ancient cities

Co M M u n i t y
The concept of community has appeared regularly
throughout urban studies and is generally
employed in reference to all aspects of the social
life of cities, including population size, demographic
distribution, and neighborhood composition.
Traditionally used by anthropologists,
sociologists, geographers, and urban planners to
signify a set of social relationships operating
within a specific boundary, location, or territory,
community is arguably one of the most contested
concepts used in the study of the city and society.
Many of these usages are either actual or ideal in
description, and it is often difficult to separate
analytical from normative usages of the term.
Although conventionally evoked to describe the
characteristics of a specific locality or area, the idea
of community has also been used in far more ideological
terms as a means by which to substantiate
a particular identity (e.g., lesbian community) or to
further a specific political project (e.g., communitybased
grassroots activism). Recent definitions of
community have tended to depict it more in social
and political terms rather than as a distinctly spatial
structure.
Defining Community
Notwithstanding the fact that community has been
notoriously difficult to define in any concise and
uncontested manner, four broad approaches can be
identified. The first approach conceives of community
as a set of social relations occurring within a
distinctly spatialized and geographical setting.
Within the disciplinary fields of anthropology, sociology,
geography, rural studies, and community
studies more generally, there exists a rich body of
work that has focused upon the form and function
of specific communities in this sense of the term.
A second approach conceptualizes community
as the outcome of a particular mode of social interaction
among individuals or social groups. Premised
upon varying degrees of consensus and conflict,
this more sociological approach essentially views
community to be the product of ongoing negotiation
between social actors.
Community has been used in a third sense to
describe a particular type of social relationship
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between the individual and society. This perspective
is perhaps closest to a commonsense interpretation
of community, as it evokes the notion of
community as a search for belonging and desire for
group membership.
The fourth approach looks at how the foundational
nature of community has been decisively
altered by innovations in the use of communications
and computer technology. According to this
view, developments in communicative and virtual
technology have fundamentally undermined more
traditional conceptualizations of community and
radically altered the means by which individuals
and social groups generate bonds of attachment.
Rather than defining community in terms of geographical
or spatial proximity, communities in this
sense are virtual and cyber-based.
Classical Formulations of Community
Variously conceptualized throughout classical
social theory as threatened with dissolution by the
advent of modernity, the concept of community
has proven to be a resilient and recurrent trope in
both theoretical and practical analysis. Writing in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
European classical sociologists such as Ferdinand
Tönnies and Émile Durkheim expressed concern
regarding the breakdown of traditional social
bonds and sources of moral cohesion. The dynamic
effects of industrialism, demographic growth,
immigration, and rapid urbanization were seen as
combining to produce a fundamental rupture
between the traditional social formations of folk
society and those of modern urban society. In this
view, the obligatory ties of duty and responsibility
toward the community that were characteristic of
premodern society were being replaced by social
formations based on mutual differentiation and
contractually based social relations.
Tönnies suggested that forms of communal association
based upon family, kinship group, and spatial
proximity (Gemeinschaft) were yielding to forms
of societal association premised upon impersonal
and contractual relationships (Gesellschaft). This
view essentially suggested the realization of community
to be incompatible within the institutional complexity
of modern society. According to Tönnies, the
transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft entailed
a fundamental sociopsychological shift in human