ancient cities

Co M M u n i t y st u d i E s
Community studies is an academic field concerned
with the study of community and the characteristics
of particular localities. A key focus of many programs
of community study is the effects of social
change upon the form and function of social life
within such specific settings. Unlike more theoretically
oriented research on the concept of community,
the field of community studies employs the methodological
tools of the social sciences as a means by
which to describe, contextualize, and investigate the
sociocultural and psychological dynamics that affect
everyday life in the community.
Research conducted on community in this sense
is often directly concerned with the effects on
social and economic life of such variables as family,
youth, health, leisure, gender, employment, immigration,
education, crime, poverty, and inequality.
As such, community studies is often closely linked
with policy implementation and analysis.
The Origins and Development
of Community Studies
The predominately Anglo-American tradition of
community studies has been primarily concerned
with the holistic analysis of the social organization
and institutional structure of three distinct settings:
small towns, rural areas, and working-class districts.
Although definitional tensions continue to
plague the precise meaning of the term community,
the interdisciplinary field of community studies has
generally assumed the mandate of investigating patterns
of social groupings or population aggregates
contained within a particular setting. The field has
its origins in three complementary approaches.
First, the study of population growth and demographic
change by social surveyors, statisticians,
and social reformists working in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was a notable
precursor of what later became known as the community
study. Although focusing largely upon
issues of health and sanitation in overcrowded and
impoverished urban conglomerates, implicit within
such investigations was an emphasis on the effects
of social change and modernization upon the
social and moral order of community life.
Second, many of the investigative and methodological
approaches utilized within community
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studies have also been influenced by the classificatory
schemas of cultural anthropology, particularly
in regard to how such variables as employment,
family, kinship, political structure, and patterns of
religious belief contribute to the stability of the
social order and the maintenance of a functionally
integrated society. Although later criticism sought to
reveal the complicity of anthropological theory and
method with colonialism, the fundamental focus
placed upon the everyday dynamics of community
life served as a point of commonality between classical
anthropological studies, traditionally conducted
in distant locales, and the application of such
approaches in Western societies.
Third, the founding fathers of sociology were
concerned with the decline of traditional social
relations amid the transformation from folk society
to urban society. Fearing that traditional ways of
life and communal relations were being threatened
with dissolution by the increasing heterogeneity
and sheer social complexity resulting from the
combined forces of industrialism and urbanization,
classical social theory sought to explore the effects
of social change upon community life and mechanisms
of social integration. Building upon the legacy
of these three traditions, community studies
subsequently emerged as an independent focus of
study in its own right to occupy a central role in
sociology, anthropology, social geography, urban
studies, and social policy programs.
Although primarily concerned with empirically
demonstrating the transition from a rural to a predominantly
urban society, early work on community
exhibited a strong continuity with the concerns
of classical social theory: namely, the transition from
an agrarian to an industrial-based urban economy,
the shift from folk to mass society, and the general
tendency to dichotomize the nature of community
and society in terms of tradition and modernity,
respectively. Whereas traditional society was seen as
the repository of the bounded, harmonious, and
homogenous community, modern society was seen
in far more heterogeneous and differentiated terms.
It is in this sense that critics of community studies
have suggested that the notion of community
employed at the heart of community studies is an
outmoded one and unsuited to the often antagonistic
nature of community life in its contemporary
manifestations. Despite this discrediting, the semantics
of community continue to be regularly evoked in
a wide range of disciplinary fields.