5 - Communities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
Summary
The community provides the setting and context within which the influences of specific social institutions operate. In the early postwar years, community studies were fashionable in the social sciences, spanning the range from anthropological studies of village life to small town studies such as Lloyd Warner's Yankee City series, the Lynds's Middletown, and John Dollard's study of a southern town. John Seeley's Canadian study of Crestwood Heights and Margaret Stacey's English study of Banbury were of the same genre. Urban neighborhoods were studied as “natural areas” forming quasi-communities within which ethnic, class, and other subcultures flourished. There were studies at Chicago of the Gold Coast and the slum, of the little Italies, Chinatowns, and so on. Herbert Gan's study of the West End of Boston pointed up the social supports provided by urban neighborhoods and the importance for urban planners to recognize the human as well as the purely physical characteristics of local areas they were altering; and in Britain, Young and Willmott's Bethnal Green studies had a similar message.
These studies made it clear that the sense of community was not lost in modern society, despite the urbanization/industrialization upheaval of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. Although the people in a modern urban locality do not relate to one another as in a small village, forming social ties in network patterns rather than tightly integrated groups, they do share elements of environmental experience and develop a sense of local identity.
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- New Interventions for Children and YouthAction-Research Approaches, pp. 185 - 241Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987