What is community?

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Andersen (imagined communities): power of nationalism to define and prescribe a sense of community that transcends physical nature, but is located in mind and heart

Wenger (communities of practice): community is about working together as a practice

Nursey-Bray: community has been defined as a place; as in a territory or place-based community where people have something in common, or there is a shared geography

Cohen: communities are formed via attachment, and they are communities of meaning

Tonnie: community related to gemeinschaft, thus a group of people that share common bonds around traditions, beliefs or objectives

Bartle: community as a collection of human individuals organised as a socio-cultural system within six dimensions relevant to community and culture (i) technological, (ii) economic. (iii) political, (iv) institutional (social), (v) aesthetic-value amd (vi) belief-conceptual.

Lee-Newby: community as a set of interrelationships among social institutions in a locality

Kaufman: community is first a place and second a configuration as a way of life, both as to how people do things and what they want, to say their institutions and goals

Johnson: community as a collection of people who share a common territory and meet their basic and social needs through interaction with one another

Reference

Nursey-Bray, M. (2020). Community Engagement: What is it?. In Dominique Hes, Christina Hernandez-Santin (Eds.) Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment, Melbourne, Australia: Palgrave macmillan, pp. 83-105

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