administrators to create subforums within their platform.

With time more advanced features have been added into forums; the ability to attach files, embed YouTube videos, and send private messages is now commonplace. As of 2014, the largest forum Gaia Online contained over 2 billion posts.

Members are commonly assigned into user groups which control their access rights and permissions. Common access levels include the following:
  • User: A standard account with the ability to create topics and reply.
  • Moderator: Moderators are typically tasked with the daily administration tasks such as answering user queries, dealing with rule-breaking posts, and the moving, editing or deletion of topics or posts.
  • Administrator: Administrators deal with the forum strategy including the implementation of new features alongside more technical tasks such as server maintenance.

Social networks:

Social networks are platforms allowing users to set up their own profile and build connections with like minded people who pursue similar interests through interaction. The first traceable example of such a site is SixDegrees.com, set up in 1997, which included a friends list and the ability to send messages to members linked to friends and see other users associations.

For much of the 21st century, the popularity of such networks has been growing. Friendster was the first social network to gain mass media attention; however, by 2004 it had been overtaken in popularity by Myspace, which in turn was later overtaken by Facebook.

In 2013, Facebook attracted 1.23 billion monthly users, rising from 145 million in 2008. Facebook was the first social network to surpass 1 billion registered accounts, and by 2020, had more than 2.7 billion active users. Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, also owns three other leading platforms for online communities: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Most top-ranked social networks originate in the United States, but European services like VK, Japanese platform LINE, or Chinese social networks WeChat, QQ or video-sharing app Douyin (internationally known as TikTok) have also garnered appeal in their respective regions.

Current trends focus around the increased use of mobile devices when using social networks.

Statistics from Statista show that, in 2013, 97.9 million users accessed social networks from a mobile device in the United States.

Classification:

Researchers and organizations have worked to classify types of online community and to characterise their structure.

For example, it is important to know the security, access, and technology requirements of a given type of community as it may evolve from an open to a private and regulated forum.

It has been argued that the technical aspects of online communities, such as whether pages can be created and edited by the general user base (as is the case with wikis) or only certain users (as is the case with most blogs), can place online communities into stylistic categories.

Another approach argues that "online community" is a metaphor and that contributors actively negotiate the meaning of the term, including values and social norms.

Some research has looked at the users of online communities. Amy Jo Kim has classified the rituals and stages of online community interaction and called it the "membership life cycle". Clay Shirky talks about communities of practice, whose members collaborate and help each other in order to make something better or improve a certain skill.

What makes these communities bond is "love" of something, as demonstrated by members who go out of their way to help without any financial interest. Campbell et al. developed a character theory for analyzing online communities, based on tribal typologies.

In the communities they investigated they identified three character types:
  1. The Big Man (offer a form of order and stability to the community by absorbing many conflictual situations personally)
  2. The Sorcerer (will not engage in reciprocity with others in the community)
  3. The Trickster (generally a comical yet complex figure that is found in most of the world's culture)

Online communities have also forced retail firms to change their business strategies. Companies have to network more, adjust computations, and alter their organizational structures. This leads to changes in a company's communications with their manufacturers including the information shared and made accessible for further productivity and profits.

Because consumers and customers in all fields are becoming accustomed to more interaction and engagement online, adjustments must be considered made in order to keep audiences intrigued.

Online communities have been characterized as "virtual settlements" that have the following four requirements: interactivity, a variety of communicators, a common public place where members can meet and interact, and sustained membership over time. Based on these considerations, it can be said that microblogs such as Twitter can be classified as online communities.

Building communities:

Dorine C. Andrews argues, in the article "Audience-Specific Online Community Design", that there are three parts to building an online community: starting the online community, encouraging early online interaction, and moving to a self-sustaining interactive environment. 

When starting an online community, it may be effective to create webpages that appeal to specific interests. Online communities with clear topics and easy access tend to be most effective. In order to gain early interaction by members, privacy guarantees and content discussions are very important. Successful online communities tend to be able to function self-sufficiently.

Participation:

There are two major types of participation in online communities: public participation and non-public participation, also called lurking. Lurkers are participants who join a virtual community but do not contribute.

In contrast, public participants, or posters, are those who join virtual communities and openly express their beliefs and opinions. Both lurkers and posters frequently enter communities to find answers and to gather general information.

For example, there are several online communities dedicated to technology. In these communities, posters are generally experts in the field who can offer technological insight and answer questions, while lurkers tend to be technological novices who use the communities to find answers and to learn.

In general, virtual community participation is influenced by how participants view themselves in society as well as by norms, both of society and of the online community.

Participants also join online communities for friendship and support. In a sense, virtual communities may fill social voids in participants' offline lives.

Sociologist Barry Wellman presents the idea of "globalization" – the Internet's ability to extend participants' social connections to people around the world while also aiding them in further engagement with their local communities.

Roles in an online community:

Although online societies differ in content from real society, the roles people assume in their online communities are quite similar. Elliot Volkman points out several categories of people that play a role in the cycle of social networking, such as:
  • Community architect – Creates the online community, sets goals and decides the purpose of the site.
  • Community manager – Oversees the progress of the society. Enforces rules, encourages social norms, assists new members, and spreads awareness about the community.
  • Professional member – This is a member who is paid to contribute to the site. The purpose of this role is to keep the community active.
  • Free members – These members visit sites most often and represent the majority of the contributors. Their contributions are crucial to the sites' progress.
  • Passive lurker – These people do not contribute to the site but rather absorb the content, discussion, and advice.
  • Active lurker – Consumes the content and shares that content with personal networks and other communities.
  • Power users – These people push for new discussion, provide positive feedback to community managers, and sometimes even act as community managers themselves. They have a major influence on the site and make up only a small percentage of the users.

Aspects of successful online communities:

An article entitled "The real value of on-line communities," written by A. Armstrong and John Hagel of the Harvard Business Review, addresses a handful of elements that are key to the growth of an online community and its success in drawing in members.

In this example, the article focuses specifically on online communities related to business, but its points can be transferred and can apply to any online community. The article addresses four main categories of business-based online communities, but states that a truly successful one will combine qualities of each of them: communities of transaction, communities of interest, communities of fantasy, and communities of relationship.

Anubhav Choudhury describes the four types of community as follows:
  1. Communities of transaction emphasize the importance of buying and selling products in a social online manner where people must interact in order to complete the transaction.
  2. Communities of interest involve the online interaction of people with specific knowledge on a certain topic.
  3. Communities of fantasy encourage people to participate in online alternative forms of reality, such as games where they are represented by avatars.
  4. Communities of relationship often reveal or at least partially protect someone's identity while allowing them to communicate with others, such as in online dating services.

Membership lifecycle:

Amy Jo Kim's membership lifecycle theory states that members of online communities begin their life in a community as visitors, or lurkers. After breaking through a barrier, people become novices and participate in community life. After contributing for a sustained period of time, they become regulars. If they break through another barrier they become leaders, and once they have contributed to the community for some time they become elders.

This life cycle can be applied to many virtual communities, such as: 
A similar model can be found in the works of Lave and Wenger, who illustrate a cycle of how users become incorporated into virtual communities using the principles of legitimate peripheral participation. They suggest five types of trajectories amongst a learning community:
  1. Peripheral (i.e. Lurker) – An outside, unstructured participation
  2. Inbound (i.e. Novice) – Newcomer is invested in the community and heading towards full participation
  3. Insider (i.e. Regular) – Full committed community participant
  4. Boundary (i.e. Leader) – A leader, sustains membership participation and brokers interactions
  5. Outbound (i.e. Elder) – Process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks

The following shows the correlation between the learning trajectories and Web 2.0 community participation by using the example of YouTube:
  • Peripheral (Lurker) – Observing the community and viewing content. Does not add to the community content or discussion. The user occasionally goes onto YouTube.com to check out a video that someone has directed them to.
  • Inbound (Novice) – Just beginning to engage with the community. Starts to provide content. Tentatively interacts in a few discussions. The user comments on other users' videos. Potentially posts a video of their own.
  • Insider (Regular) – Consistently adds to the community discussion and content. Interacts with other users. Regularly posts videos. Makes a concerted effort to comment and rate other users' videos.
  • Boundary (Leader) – Recognized as a veteran participant, their opinions are granted greater consideration by the community. Connects with regulars to make higher-concept ideas. The user has become recognized as a contributor to watch. Their videos may be podcasts commenting on the state of YouTube and its community. The user would not consider watching another user's videos without commenting on them. Will often correct a user in behavior the community considers inappropriate. Will reference other users' videos in their comments as a way to cross link content.
  • Outbound (Elders) – Leave the community. Their interests may have changed, the community may have moved in a direction that they disagree with, or they may no longer have time to maintain a constant presence in the community.

Newcomers:

Newcomers are important for online communities. Online communities rely on volunteers' contribution, and most online communities face high turnover rate as one of their main challenges.

For example, only a minority of Wikipedia users contribute regularly, and only a minority of those contributors participate in community discussions. In one study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, they found that "more than two-thirds (68%) of newcomers to Usenet groups were never seen again after their first post". 

Above facts reflect a point that recruiting and remaining new members have become a very crucial problem for online communities: the communities will eventually wither away without replacing members who leave.

Newcomers are new members of the online communities and thus often face many barriers when contributing to a project, and those barriers they face might lead them to give up the project or even leave the community.

By conducting a systematic literature review over 20 primary studies regarding to the barriers faced by newcomers when contributing to the open source software projects, Steinmacher et al. identified 15 different barriers and they classified those barriers into five categories as described below:
  1. Social Interaction: this category describes the barriers when newcomers interact with existing members of the community. The three barriers that they found have main influence on newcomers are: "lack of social interaction with project members",'"not receiving a timely response", and "receiving an improper response".
  2. Newcomers' Previous Knowledge: this category describes the barriers which is regarding to the newcomers' previous experience related to this project. The three barriers they found classified into this part are: "lack of domain expertise", "lack of technical expertise", and "lack of knowledge of project practices".
  3. Finding a Way to Start: this category describes the issues when newcomers try to start contributing. The two barriers they found are: "Difficulty to find an appropriate task to start with", and "Difficulty to find a mentor".
  4. Documentation: documentation of the project also shown to be barriers for newcomers especially in the Open Source Software projects. The three barriers they found are: "Outdated documentation", "Too much documentation", and "Unclear code comments".
  5. Technical Hurdles: technical barriers are also one of the major issue when newcomers start contributing. This category includes barriers: "Issues setting up a local workspace", "Code complexity" and "Software architecture complexity".

Because of the barriers described above, it is very necessary that online communities engage newcomers and help them to adjust to the new environment. From online communities' side, newcomers can be both beneficial and harmful to online communities.

On the one side, newcomers can bring online communities innovative ideas and resources. On the other side, they can also harm communities with misbehavior caused by their unfamiliarity with community norms. 

Kraut et al. defined five basic issues faced by online communities when dealing with newcomers, and proposed several design claims for each problem in their book Building Successful Online Communities.
  1. Recruitment. Online communities need to keep recruiting new members in the face of high turnover rate of their existing members. Three suggestions are made in the book:
    • Interpersonal recruitment: recruit new members by old members' personal relationship
    • Word of mouth recruitment: new members will join in the community because of the word-of-mouth influence from existing member
    • Impersonal advertisement: although the direct effect is weaker than previous two strategies, impersonal advertising can effectively increase number of people joining among potential members with little prior knowledge of the community.
  2. Selection. Another challenge for online communities is to select the members who are a good fit. Unlike the offline organizations, the problem of selecting right candidates is more problematic for online communities since the anonymity of the users and the ease of creating new identities online. Two approaches are suggested in the book:
    • Self-selection: make sure that only good fit members will choose to join.
    • Screen: make sure that only good fit members will allow to join.
  3. Keeping Newcomers Around. Before new members start feel the commitment and do major contribution, they must be around long enough in online communities to learn the norms and form the community attachment. However, the majority of them tend to leave the communities at this period of time. At this period of time, new members are usually very sensitive to either positive or negative evidence they received from group, which may largely impact the users' decision on whether they quit or stay. Authors suggested two approaches:
    • Entry Barriers: Higher entry barriers will be more likely to drive away new members, but those members who survived from this severe initiation process should have stronger commitment than those members with lower entry barriers.
    • Interactions with existing members: communicating with existing members and receiving friendly responses from them will encourage the new members' commitment. The existing members are encouraged to treat the newcomers gently. One study by Halfaker et al. suggested that reverting new members' work in Wikipedia will likely to make them leave the communities. Thus, new members are more likely to stay and develop commitment if the interaction between existing member and new members are friendly and gentle. The book suggested different ways, including "introduction threads" in the communities, "assign the responsibilities of having friendly interactions with newcomers to designated older-timers", and "discouraging hostility towards newcomers who make mistakes".
  4. Socialization. Different online communities have their own norms and regulations, and new members need to learn to participate in an appropriate way. Thus, socialization is a process through which new members acquire the behaviors and attitude essential to playing their roles in a group or organization. Previous research in organizational socialization demonstrated that newcomers' active information seeking and organizational socialization tactics are associated with better performance, higher job satisfaction, more committed to the organization, more likely to stay and thus lower turnover rate. However, this institutionalized socialization tactics are not popular used in online setting, and most online communities are still using the individualized socialization tactics where newcomers being socialized individually and in a more informal way in their training process. Thus, in order to keep new members, the design suggestions given by this book are: "using formal, sequential and collective socialization tactics" and "old-timers can provide formal mentorship to newcomers."
  5. Protection. Newcomers are different from the existing members, and thus the influx of newcomers might change the environment or the culture developed by existing members. New members might also behave inappropriately, and thus be potentially harmful to online communities, as a result of their lack of experience. Different communities might also have different level of damage tolerance, some might be more fragile to newcomers' inappropriate behavior (such as open source group collaboration software project) while others are not (such as some discussion forums). So the speed of integrating new members with existing communities really depends on community types and its goals, and groups need to have protection mechanisms that serve to multiple purposes.

Motivations and barriers to participation:
Main article: Motivations for online participation

Successful online communities motivate online participation. Methods of motivating participation in these communities have been investigated in several studies.

There are many persuasive factors that draw users into online communities. Peer-to-peer systems and social networking sites rely heavily on member contribution. Users' underlying motivations to involve themselves in these communities have been linked to some persuasion theories of sociology.
  • According to the reciprocation theory, a successful online community must provide its users with benefits that compensate for the costs of time, effort and materials members provide. People often join these communities expecting some sort of reward.
  • The consistency theory says that once people make a public commitment to a virtual society, they will often feel obligated to stay consistent with their commitment by continuing contributions.
  • The social validation theory explains how people are more likely to join and participate in an online community if it is socially acceptable and popular.

One of the greatest attractions towards online communities is the sense of connection users build among members. Participation and contribution are influenced when members of an online community are aware of their global audience.

The majority of people learn by example and often follow others, especially when it comes to participation. Individuals are reserved about contributing to an online community for many reasons including but not limited to a fear of criticism or inaccuracy. Users may withhold information that they don't believe is particularly interesting, relevant, or truthful.

In order to challenge these contribution barriers, producers of these sites are responsible for developing knowledge-based and foundation-based trust among the community.

Users' perception of audience is another reason that makes users participate in online communities. Results showed that users usually underestimate their amount of audiences in online communities. Social media users guess that their audience is 27% of its real size.

Regardless of this underestimation, it is shown that amount of audience affects users' self-presentation and also content production which means a higher level of participation.

There are two types of virtual online communities (VOC): dependent and self-sustained VOCs. The dependent VOCs are those who use the virtual community as extensions of themselves, they interact with people they know. Self-sustained VOCs are communities where relationships between participating members is formed and maintained through encounters in the online community. 

For all VOCs, there is the issue of creating identity and reputation in the community. People can create whatever identity they would like to through their interactions with other members. The username is what members identify each other by but it says very little about the person behind it.

The main features in online communities that attract people are a shared communication environment, relationships formed and nurtured, a sense of belonging to a group, the internal structure of the group, common space shared by people with similar ideas and interests. The three most critical issues are belonging, identity, and interest. For an online community to flourish there needs to be consistent participation, interest, and motivation.

Research conducted by Helen Wang applied the Technology Acceptance Model to online community participation. Internet self-efficacy positively predicted perceived ease of use. Research found that participants' beliefs in their abilities to use the internet and web-based tools determined how much effort was expected.

Community environment positively predicted perceived ease of use and usefulness. Intrinsic motivation positively predicted perceived ease of use, usefulness, and actual use. The technology acceptance model positively predicts how likely it is that an individual will participate in an online community.

Consumer-vendor interaction:

Establishing a relationship between the consumer and a seller has become a new science with the emergence of online communities. It is a new market to be tapped by companies and to do so, requires an understanding of the relationships built on online communities.

Online communities gather people around common interests and these common interests can include brands, products, and services.  Companies not only have a chance to reach a new group of consumers in online communities, but to also tap into information about the consumers.

Companies have a chance to learn about the consumers in an environment that they feel a certain amount of anonymity and are thus, more open to allowing a company to see what they really want or are looking for.

In order to establish a relationship with the consumer a company must seek a way to identify with how individuals interact with the community. This is done by understanding the relationships an individual has with an online community.

There are six identifiable relationship statuses:
  1. considered status,
  2. committed status,
  3. inactive status,
  4. faded status,
  5. recognized status,
  6. and unrecognized status.

Unrecognized status means the consumer is unaware of the online community or has not decided the community to be useful. The recognized status is where a person is aware of the community, but is not entirely involved.

A considered status is when a person begins their involvement with the site. The usage at this stage is still very sporadic. The committed status is when a relationship between a person and an online community is established and the person gets fully involved with the community.

The inactive status is when an online community has not relevance to a person. The faded status is when a person has begun to fade away from a site.  It is important to be able to recognize which group or status the consumer holds, because it might help determine which approach to use.

Companies not only need to understand how a consumer functions within an online community, but also a company "should understand the communality of an online community"  

This means a company must understand the dynamic and structure of the online community to be able to establish a relationship with the consumer. Online communities have cultures of their own, and to be able to establish a commercial relationship or even engage at all, one must understand the community values and proprieties. It has even been proved beneficial to treat online commercial relationships more as friendships rather than business transactions.

Through online engagement, because of the smoke screen of anonymity, it allows a person to be able to socially interact with strangers in a much more personal way. This personal connection the consumer feels translates to how they want to establish relationships online.

They separate what is commercial or spam and what is relational. Relational becomes what they associate with human interaction while commercial is what they associate with digital or non-human interaction.

Thus the online community should not be viewed as "merely a sales channel".  Instead it should be viewed as a network for establishing interpersonal communications with the consumer.

Growth cycle:
See also: Metcalfe's law and Bass diffusion model

Most online communities grow slowly at first, due in part to the fact that the strength of motivation for contributing is usually proportional to the size of the community. As the size of the potential audience increases, so does the attraction of writing and contributing. This, coupled with the fact that organizational culture does not change overnight, means creators can expect slow progress at first with a new virtual community.

As more people begin to participate, however, the aforementioned motivations will increase, creating a virtuous cycle in which more participation begets more participation.

Community adoption can be forecast with the Bass diffusion model, originally conceived by Frank Bass to describe the process by which new products get adopted as an interaction between innovative early adopters and those who follow them.

Online learning community:

Online learning is a form of online community. The sites are designed to educate. Colleges and universities may offer many of their classes online to their students; this allows each student to take the class at his or her own pace.

According to an article published in volume 21, issue 5 of the European Management Journal titled "Learning in Online Forums", researchers conducted a series of studies about online learning. They found that while good online learning is difficult to plan, it is quite conducive to educational learning.

Online learning can bring together a diverse group of people, and although it is asynchronous learning, if the forum is set up using all the best tools and strategies, it can be very effective.

Another study was published in volume 55, issue 1 of Computers and Education and found results supporting the findings of the article mentioned above. The researchers found that motivation, enjoyment, and team contributions on learning outcomes enhanced students learning and that the students felt they learned well with it.

A study published in the same journal looks at how social networking can foster individual well-being and develop skills which can improve the learning experience.

These articles look at a variety of different types of online learning. They suggest that online learning can be quite productive and educational if created and maintained properly.

One feature of online communities is that they are not constrained by time thereby giving members the ability to move through periods of high to low activity over a period of time. This dynamic nature maintains a freshness and variety that traditional methods of learning might not have been able to provide.

It appears that online communities such as Wikipedia have become a source of professional learning. They are an active learning environment in which learners converse and inquire.

In a study exclusive to teachers in online communities, results showed that membership in online communities provided teachers with a rich source of professional learning that satisfied each member of the community.

Saurabh Tyagi describes benefits of online community learning which include:
  • No physical boundaries: Online communities do not limit their membership nor exclude based on where one lives.
  • Supports in-class learning: Due to time constraints, discussion boards are more efficient for question & answer sessions than allowing time after lectures to ask questions.
  • Build a social and collaborative learning experience: People are best able to learn when they engage, communicate, and collaborate with each other. Online communities create an environment where users can collaborate through social interaction and shared experiences.
  • Self-governance: Anyone who can access the internet is self-empowered. The immediate access to information allows users to educate themselves.

These terms are taken from Edudemic, a site about teaching and learning. The article "How to Build Effective Online Learning Communities" provides background information about online communities as well as how to incorporate learning within an online community.

Video "Gaming" and Online Interactions:

One of the greatest attractions towards online communities and the role assigned to an online community, is the sense of connection in which users are able to build among other members and associates. Thus, it is typical to reference online communities when regarding the 'gaming' universe.

The online video game industry has embraced the concepts of cooperative and diverse gaming in order to provide players with a sense of community or togetherness. Video games have long been seen as a solo endeavor – as a way to escape reality and leave social interaction at the door.

Yet, online community networks or talk pages have now allowed forms of connection with other users. These connections offer forms of aid in the games themselves, as well as an overall collaboration and interaction in the network space.

For example, a study conducted by Pontus Strimling and Seth Frey found that players would generate their own models of fair "loot" distribution through community interaction if they felt that the model provided by the game itself was insufficient.

The popularity of competitive the online multiplayer games has now even promoted informal social interaction through the use of the recognized communities.

Problems With Online Gaming Communities:

As with other online communities, problems do arise when approaching the usages of online communities in the gaming culture, as well as those who are utilizing the spaces for their own agendas.

"Gaming Culture" offers individuals personal experiences, development of creativity, as well an assemblance of togetherness that potentially resembles formalized social communication techniques.

On the other hand, these communities could also include toxicity, online disinhibition, and cyberbullying.
  • Toxicity: Toxicity in games usually takes the form of abusive or negative language or behavior.
  • Online Disinhibition: The utilization in gaming communities to say things that normally wouldn't have been said in an in-person scenario. Offers the individual the access to less restraint ion culturally appropriated interactions, and is typically through the form of aggressiveness. This action is also typically offered through the form of anonymity.
    • Dissociative Anonymity
    • Invisibility
    • Power of Status and Authority
  • Cyberbullying: Cyberbullying stems from various levels of degree, but inevitably is cast as abuse and harassment in nature.

Online health community:

Online health communities is one example of online communities which is heavily used by internet users. A key benefit of online health communities is providing user access to other users with similar problems or experiences which has a significant impact on the lives of their members. 

Through people participation, online health communities will be able to offer patients opportunities for emotional support and also will provide them access to experience-based information about particular problem or possible treatment strategies. Even in some studies, it is shown that users find experienced-based information more relevant than information which was prescribed by professionals. 

Moreover, allowing patients to collaborate anonymously in some of online health communities suggests users a non-judgmental environment to share their problems, knowledge, and experiences. However, recent research has indicated that socioeconomic differences between patients may result in feelings of alienation or exclusion within these communities, even despite attempts to make the environments inclusive.

Problems:

Online communities are relatively new and unexplored areas. They promote a whole new community that prior to the Internet was not available. Although they can promote a vast array of positive qualities, such as relationships without regard to race, religion, gender, or geography, they can also lead to multiple problems.

The theory of risk perception, an uncertainty in participating in an online community, is quite common, particularly when in the following online circumstances:
  1. performances,
  2. financial,
  3. opportunity/time,
  4. safety,
  5. social,
  6. psychological loss.

Clay Shirky explains one of these problems like two hoola-hoops. With the emersion of online communities there is a "real life" hoola-hoop and the other and "online life". These two hoops used to be completely separate but now they have swung together and overlap.

The problem with this overlap is that there is no distinction anymore between face-to-face interactions and virtual ones; they are one and the same. Shirky illustrates this by explaining a meeting. A group of people will sit in a meeting but they will all be connected into a virtual world also, using online communities such as wiki.

A further problem is identity formation with the ambiguous real-virtual life mix. Identity formation in the real world consisted of "one body, one identity", but the online communities allow you to create "as many electronic personae" as you please. This can lead to identity deception. Claiming to be someone you're not can be problematic with other online community users and for yourself. Creating a false identity can cause confusion and ambivalence about which identity is true.

A lack of trust regarding personal or professional information is problematic with questions of identity or information reciprocity. Often, if information is given to another user of an online community, one expects equal information shared back. However, this may not be the case or the other user may use the information given in harmful ways. 

The construction of an individual's identity within an online community requires self-presentation. Self-presentation is the act of "writing the self into being", in which a person's identity is formed by what that person says, does, or shows. This also poses a potential problem as such self-representation is open for interpretation as well as misinterpretation.

While an individual's online identity can be entirely constructed with a few of his/her own sentences, perceptions of this identity can be entirely misguided and incorrect.

Online communities present the problems of preoccupation, distraction, detachment, and desensitization to an individual, although online support groups exist now. Online communities do present potential risks, and users must remember to be careful and remember that just because an online community feels safe does not mean it necessarily is.

Trolling and harassment:
Main article: Cyberbullying

Cyber bullying, the "use of long-term aggressive, intentional, repetitive acts by one or more individuals, using electronic means, against an almost powerless victim" which has increased in frequency alongside the continued growth of web communities with an Open University study finding 38% of young people had experienced or witnessed cyber bullying. 

It has received significant media attention due to high-profile incidents such as the death of Amanda Todd who before her death detailed her ordeal on YouTube.

A key feature of such bullying is that it allows victims to be harassed at all times, something not possible typically with physical bullying. This has forced Governments and other organisations to change their typical approach to bullying with the UK Department for Education now issuing advice to schools on how to deal with cyber bullying cases.

The most common problem with online communities tend to be online harassment, meaning threatening or offensive content aimed at known friends or strangers through ways of online technology. Where such posting is done "for the lulz" (that is, for the fun of it), then it is known as trolling. 

Sometimes trolling is done in order to harm others for the gratification of the person posting.

The primary motivation for such posters, known in character theory as "snerts", is the sense of power and exposure it gives them. Online harassment tends to affect adolescents the most due to their risk-taking behavior and decision-making processes. One notable example is that of Natasha MacBryde who was tormented by Sean Duffy, who was later prosecuted.

In 2010, Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old New Yorker committed suicide. Trolls pounced on her tribute page posting insensitive and hurtful images of nooses and other suicidal symbolism. Four years prior to that an 18-year-old died in a car crash in California. Trolls took images of her disfigured body they found on the internet and used them to torture the girl's grieving parents. 

Psychological research has shown that anonymity increases unethical behavior through what is called the online disinhibition effect. Many website and online communities have attempted to combat trolling.

There has not been a single effective method to discourage anonymity, and arguments exist claiming that removing Internet users' anonymity is an intrusion of their privacy and violates their right to free speech.

Julie Zhou, writing for the New York Times, comments that "There's no way to truly rid the Internet of anonymity. After all, names and email addresses can be faked. And in any case many commenters write things that are rude or inflammatory under their real names". Thus, some trolls don't even bother to hide their actions and take pride in their behavior. 

The rate of reported online harassment has been increasing as there has been a 50% increase in accounts of youth online harassment from the years 2000–2005.

Another form of harassment prevalent online is called flaming. According to a study conducted by Peter J. Moor, flaming is defined as displaying hostility by insulting, swearing or using otherwise offensive language. 

Flaming can be done in either a group style format (the comments section on YouTube) or in a one-on-one format (private messaging on Facebook). Several studies have shown that flaming is more apparent in computer mediated conversation than in face to face interaction.

For example, a study conducted by Kiesler et al. found that people who met online judged each other more harshly than those who met face to face. The study goes on to say that the people who communicated by computer "felt and acted as though the setting was more impersonal, and their behavior was more uninhibited. These findings suggest that computer-mediated communication ... elicits asocial or unregulated behavior".

Unregulated communities are established when online users communicate on a site although there are no mutual terms of usage. There is no regulator. Online interest groups or anonymous blogs are examples of unregulated communities.

Cyberbullying is also prominent online. Cyberbullying is defined as willful and repeated harm inflicted towards another through information technology mediums. Cyberbullying victimization has ascended to the forefront of the public agenda after a number of news stories came out on the topic. 

For example, Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide in 2010 after his roommate secretly filmed him in an intimate encounter and then streamed the video over the Internet. Numerous states, such as New Jersey, have created and passed laws that do not allow any sort of harassment on, near, or off school grounds that disrupts or interferes with the operation of the school or the rights of other students. In general, sexual and gender-based harassment online has been deemed a significant problem.

Trolling and cyber bullying in online communities are very difficult to stop for several reasons:
  1. Community members don't wish to violate libertarian ideologies that state everyone has the right to speak.
  2. The distributed nature of online communities make it difficult for members to come to an agreement.
  3. Deciding who should moderate and how create difficulty of community management.

​An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet (web sites, email, instant messaging, etc.) to communicate, work together and pursue their interests over time.

​Hazing:

A lesser known problem is hazing within online communities. Members of an elite online community use hazing to display their power, produce inequality, and instill loyalty into newcomers. While online hazing doesn't inflict physical duress, "the status values of domination and subordination are just as effectively transmitted". 

Elite members of the in-group may haze by employing derogatory terms to refer to newcomers, using deception or playing mind games, or participating in intimidation, among other activities.

"[T]hrough hazing, established members tell newcomers that they must be able to tolerate a certain level of aggressiveness, grossness, and obnoxiousness in order to fit in and be accepted by the BlueSky community".

Privacy:

Online communities like social networking websites have a very unclear distinction between private and public information. For most social networks, users have to give personal information to add to their profiles. Usually, users can control what type of information other people in the online community can access based on the users familiarity with the people or the users level of comfort.

These limitations are known as "privacy settings". Privacy settings bring up the question of how privacy settings and terms of service affect the expectation of privacy in social media.

After all, the purpose of an online community is to share a common space with one another. Furthermore, it is hard to take legal action when a user feels that his or her privacy has been invaded because he or she technically knew what the online community entailed.

Creator of the social networking site Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, noticed a change in users' behavior from when he first initiated Facebook. It seemed that "society's willingness to share has created an environment where privacy concerns are less important to users of social networks today than they were when social networking began". 

However even though a user might keep his or her personal information private, his or her activity is open to the whole web to access. When a user posts information to a site or comments or responds to information posted by others, social networking sites create a tracking record of the user's activity. 

Platforms such as Google and Facebook collect massive amounts of this user data through their surveillance infrastructures.

Internet privacy relates to the transmission and storage of a persons data and their right to anonymity whilst online with the UN in 2013 adopting online privacy as a human right by a unanimous vote. 

Many websites allow users to sign up with a username which needn't be their actual name which allows a level of anonymity, in some cases such as the infamous imageboard 4chan users of the site do not need an account to engage with discussions.

However, in these cases depending on the detail of information about a person posted it can still be possible to work out a users identity.

Even when a person takes measures to protect their anonymity and privacy revelations by Edward Snowden a former contractor at the Central Intelligence Agency about mass surveillance programs conducted by the US intelligence services involving the mass collection of data on both domestic and international users of popular websites including Facebook and YouTube as well as the collection of information straight from fiber cables without consent appear to show individuals privacy is not always respected.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly stated that the company had not been informed of any such programs and only handed over individual users data when required by law implying that if the allegations are true that the data harvested had been done so without the company's consent.

The growing popularity of social networks where a user using their real name is the norm also brings a new challenge with one survey of 2,303 managers finding 37% investigated candidates social media activity during the hiring process with a study showing 1 in 10 job application rejections for those aged 16 to 34 could be due to social media checks.

Reliability of information:

Web communities can be an easy and useful tool to access information. However, the information contained as well as the users' credentials cannot always be trusted, with the internet giving a relatively anonymous medium for some to fraudulently claim anything from their qualifications or where they live to, in rare cases, pretending to be a specific person. 

Malicious fake accounts created with the aim of defrauding victims out of money has become more high-profile with four men sentenced to between 8 years and 46 weeks for defrauding 12 women out of £250,000 using fake accounts on a dating website. 

In relation to accuracy one survey based on Wikipedia that evaluated 50 articles found that 24% contained inaccuracies, while in most cases the consequence might just be the spread of misinformation in areas such as health the consequences can be far more damaging leading to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration providing help on evaluating health information on the web.

Imbalance:
See also: 1% rule (Internet culture)

The 1% rule states that within an online community as a rule of thumb only 1% of users actively contribute to creating content. Other variations also exist such as the 1-9-90 rule[a] when taking editing into account. 

This raises problems for online communities with most users only interested in the information such a community might contain rather than having an interest in actively contributing which can lead to staleness in information and community decline. 

This has led such communities which rely on user editing of content to promote users into becoming active contributors as well as retention of such existing members through projects such as the Wikimedia Account Creation Improvement Project.

Legal issues:

​In the US, two of the most important laws dealing with legal issues of online communities, especially social networking sites are Section 512c of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Section 512c removes liability for copyright infringement from sites that let users post content, so long as there is a way by which the copyright owner can request the removal of infringing content. The website may not receive any financial benefit from the infringing activities.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives protection from any liability as a result from the publication provided by another party. Common issues include defamation, but many courts have expanded it to include other claims as well.

Online communities of various kinds (social networking sites, blogs, media sharing sites, etc.) are posing new challenges for all levels of law enforcement in combating many kinds of crimes including harassment, identity theft, copyright infringement, etc.

Copyright law is being challenged and debated with the shift in how individuals now disseminate their intellectual property. Individuals come together via online communities in collaborative efforts to create.

Many describe current copyright law as being ill-equipped to manage the interests of individuals or groups involved in these collaborative efforts. Some say that these laws may even discourage this kind of production.

Laws governing online behavior pose another challenge to lawmakers in that they must work to enact laws that protect the public without infringing upon their rights to free speech.

Perhaps the most talked about issue of this sort is that of cyberbullying. Some scholars call for collaborative efforts between parents, schools, lawmakers, and law enforcement to curtail cyberbullying.

Laws must continually adapt to the ever-changing landscape of social media in all its forms; some legal scholars contend that lawmakers need to take an interdisciplinary approach to creating effective policy whether it is regulatory, for public safety, or otherwise.

Experts in the social sciences can shed light on new trends that emerge in the usage of social media by different segments of society (including youths). Armed with this data, lawmakers can write and pass legislation that protect and empower various online community members.

See also:


​




Communal Living including a List of Communes Pictured below: Voices from the epicenter of ’60s communes, which flourished like wildflowers in the hills of New Mexico.
Click here for a List of Intentional Communities.

An intentional community (or Commune) is a voluntary residential community which is designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork from the start. 

The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision, and typically share responsibilities and property.

This way of life is sometimes characterized as an "alternative lifestyle". Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or communal experiments. The multitude of intentional communities includes: 
History:

Look up commune in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Ashrams are likely the earliest intentional communities founded around 1500 BCE, while Buddhist monasteries appeared around 500 BCE. Pythagoras founded an intellectual vegetarian commune in about 525 BCE in southern Italy. 

Hundreds of modern intentional communities were formed across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand out of the intellectual foment of utopianism.

Intentional communities exhibit the utopian ambition to create a better, more sustainable world for living. Nevertheless, the term utopian community as a synonym for an intentional community might be considered to be of pejorative nature and many intentional communities do not consider themselves to be utopian. 

Also the alternative term commune is considered to be non-neutral or even linked to leftist politics or hippies.

Synonyms and Definitions:

Additional terms referring to an intentional community can be: 
  • alternative lifestyle, 
  • intentional society, 
  • cooperative community, 
  • withdrawn community, 
  • enacted community, 
  • socialist colony, 
  • communistic society, 
  • collective settlement, 
  • communal society, 
  • commune, 
  • mutualistic community, 
  • communitarian experiment, 
  • experimental community, 
  • utopian experiment, 
  • practical utopia,
  • and utopian society
​Variety:

The purposes of intentional communities vary and may be political, spiritual, economic, or environmental. In addition to spiritual communities, secular communities also exist. 

One common practice, particularly in spiritual communities, is communal meals. Egalitarian values can be combined with other values. Benjamin Zablocki categorized communities this way:
Membership:

Members of Christian intentional communities want to emulate the practices of the earliest believers.

Using the biblical book of Acts (and, often, the Sermon on the Mount) as a model, members of these communities strive to demonstrate their faith in a corporate context, and to live out the teachings of the New Testament, practicing compassion and hospitality. 

Communities such as the Simple Way, the Bruderhof and Rutba House would fall into this category. Despite strict membership criteria, these communities are open to visitors and not reclusive to the extent of some other intentional communities.

A survey in the 1995 edition of the "Communities Directory", published by Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), reported that 54 percent of the communities choosing to list themselves were rural, 28 percent were urban, 10 percent had both rural and urban sites, and 8 percent did not specify.

Governance:

The most common form of governance in intentional communities is democratic (64 percent), with decisions made by some form of consensus decision-making or voting.

A hierarchical or authoritarian structure governs 9 percent of communities, 11 percent are a combination of democratic and hierarchical structure, and 16 percent do not specify.

Core principles:

The central characteristics of communes, or core principles that define communes, have been expressed in various forms over the years. The term "communitarian" was invented by the Suffolk-born radical John Goodwyn Barmby, subsequently a Unitarian minister.

At the start of the 1970s, The New Communes author Ron E. Roberts classified communes as a subclass of a larger category of Utopias. He listed three main characteristics:
  • First, egalitarianism – that communes specifically rejected hierarchy or graduations of social status as being necessary to social order.
  • Second, human scale – that members of some communes saw the scale of society as it was then organized as being too industrialized (or factory sized) and therefore unsympathetic to human dimensions.
  • And third, that communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic.

Twenty five years later, Dr. Bill Metcalf, in his edited book Shared Visions, Shared Lives defined communes as having the following core principles: the importance of the group as opposed to the nuclear family unit, a "common purse", a collective household, group decision making in general and intimate affairs.

Sharing everyday life and facilities, a commune is an idealized form of family, being a new sort of "primary group" (generally with fewer than 20 people although there are examples of much larger communes). Commune members have emotional bonds to the whole group rather than to any sub-group, and the commune is experienced with emotions which go beyond just social collectivity.

​​By region:

With the simple definition of a commune as an intentional community with 100% income sharing, the online directory of the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) lists 222 communes worldwide (28 January 2019). 

Some of these are religious institutions such as abbeys and monasteries. Others are based in anthroposophic philosophy, including Camphill villages that provide support for the education, employment, and daily lives of adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental health problems or other special needs. 

Many communes are part of the New Age movement.

Many cultures naturally practice communal or tribal living, and would not designate their way of life as a planned 'commune' per se, though their living situation may have many characteristics of a commune.

Australia:

In Australia, many intentional communities started with the hippie movement and those searching for social alternatives to the nuclear family. One of the oldest continuously running communities is called "Moora Moora Co-operative Community" with about 47 members (Oct 2021).

Located at the top of Mount Toolebewong, 65km east of Melbourne, Victoria at an altitude of 600–800 m, this community has been entirely off the electricity grid since its inception in 1974. Founding members still resident include Peter and Sandra Cock.

Germany:

In Germany, a large number of the intentional communities define themselves as communes and there is a network of political communes called "Kommuja" with about 30 member groups (May 2009). Germany has a long tradition of intentional communities going back to the groups inspired by the principles of Lebensreform in the 19th century.

Later, about 100 intentional communities were started in the Weimar Republic after World War I; many had a communal economy. In the 1960s, there was a resurgence of communities calling themselves communes, starting with the Kommune 1 in Berlin, followed by Kommune 2 (also Berlin) and Kommune 3 in Wolfsburg.

In the German commune book, Das KommuneBuch, communes are defined by Elisabeth Voß as communities which:
  • Live and work together
  • Have a communal economy, i.e. common finances and common property (land, buildings, means of production)
  • Have communal decision making – usually consensus decision making
  • Try to reduce hierarchy and hierarchical structures
  • Have communalization of housework, childcare and other communal tasks
  • Have equality between women and men
  • Have low ecological footprints through sharing and saving resources

Israel:

​Kibbutzim in Israel, (sing., kibbutz) are examples of officially organized communes, the first of which were based on agriculture. Other Israeli communities are Neve Shalom, Kvutza, Yishuv Kehilati, Moshavim and Kfar No'ar. Today, there are dozens of urban communes growing in the cities of Israel, often called urban kibbutzim.

The urban kibbutzim are smaller and more anarchist. Most of the urban communes in Israel emphasize social change, education, and local involvement in the cities where they live. Some of the urban communes have members who are graduates of zionist-socialist youth movements, like HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed, HaMahanot HaOlim and Hashomer Hatsair.

Ireland:

In 1831 John Vandeleur (a landlord) established a commune on his Ralahine Estate at Newmarket-on-Fergus, County Clare. Vandeleur asked Edward Thomas Craig, an English socialist, to formulate rules and regulations for the commune. It was set up with a population of 22 adult single men, 7 married women and their 7 husbands, 5 single women, 4 orphan boys and 5 children under the age of 9 years.

No money was employed, only credit notes which could be used in the commune shop. All occupants were committed to a life with no alcohol, tobacco, snuff or gambling. All were required to work for 12 hours a day during the summer and from dawn to dusk in winter. The social experiment prospered for a time and 29 new members joined.

However, in 1833 the experiment collapsed due to the gambling debts of John Vandeleur. The members of the commune met for the last time on 23 November 1833 and placed on record a declaration of "the contentment, peace and happiness they had experienced for two years under the arrangements introduced by Mr. Vandeleur and Mr. Craig and which through no fault of the Association was now at an end".

Russia:

In imperial Russia, the vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within a mir community, which acted as a village government and a cooperative. The very widespread and influential pre-Soviet Russian tradition of Monastic communities of both sexes could also be considered a form of communal living.

After the end of communism in Russia, monastic communities have again become more common, populous and, to a lesser degree, more influential in Russian society. Various patterns of Russian behavior — toloka (толока), pomochi (помочи), artel (артель) — are also based on communal ("мирские") traditions.

South Africa:

In 1991, Afrikaners in South Africa founded the controversial Afrikaner-only town of Orania, with the goal of creating a stronghold for the Afrikaner minority group, the Afrikaans language and the Afrikaner culture. 

By 2022, the population was 2,500. The town was experiencing rapid growth and the population had climbed by 55% from 2018.  They favour a model of strict Afrikaner self-sufficiency and have their own currency, bank, local government and only employ Afrikaners.

United Kingdom:

A 19th century advocate and practitioner of communal living was the utopian socialist John Goodwyn Barmby, who founded a Communist Church before becoming a Unitarian minister.

​The Simon Community in London is an example of social cooperation, made to ease homelessness within London. It provides food and religion and is staffed by homeless people and volunteers. Mildly nomadic, they run street "cafés" which distribute food to their known members and to the general public.

​The Bruderhof has three locations in the UK. In Glandwr, near Crymych, Pembrokeshire, a co-op called Lammas Ecovillage focuses on planning and sustainable development. Granted planning permission by the Welsh Government in 2009, it has since created 9 holdings and is a central communal hub for its community. 

In Scotland, the Findhorn Foundation founded by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean in 1962 is prominent for its educational centre and experimental architectural community project based at The Park, in Moray, Scotland, near the village of Findhorn.

The Findhorn Ecovillage community at The Park, Findhorn, a village in Moray, Scotland, and at Cluny Hill in Forres, now houses more than 400 people.

Historic agricultural examples include the Diggers settlement on St George's Hill, Surrey during the English Civil War and the Clousden Hill Free Communist and Co-operative Colony near Newcastle upon Tyne during the 1890s.

United States:

There is a long history of utopian communities in America which led to the rise in the communes of the hippie movement—the "back-to-the-land" ventures of the 1960s and 1970s.

One commune that played a large role in the hippie movement was Kaliflower, a utopian living cooperative that existed in San Francisco between 1967 and 1973 built on values of free love and anti-capitalism.

Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times wrote that "after decades of contraction, the American commune movement has been expanding since the mid-1990s, spurred by the growth of settlements that seek to marry the utopian-minded commune of the 1960s with the American predilection for privacy and capital appreciation." 

The Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) is the best source for listings of and more information about communes in the United States.

While many American communes are short lived, some have been in operation for over 50 years. The Bruderhof was established in the US in 1954, Twin Oaks in 1967 and Koinonia Farm in 1942. Twin Oaks is a rare example of a non-religious commune surviving for longer than 30 years.

See also:







Urbanization of the United States, including Urban Sprawl and Urban Decay Pictured below: Before and After: Seeing How Much the World has Changed in the Last Century will blow your mind!
​The urbanization of the United States has progressed throughout its entire history. Over the last two centuries, the United States of America has been transformed from a predominantly rural, agricultural nation into an urbanized, industrial one. 

This was largely due to the Industrial Revolution in the United States (and parts of Western Europe) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the rapid industrialization which the United States experienced as a result.

In 1790, only about one out of every twenty Americans (on average) lived in urban areas (cities), but this ratio had dramatically changed to one out of four by 1870, one out of two by 1920, two out of three in the 1960s, and four out of five in the 2000s.

Urbanization:

The urbanization of the United States occurred over a period of many years, with the nation only attaining urban-majority status between 1910 and 1920. Currently, over four-fifths of the U.S. population resides in urban areas, a percentage which is still increasing today.

The United States Census Bureau changed its classification and definition of urban areas in 1950 and again in 1990, and caution is thus advised when comparing urban data from different time periods.

Urbanization was fastest in the Northeastern United States, which acquired an urban majority by 1880. Some Northeastern U.S. states had already acquired an urban majority before then, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island (majority-urban by 1850), and New York (majority-urban since about 1870).


The Midwestern and Western United States became urban majority in the 1910s, while the Southern United States only became urban-majority after World War II, in the 1950s.

The Western U.S. is the most urbanized part of the country today, followed closely by the Northeastern United States. The Southern U.S. experienced rapid industrialization after World War II, and is now over three-quarters urban, having almost the same urban percentage in 2010 as the Midwestern United States. 

Just four U.S. states (out of fifty) have a rural majority today, and even some of these states (such as Mississippi) are continuing to urbanize. Some U.S. states currently have an urban percentage around or above 90%, an urbanization rate almost unheard of a century ago.

The state of Maine (and Vermont, to a lesser degree) has bucked the trend towards greater urbanization which is exhibited throughout the rest of the United States. Maine's highest urban percentage ever was less than 52% (in 1950), and today less than 39% of the state's population resides in urban areas.

Maine is currently the least urban U.S. state; its urban percentage (39%) is less than half of the United States average (81%). Maine was less urban than the United States average in every U.S. census since the first one in 1790.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Urbanization in the United States: ___________________________________________________________________________

​Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city. 

Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. 

Medieval suburbs suffered from the loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Modern disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The cost of building urban infrastructure for new developments is hardly ever recouped through property taxes, amounting to a subsidy for the developers and new residents at the expense of existing property taxpayers.

In Continental Europe, the term peri-urbanisation is often used to denote similar dynamics and phenomena, but the term urban sprawl is currently being used by the European Environment Agency. There is widespread disagreement about what constitutes sprawl and how to quantify it.

For example, some commentators measure sprawl by residential density, using the average number of residential units per acre in a given area. Others associate it with decentralization (spread of population without a well-defined centre), discontinuity (leapfrogging development, as defined below), segregation of uses, and so forth.

The term urban sprawl is highly politicized and almost always has negative connotations. It is criticized for causing environmental degradation, intensifying segregation, and undermining the vitality of existing urban areas, and is attacked on aesthetic grounds.

The pejorative meaning of the term means that few openly support urban sprawl as such. The term has become a rallying cry for managing urban growth.

Definition:
​
The term "urban sprawl" was often used in the letters between Lewis Mumford and Frederic J. Osborn, firstly by Osborn in his 1941 letter to Mumford and later by Mumford, generally condemning the waste of agricultural land and landscape due to suburban expansions.

The term was used in an article in The Times in 1955 as a negative comment on the state of London's outskirts. Definitions of sprawl vary; researchers in the field acknowledge that the term lacks precision. 

Batty et al. defined sprawl as "uncoordinated growth: the expansion of community without concern for its consequences, in short, unplanned, incremental urban growth which is often regarded unsustainable." Bhatta et al. wrote in 2010 that despite a dispute over the precise definition of sprawl, there is a "general consensus that urban sprawl is characterized by [an] unplanned and uneven pattern of growth, driven by a multitude of processes and leading to inefficient resource utilization."

Reid Ewing has shown that sprawl has typically been characterized as urban developments exhibiting at least one of the following characteristics: low-density or single-use development, strip development, scattered development, and/or leapfrog development (areas of development interspersed with vacant land). 

He argued that a better way to identify sprawl was to use indicators rather than characteristics because this was a more flexible and less arbitrary method. He proposed using "accessibility" and "functional open space" as indicators. Ewing's approach has been criticized for assuming that sprawl is defined by negative characteristics.

What constitutes sprawl may be considered a matter of degree and will always be somewhat subjective under many definitions of the term. Ewing has also argued that suburban development does not, per se, constitute sprawl depending on the form it takes, although Gordon & Richardson have argued that the term is sometimes used synonymously with suburbanization in a pejorative way.

Examples and counterexamples:

According to the National Resources Inventory (NRI), about 44 million acres (69,000 sq mi; 180,000 km2) of land in the United States was developed between 1982 and 2017. 

Presently, the NRI classifies approximately 100,000 more square kilometres (40,000 square miles) (an area approximately the size of Kentucky) as developed than the Census Bureau classifies as urban. The difference in the NRI classification is that it includes rural development, which by definition cannot be considered to be "urban" sprawl.

Currently, according to the 2000 Census, approximately 2.6 percent of the U.S. land area is urban. Approximately 0.8 percent of the nation's land is in the 37 urbanized areas with more than 1,000,000 population. In 2002, these 37 urbanized areas supported around 40% of the total American population.

Nonetheless, some urban areas like Detroit have expanded geographically even while losing population. But it was not just urbanized areas in the U.S. that lost population and sprawled substantially.

According to data in "Cities and Automobile Dependence" by Kenworthy and Laube (1999), urbanized area population losses occurred while there was an expansion of sprawl between 1970 and 1990 in the following:  albeit without the dismantling of infrastructure that occurred in the United States.
Pictured above: Despite its reputation for urban sprawl and car culture, Los Angeles is the densest major built-up urban area in the United States.

Metropolitan Los Angeles for example, despite popular notions of being a sprawling city, is the densest major urban area (over 1,000,000 population) in the US, being denser than the New York urban area and the San Francisco urban area. 

​In the United States, for example, most of metropolitan Los Angeles is built at more uniform low to moderate density, leading to a much higher overall density for the entire region.

This is in contrast to New York, San Francisco or Chicago which have compact, high-density cores surrounded by areas of very low-density suburban periphery, such as eastern Suffolk County in the New York metro area and Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Some cases of sprawl challenge the definition of the term and what conditions are necessary for urban growth to be considered sprawl. Metropolitan regions such as Greater Mexico City, Delhi National Capital Region and Beijing, are often regarded as sprawling despite being relatively dense and mixed use.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Urban Sprawl: ___________________________________________________________________________

​Urban decay (also known as urban rot, urban death or urban blight) is the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. There is no single process that leads to urban decay which is why it can be hard to encapsulate its magnitude.

Urban decay can include the following aspects:
Since the 1970s and 1980s, urban decay has been a phenomenon associated with some Western cities, especially in North America and parts of Europe. Cities have experienced population flights to the suburbs and exurb commuter towns; often in the form of white flight. 

Another characteristic of urban decay is blight - the visual, psychological, and physical effects of living among empty lots, buildings, and condemned houses.

Urban decay has no single cause. It results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic conditions, including the city's urban planning decisions, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of freeways and railroad lines that bypass or run through the area, depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining, and immigration restrictions.

Causes:

During the Industrial Revolution, many people moved from rural areas to cities for employment in the manufacturing industry, thus causing urban populations to boom.

Subsequent economic change left many cities economically vulnerable. Studies such as the Urban Task Force (DETR 1999), the Urban White Paper (DETR 2000), and a study of Scottish cities (2003) posit those areas suffering from industrial decline, high unemployment, poverty, and a decaying physical environment (sometimes including contaminated land and obsolete infrastructure)—prove "highly resistant to improvement".

Changes in transportation from the public to the private, (specifically the private motor car) eliminated some of the cities' public transport service advantages, e.g., fixed-route buses and trains.

In particular, at the end of World War II, many political decisions favored suburban development and encouraged suburbanization through financial incentives like FHA loans and VA mortgage aid. This allowed many veterans of World War II and their families to afford comfortable single family housing in suburbs.

The manufacturing industry has historically been a base for the prosperity of major cities. When these industries relocate to larger, less urban environments, some cities have experienced population loss with associated urban decay, and even riots. Cutbacks on police and fire services may result, while lobbying for government funded housing may increase.

Increased city taxes encourage residents to move out. Libertarian economists argue that rent control contributes to urban blight by reducing new construction and investment in housing and disincentivizing maintenance.

Countries:

United States:
Further information: Rust Belt and United States cities by crime rate

Historically in the United States, the white middle class gradually left the cities for suburban areas due to African-American migration north toward cities after World War I. American cities often declare blighted status once determined that urban renewal strategies are the most appropriate means to encourage the private investment for reversing deteriorating downtown conditions.

Some historians differentiate between the first Great Migration (1910–1930), numbering about 1.6 million African-American migrants who left mostly Southern rural areas to migrate to northern and Midwestern industrial cities, and, after a lull during the Great Depression, a Second Great Migration (1940–1970), in which 5 million or more African-Americans moved, including many to California and various western cities.

Between 1910 and 1970, African-Americans moved from southern States, especially Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas to other regions of the United States, many of them townspeople with urban skills. 

By the end of the Second Great Migration, African-Americans had become an urbanized population, with more than 80% of Black Americans living in cities. A majority of 53 percent remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the Northeast and Midwest and 7 percent in the West.

From the 1930s until 1977, African-Americans seeking borrowed capital for housing and businesses were discriminated against via the federal-government–legislated discriminatory lending practices for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) via redlining. In 1977, the US Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to help meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Later urban centers were drained further through the advent of mass car ownership, the marketing of suburbia as a location to move to, and the building of the Interstate Highway System. In North America, this shift manifested itself in strip malls, suburban retail and employment centers, and very low-density housing estates. Large areas of many northern cities in the United States experienced population decreases and a degradation of urban areas.

Inner-city property values declined, and economically disadvantaged populations moved in. In the U.S., the new inner-city poor were often African-Americans that migrated from the South in the 1920s and 1930s. As they moved into traditional white neighborhoods, ethnic frictions served to accelerate flight to the suburbs.

United Kingdom:
​
Like many industrial nations before the Second World War, the United Kingdom carried out extensive slum clearances. These efforts continued after the war, however in many of these slums, depopulation became common, producing compounding decay.

The UK is unlike much of Europe in having high overall population density, but low urban population density outside of London. In London, many former slum neighbourhoods like in Islington became "highly prized," however this was the exception to the rule, and much of the north of England remains deprived.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation in the 1980s and 90s undertook extensive studies culminating with a 1991 report which analyzed the 20 most difficult council estates.

Many of the most unpopular estates were in East London, Newcastle upon Tyne, Greater Manchester, Glasgow, the South Wales valleys, and Liverpool, their unpopularity driven by a variety of causes from the loss of key industries, population decline, and counterurbanization.

Population decline in particular was noted to be faster in inner city areas than in outer ones, however a decline was noted throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s in both inner and outer city areas. Jobs declined between 1984 and 1991 (a decline observed particularly among men), while outer areas saw job growth (particularly among women). 

The UK also saw urban areas become more ethnically diverse, however urban decline was not limited to areas which saw population changes. Manchester in 1991 had a non-white population 7.5% higher than the national average, but Newcastle had a 1% smaller non-white population.

Features of British urban decay analyzed by the Foundation included empty houses; widespread demolitions; declining property values; and low demand for all property types, neighborhoods, and tenures.

Urban decay has been found by the Foundation to be "more extreme and therefore more visible" in the north of the United Kingdom. They note this trend of northern decline has been observed not just in the United Kingdom but also in much of Europe. 

Some seaside resort towns have also experienced urban decay towards the end of the 20th century. The UK's period of urban decay was exemplified by The Specials' 1981 hit single "Ghost Town".

France:
Main article: Banlieue
​
Large French cities are often surrounded by areas of urban decay. While city centers tend to be occupied mainly by upper-class residents, cities are often surrounded by public housing developments, with many tenants being of North African origin (from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), and recent immigrants.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, publicly funded housing projects resulted in large areas of mid to high-rise buildings. These modern "grands ensembles" were welcomed at the time, as they replaced shanty towns and raised living standards, but these areas were heavily affected by economic depression in the 1980s.

The banlieues of large cities like Lyon, especially the northern Parisian banlieues, are severely criticized and forgotten by the country's territorial spatial planning administration.

They have been ostracized ever since the French Commune government of 1871, considered as "lawless" or "outside the law", even "outside the Republic", as opposed to "deep France" or "authentic France", which is associated with the countryside.

In November 2005, the French suburbs were the scene of severe riots sparked by the accidental electrocution of two teenagers in the northern suburbs of Paris, and fueled in part by the substandard living conditions in these areas. Many deprived suburbs of French cities were suddenly the scenes of clashes between youngsters and the police, with violence and numerous car burnings resulting in huge media coverage.

Today the situation remains generally unchanged; however, there is a level of disparity. Some areas are experiencing increased drug trafficking, while some northern suburbs of Paris and areas like Vaulx-en-Velin are undergoing refurbishment and re-development.

Some previously mono-industrial towns in France are experiencing increasing crime, decay, and decreasing population. The issue remains a divisive issue in French public politics.

Italy:
​​
In Italy, one of the most well-known case of urban decay is represented by the Vele di Scampia, a large public housing estate built between 1962 and 1975 in the Scampia neighborhood of Naples.

The idea behind the project was to provide a huge urban housing project, where hundreds of families could socialize and create a community. The design included a public transportation rail station, and a large park area between the two buildings. The planners wanted to create a small city model with large parks, playing fields, and other facilities.

However, various events, starting with the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia, led to urban decay inside this project and in the surrounding areas. Many families left homeless by the earthquake squatted inside the Vele. The lack of police presence, led to a rise in Camorra drug trade, as well as other gang and illicit activity.

South Africa:

In South Africa, the most prominent urban decay case is Hillbrow, an inner-city neighborhood of Johannesburg which was formerly affluent. At the end of apartheid in 1994, many middle-class white residents moved out and were replaced by mainly low-income workers and unemployed people, including many refugees and undocumented immigrants from neighboring countries.

Many businesses that operated in the area followed their customers to the suburbs, and some apartment buildings were "hi-jacked" by gangs who collected rentals from residents but failed to pay the utility bills, leading to termination of municipal services and a refusal by the legal owners to invest in maintenance or cleaning. 

Occupied today by low-income residents and immigrants and being heavily over-crowded; the proliferation of crime, drugs, illegal businesses, and decay of properties have become prevalent.

Germany:

Many east German towns such as Hoyerswerda face or are facing significant population loss and urban shrinkage since the reunification of Germany in 1990. Hoyerswerda's population has dropped about 40% since its peak and there is a significant lack of teenagers and twenty-somethings due to the declining birthrates during the uncertainty of reunification. 

Part of the blight in east Germany is due to the construction and preservation practices of the socialist government under the German Democratic Republic (GDR). To fill the housing needs, the GDR quickly built many prefabricated apartment buildings.

​In addition, historic preservation of pre-war buildings varied; in some cases, the rubble of buildings destroyed by the war were simply left there while in other cases the debris was removed, and an empty lot remained. Other standing historical structures were left to decay in the early GDR as they did not represent the socialist ideals of the country.

Policy responses to urban decay:
​
The main responses to urban decay have been through positive public intervention and policy, through a plethora of initiatives, funding streams, and agencies, using the principles of New Urbanism (or through Urban Renaissance, its UK/European equivalent). Gentrification has also had a significant effect, and remains the primary means of a natural remedy.

United States:
Further information:  ​
In the United States, early government policies included "urban renewal" and building of large-scale housing projects for the poor. Urban renewal demolished entire neighborhoods in many inner cities and it was as much a cause of urban decay as a remedy. These government efforts are now thought by many to have been misguided.

For multiple reasons including increased demand for urban amenities, some cities have rebounded from these policy mistakes. Meanwhile, some of the inner suburbs built in the 1950s and 60s are beginning the process of decay, as those who are living in the inner city are pushed out due to gentrification.

Europe:

In Western Europe, where undeveloped land is scarce and urban areas are generally recognized as the drivers of the new information and service economies, urban renewal has become an industry in itself, with hundreds of agencies and charities set up to tackle the issue.

European cities have the benefit of historical organic development patterns already concurrent to the New Urbanist model, and although derelict, most cities have attractive historical quarters and buildings ripe for redevelopment.

In the inner-city estates and suburban cities, the solution is often more drastic, with 1960s and 70s state housing projects being totally demolished and rebuilt in a more traditional European urban style, with a mix of housing types, sizes, prices, and tenures, as well as a mix of other uses such as retail or commercial.

One of the best examples of this is in Hulme, Manchester, which was cleared of 19th-century housing in the 1950s to make way for a large estate of high-rise flats. During the 1990s, it was cleared again to make way for new development built along new urbanist lines.

See also: General: Specific:






​
Urban PlanningPictured below: Washington, D.C., originally a planned community
​Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks and their accessibility.

Traditionally, urban planning followed a top-down approach in master planning the physical layout of human settlements. The primary concern was the public welfare, which included considerations of efficiency, sanitation, protection and use of the environment, as well as effects of the master plans on the social and economic activities. 

Over time, urban planning has adopted a focus on the social and environmental bottom-lines that focus on planning as a tool to improve the health and well-being of people while maintaining sustainability standards.

Sustainable development was added as one of the main goals of all planning endeavors in the late 20th century when the detrimental economic and the environmental impacts of the previous models of planning had become apparent. 

Similarly, in the early 21st century, Jane Jacob's writings on legal and political perspectives to emphasize the interests of residents, businesses and communities effectively influenced urban planners to take into broader consideration of resident experiences and needs while planning.

Urban planning answers questions about how people will live, work and play in a given area and thus, guides orderly development in urban, suburban and rural areas. 

Although predominantly concerned with the planning of settlements and communities urban planners are also responsible for planning:
  • the efficient transportation of goods, resources, people and waste;
  • the distribution of basic necessities such as water and electricity;
  • a sense of inclusion and opportunity for people of all kinds, culture and needs;
  • economic growth or business development;
  • improving health and conserving areas of natural environmental significance that actively contributes to reduction in CO2 emissions as well as protecting heritage structures and built environments.

Since most urban planning teams consist of highly educated individuals that work for city governments, recent debates focus on how to involve more community members in city planning processes.

Urban planning is an interdisciplinary field that includes: 
Practitioners of urban planning are concerned with:
  • research and analysis,
  • strategic thinking,
  • engineering architecture,
  • urban design, 
  • public consultation,
  • policy recommendations,
  • implementation
  • and management.

It is closely related to the field of urban design and some urban planners provide designs for streets, parks, buildings and other urban areas. Urban planners work with the cognate fields of civil engineering, landscape architecture, architecture, and public administration to achieve strategic, policy and sustainability goals.

Early urban planners were often members of these cognate fields though today, urban planning is a separate, independent professional discipline. The discipline of urban planning is the broader category that includes different sub-fields such as: 
Creating the plans requires a thorough understanding of penal codes and zonal codes of planning.

Another important aspect of urban planning is that the range of urban planning projects include the large-scale master planning of empty sites or Greenfield projects as well as small-scale interventions and refurbishments of existing structures, buildings and public spaces. 

Pierre Charles L'Enfant in Washington, D.C., Daniel Burnham in Chicago, Lúcio Costa in Brasília and Georges-Eugene Haussmann in Paris planned cities from scratch, and Robert Moses and Le Corbusier refurbished and transformed cities and neighborhoods to meet their ideas of urban planning.

​History:
Further information: History of urban planning and Grid Plan

There is evidence of urban planning and designed communities dating back to the Mesopotamian, Indus Valley, Minoan, and Egyptian civilizations in the third millennium BCE.

Archaeologists studying the ruins of cities in these areas find paved streets that were laid out at right angles in a grid pattern. The idea of a planned out urban area evolved as different civilizations adopted it.

Beginning in the 8th century BCE, Greek city states primarily used orthogonal (or grid-like) plans. Hippodamus of Miletus (498–408 BC), the ancient Greek architect and urban planner, is considered to be "the father of European urban planning", and the namesake of the "Hippodamian plan" (grid plan) of city layout.

The ancient Romans, inspired by the Greeks, also used orthogonal plans for their cities. City planning in the Roman world was developed for military defense and public convenience.

The spread of the Roman Empire subsequently spread the ideas of urban planning. As the Roman Empire declined, these ideas slowly disappeared. However, many cities in Europe still held onto the planned Roman city center.

Cities in Europe from the 9th to 14th centuries, often grew organically and sometimes chaotically. But in the following centuries with the coming of the Renaissance many new cities were enlarged with newly planned extensions. 

From the 15th century on, much more is recorded of urban design and the people that were involved. In this period, theoretical treatises on architecture and urban planning start to appear in which theoretical questions around planning the main lines, ensuring plans meet the needs of the given population and so forth are addressed and designs of towns and cities are described and depicted.

During the Enlightenment period, several European rulers ambitiously attempted to redesign capital cities. During the Second French Empire, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, under the direction of Napoleon III, redesigned the city of Paris into a more modern capital, with long, straight, wide boulevards.

Planning and architecture went through a paradigm shift at the turn of the 20th century. The industrialized cities of the 19th century grew at a tremendous rate. The evils of urban life for the working poor were becoming increasingly evident as a matter of public concern.

The laissez-faire style of government management of the economy, in fashion for most of the Victorian era, was starting to give way to a New Liberalism that championed intervention on the part of the poor and disadvantaged.

Around 1900, theorists began developing urban planning models to mitigate the consequences of the industrial age, by providing citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments. The following century would therefore be globally dominated by a central planning approach to urban planning, not necessarily representing an increment in the overall quality of the urban realm.

At the beginning of the 20th century, urban planning began to be recognized as a separate profession. The Town and Country Planning Association was founded in 1899 and the first academic course in Great Britain on urban planning was offered by the University of Liverpool in 1909. 

In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism and uniformity began to surface in urban planning, and lasted until the 1970s. In 1933, Le Corbusier presented the Radiant City, a city that grows up in the form of towers, as a solution to the problem of pollution and over-crowding. But many planners started to believe that the ideas of modernism in urban planning led to higher crime rates and social problems.

In the second half of the 20th century, urban planners gradually shifted their focus to individualism and diversity in urban centers.

21st century practices:
See also: Mobility transition

Urban planners studying the effects of increasing congestion in urban areas began to address the externalities, the negative impacts caused by induced demand from larger highway systems in western countries such as in the United States.

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicted in 2018 that around 2.5 billion more people occupy urban areas by 2050 according to population elements of global migration.

New planning theories have adopted non-traditional concepts such as Blue Zones and Innovation Districts to incorporate geographic areas within the city that allow for novel business development and the prioritization of infrastructure that would assist with improving the quality of life of citizens by extending their potential lifespan.

Planning practices have incorporated policy changes to help address anthropocentric global climate change. London began to charge a congestion charge for cars trying to access already crowded places in the city. Cities nowadays stress the importance of public transit and cycling by adopting such policies.

Theories: ​
​Planning theory is the body of scientific concepts, definitions, behavioral relationships, and assumptions that define the body of knowledge of urban planning.

There are eight procedural theories of planning that remain the principal theories of planning procedure today:
  1. the rational-comprehensive approach,
  2. the incremental approach,
  3. the transactive approach,
  4. the communicative approach,
  5. the advocacy approach,
  6. the equity approach,
  7. the radical approach,
  8. and the humanist or phenomenological approach. 

Some other conceptual planning theories include Ebenezer Howard's The Three Magnets theory that he envisioned for the future of British settlement, also his Garden Cities, the Concentric Model Zone also called the Burgess Model by sociologist Ernest Burgess, the Radburn Superblock that encourages pedestrian movement, the Sector Model and the Multiple Nuclei Model among others.

Technical aspects:
Further information: Technical aspects of urban planning

Technical aspects of urban planning involve the application of scientific, technical processes, considerations and features that are involved in planning for land use, urban design, natural resources, transportation, and infrastructure.

Urban planning includes techniques such as:
  • predicting population growth, 
  • zoning,
  • geographic mapping and analysis,
  • analyzing park space,
  • surveying the water supply,
  • identifying transportation patterns,
  • recognizing food supply demands,
  • allocating healthcare and social services,
  • and analyzing the impact of land use.

In order to predict how cities will develop and estimate the effects of their interventions, planners use various models. These models can be used to indicate relationships and patterns in demographic, geographic, and economic data. They might deal with short-term issues such as how people move through cities, or long-term issues such as land use and growth. 

One such model is the Geographic Information System (GIS) that is used to create a model of the existing planning and then to project future impacts on the society, economy and environment.

Building codes and other regulations dovetail with urban planning by governing how cities are constructed and used from the individual level. Enforcement methodologies include governmental zoning, planning permissions, and building codes, as well as private easements and restrictive covenants.

Urban planners:
Further information: Urban planner

An urban planner is a professional who works in the field of urban planning for the purpose of optimizing the effectiveness of a community's land use and infrastructure. They formulate plans for the development and management of urban and suburban areas, typically analyzing land use compatibility as well as economic, environmental and social trends.

In developing any plan for a community (whether commercial, residential, agricultural, natural or recreational), urban planners must consider a wide array of issues including sustainability, existing and potential pollution, transport including potential congestion, crime, land values, economic development, social equity, zoning codes, and other legislation.

The importance of the urban planner is increasing in the 21st century, as modern society begins to face issues of increased population growth, climate change and unsustainable development. An urban planner could be considered a green collar professional.

Some researchers suggest that urban planners around the world work in different "planning cultures", adapted to their local cities and cultures. However, professionals have identified skills, abilities and basic knowledge sets that are common to urban planners across national and regional boundaries.

Criticisms and debates:

The school of neoclassical economics argues that planning is unnecessary, or even harmful, because market efficiency allows for effective land use. A pluralist strain of political thinking argues in a similar vein that the government should not intrude in the political competition between different interest groups which decides how land is used. 

The traditional justification for urban planning has in response been that the planner does to the city what the engineer or architect does to the home, that is, make it more amenable to the needs and preferences of its inhabitants.

The widely adopted consensus-building model of planning, which seeks to accommodate different preferences within the community has been criticized for being based upon, rather than challenging, the power structures of the community. Instead, agonism has been proposed as a framework for urban planning decision-making.

Another debate within the urban planning field is about who is included and excluded in the urban planning decision-making process. Most urban planning processes use a top-down approach which fails to include the residents of the places where urban planners and city officials are working. 

Sherry Arnstein's "ladder of citizen participation" is oftentimes used by many urban planners and city governments to determine the degree of inclusivity or exclusivity of their urban planning. One main source of engagement between city officials and residents are city council meetings that are open to the residents and that welcome public comments.

Additionally, there are some federal requirements for citizen participation in government-funded infrastructure projects.

Many urban planners and planning agencies rely on community input for their policies and zoning plans. How effective community engagement is can be determined by how member's voices are heard and implemented.

Participatory urban planning:

Participatory planning in the United States emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, participatory planning began to enter the development field, with similar characteristics and agendas. 

There are many notable urban planners and activists whose work facilitated and shaped participatory planning movements. Jane Jacobs and her work is one of the most significant contributions to participatory planning because of the influence it had across the entire United States. There has also been a recent emergence in engaging youth in urban planning education.

See also:







Urban Politics in the United States Pictured below: Durham, North Carolina (below), landed among the top-performing cities in WalletHub's list of best- and worst-run cities.: America's Best- and Worst-Run Cities (U.S. News & World Report)
​​American urban politics refers to politics within cities of the United States of America. City governments, run by mayors or city councils, hold a restricted amount of governing power. State and federal governments have been granted a large portion of city governance as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.

The small remaining power held by individual cities becomes a target of numerous outside influences such as large corporations and real-estate developers. American Urban Politics determine the socio-economic make-up of urban neighborhoods and contribute to the ever present disparity between Urban America and Suburban America.

Local power distribution:

Three main systems of city government describe local power distribution in the United States: mayor-council systems, the commission plan and the council-manager plan.

The mayor–council government has two variants, the weak-mayor system and the strong-mayor system. Under the weak-mayor system the mayor has extremely limited power and is forced to share power with other locally elected officials. The strong-mayor system allows the mayor to appoint certain officials and gives the mayor some veto powers. 

Some communities have given the mayor additional veto, appointment, or reporting authorities, with some granting their mayors the power to initiate hiring or involuntary termination of the professional manager.

A city commission government consists of five to nine elected members of a city council who also serve as the heads of major city departments. This form of government blends legislative and executive branch functions in the same body. Proponents of the council-manager form typically consider the city commission form to be the predecessor of, not the alternative to, the council-manager form of government.

City governments search for an equilibrium in their relations with the external environment. Urban politics is politics in and about cities. This term refers to the diverse political structure that occurs in urban areas where there is diversity in both race and socioeconomic status. City governments search for an equilibrium in their relations with the external environment.

A city government's orientation reflects both its leaders' aspirations and its tax-services balance. politics plays an important role in explaining the path and direction a city chooses. A city's economic development functions and for the political decision to mobilize public capital. City investment in, and regulation of, development projects is the most effective means by which a city controls and molds its growth in pursuit of its future cityscape.

A council–manager government consists of a city council that appoints a professionally trained manager who is given responsibility for running the daily affairs of the city. The city council possesses the authority to remove any unsatisfactory manager at any time needed.

For further information: Local government in the United States

Urban regime theories:

Urban regime theories seek to explain relationships among elected officials and those individuals who influence their decisions.

Corporate regimes or development regimes promote growth and normally reflect the interests of a city's major corporations while neglecting the interests of poor, distressed areas of a city.

Caretaker regimes normally oppose large-scale development projects in fear of increased taxes and disrupting normal ways of life.

Progressive regimes respond to the needs of lower- and middle-class citizens and environmental groups to keep things as they are, rather than to economic growth.

Intergovernmental regimes exist in cities of extreme need that are mismanaged and financially troubled. The governor and state legislators are important regime actors.

History of urban America:
Main article: American urban history

During the westward expansion period of the 18th and 19th centuries, numerous areas were settled as trading posts along major transportation routes. Sometimes called “walking cities” because of their small size and limited mode of transportation, these areas were economic centers that had not yet experienced the influx of population that came with industrialization and immigration.

As industry and transportation technologies improved, American cities became centers of production and the process of urbanization began to take place. The country became increasingly urban, and cities grew not only in terms of population but also in size, with skyscrapers pushing cities upward and new transportation systems extending them outward.

Part of the urban population growth was fueled by an unprecedented mass immigration to the United States that continued unabated into the first two decades of the twentieth century. Cities became locations of opportunity that drove rural to urban migration, but the waves of people also led to congestion, overcrowded housing, undesirable living conditions, poor sanitation and major health epidemics.

As these problems persisted the rich and affluent citizens left the problems in the central city and moved to the outer edges, thus beginning the first stages of suburbanization that carried on well into the 20th century. Suburbanization boomed following the invention of railroads, automobiles, assembly-line production and telecommunications. 

Urban America slowly lost its importance and moved toward a metropolitan America that, in most cases, consisted of poor, underdeveloped, old-city centers, surrounded by wealthy, developed suburbs and edge-cities.

See also:







Suburbanization Pictured below: The 50 best suburbs in America, ranked
​Suburbanization, or suburbanisation, is a population shift from central urban areas into suburbs, resulting in the formation of (sub)urban sprawl.

As a consequence of the movement of households and businesses out of the city centers, low-density, peripheral urban areas grow. Sub-urbanization is inversely related to urbanization (urbanisation), which denotes a population shift from rural areas into urban centers.

Many residents of metropolitan regions work within the central urban area, but live outside of it, in satellite communities called suburbs, and commute to work by car or mass transit.

Others have the opportunity to work from home, due to technological advances. Suburbanization often occurs in more economically developed countries. The United States is believed to be the first country in which the majority of the population lived in suburbs rather than cities or rural areas.

Proponents of containing the urban sprawl argue that the sprawl leads to urban decay and a concentration of lower-income residents in the inner city, in addition to environmental harm.

In some cases, suburbanization is temporary. As population grows, the zones of the concentric zone model may move outward to escape the increasing density of inward areas. For example, Kings County, New York served New York City as farmland in the 18th century, with boats carrying produce across the East River. The steam ferry later made Brooklyn Heights a commuter town for Wall Street.

With streetcars, suburbanization spread through the county, and the City of Brooklyn grew to fill the county. Areas along the river became industrialized and apartment buildings filled the places where factories did not replace the scattered houses. As a result, much of Brooklyn transformed from a suburban economy into an urban economy entirely—many other suburbs followed this same cycle.

History:

United States:

​Post–World War II economic expansion in the United States brought an increase in suburbanization, when soldiers returned home from war to reside in houses outside of the city. During this time America had a prosperous postwar economy, which resulted in more available leisure time and an increased priority in creating a family unit.

Throughout the years, the desire to separate work life and home life has grown, causing an increase in suburban populations. Suburbs are often built around certain industries such as restaurants, shopping, and entertainment, which allows suburban residents to travel less and interact more within the suburban area. Suburbs in the United States have also evolved through advances in technology, which allows for more opportunities in remote work rather than commuting.

In the early 21st century, the spread of communication services, such as broadband, e-mail, and practical home video conferencing, have enabled more people to work from home rather than commuting. This can occur either in the city or in the suburbs, thus giving the suburbs the same advantages, information. and supplies as centralized businesses had.

Similarly, the rise of modern delivery logistics in postal services, which take advantage of computerization and the availability of efficient transportation networks, also eliminates some of the advantages that were once to be had from having a business located in the city.

Industrial, warehousing, and factory land uses have also moved to suburban areas. This removes the need for company headquarters to be within a quick courier distance of the warehouses and ports. Urban areas often suffer from traffic congestion, which creates extra driver costs for the company that may have otherwise been reduced if they were located in a suburban area near a highway instead.

As with residential, lower property taxes and low land prices encourage selling industrial land for profitable brownfield redevelopment.

Suburban areas also offer more land to use as a buffer between industrial areas and residential and retail spaces. This may avoid NIMBY sentiments and gentrification pressure from the local community due to residential and retail areas being adjacent to industrial spaces in an urban area.

Suburban municipalities can offer tax breaks, specialized zoning, and regulatory incentives to attract industrial land users to their area, such as City of Industry, California. The overall effect of these developments is that both businesses and individuals now see an advantage to locating in the suburbs, where the cost of buying land, renting space, and running their operations is cheaper than in the city.

This continuing dispersal from a single-city center has led to another recent phenomena in American suburbs, the advent of edge cities and exurbs, which arise out of clusters of office buildings built in suburban commercial centers, shopping malls, and other high-density developments.

With more and more jobs for suburbanites being located in these areas rather than in the main city core that the suburbs grew out of, traffic patterns, which for decades centered on people commuting into the center city to work in the morning and then returning home in the evening, have become more complex, with the volume of intra-suburban traffic increasing tremendously. 

By 2000, half of the US population lived in suburban areas.

Psychological Effects:

​Social isolation:

Historically, it was believed that living in highly urban areas resulted in social isolation, disorganization, and psychological problems, while living in the suburbs was supposed to overall improve happiness, due to lower population density, lower crime, and a more stable population.

A study based on data from 1974, however, found this not to be the case, finding that people living in the suburbs had neither greater satisfaction with their neighborhood nor greater satisfaction with the quality of their lives as compared to people living in urban areas.

Drug abuse:

Pre-existing disparities in the demographic composition of suburbs pose problems in drug consumption and abuse. This is due to the disconnection created between drug addiction and the biased outward perception of suburban health and safety. 

The difference in drug mortality rates of suburban and urban spaces is sometimes fueled by the relationship between the general public, medical practitioners, and the pharmaceutical industry. These affluent individuals who are living in the suburbs often have an increased means of obtaining otherwise expensive and potent drugs, such as opioids and narcotics through valid prescriptions. 

In the United States, the combination of demographic and economic features created as a result of suburbanization has increased the risk of drug abuse in suburban communities.

Heroin in suburban communities has increased in incidence as new heroin users in the United States are predominantly white suburban men and women in their early twenties.

Adolescents and young adults are at an increased risk of drug abuse in suburban spaces due to the enclosed social and economic enclaves that surburbanization propagates. The New England Study of Suburban Youth found that the upper middle class suburban cohorts displayed an increased drug use when compared to the natural average.

The shift in demographics and economic statuses caused by suburbanization has increased the risk of drug abuse in affluent American communities and changed the approach to drug abuse public health initiatives. When addressing public health concerns of drug abuse with patients directly, suburban health care providers and medical practitioners have the advantage of treating a demographic of drug abuse patients that are better educated and equipped with resources to recover from addiction and overdose. 

The disparity of treatment and initiatives between suburban and urban environments in regard to drug abuse and overdose is a public health concern. Although suburban healthcare providers may have more resources to address drug addiction, abuse, and overdose, preconceived ideas about suburban lifestyles may prevent them from providing proper treatment to patients. 

Considering the increasing incidence of drug abuse in suburban environments, the contextual factors that affect certain demographics must also be considered to better understand the prevalence of drug abuse in suburbs; for example, adolescents and their relationship with social groups in school and other socializing forces that occur as a result of suburbanization impact drug abuse incidence.

​Economic impacts:

The economic impacts of suburbanization have become very evident since the trend began in the 1950s. Changes in infrastructure, industry, real estate development costs, fiscal policies, and diversity of cities have been easily apparent, as "making it to the suburbs," mainly in order to own a home and escape the chaos of urban centers, have become the goals of many American citizens.

These impacts have many benefits as well as side effects and are becoming increasingly important in the planning and revitalization of modern cities.

Impact on urban industry:

​The days of industry dominating the urban cores of cities are diminishing as population decentralization of urban centers increases. Companies increasingly look to build industrial parks in less populated areas, largely for more modern buildings and ample parking, as well as to appease the popular desire to work in less congested areas.

Government economic policies that provide incentives for companies to build new structures and lack of incentives to build on Brownfield land also contribute to the flight of industrial development from major cities to surrounding suburban areas.

As suburban industrial development becomes increasingly more profitable, it becomes less financially attractive to build in high-density areas. Another impact of industry leaving the city is the reduction of buffer zones separating metropolitan areas, industrial parks and surrounding suburban residential areas. As this land becomes more economically relevant, the value of such properties very often increases, causing many undeveloped landowners to sell their land.

Consequences on infrastructure:

As America continues to sprawl, the cost of the required water lines, sewer lines, and roads could cost more than $21,000 per residential and non-residential development unit, costing the American government $1.12 trillion between 2005 and 2030.

Along with the costs of infrastructure, existing infrastructure suffers, as most of the government's money that is dedicated to improving infrastructure goes to paying for the new necessities in areas further out from the urban core. As a result, the government will often forgo maintenance on previously built infrastructure.

Real estate development costs:

For residential properties, suburbanization allows lower prices, so people can drive until they can find an area in which they can afford to buy a home. These areas may lack urban infrastructure such as parks and public transit. Prices of homes downtown usually decrease as well to compete with the inexpensive homes in the suburbs.

One of the main benefits of living in the suburbs is that one gets a much larger piece of land than in the city. Thus, bigger lots mean fewer lots and suburbanization leads to less intense development of real estate.

Fiscal impact:

The fiscal deficit grows as a result of suburbanization, mainly because in less densely populated areas, property taxes tend to be lower. Also, because of the typical spread pattern of suburban housing, the lack of variety of housing types, and the greater distance between homes, real estate development and public service costs increase, which in turn increase the deficit of upper levels of government. 

Conversely, for the cities it meant lower tax incomes, which meant less money for amenities, including libraries and schools, because the people who stayed were lower-income, and because of relative de-population.

Effect on urban diversity:

As the trend of suburbanization took hold, many of the people who left the city for the suburbs were white. As a result, there was a rise in black home ownership in central cities. As white households left for the suburbs, housing prices in transition neighborhoods fell, which often lowered the cost of home ownership for black households.

This trend was stronger in older and denser cities, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, because new construction was generally more difficult. As of the 2010 census, minorities like African Americans, Asian Americans and Indo-Americans have become an increasing large factor in recent suburbanization. Many suburbs now have since 1990 large minority communities in suburban and commuter cities.

Environmental impacts:

The growth of suburbanization and the spread of people living outside the city can cause negative impacts on the environment. Suburbanization has been linked to the increase in vehicle mileage, increase land use, and increase in residential energy consumption.

From these factors of suburbanization, it has then caused a degradation of air quality, increase usage of natural resources like water and oil, as well as increased amounts of greenhouse gas. With the increased use of vehicles to commute to and from the work place this causes increased use of oil and gas as well as an increase in emissions.

With the increase in emissions from vehicles, this then can cause air pollution and degrades the air quality of an area. Suburbanization is growing which causes an increase in housing development, which causes an increase in land consumption and available land.

Suburbanization has also been linked to increases in natural resource use like water to meet residents' demands and to maintain suburban lawns. Also, with the increase in technology and consumptions of residents there is an increase in energy consumption by the amount of electricity used by residents.

Social Impacts:

Suburbanization has negative social impacts on many groups of people, including children, adolescents, and the elderly. Children who are affected by suburbanization, or urban sprawl, are commonly referred to as "cul-de-sac kids."

Because children living in a suburb cannot go anywhere without a parent, they are unable to practice being independent. Teenagers that are unable to be independent experience a lot of boredom, isolation, and frustration. These feelings have even led to an increase in rates of teenage suicide and school shootings in suburban areas.

​Despite these issues with young people, suburbia was still intended for young families. The elderly in suburbia experience social isolation once they lose their license to drive. In order to leave their home the elderly need to be able to afford a chauffeur or be willing to ask relatives to drive them around. This has resulted in upper-class elderly moving to retirement communities. Both the wealthy elderly and those who still live in suburbs are largely separated from all other groups of society.

See also:







Rural Areas in the United StatesPictured below: How Rural Are the States?
​Rural areas in the United States, often referred to as rural America, consists of approximately 97% of the United States' land area. An estimated 60 million people, or one-in-five residents (17.9% of the total U.S. population), live in rural America.

Definitions vary from different parts of the United States government as to what constitutes these areas.

Rural areas tend to be poorer and their populations are older than in other parts of the United States, in part because of rural flight, declining infrastructure, and fewer economic prospects.

This declining population also results in less access to services, such as high quality medical and education systems.

Definitions:

The United States Census Bureau defines these areas in the United States as sparsely populated and far from urban centers, which make up an estimated 3% of the land area of the U.S., but is home to more than 80% of the total population.

The United States Office of Management and Budget defines rural areas in the United States by county; some rural areas are classified into metropolitan counties. Others are spread throughout the numerous micropolitan statistical areas.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has four different systems for defining rural areas:
  1. Frontier and Remote (FAR) area codes, which define rural areas in four levels of increasing remoteness by ZIP code,
  2. Rural–Urban Commuting Areas (RUCA),
  3. Urban Influence Codes (UICs),
  4. and Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC).

The United States Department of Health and Human Services has two agencies that define rural areas. The Health Resources and Services Administration addresses the shortcomings of the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and RUCA definitions to produce a definition that is balanced between them. 

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services uses its own definition for setting Medicare payment rates.

CityLab defines rural areas by congressional district, based on census tracts and a machine-learning algorithm.

History:

Rural America was the center of the Populist movement of the United States in the 1890s. Since the 1930s, the rural United States has largely been a stronghold for the Republican Party. A notable exception in recent times is Vermont, a highly rural state which has elected numerous Democrats to office in the 21st century.

Demographics:

Most rural counties are experiencing persistent population decline.

Compared with households in urban areas, rural households had lower median household income ($52,386 compared with $54,296), lower median home values ($151,300 compared with $190,900), and lower monthly housing costs for households paying a mortgage ($1,271 compared with $1,561). A higher percentage owned their housing units "free and clear," with no mortgage or loan (44.0 percent compared with 32.3 percent).

​States with the highest median household incomes in rural areas were Connecticut ($93,382) and New Jersey ($92,972) (not statistically different from each other). The state with the lowest rural median household income was Mississippi ($40,200). Among rural areas, poverty rates varied from a low in Connecticut (4.6 percent) to a high in New Mexico (21.9 percent).

About 13.4 million children under the age of 18 live in rural areas of the nation. Children in rural areas had lower rates of poverty than those in urban areas (18.9 percent compared with 22.3 percent), but more of them were uninsured (7.3 percent compared with 6.3 percent). A higher percentage of "own children" in rural areas lived in married-couple households (76.3 percent compared with 67.4 percent). ("Own children" includes never-married biological, step and adopted children of the couple).

As of 2016, about 7 percent of homeless people in the United States live in rural areas, although some believe that this is an underestimate.

Health:
See also: Medical deserts in the United States

There are significant health disparities between urban and rural areas of the United States.

The per capita rate of primary care physicians is lower in rural areas of the country (65 primary care physicians per 100,000 rural Americans, compared to 105 primary care physicians for urban and suburban Americans). 

Rural Americans are also more likely than other Americans to suffer from chronic health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

A study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics in 2015 analyzed data on U.S. youth suicide rates from 1996 to 2010. It found that the rates of suicides for rural Americans aged 10 to 24 was almost double the rate among their urban counterparts. This was attributed to social isolation, greater availability of guns, and difficulty accessing healthcare.

Notwithstanding the economic and health challenges, a 2018 survey of rural adults found a majority felt they were better off financially than their parents at the same age. They thought their children would also experience such improvement. Forty percent said their lives came out better than they expected.

See also:






​
Zoning in the United States Pictured below: Planning and Community Development of the City of Ashtabula, OH
​Zoning in the United States

​In the United States, zoning includes various land use laws falling under the police power rights of state governments and local governments to exercise authority over privately owned real property. 

Zoning laws in major cities originated with the Los Angeles zoning ordinances of 1904 and the New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution. Early zoning regulations were in some cases motivated by racism and classism, particularly with regard to those mandating single-family housing. 

Zoning ordinances did not allow African-Americans moving into or using residences that were occupied by majority whites due to the fact that their presence would decrease the value of a home. 

The constitutionality of zoning ordinances was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926.

According to the New York Times, "single-family zoning is practically gospel in America," as a vast number of cities zone land extensively for detached single-family homes. Low-density residential zoning is far more predominating in U.S. cities than in other countries.

The housing shortage in many metropolitan areas, coupled with racial residential segregation, has led to increased public focus and political debates on zoning laws. Studies indicate that strict zoning regulations constrain the supply of housing and inflate housing prices, as well as contribute to inequality and a weaker economy.

Strict zoning laws have been found to contribute to racial housing segregation in the United States, and zoning laws that prioritize single-family housing have raised concerns regarding housing availability, housing affordability and environmental harms.

There are no substantial differences between liberal and conservative homeowners in their opposition to the construction of dense housing in their neighborhoods.

Origins and history

Zoning is the process of dividing a municipality into separate districts, or zones, upon which differing regulations, typically regarding land use, are applied. The enforcement of these regulations is enabled by the police powers delegated from the state to local government.

Many argue that German urban planner Reinhard Baumister was the first to develop a system of land use separation that could be considered "zoning". Frankfurt's nineteenth century zoning plans were used as inspiration across America and other countries in Western Europe.

​The purported need for formal zoning in America arose at the turn of the twentieth century as cities such as New York, experiencing rapid urbanization and growth in industry, felt a growing need to reduce congestion, stabilize property values, combat poor urban design, and protect residents from issues such as crowded living conditions, outbreaks of disease, and industrial pollution, through legal means. 

Edward M. Bassett, author of the first comprehensive zoning ordinance in the United States, wrote in 1922: "Skyscrapers would be built to unnecessary height, their cornices projecting into the street and shutting out light and air. The lower floors needed artificial light in the daytime. Business centers instead of being rationally spread out were intensively congested. Transit and street facilities were overwhelmed..."

Additionally, many of the earliest zoning laws in the United States were influenced by a demand for class, ethnic, and race-based segregation. Early zoning ordinances in the United States were more narrow in scope and later became more comprehensive. 

Modesto, California's 1885 ordinance banning wash houses from certain areas of the city has been argued to be America's first true zoning ordinance. Richmond's 1908 zoning ordinance regulating the height and arrangement of buildings was upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in 1910, a decision used as precedent in the implementation of New York City's 1916 Zoning Resolution.

1904–1930:

Los Angeles, 1904-1909:

​Zoning in Los Angeles is commonly believed to have been first enacted in 1908, although Los Angeles City Council passed the first municipal zoning ordinance in the United States, Ordinance 9774, on July 25, 1904. 

Though the ordinance did not assign all parts of the city to a zoning map, as with later American ordinances, it did establish three residential districts in which laundries and wash houses were prohibited. The prohibition against laundries had a racial component since many were owned by Chinese residents and citizens. 

This ordinance would later be replaced in 1908 with other ordinances that expanded the scope of the residential districts and greatly expanded the scope of prohibited industries. Existing nuisance laws had already prohibited some industrial land uses in Los Angeles.

Dangerous businesses (such as warehousing explosives) were illegal before 1908, as were odorous land uses, such as slaughterhouses and tanneries. The California Supreme Court had already upheld such rules in Yick Wo (1886). Many later California court cases supported the 1908 ordinances, even in one case of ex post facto relocation of an existing brickyard.

Ordinance 16170, adopted on September 16, 1908 established six industrial districts. These were drawn mainly in areas which had already hosted significant industrial development such as corridors along the freight railroads and the Los Angeles River.

A new ordinance adopted on August 3, 1909, established that all land within Los Angeles that was not part of an industrial district would become a residence district. However, between 1909 and 1915, Los Angeles City Council responded to some requests by business interests to create exceptions to industrial bans within the three residential districts.

They did this through the legal device of districts within districts. While some might have been benign, such as motion picture districts, some others were polluting, such as poultry slaughterhouse districts. Despite the expanding list of exceptions, new ordinances in other cities (i.e., 1914 Oakland ordinance) followed the 1908 Los Angeles model through about 1917. There existed 22 cities with zoning ordinances by 1913.

Race-based zoning ordinances, 1910–1917:

Many American cities passed residential segregation laws based on race between 1910 and 1917. Baltimore City Council passed such a law in December 1910. Unlike the Los Angeles Residential District which created well-defined areas for residential land use, the Baltimore scheme was implemented on a block-by-block basis. 

Druid Hill had already existed as a de facto all-black neighborhood, but some whites in nearby neighborhoods protested for formal segregation. Just a few months later, Richmond, Virginia passed its race-based zoning law, which was upheld by the Supreme Court of Virginia in the 1915 case Hopkins v. City of Richmond. 

Over the next few years, several southern cities established race-based residential zoning ordinances, including four other cities in Virginia, one in North Carolina, and another in South Carolina. Atlanta passed a law similar to 1910 Baltimore ordinance. Before 1918, race-based zoning ordinances were adopted in New Orleans, Louisville, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City.

In the end, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Louisville ordinance, ruling in Buchanan v. Warley that race-based zoning was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment more specifically, the Court held that the law violated the "right to contract" and the right to alienate property. 

Despite the Buchanan ruling, the city of Atlanta devised a new race-based zoning ordinance, arguing that the Supreme Court had merely applied to specific defects of the Louisville ordinance. Even after the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the Atlanta ordinance, the city continued to use their racially based residential zoning maps.

Other municipalities tested the limits of Buchanan; Florida, Apopka and West Palm Beach drafted race-based residential zoning ordinances. Birmingham, Indianapolis, and New Orleans all passed race-based zoning laws, while Atlanta, Austin, Kansas City, Missouri, and Norfolk considered race in their "spot zoning" decisions. In some cases, these practices continued for decades after Buchanan.

While not explicitly race-based, it is believed that Berkeley, California is where single-family zoning first originated, as an effort to keep minorities out of white neighborhoods.

1916 New York Zoning Resolution:
Main article: 1916 Zoning Resolution
​
In 1916, New York City adopted the first zoning regulations to apply citywide as a reaction to construction of the Equitable Building (which still stands at 120 Broadway). The building towered over the neighboring residences, completely covering all available land area within the property boundary, blocking windows of neighboring buildings and diminishing the availability of sunshine for the people in the affected area.

Bassett's zoning map established height restrictions for the entire city, expressed as ratios between maximum building height and the width of adjacent streets. Residential zones were the most restrictive, limiting building height to no higher than the width of adjoining streets.

The law also regulated land use, preventing factories and warehousing from encroaching on retail districts.

These laws, written by a commission headed by Edward Bassett and signed by Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, became the blueprint for zoning in the rest of the country, partly because Bassett headed the group of planning lawyers who wrote The Standard State Zoning Enabling Act that was issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1924 and accepted almost without change by most states.

The effect of these zoning regulations on the shape of skyscrapers was illustrated famously by architect and illustrator Hugh Ferriss.

Standard State Zoning Enabling Act:
Main article: Standard State Zoning Enabling Act

The State Standard Zoning Enabling Act (SZEA) is a federal planning document first drafted and published through the United States Commerce Department in 1922, which gave states a model under which they could enact their own zoning enabling laws. The genesis for this act is the initiative of Herbert Hoover while he was Secretary of Commerce.

Deriving from a general policy to increase home ownership in the United States, Secretary Hoover established the Advisory Committee on Zoning, which was assigned the task of drafting model zoning statutes. This committee was later known as the Advisory Committee on City Planning and Zoning.

Among the members of this committee were Edward Bassett, Alfred Bettman, Morris Knowles, Nelson Lewis, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Lawrence Veiller.

The Advisory Committee on Zoning appointed a subcommittee under the title of "Laws and Ordinances." This committee—which included Bassett, Knowles, Lewis, and Veiller—composed a series of drafts for SZEA, with one dated as early as December 15, 1921. A second draft came forth from the subcommittee in January 1922.

Several drafts culminated in the first published document in 1924, which was revised and republished in 1926.

Initial reception:

During their inception, zoning laws were harshly criticized as an overreach of government power. Some believed that they were an unjust restriction of private action, while others believed that the power of zoning would be corrupted in the hands of bureaucrats. General P. Lincoln Mitchell went as far as to call zoning laws "an advanced form of communism."

Others supported zoning laws for their uniform and consistent application, and believed that they would be a force of social equality. The constitutionality of zoning laws was highly debated until the ruling of Euclid v. Amber Realty.

Euclid v. Ambler Realty:
Main article: Euclid v. Ambler Realty

The constitutionality of zoning ordinances was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926. The zoning ordinance of Euclid, Ohio was challenged in court by a local land owner on the basis that restricting use of property violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Ambler Realty Company filed suit on November 13, 1922 against the Village of Euclid, Ohio, alleging that the local zoning ordinances effectively diminished its property values.

The village had zoned an area of land held by Ambler Realty as a residential neighborhood. Ambler argued that it would lose money because if the land could be leased to industrial users it would have netted a great deal more money than as a residential area. Ambler Realty claimed these breaches implied an unconstitutional taking of property and denied equal protection under the law.

The trial court originally ruled in Ambler's favor, holding zoning unconstitutional. Among other reasons, the trial court found that zoning was an illegitimate device to facilitate social and economic segregation.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, holding that zoning was a nuisance-preventing device, and as such a proper exercise of the state regulatory police power.

​Houston, 1924–1929:

​Houston remains an exception within the United States because it never adopted a zoning ordinance. However, strong support existed for zoning in Houston among elements within municipal government and among the city's elites during the 1920s.

In 1924, Mayor Oscar Holcombe, appointed the first funded City Planning Commission. City Council voted in favor of hiring S. Herbert Hare of Hare and Hare as a planning consultant. Following the passage of a state zoning enabling statute in 1927, Holcombe appointed Will Hogg to chair a new City Planning Commission. 

Will Hogg was a co-founder of the River Oaks development, the son of a former Texas Governor and an heir to family oil wealth. By 1929, both Hare and Hogg abandoned efforts to push the zoning ordinance to a referendum. In their estimation, there was not enough support for it. Hogg resigned as chair of the City Planning Commission that year.

Houston is the largest city in the country with no zoning ordinances. Houston voters have rejected efforts to implement zoning in 1948, 1962, and 1993. Houston is similar, however, to other large cities throughout the Sun Belt, who all experienced the bulk of their population growth during the Age of the Automobile.

The largest of these cities, such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Tampa, Dallas, Phoenix, and Kansas City, have all expanded their metropolitan footprints along with Houston while having land use zoning.

While Houston has no official zoning ordinances, many private properties have legal covenants or "deed restrictions" that limit the future uses of land, with effects similar to those of zoning systems.

Also, the city has enacted development regulations that specify how lots are subdivided, standard setbacks, and parking requirements. The regulations have contributed to the city's automobile-dependent sprawl, by requiring the existence of large minimum residential lot sizes and large commercial parking lots.

21st century:

In the early 21st century, several local and state governments across the United States have been relaxing or abolishing specific zoning classes (e.g. single-family zoning) to address various issues that have arisen as a result of zoning, such as housing affordability crises and racial and socio-economic segregation. 

In addition, federal legislation to reform exclusionary zoning has been proposed by national politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties since at least the 2010s.

California:

In September 2021, the state of California adopted Senate Bill 9 allowing the development of up to four residential units on single-family lots, following a growing push from local governments such as Berkeley (set to phase out single-family zoning by December 2022), San Jose and other cities across the state.

Massachusetts:

In 2000, Republican governor Paul Cellucci of Massachusetts passed the Community Preservation Act for housing affordability. In 2004, Republican governor Mitt Romney adopted the 40R law which provided financial incentives to cities, suburbs, and towns to adopt zoning legislation for new rental and condo units around rail stations. 

In 2012, Democratic governor Deval Patrick expanded 40R with Compact Neighborhoods, incentivizing zoning for denser, multifamily housing near rail and transit hubs across the Commonwealth. 

In November 2017, Republican governor Charlie Baker introduced the Housing Choice reform (adopted in January 2021), including relaxing the requirement of a two-thirds majority to a simple majority at the local level to pass zoning amendments for new housing, a requirement for 175 cities and towns in the Greater Boston area to rezone land for denser, multi-family housing near MBTA stations, and financial means of compliance to new zoning regulations on top of existing incentives. 

Unlike California, where the state legislature has taken a more leading role in local zoning reform, the focus in Massachusetts is on local government control of zoning policy changes; both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.

Minneapolis:

On December 7, 2018, Minneapolis in Minnesota became the first U.S. city to decide to completely phase out exclusionary single-family zoning policies (then covering 70% of its residential land) in three stages. 

It also planned to allow construction of new three-to-six story buildings near transit stops, abolish off-street minimum parking requirements (the fourth U.S. city to do so), require new apartment developments to set aside 10% of units for moderate-income households, and to increase funding for affordable housing to combat homelessness and support low-income renters. 

Aside from increasing housing affordability and reducing racial and economic segregation, reducing commutes and making housing more environmentally friendly was an additional stated purpose.

Oregon:

The House Bill 2001, adopted by the Oregon Senate in a 17-9 vote on June 30, 2019, effectively eliminated single-family zoning in large Oregonian cities. Towns with at least 10,000 residents were required to allow the development of duplexes in single-family zones, while cities with over 25,000 residents and a few smaller places in the Portland metropolitan area also had to permit triplexes, fourplexes, and "cottage clusters" (several small homes around a common yard) in addition to duplexes on land that had until then been reserved for single-family homes.

Scope:
​
Theoretically, the primary purpose of zoning is to segregate uses that are thought to be incompatible and provide stability to property values. 

In practice, zoning is also used as a permitting system to prevent new development from harming existing residents or businesses. Zoning is commonly exercised by local governments such as counties or municipalities, although the state determines the nature of the zoning scheme with a zoning enabling law. Federal lands are not subject to state planning controls.

Zoning may include regulation of the kinds of activities that will be acceptable on particular lots (such as open space, residential, agricultural, commercial, or industrial), the densities at which those activities may be performed (from low-density housing such as single family homes to high-density such as high-rise apartment buildings), the height of buildings, the amount of space structures may occupy, the location of a building on the lot (setbacks), the proportions of the types of space on a lot (for example, how much landscaped space and how much paved space), and how much parking must be provided). 

Some commercial zones specify what types of products may be sold by particular stores. The details of how individual planning systems incorporate zoning into their regulatory regimes varies although the intention is always similar.

Most zoning systems have a procedure for granting variances (exceptions to the zoning rules), usually because of some perceived hardship due to the particular nature of the property in question. If the variance is not warranted, then it may cause an allegation of spot zoning to arise.

Most state zoning-enabling laws prohibit local zoning authorities from engaging in any spot zoning because it would undermine the purpose of a zoning scheme.

Zoning codes vary by jurisdiction. As one example, residential zones might be coded as R1 for single-family homes, R2 for two-family homes, and R3 for multiple-family homes. As another example, R60 might represent a minimum lot of 60,000 sq. ft. (1.4 acre or about 0.5 hectares) per single family home, while R30 might require lots of only half that size.

​Legal challenges:

There are several limitations to the ability of local governments in asserting police powers to control land use. First, constitutional constraints include freedom of speech (First Amendment), unjust takings of property through the use of zoning that denies land owners the ability to put their land to reasonable, income producing uses (Fifth Amendment), and equal protection (Fourteenth Amendment).

There are also federal statutes that sometimes constrain local zoning. These include the Federal Housing Amendments Act of 1988, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000.

Freedom of speech:
See also: Lawn sign

Local governments regulate signage on private property through zoning ordinances.

Sometimes courts invalidate laws which regulate the content of speech rather than the manners and modes of speech. One court invalidated a local ordinance that prohibited "for sale" and "sold" signs on private property. Another court struck down a law which prohibited signs for adult cabarets.

Takings after 1987:

Beginning in 1987, several United States Supreme Court cases ruled against land use regulations as being a taking requiring just compensation pursuant to the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. First English Evangelical Lutheran Church v. Los Angeles County ruled that even a temporary regulatory taking may require compensation. 

Nollan v. California Coastal Commission ruled that construction permit conditions that fail to substantially advance the agency's authorized purposes, require compensation. 

Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council ruled that numerous environmental concerns were not sufficient to deny all development without compensation. 

Dolan v. City of Tigard ruled that conditions of a permit must be roughly proportional to the adverse impacts of the proposed new development. 

Palazzolo v. Rhode Island ruled property rights are not diminished by unconstitutional laws that exist without challenge at the time the complaining property owner acquired title.

Equal protection:

Specific zoning laws have been overturned in some other U.S. cases where the laws were not applied evenly (violating equal protection) or were considered to violate free speech. In the Atlanta suburb of Roswell, Georgia, an ordinance banning billboards was overturned in court on such grounds. 

It has been deemed that a municipality's sign ordinance must be content neutral with regard to the regulation of signs. The city of Roswell, Georgia now has instituted a sign ordinance that regulates signs, based strictly on dimensional and aesthetic codes rather than an interpretation of the sign content (i.e. use of colors, lettering, etc.).

Religious exercise:

On other occasions, religious institutions sought to circumvent zoning laws, citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA).

The Supreme Court eventually overturned RFRA in just such a case, City of Boerne v. Flores 521 U.S. 507 (1997). Congress enacted the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000, however, in an effort to correct the constitutionally objectionable problems of the RFRA.

In the 2005 case of Cutter v. Wilkinson, the United States Supreme Court held RLUIPA to be constitutional as applied to institutionalized persons, but has not yet decided RLUIPA's constitutionality as it relates to religious land uses.

Wildlife sanctuaries:

In early 2022, the town of Woodside, California drew widespread derision for declaring itself a "mountain lion habitat" to avoid state affordable housing requirements. It backed down on that attempt after California Attorney General Rob Bonta denied this claim. 

Bonta wrote: "There is no valid basis to claim that the entire town of Woodside is a habitat for mountain lions. Land that is already developed — with, for example a single-family home — is not, by definition, habitat. (...) Our message to local governments is simple: act in good faith, follow the law, and do your part to increase the housing supply." 

According to housing advocate Sonja Trauss, this was just one of about 40 cases in which Californian towns attempted to limit, block or discourage housing development to maintain exclusionary single-family zones in violation of Senate Bill 9 (SB9) adopted in September 2021.

Types:

Zoning codes have evolved over the years as urban planning theory has changed, legal constraints have fluctuated, and political priorities have shifted. The various approaches to zoning may be divided into three categories: Euclidean (use-based), performance, and form-based.

Euclidean:
Named for the type of zoning code adopted in the town of Euclid, Ohio, Euclidean (also known as exclusionary) zoning codes are by far the most prevalent in the United States, being used extensively in small towns and large cities alike.

Euclidean zoning is characterized by the segregation of land uses into specified geographic districts and dimensional standards stipulating limitations on the magnitude of development activity that is allowed to take place on lots within each type of district. Typical types of land-use districts in Euclidean zoning are: residential, commercial, and industrial. 

Uses within each district are usually heavily prescribed to exclude other types of uses (residential districts typically disallow commercial or industrial uses). Some "accessory" or "conditional" uses may be allowed in order to accommodate the needs of the primary uses.

Dimensional standards apply to any structures built on lots within each zoning district, and typically, take the form of setbacks, height limits, minimum lot sizes, lot coverage limits, and other limitations on the building envelope.

Euclidean zoning takes two forms, flat and hierarchical. Under flat Euclidean zoning, each district is strictly designated for one use. Hierarchical zoning uses traditional Euclidean zoning classifications (industrial, commercial, multi-family, residential, etc.), but places them in a hierarchical order "nesting" one zoning class within another.

For example, multi-family is not only permitted in "higher order" multi-family zoning districts, but also permitted in high order commercial and industrial zoning districts as well.

Protection of land values is maintained by stratifying the zoning districts into levels according to their location in the urban society (neighborhood, community, municipality, and region). Hierarchical Euclidean zoning generally, fell out of favor in the mid-twentieth century, with flat zoning becoming more popular, although many municipalities still incorporate some degree of hierarchy in their zoning ordinances.

Euclidean zoning is used by many municipalities due to its ease of implementation (one set of explicit, prescriptive rules), long-established legal precedent, and familiarity to planners and design professionals. Euclidean zoning has been criticized, however, for its lack of flexibility.

Separation of uses can contribute to urban sprawl, loss of open space, heavy infrastructure costs, and automobile dependency.

Performance:

Also known as "effects-based planning", performance zoning, first advocated by Lane Kendig in 1982, uses performance-based or goal-oriented criteria to establish review parameters for proposed development projects in any area of a municipality. 

Performance zoning often utilizes a "points-based" system whereby a property developer may apply credits toward meeting established zoning goals through selecting from a 'menu' of compliance options (some examples include: mitigation of environmental impacts, providing public amenities, building affordable housing units, etc.).

Additional discretionary criteria may be established also as part of the review process.

The appeal of performance zoning lies in its high level of flexibility, rationality, transparency, and accountability. Performance zoning avoids the arbitrary nature of the Euclidean approach, and better accommodates market principles and private property rights with environmental protection.

However, performance zoning can be extremely difficult to implement due to the complexity of preparing an impact study for each project, and can require a high level of discretionary activity on the part of the supervising authority. For this reason, performance zoning has not been adopted widely in the US and is usually limited to specific categories within a broader prescriptive code when found.

Form-based:
Main article: Form-based code

Form-based zoning relies on rules applied to development sites according to both prescriptive and potentially discretionary criteria. Typically, these criteria are dependent on lot size, location, proximity, and other various site- and use-specific characteristics.

For example, in a largely suburban single family residential area, uses such as offices, retail, or even light industrial could be permitted so long as they conformed (setback, building size, lot coverage, height, and other factors) with other existing development in the area.

Form based codes offer considerably more flexibility in building uses than do Euclidean codes but, as they are comparatively new, may be more challenging to create. Form-based codes have not yet been widely adopted in the United States. When form-based codes do not contain appropriate illustrations and diagrams, they have been criticized as being difficult to interpret.

One example of a recently adopted code with form-based design features is the Land Development Code adopted by Louisville, Kentucky in 2003. This zoning code creates "form districts" for Louisville Metro. Each form district intends to recognize that some areas of the city are more suburban in nature, while others are more urban.

Building setbacks, heights, and design features vary according to the form district. As an example, in a "traditional neighborhood" form district, a maximum setback might be 15 feet (4.6 m) from the property line, while in a suburban "neighborhood" there may be no maximum setback.

Dallas, Texas, is currently developing an optional form-based zoning ordinance. Since the concept of form-based codes is relatively new, this type of zoning may be more challenging to enact.

Additional provisions:

Additional zoning provisions exist that are not their own distinct types of zoning but seek to improve existing varieties through the incorporation of flexible practices and other elements such as incentives or the usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Incentive zoning:

First implemented in Chicago and New York City, incentive zoning is intended to provide a reward-based system to encourage development that meets established urban development goals. 

Typically, a base level of prescriptive limitations on development will be established and an extensive list of incentive criteria will be established for developers to adopt or not, at their discretion. A reward scale connected to the incentive criteria provides an enticement for developers to incorporate the desired development criteria into their projects.

Common examples include (floor-area-ratio) bonuses for affordable housing provided on-site (known as inclusionary zoning) and height limit bonuses for the inclusion of public amenities on-site. Incentive zoning has become more common throughout the United States during the last 20 years.

Incentive zoning allows for a high degree of flexibility, but may be complex to administer. The more a proposed development takes advantage of incentive criteria, the more closely it has to be reviewed on a discretionary basis. The initial creation of the incentive structure in order to best serve planning priorities also may be challenging and often, requires extensive ongoing revision to maintain balance between incentive magnitude and value given to developers.

Incentive zoning has also been criticized for increasing traffic, reducing natural light, and offering developers larger rewards than those reaped by the public.

Smart zoning:
See also: Smart growth and Smart city

Smart zoning is a broad term that consists of several alternatives to Euclidean zoning that incorporate information and communication technologies. 

There are a number of different techniques to accomplish smart zoning. Floating zones, cluster zoning, and planned unit development (PUDs) are possible even as the conventional Euclidean code exists, or the conventional code may be completely replaced by a smart performance or form-based code, as the city of Miami has done. 

The incorporation of ICTs to measure metrics such as walkability, and the flexibility and adaptability that smart zoning can provide, have been cited as advantages of smart zoning over "non-smart" performance or form-based codes.

Floating zones:

Floating zones involve an ordinance that describes a zone's characteristics and requirements for its establishment, but its location remains without a designation until the board finds that a situation exists that allows the implementation of that type of zone in a particular area.

When the criteria of a floating zone is met the floating zone ceases "to float" and is adopted by a zoning amendment. Some states allow this type of zoning, such as New York and Maryland, while states such as Pennsylvania do not, as an instance of spot zoning. 

To be upheld, the floating zone the master plan must permit floating zones or at least they should not conflict with the master plan. Further, the criteria and standards provided for them should be adequate and the action taken should not be arbitrary or unreasonable. Generally, the floating zone is more easily adoptable and immune from legal challenges if it does not differ substantially from zoned area in which it is implemented.

Cluster zoning:

Cluster zoning permits residential uses to be clustered more closely together than normally allowed, thereby leaving substantial land area to be devoted to open space. Cluster zoning has been favored for its preservation of open space and reduction in construction and utility costs via consolidation, although existing residents may often disapprove due to a reduction in lot sizes.

Planned unit development (PUD):
Main article: Planned unit development

Planned unit development is cluster zoning, but allows for mixed uses. They include some commercial and light industrial uses in order to blend together a traditional downtown environment, but at a suburban scale. Some have argued, however, that such a planned unit development may be a sham for the purpose of bringing in commercial and industrial uses forbidden by the state's zoning law; some courts have held such a "sham" to be an "arbitrary and capricious abuse" of the police power.

Composite zoning:

"Composite" zoning is a type of zoning that consists of a use component, site component, and architectural component. The use component is similar in nature to the use districts of Euclidean zoning.

With an emphasis on form standards, however, use components are typically more inclusive and broader in scope. The site components define a variety of site conditions from low intensity to high intensity such as size and scale of buildings and parking, accessory structures, drive-through commercial lanes, landscaping, outdoor storage and display, vehicle fueling and washing, overhead commercial service doors, etc.

The architectural components address architectural elements and materials, as well as the general level of architectural design.

This zoning method is more flexible and contextually adaptable than standard Euclidean zoning while being easier to interpret than other form-based codes. It has been implemented in Leander, Texas, and is growing in popularity.

Amendments to zoning regulations:

Amendments to zoning regulations may be subject to judicial review, should such amendments be challenged as ultra vires or unconstitutional.

The standard applied to the amendment to determine whether it may survive judicial scrutiny is the same as the review of a zoning ordinance: whether the restriction is arbitrary or whether it bears a reasonable relationship to the exercise of the police power of the state.

If the residents in the targeted neighborhood complain about the amendment, their argument in court does not allow them any vested right to keep the zoned district the same.However, they do not have to prove the difficult standard that the amendment amounts to a taking.

If the gain to the public for the rezoning is small compared to the hardships that would affect the residents, then the amendment may be granted if it provides relief to the residents.

If the local zoning authority passes the zoning amendment, then spot zoning allegations may arise should the rezoning be preferential in nature and not reasonably justified.

Limitations and criticisms:

Land-use zoning is a tool in the treatment of certain social ills and part of the larger concept of social engineering. There is criticism of zoning particularly amongst proponents of limited government or Laissez-faire political perspectives.

The inherent danger of zoning, as a coercive force against property owners, has been described in detail in Richard Rothstein's book The Color of Law (2017). Government zoning was used significantly as an instrument to advance racism through enforced segregation in the North and South from the early part of the 20th century up until recent decades.

Circumventions:

Generally, existing development in a community is not affected by the new zoning laws because it is "grandfathered" or legally non-conforming as a nonconforming use, meaning the prior development is exempt from compliance. Consequently, zoning may only affect new development in a growing community.

In addition, if undeveloped land is zoned to allow development, that land becomes relatively expensive, causing developers to seek land that is not zoned for development with the intention to seek rezoning of that land. Communities generally react by not zoning undeveloped land to allow development until a developer requests rezoning and presents a suitable plan. Development under this practice appears to be piecemeal and uncoordinated.

Communities try to influence the timing of development by government expenditures for new streets, sewers, and utilities usually desired for modern developments. Contrary to federal recommendations discouraging it, the development of interstate freeways for purposes unrelated to planned community growth, creates an inexorable rush to develop the relatively cheap land near interchanges. 

Property tax suppression measures such as California Proposition 13 led many communities desperate to capture sales tax revenue to disregard their comprehensive plans and rezone undeveloped land for retail establishments.

In Colorado, local governments are free to choose not to enforce their own zoning and other land regulation laws. This is called selective enforcement. Steamboat Springs, Colorado is an example of a location with illegal buildings and lax enforcement.

Social:

In more recent times, zoning has been criticized by urban planners and scholars (most notably Jane Jacobs) as a source of new social ills, including urban sprawl, the separation of homes from employment, and the rise of "car culture". Some communities have begun to encourage development of denser, homogenized, mixed-use neighborhoods that promote walking and cycling to jobs and shopping.

Nonetheless, a single-family home and car are major parts of the "American Dream" for nuclear families, and zoning laws often reflect this: in some cities, houses that do not have an attached garage have been deemed "blighted" and are subject to redevelopment. 

Movements that disapprove of Euclidean zoning, such as New Urbanism and Smart Growth, generally try to reconcile these competing demands. New Urbanists in particular favor creative urban design solutions that hark back to 1920s and 1930s practices of hierarchical zoning, or form-based code.

Exclusionary:

Zoning has long been criticized as a tool of racial and socio-economic exclusion and segregation, primarily through minimum lot-size requirements and land-use segregation. 

Early zoning codes often were explicitly racist, or designed to separate social classes.

Exclusionary practices remain common among suburbs wishing to keep out those deemed socioeconomically or ethnically undesirable: for example, representatives of the city of Barrington Hills, Illinois once told editors of the Real Estate section of the Chicago Tribune that the city's 5-acre (20,000 m2) minimum lot size helped to "keep out the riff-raff."

Occupancy restrictions, such as those restricting the number of unrelated occupants that can occupy a single-family dwelling, have been criticized for their rigidity to traditional ideas of the nuclear family. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas argued in the case Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas that argued it was the objective of the state to preserve traditional family values, something critics have used as a pejorative against single-family zoning.

Racially-segregated zoning:

Since 1910 in Baltimore, numerous U.S. States created racial zoning laws; however such laws were ruled out in 1917 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such laws interfered with the property rights of owners (Buchanan v. Warley). 

There were repeated attempts by various states, municipalities, and individuals since then to create zoning and housing laws based on race, however, such laws eventually were overturned by the courts. The legality of all discrimination in housing, by public or private entities, was ended by the Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968).

Despite such rulings, there is widespread evidence that zoning laws are still used for the purpose of racial segregation. In the wake of the Fair Housing Act, localities increasingly used purportedly non-racial zoning laws to keep non-whites out of white neighborhoods. 

Localities prohibited duplexes, small homes, and multi-family buildings, which were more likely to be occupied by racial minorities, recent immigrants, and poor households. The outcome of segregating different areas of cities and regions by uses or characteristics of uses has resulted in increased racial and economic segregation.

Housing affordability:

Zoning also has been implicated as a primary driving factor in the rapidly accelerating lack of affordable housing in urban areas. 

One mechanism for this is zoning by many suburban and exurban communities for very large minimum residential lot and building sizes in order to preserve home values by limiting the total supply of housing, which thereby excludes poorer people.This shifts the market toward more expensive homes than ordinarily might be built.

According to the Manhattan Institute, as much as half of the price paid for housing in some jurisdictions is directly attributable to the hidden costs of restrictive zoning regulation.

For example, the entire town of Los Altos Hills, California (with the exception of the local community college and a religious convent), is zoned for residential use with a minimum lot size of one acre (4,000 m²) and a limit to only one primary dwelling per lot. All these restrictions were upheld as constitutional by federal and state courts in the early 1970s.

The town traditionally attempted to comply with state affordable housing requirements by counting secondary dwellings (that is, apartments over garages and guest houses) as affordable housing, and since 1989 also has allowed residents to build so-called "granny units".

In 1969 Massachusetts enacted the Massachusetts Comprehensive Permit Act: Chapter 40B, originally referred to as the anti-snob zoning law. Under this statute, in municipalities with less than 10% affordable housing, a developer of affordable housing may seek waiver of local zoning and other requirements from the local zoning board of appeals, with review available from the state Housing Appeals Committee if the waiver is denied.

Similar laws are in place in other parts of the United States (e.g., Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Illinois), although their effectiveness is disputed.

Critics of zoning note that zoning laws are a disincentive to provide housing which results in an increase in housing costs and a decrease in productive economic output. For example, A 2017 study showed that if all states deregulated their zoning laws only halfway to the level of Texas, a state known for low zoning regulations, their GDP would increase by 12 percent due to more productive workers and opportunity. 

Furthermore, critics note that it impedes the ability of those that wish to provide charitable housing from doing so. For example, in 2022, Gloversville's Free Methodist Church in New York wished to provide 40 beds for the homeless population in -4 degree weather and were inhibited from doing so.

Health and environmental concerns:

A study of greenhouse gas emissions found that strict zoning laws "seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions." Public officials have argued that, while zoning laws have historically had a negative impact on the environment through their promotion of low-density sprawl and car-centric development, zoning can be used to preserve open space and as a tool to promote the usage of renewable energy. 

These forms of development, by fostering car dependency, may also contribute to a rise in sedentary lifestyles and obesity.

See also:







School Districts in the United States Pictured below: Top 10 Largest School Districts by Enrollment and Per Pupil Current Spending
A school district is a special-purpose district that operates local public primary and secondary schools in various nations.

In the United States:

For a more comprehensive list, see Lists of school districts in the United States.In the U.S, most K–12 public schools function as units of local school districts, which usually operate several schools, and the largest urban and suburban districts operate hundreds of schools.

While practice varies significantly by state (and in some cases, within a state), most American school districts operate as independent local governmental units under a grant of authority and within geographic limits created by state law. 

The executive and legislative power over locally controlled policies and operations of an independent school district are, in most cases, held by a school district's board of education.

Depending on state law, members of a local board of education (often referred to informally as a school board) may be elected, appointed by a political office holder, serve ex officio, or a combination of any of these.

An independent school district is a legally separate body corporate and political. While the controlling law varies, in the United States most school districts operate as independent local governmental units with exclusive authority over K–12 public educational operations and policies. The extent of this control is set by state-level law. Litigation against school districts is common; law firms that specialize in school law handle such litigation and it is paid for by school board professional liability insurance. 

Independent school districts often exercise authority over a school system that is analogous to the authority of local governments like that of a town or a county. These include the power to enter contacts, eminent domain, and the power to issue binding rules and regulations affecting school policies and operations.

The power of school districts to tax and spend is generally more limited. An independent school district's annual budget may require approval by the plebiscite (much of New York) or the local government.

Additionally, independent taxation authority may or may not exist as in Virginia, whose school divisions have no taxing authority and must depend on another local government (county, city, or town) for funding.

Its governing body, which is typically elected by direct popular vote but may be appointed by other governmental officials, is called a school board, board of trustees, board of education, school committee, or the like. This body appoints a superintendent of schools, usually an experienced public school administrator, to function as the district's chief executive for carrying out day-to-day decisions and policy implementations. The school board may also exercise a quasi-judicial function in serious employee or student discipline matters.

School districts in the Midwest and West tend to cross municipal boundaries, while school districts in New England and the Mid-Atlantic regions tend to adhere to city, township, and/or county boundaries. 

As of 1951 school districts were independent governmental units in 26 states, while in 17 states there were mixes of independent school districts and school districts subordinate to other local governments. In nine states there were only school districts subordinate to local governments.

In most Southern states, school systems operate either as an arm of county government or at least share coextensive boundaries with the state's counties. A 2010 study by economist William A. Fischel found that "two-thirds of medium-to-large American cities have boundaries that substantially overlap those of a single school district" with substantial regional and state variations in the degree of overlap, "ranging from nearly perfect congruence in New England, New Jersey, and Virginia, to hardly any in Illinois, Texas, and Florida." 

Older and more populous municipalities "tend to have boundaries that closely match those of a single school district." Noting that most modern school districts were formed by consolidating one-room school districts in the first seven decades of the 20th century, Fischel argues that "outside the South, these consolidations were consented to by local voters" who "preferred districts whose boundaries conformed to their everyday interactions rather than formal units of government" and that "[t]he South ended up with county-based school districts because segregation imposed diseconomies of scale on district operations and required larger land-area districts."

In New York, most school districts are separate governmental units with the power to levy taxes and incur debt, except for the five cities with a population of over 125,000 (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers, and New York City), where the schools are operated directly by the municipalities.

The Hawaii State Department of Education functions as a single statewide school district, unique among states.

According to a 2021 study, the demographics of voters who elect local school boards in the United States tend not to align with the demographics of the students. This gap is "most pronounced in majority nonwhite jurisdictions and school districts with the largest racial achievement gaps."

History:

There were 130,000 school districts in the country in 1930, with an average student population of 150. From 1942 to 1951 the number of school districts declined from 108,579 to 70,452, a decrease of 38,127 or 35%. 

Many states had passed laws facilitating school district consolidation. In 1951 the majority of the school districts in existence were rural school districts only providing elementary education, and some school districts did not operate schools but instead provided transportation to other schools.

The Midwest had a large number of rural school districts.

Previously areas of the Unorganized Borough of Alaska were not served by school districts but instead served by schools directly operated by the Alaska Department of Education and by Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools. The state schools were transferred to the Alaska State-Operated School System (SOS) after the Alaska Legislature created it in 1971; that agency was terminated in 1975, with its schools transferred to the newly created Alaska Unorganized Borough School District, which was broken apart into twenty-one school districts the following year.

In the 2017 Census of Governments, the United States Census Bureau enumerated the following numbers of school systems in the United States:
  • 12,754 school district governments
  • 571 county-dependent school systems
  • 223 municipal-dependent school systems
  • 32 state-dependent school systems
  • 481 township-dependent school systems

School districts in the US have reduced the number of their employees by 3.3%, or 270,000 between 2008 and 2012, owing to a decline in property tax revenues during and after the Great Recession. By 2016 there were about 13,000 school districts, and the average student population was about 5,000.

Terminology:

Although these terms can vary slightly between various states and regions, these are typical definitions for school district constitution:

Schools:
  • An elementary or primary school usually includes kindergarten and grades one through five or six. In some school districts, these grades are divided into two schools. Primary school is most commonly used for schools housing students in kindergarten through grade two or three in districts where the older elementary students are in intermediate schools (see below).
  • A middle school usually includes grades six or seven through eight or nine. In some places, the alternative terms junior high school or intermediate school are still used. Junior high school often refers to schools that cover grades seven through nine. Intermediate school is also used for schools that cover grades three through five (or so) when they are separated from elementary schools.
  • A high school usually includes grades nine or ten through twelve and may also include grades seven and eight. Many high schools cover only grades ten to twelve; this type of school is sometimes referred to as a senior high school.

Districts:

These terms may not appear in a district's name, even though the condition may apply.
  • A unified school district includes elementary and secondary (middle school and high school) educational levels.
  • The word central in a district's name indicates that the district is formed from a consolidation ("centralization") of multiple districts and that the central district's operations are centralized relative to those of the previous districts.
  • The word community in a district's name indicates that the district is formed to serve a community of people with common interests and associations and with a community center.
  • The word free in a district's name indicates that no tuition is charged to attend district schools. In New York, it is used in conjunction with the union to indicate a district composed of multiple, formerly independent common school districts now free of restrictions placed on New York State's common school districts.
  • The word union or consolidated in a district's name indicates that it was formed from two or more districts.
  • In Missouri, most district names include a C- (for "consolidated") or, more commonly, an R- (for "reorganized") followed by a number, commonly in Roman numerals.
  • The word joint in a district's name indicates that it includes territory from more than one county. By extension, a joint state school district, such as Union County–College Corner JSD, includes territory in more than one state.
  • The word independent can have different meanings, depending on the state.
    • Kentucky — Under Kentucky Revised Statutes § 160.020, an "Independent" district is defined as one whose jurisdiction does not cover an entire county. If a county has no independent district, its school district boundaries coincide exactly with its borders. Following the most recent closure of an independent district in 2019, the state has 52 independent school districts along with 120 county districts, with the most significant concentrations of independent districts found in Northern Kentucky and the Eastern Coalfield region. These districts are generally associated with a city, or sometimes with a cluster of adjoining cities. Unlike county districts, independent districts can cross county lines, as in the Caverna Independent School District centered on Cave City and Horse Cave and the Corbin Independent School District. Note that some districts in the state are independent despite not having "Independent" in their official name, as in the Owensboro Public Schools and Paducah Public Schools.
    • Minnesota — Per Minnesota Statute 120A.05, "Independent" denotes any school district validly created and existing as an independent, consolidated, joint independent, county, or a ten or more township district as of July 1, 1957, or under to the Education Code.
    • Texas — Here, "Independent" denotes that the district is separate from any county- or municipal-level entity. All of the state's school districts, with only one exception (Stafford Municipal School District), are independent of any municipal or county control. Moreover, school district boundaries rarely coincide with municipal limits or county lines. Most districts use the term "Independent School District" in their name; in the few cases where the term "Common School District" is used the district is still an independent governmental entity. An independent school district resulting from a consolidation of two or more independent school districts is called a consolidated independent school district, sometimes abbreviated "CISD."
  • In Ohio, school districts are classified as either city school districts, exempted village school districts, or local school districts. City and exempted village school districts are exempted from county boards of education, while local school districts remain under county school board supervision. School districts may combine resources to form a fourth type of school district, the joint vocational school district, which focuses on a technical skills-based curriculum.
  • In Michigan, there are intermediate school districts (ISD), regional education service districts (RESD), or regional education service agencies (RESA), largely at the county level. The local school districts run the schools and most programs, but often bilingual aides, programs for the deaf and blind, special education for the severely impaired, and career and technical education programs are run by the intermediate school district or equivalent.
  • County-wide school districts are most commonly found in Mid-Atlantic and Southern states such as Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Nevada and Utah also have mostly county-wide school districts, and Alaska has many borough-wide school districts. Hawaii operates its schools at the state level through its department of education.
  • In Maine, there are regional school units wherein smaller districts were consolidated into RSUs in 2008 when state laws changed.

​See also:






​
The Digital Divide Pictured below:  How to Close the Digital Divide in the U.S. (Harvard Business Review) (See below for the complete article)
How to Close the Digital Divide in the U.S.
by Bhaskar Chakravorti

The U.S. government is negotiating a plan to address one of the most important — but overlooked — problems facing the country: the digital divide. While this problem is often talked about as a simple problem of access to broadband internet service, it is deeper and more complex than mere infrastructure.

In truth, the digital divide also is a problem of inclusivity, institutions, and individual proficiency, and a solution needs to address all four dimensions.

Policymakers should:
  1. pay for improvements using a “Romer” tax levied on digital ads,
  2. coordinate locally appropriate solutions,
  3. recruit Big Tech and major internet service providers to help close gaps,
  4. invite public-private solutions,
  5. update and expand existing affordability programs,
  6. build in future-proofing,
  7. and invest in digital literacy.

​Finally, America appears to be taking bold action on fixing its fraying infrastructure. President Joe Biden’s proposed American Jobs Plan — despite being negotiated down in a bipartisan deal — is a significant step in addressing one the of the country’s most pressing, deeply rooted, and often overlooked problems: The plan contains a $65 billion budget spread over eight years to close the gaps in the digital infrastructure.

It’s a major investment. Unfortunately, it still falls well short of what’s needed to actually solve the problem. According to our analyses, the budget should have been two and half times as large as the original $100 billion. Let me explain why and what can be done to move forward.

It’s long been acknowledged that even as the digital industry exploded out of this country,

America lived with a “digital divide.” While this is loosely understood as the gap between those who have access to reliable internet service and those who don’t, the true nature and extent of the divide is often under-appreciated.

Internet infrastructure is, of course, an essential element of the divide, but infrastructure alone does not necessarily translate into adoption and beneficial use. Local and national institutions, affordability and access, and the digital proficiency of users, all play significant roles — and there are wide variations across the United States along each of these.

As part of our research initiative, Imagining a Digital Economy for All (IDEA) 2030 (established in collaboration with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth), we disaggregated the digital divide into four distinct components and scored the 50 states along each of these:
  • Infrastructure 
  • Internet speeds;
  • terrestrial broadband
  • coverage;
  • smartphone usage.

Inclusivity: Affordability of broadband; equity of broadband access across income groups; actual usage of the internet at broadband speeds.

Institutions: Political prioritization of broadband strategy; best practices of government use of technology for public services; restrictions on alternative local broadband solutions, such as municipal networks.

​Digital Proficiency: How well people can navigate the digital world, which is shaped by demographic profile, education levels, political tolerance, degree of skepticism about news sourced from social media.

The state of the digital divide across all 50 states can be visualized in the exhibit below:

The Digital Divide Reinforces Divides in Key Services:

The inability to use the internet pushes access to many essential services out of reach. Often, this compounds other inequities and historical injustices.

Consider telehealth, an essential lifeline post-pandemic — particularly with a surge in mental health consultations.

Even as many states expanded telehealth policies to accommodate this surge, our research shows that the digital divide hampered access in New Mexico, Montana, Vermont, and Iowa.

Other states, including West Virginia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and South Carolina, were slow in expanding their policies and are poor in terms of digital access as well.

A parallel story played out with schools. As more than 55 million students moved to online learning during the pandemic, one in five teens, ages 13 to 17, reported being unable to do their homework “often” or “sometimes” because of unreliable Internet access. Twelve million children were without internet access altogether. The challenges varied by location.

To consider an extreme example, 70% of children in the Kansas City school district did not have internet access at home, a problem made worse by the fact that Missouri only spends about $10,600 per pupil, which puts it near the bottom third compared to other states.

The digital divide also reinforces racial inequity. Nearly half of Americans without at-home internet were in Black and Hispanic households. With a 14-point gap in broadband access between white and Black households with school-going children, and a 12-point gap between white and Hispanic households, we find that up to 40% of disconnected K-12 students from Black, Latino, and indigenous communities struggle with insufficient digital literacy, language obstacles, and other disincentives to use the internet and find ways to gain better access.

The digital divisions are likely to keep these historic disadvantages in place in the future. Seventy percent of Black and 60% of Hispanic respondents report being underprepared with digital skills, affecting their employability.

While a third of all white workers in 2018 were in jobs they could do from home, less than 20% percent of Black workers and only 16% percent of Hispanic workers were in jobs that could be done remotely. Without additional intervention to close this divide, a majority of Black and Hispanic workers could be locked out of 86% of jobs by 2045.

The divide has economic costs overall. Access to reliable internet is also a strong predictor of economic opportunity. According to a Deloitte study, a 10% increase in broadband access in 2014 would have resulted in more than 875,000 additional U.S. jobs and $186 billion more in economic output in 2019.

The shift to remote work has been an opportunity to spread talent and economic benefits across the country — 14 to 23 million Americans say they intend to relocate to a different city or region, according to a study by Upwork, and many already have. But while several cities and states have been offering incentives for inbound moves, most of the regions eager for inbound moves also have some of the largest digital gaps.

Consider West Virginia, where the governor is offering $12,000 to remote workers. But according to our analyses, West Virginia ranks 50 out of 50 in infrastructure and digital literacy, 46 in inclusivity and 19 in institutions. Sixty-two percent of urban West Virginia does not use the internet at broadband speeds.

The Digital Divide is Deeper Than We Think — But We Can Still Fix It:

Biden’s original infrastructure budget proposed $100 billion for digital infrastructure. While large, it is actually not large enough: It mirrored a parallel proposal in Congress, which, in turn, drew upon a 2017 FCC estimate that it would cost $80 billion to expand broadband access to every household.

These budgets use an incorrect FCC mapping of access to the country’s digital infrastructure, which pegs the broadband disconnected at “fewer than 14.5 million,” which even the current acting FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, acknowledges is an undercount.

A more reliable “manual” check by the research group, BroadbandNow, estimated 42 million Americans were without broadband; factoring in other challenges in getting people to actually use the service, that number of people not using broadband is arguably much higher.

Using the FCC’s cost structures on these revised figures, our research team analyses the budget need to be at least $240 billion — $175 billion more than the $65 billion allocated under the terms of the current bipartisan deal.

The number could be even higher, as the Biden American Jobs Plan fact sheet calls for “future-proof” broadband and the need to upgrade the nation’s broadband standards to enable high bandwidth-using applications such as streaming video and Zoom conferencing that have proved to be essential through the pandemic.

While the Biden team insists it has creative ways to stretch the tighter budget, it still needs new revenue sources and opportunities to save on costs.

Fixing the digital divide ought to be a priority as it sits at the center of numerous other societal problems, ranging from racial inequities to unevenness of access to essential needs, including health care and education. The execution will need to be locally appropriate and must go beyond filling in physical infrastructure.

I have several recommendations for action. They will require leadership and collaboration across government and business at the federal and local levels.

Use a “Romer” tax to cover the budget shortfall. The current political environment demands that this initiative be paid for without deficit spending. I would recommend turning to the industry that stands to benefit the most from connectivity: Big Tech. The Nobel laureate, Paul Romer, has recently suggested taxing revenues from targeted digital ads, which, in my opinion, would be an ideal revenue source.

Digital ads offer large revenue pools: In 2020, social media advertising revenues were $41.5 billion, while digital video advertising revenue were $26.2 billion and advertisers were expected to spend $59.22 billion on search ads. A tax rate of, say, 19% could help close the $175 billion budget gap over eight years. The tech tax revenues could be collected in a new Universal Broadband Fund, modeled on the Universal Service Fund, by which long-distance telecoms were assessed to subsidize telephone service to high-cost areas.

FCC chair Rosenworcel has said she finds such a proposal “intriguing,” but that “it’s clear that this would require action from Congress.” Maryland has already adopted the idea and other states are considering it.

Coordinate locally appropriate solutions. The digital divide is an aggregate of many divides, with local barriers to be overcome. We should prioritize efforts in states where less than a third of the population has basic broadband access: Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Alabama, and West Virginia. We need to enable new entrants by removing bureaucratic obstacles, such as bans on municipal networks, which currently exist in  18 states.

All states should have a broadband strategy. In addition, a reconsideration of the FCC’s 2017 decision to roll back net neutrality — the idea that internet service providers should not be allowed to favor or throttle service for particular forms of traffic — can help restrain broadband providers from charging more for certain services or content. A federally orchestrated approach will help ensure consistency, inclusion, and a prioritization of resources and regulatory reforms.

Recruit Big Tech and internet service providers (ISPs) to help close gaps. As the government has leverage over the tech giants that are in the regulatory crosshairs — Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple — these companies ought to be encouraged to offer favorable deals on the internet access infrastructure they own. For example, Facebook has high-capacity fiberoptic networks that can be used to provide broadband access, along with its Terragraph technology that can be used to deliver fiber-like speeds in urban settings.

In parallel, major ISPs should also be made to fulfill their outstanding commitments to provide internet access. CenturyLink and Frontier Communications, for example, have taxpayer-subsidized broadband connectivity projects that need to be finished. These “low hanging fruits” should be a key part of the administration’s plan.

Identify gap areas and invite public-private solutions. Given the numerous restrictions on purely public or municipal solutions, the federal government should be open to local public-private partnerships prioritizing the most vulnerable areas to accelerate the process. It can organize a bidding process to solicit solutions and get state governments involved in the process, then set targets for each state and tie subsidies, grants, and additional incentives to hit them.

There is successful precedent for similar projects: Google and the state of California collaborated to connect 100,000 rural households, Microsoft and other companies worked with NGOs on a digital connectivity pilot in East Cleveland, and Facebook’s fiber network helped connect multiple educational institutions in North Carolina.

Update and expand existing affordability programs. The FCC’s E-Rate program, originally designed to provide discounts to schools and libraries for telecoms access, should be expanded to include households with schoolchildren in broadband deserts. Then there’s the federal Lifeline program, designed to provide subsidies for telephone and internet services to eligible low-income households.

However, the service quality was so poor that only 25% of those eligible took advantage of it. This situation can be improved by providing further funding for Lifeline and offering a wider set of better connectivity plans to users.

Build in future-proofing. The standards for broadband need to be raised in order to accommodate the increased demands on internet ecosystems down the road. A bipartisan group of four U.S. senators have even sent a letter to the FCC, the U.S. Commerce Department, and the Department of Agriculture, urging raising the federal broadband standard to 100 Mbps in keeping with these growing needs.

Resistance from cable and telecom companies about such a change in standards needs to be anticipated and managed. (These companies worry that they would be excluded from government grants and subsidies and that competitors backed by public subsidies would have an unfair advantage.) Also, future-proofing should integrate a federal “Dig Once” mandate that would require the simultaneous construction of broadband infrastructure alongside other unrelated construction projects, wherever feasible.

Such a policy could save considerably on construction costs and allow simultaneous construction of broadband infrastructure alongside other infrastructure projects.

Invest in digital literacy. Only 40% of American adults can answer basic questions on topics including phishing, privacy, and cookies. Digital literacy is key to improving adoption, combating misinformation and scams, and limiting the risks of cyber-attacks. Public and private-sector initiatives can build on the foundations set by the Accessible and Affordable Internet for All Act that puts aside $60 million in grants to states seeking to bolster digital literacy programs.

Lifelong digital proficiency programs — beginning at a young age in the broader education system and continuing through later adulthood on the job — can offer Americans a source of resilience against these threats and make them better consumers of the digital ecosystems.

More resources for “digital inclusion funds” and “digital navigators” that already help low-income households and older adults in the use of technology in many cities ought to be scaled-up nationwide

Bridging of the digital divide is both complex and daunting, but there are reasons for hope. Many institutions — both public and private — stand to gain from it being addressed. The pandemic experience is a reminder of the very real costs of the digital divide that have added up over the years: Schoolchildren without internet access fell behind. Residents of internet deserts missed vaccine appointments snapped up by internet-enabled non-residents. 

Disadvantaged minority populations felt the pinch of inadequate high-speed internet access as jobs and job searches went remote. We now have a rare bipartisan agreement on the urgency of solving the problem. Let’s act on it.

The author is grateful to Christina Filipovic, Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi, Joy Zhang, and the IDEA 2030 research team. For more details and data on the digital divide in the United States, please visit Turning America’s Digital Divide into Digital Dividends.
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Digital divide (by Wikipedia)

The digital divide is the unequal access to digital technology, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and the internet. The digital divide creates a division and inequality around access to information and resources. 

In the Information Age in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) have eclipsed manufacturing technologies as the basis for world economies and social connectivity, people without access to the Internet and other ICTs are at a socio-economic disadvantage, for they are unable or less able to find and apply for jobs, shop and sell online, participate democratically, or research and learn.

Historical background:

The historical roots of the digital divide in Europe reach back to the increasing gap that occurred during the early modern period between those who could and couldn't access the real time forms of calculation, decision-making and visualization offered via written and printed media. 

Within this context, ethical discussions regarding the relationship between education and the free distribution of information were raised by thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). The latter advocated that governments should intervene to ensure that any society's economic benefits should be fairly and meaningfully distributed.

Amid the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, Rousseau's idea helped to justify poor laws that created a safety net for those who were harmed by new forms of production. Later when telegraph and postal systems evolved, many used Rousseau's ideas to argue for full access to those services, even if it meant subsidizing hard to serve citizens.

Thus, "universal services" referred to innovations in regulation and taxation that would allow phone services such as AT&T in the United States serve hard to serve rural users. In 1996, as telecommunications companies merged with Internet companies, the Federal Communications Commission adopted Telecommunications Services Act of 1996 to consider regulatory strategies and taxation policies to close the digital divide.

Though the term "digital divide" was coined among consumer groups that sought to tax and regulate Information and communications technology (ICeT) companies to close the digital divide, the topic soon moved onto a global stage.

The focus was the World Trade Organization which passed a Telecommunications Services Act, which resisted regulation of ICT companies, so that they would be required to serve hard to serve individuals and communities.

In 1999, in an effort to assuage anti-globalization forces, the WTO hosted the "Financial Solutions to Digital Divide" in Seattle, USA, co-organized by Craig Warren Smith of Digital Divide Institute and Bill Gates Sr. the chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was the catalyst for a full scale global movement to close the digital divide, which quickly spread to all sectors of the global economy. In 2000, US president Bill Clinton mentioned the term in the State of the Union Address.

During the COVID-19 pandemic:

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide issued stay-at-home orders that established lockdowns, quarantines, restrictions, and closures. The resulting interruptions to schooling, public services, and business operations drove nearly half of the world's population into seeking alternative methods to conduct their lives while in isolation.

These methods included telemedicine, virtual classrooms, online shopping, technology-based social interactions and working remotely, all of which require access to high-speed or broadband internet access and digital technologies.

A Pew Research Center study reports that 90% of Americans describe the use of the internet as "essential" during the pandemic.

According to the Pew Research Center, 59% of children from lower income families were likely to face digital obstacles in completing school assignments. These obstacles included the use of a cellphone to complete homework, having to use public WiFi because of unreliable internet service in the home, and lack of access to a computer in the home.

This difficulty, titled the homework gap, affects more than 30% of K-12 students living below the poverty threshold, and disproportionally affects American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic students. These types of interruptions or privilege gaps in education exemplify problems in the systemic marginalization of historically oppressed individuals in primary education. The pandemic exposed inequity causing discrepancies in learning.

A lack of "tech readiness", that is, confident and independent use of devices, was reported among the elderly; with more than 50% reporting an inadequate knowledge of devices and more than one-third reporting a lack of confidence. This aspect of the digital divide and the elderly occurred during the pandemic as healthcare providers increasingly relied upon telemedicine to manage chronic and acute health conditions.

Aspects;

There are manifold definitions of the digital divide, all with slightly different emphasis, which is evidenced by related concepts like:
​Infrastructure:

The infrastructure by which individuals, households, businesses, and communities connect to the Internet address the physical mediums that people use to connect to the Internet such as desktop computers, laptops, basic mobile phones or smartphones, iPods or other MP3 players, gaming consoles such as Xbox or PlayStation, electronic book readers, and tablets such as iPads.

​Traditionally, the nature of the divide has been measured in terms of the existing numbers of subscriptions and digital devices. Given the increasing number of such devices, some have concluded that the digital divide among individuals has increasingly been closing as the result of a natural and almost automatic process. 

Others point to persistent lower levels of connectivity among women, racial and ethnic minorities, people with lower incomes, rural residents, and less educated people as evidence that addressing inequalities in access to and use of the medium will require much more than the passing of time. Recent studies have measured the digital divide not in terms of technological devices, but in terms of the existing bandwidth per individual (in kbit/s per capita).

As shown in the Figure on the side, the digital divide in kbit/s is not monotonically decreasing but re-opens up with each new innovation. For example, "the massive diffusion of narrow-band Internet and mobile phones during the late 1990s" increased digital inequality, as well as "the initial introduction of broadband DSL and cable modems during 2003–2004 increased levels of inequality". 

During the mid-2000s, communication capacity was more unequally distributed than during the late 1980s, when only fixed-line phones existed. The most recent increase in digital equality stems from the massive diffusion of the latest digital innovations (i.e. fixed and mobile broadband infrastructures, e.g. 5G and fiber optics FTTH). 

Measurement methodologies of the digital divide, and more specifically an Integrated Iterative Approach General Framework (Integrated Contextual Iterative Approach – ICI) and the digital divide modeling theory under measurement model DDG (Digital Divide Gap) are used to analyze the gap existing between developed and developing countries, and the gap among the 27 members-states of the European Union.

Skills and digital literacy:

Research from 2001 showed that the digital divide is more than just an access issue and cannot be alleviated merely by providing the necessary equipment. There are at least three factors at play: information accessibility, information utilization, and information receptiveness.

More than just accessibility, the digital divide consists on society's lack of knowledge on how to make use of the information and communication tools once they exist within a community.

Information professionals have the ability to help bridge the gap by providing reference and information services to help individuals learn and utilize the technologies to which they do have access, regardless of the economic status of the individual seeking help.

Location:

​Internet connectivity can be utilized at a variety of locations such as homes, offices, schools, libraries, public spaces, Internet cafes and others. There are also varying levels of connectivity in rural, suburban, and urban areas.

In 2017, the Wireless Broadband Alliance published the white paper The Urban Unconnected, which highlighted that in the eight countries with the world's highest GNP about 1.75 billion people lived without an Internet connection and one third of them resided in the major urban centers. Delhi (5.3 millions, 9% of the total population), São Paulo (4.3 millions, 36%), New York (1.6 mln, 19%), and Moscow (2.1 mln, 17%) registered the highest percentages of citizens that weren't provided of any type of Internet access.

As of 2021, only about half of the world's population had access to the internet leaving 3.7 billion people without internet. A majority of those are from developing countries with a large portion of them being women. 

One of the leading factors of this is that globally different governments have different policies relating to issues such as privacy, data governance, speech freedoms as well as many other factors.

This makes it challenging for technology companies to create an environment for users that are from certain countries due to restrictions put in place in the region. This disproportionately impacts the different regions of the world with Europe having the highest percentage of the population online while Africa has the lowest. From 2010 to 2014 Europe went from 67% to 75% and in the same time span Africa went from 10% to 19%.

Network speeds play a large role in the quality and experience a user takes away from using the internet. Large cities and towns may have better access to high speed internet than rural areas which may have limited or no service. 

Households can be locked into a specific service provider since it may be the only carrier that even offers service to the area. This applies to regions that have developed networks like the United States but also applies to developing countries, creating very large areas that have virtually no coverage. 

In instances like this there are very limited options that a person could take to solve this since the issue is mainly infrastructure. Technologies that provide an internet connection through satellite are becoming more common, like Starlink, but are still not available for people in many regions.

Based on location, a connection may have speeds that are virtually unusable solely because a network provider has limited infrastructure in the area which emphasizes how important location is. For example, to download 5GB of data in Taiwan it would take approximately 8 minutes while the same download would take 1 day, 6 hours, 1minute, and 40 seconds to download in Yemen.

Applications:

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, surveyed almost 1,400 parents and reported in 2011 that 47 percent of families with incomes more than $75,000 had downloaded apps for their children, while only 14 percent of families earning less than $30,000 had done so.

Reasons and correlating variables:

As of 2014, the gap in a digital divide was known to exist for a number of reasons. Obtaining access to ICTs and using them actively has been linked to demographic and socio-economic characteristics including income, education, race, gender, geographic location (urban-rural), age, skills, awareness, political, cultural and psychological attitudes.

Multiple regression analysis across countries has shown that income levels and educational attainment are identified as providing the most powerful explanatory variables for ICT access and usage. Evidence was found that Caucasians are much more likely than non-Caucasians to own a computer as well as have access to the Internet in their homes.

As for geographic location, people living in urban centers have more access and show more usage of computer services than those in rural areas. Gender was previously thought to provide an explanation for the digital divide, many thinking ICT were male gendered, but controlled statistical analysis has shown that income, education and employment act as confounding variables and that women with the same level of income, education and employment actually embrace ICT more than men (see Women and ICT4D). 

However, each nation has its own set of causes or the digital divide. For example, the digital divide in Germany is unique because it is not largely due to difference in quality of infrastructure.

The correlation between income and internet use suggests that the digital divide persists at least in part due to income disparities. Most commonly, a digital divide stems from poverty and the economic barriers that limit resources and prevent people from obtaining or otherwise using newer technologies.

In research, while each explanation is examined, others must be controlled to eliminate interaction effects or mediating variables, but these explanations are meant to stand as general trends, not direct causes. Measurements for the intensity of usages, such as incidence and frequency, vary by study.

Some report usage as access to Internet and ICTs while others report usage as having previously connected to the Internet. Some studies focus on specific technologies, others on a combination (such as Infostate, proposed by Orbicom-UNESCO, the Digital Opportunity Index, or ITU's ICT Development Index).

Economic gap in the United States:

During the mid-1990s, the United States Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) began publishing reports about the Internet and access to and usage of the resource.

The first of three reports is titled "Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the "Have Nots" in Rural and Urban America" (1995), the second is "Falling Through the Net II: New Data on the Digital Divide" (1998), and the final report "Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide" (1999). 

The NTIA's final report attempted clearly to define the term digital divide; "the digital divide—the divide between those with access to new technologies and those without—is