of community, they could eventually, in Marx’s
Community
Briavel Holcomb
Rutgers University, USA
The word community, derived from the Latin
communitas, has variable meanings but all imply
relationships, whether among people, plants,
or animals. Until relatively recently, and still
to a large extent today, community had spatial
implications. A common usage refers to the
relationships among people in a particular place
and indicates a sense of belonging both to place
and to the social group(s) within it. Attention to
the notion of community followed from Ferdi-
nand Tonnies’s 1887 groundbreaking distinction
between gemeinschaft (communal society) and
gesellschaft (associational society). The former
references traditional, personal, face-to-face
relationships typical of rural life at that time. The
latter identifies less personal relationships follow-
ing from individuals interacting with businesses
and bureaucracies. Gemeinschaft was romanti-
cized as providing deeper senses of belonging
and mutual aid, while industrialization weakened
traditional bonds of family, religion, and kinship.
The writings of Karl Marx center on concep-
tion of community. For Marx, community is a
democratic form of association which replaces
the state. Humans are communal animals and
can only achieve their highest form of existence
in a community. The individual develops in
association with others but Marx saw traditional
village community as stifling, enclosed, and not
conducive to the true freedom and individualism
to which all should aspire. While the cities of
the Industrial Revolution provided the antithesis
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0010
view, provide the possibility of evolving to an
environment in which the individual contributes
according to his ability and receives according to
his need. That perfect community is democratic
and free. It could be, but is not necessarily,
place-based. For Marx, democracy is of the
nature of community. The ideal communist
society is one in which the freedom of the indi-
vidual is obtained through their free association
with others in which all productive activity is a
matter of individual or collective choice.
The famous “Chicago School” in sociology
also offered a distinctive notion of community. In
the first half of the twentieth century, this School
focused on ecological ideas of urban form and
stressed the importance of place and location in
ideas of community formation, while reinforcing
the notion that the modernization of urban life
was reducing traditional values of community
belonging. Louis Wirth’s classic article on urban-
ism, published in 1938, argued that people living
in cities depended on more daily interactions
than their rural predecessors, but that those
interactions were impersonal, superficial, and
transitory. In a heterogeneous society, people
belonged to more groups, but their needs and
preferences were subsumed into those of the
majority. People join groups in order to pool
resources which are directed to serve the average
constituent. Communities, then, are rational or
functional rather than emotional. Another mem-
ber of the Chicago School, Robert Park, applied
ideas of ecology developed for plant and animal
communities to observations of urban life. The
notions of competition, invasion, dominance,
and segregation which were current in ecology
were used to study human behavior and Park
C OMMUN I T Y
emphasized the importance of communication
in the formation of community. Park saw the
city as a series of “cells” in the urban organism
with spatial contiguity of neighborhoods, immi-
grant groups, and functional districts providing
bases for community. Nonetheless, although
he stressed place and locality, Park also was
open to the possibilities of nonspatially deter-
mined forms of human association. He noted
that various urban institutions from schools,
to churches, to street gangs, aided by commu-
nications including newspapers, could create
communities of interest not reliant on spatial
contiguity. The place-based idea of community
so redolent in the Chicago School has remained
a strong theme in both geographical theory and
praxis, particularly in urban areas. However, the
Chicago sociologists assumed the urban soci-
eties were characterized by impersonality, social
disorganization, alienation, and anomie. Urban
places were essentially anti-community in the
conventional sense. Marx’s optimistic predictions
made in nineteenth-century Manchester about
the (r)evolution of industrial cities were not
evident in twentieth-century Chicago.
While ideas of community historically have
not been exclusively place-based or spatial,
the second half of the twentieth century saw
growing recognition of the existence of aspa-
tial or at least not place-based communities.
An early contribution was Melvin Webber’s
1963 “Order in Diversity: Community with-
out Propinquity” in which he argued that
the sociologists’ lament that community was
dead/dying was short-sighted, and that people
were continuing to form communities based
on common interests, professional identities,
and other nonspatial associations. This focus on
time–space distantiation was a relatively fresh
idea in 1963, but was a precursor to subsequent
thought which has, of course, “exploded” with
2
the Internet. Webber likewise noted that tradi-
tional distinctions between rural and urban were
diminishing as people of all occupations could
participate in national urban life.
Around the same period, Herbert Gans and
others argued that the Chicago School was
too pessimistic in its view that industrial cities
destroyed the real sense of community which
had characterized rural village life. Gans’s 1962
classic study of the West End of Boston found
that the cohesive social networks and sense of
identity associated with rural life were replicated
in “urban villages” often based on either ethnic-
ity (Italians in Boston’s case) or class (working
class in London or Chicago). Some reinforced
this view, pointing to the strong ties formed
by shared experience, kinship, friendships, and
attachment to place. But others pointed out that
working-class neighborhoods were frequently
characterized by economic insecurity, social
stress, conflict, and crime. High density, some-
times combined with ethnic diversity, was not
conducive to mutual support and community
enhancement. Some considered Gans a roman-
ticist. But few found a sense of community in
suburbia. Mid-twentieth-century critics, such as
Lynds, Mumford, and Whyte (The Organization
Man), saw suburbia as a place of nuclear families
enjoying privacy and individuality rather than
strong community ties. Nevertheless, Gans’s
(1967) study of suburban Levittown found evi-
dence of communities in which residents chose
to participate in relatively loose association for
purposes ranging from parent–teacher associa-
tions to country clubs, gardening, and the like.
It seemed that urban versus suburban commu-
nities were similar in purpose but different in
execution.
Whether or not community was dead, it
was resurrected by activists and government in
the 1960s and 1970s. Faced with “the urban
crisis,” civil disturbances, and cries for a war

on poverty, various federal programs based on
the presumption of community were initiated,
and in many cases have survived well into
the twenty-first century. The Community
Development Block Grant (CDBG) program
was enacted in 1974 under President Gerald
Ford with bipartisan support. Cities and states
received federal grants and were required to
submit allocation reports showing where and
how the money was spent. The amount of
the grant was determined by such measures
as poverty rate, overcrowding, and amount of
deteriorated housing, and a rural “set aside” sent
a third of monies to rural areas. The idea behind
CDBG was that it would be a “bottom-up”
approach with local people setting priorities
and being involved in deciding where and how
monies would be spent. It was also a reaction to
the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty”
which had spawned a large federal bureaucracy
inappropriate for Republican administrations.
However, perhaps ironically, proponents of
CDBG included such organizations as ACORN
(Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now), begun in 1970, which grew to
the largest community organization for low and
moderate income people before disbanding in
2010. ACORN and other activist community
organizations of the period were inspired by
the ideas of community organizer Saul Alinsky
(who had studied with Robert Park at Chicago).
Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals (1971) was based
on his experience organizing with the Industrial
Areas Foundation. He recommended working
with the “have nots,” the poorest segment of
society, and stressed the need to communicate
in organizing. Alinsky was both idealistic and
pragmatic. Among his rules were: Make the enemy
live up to its own book of rules. Ridicule is man’s
most potent weapon. Never go outside the expertise of
your people. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
ACORN survived until 2010 but other less
C OMMU NITY
radical alternatives, such as the Industrial Area
Foundation, continue today to carry on similar
community organizing.
CDBG has, of course, had its critics, who
argued that its priorities and execution were
flawed. Critics noted that some projects on
which funds were spent were frivolous and did
not target the most needy, and the amount
of money allocated had declined (from US$2.7
billion in 1975 to $1.7 billion in 2014). Although
the program was conceived with an antipoverty
agenda, much of the money now is widely
distributed to middle and even upper income
places, while that going to lower income com-
munities may be spent on infrastructure which
makes places more attractive to middle income
residents. CDBG monies have paid for tennis
courts, recreation centers, and senior citizen
centers in well-off communities, sugarcane mills
in Hawaii, and, reportedly, psychic readings for
a mayor in Texas. Yet CDBG remains a viable
program as local people receive federal funds
for locally determined needs. In the United
States, the Community Development Society,
an organization formed several decades ago with
a mostly US-based membership, is devoted to
helping professionals engage with community
members to improve the sustainability and well-
being of communities. Among their principles
is that members should disengage from support
of any effort that is likely to adversely affect the
disadvantaged members of a community. The
society holds annual conferences for practitioners
of community development and publishes Com-
munity Development quarterly. The articles include
both theoretical and case-based contributions,
focused primarily on North America.
A considerably more international perspective
is that of the Community Development Jour-
nal, a quarterly that claims to be the leading
international journal in the field and seeks
to publish articles that challenge conventional
3
C OMMUN I T Y
wisdom, suggest innovations, and relate to issues
of social justice, diversity, and environmental
sustainability. Published by Oxford University
Press, a recent (July 2013) issue included arti-
cles about communities in Columbia’s mining
region, fishing versus oil production in Ghana,
and the role of anthropology in New Guinea’s
extractive industries. While providing provoca-
tive reading, the journal complicates the task
of defining community development and chal-
lenges the conventional wisdom that community
is local by showing the many ways communities
are linked to outside, sometimes distant, forces.
The adage “think globally, act locally” (a saying
attributed to various people) might be thought
of as a theme of the journal.
Cities throughout the world have recently
seen the growth of “specialized” communities
often catering to particular interest groups such
as the elderly or the affluent. Ironically, per-
haps, the first retirement community established
was Youngtown, Florida, and was followed by
hundreds of others in warmer states like Arizona,
California, and other parts of the world. Such
communities may provide a continuum of hous-
ing from independent living to assisted living
or even nursing homes. They typically cater
to middle income residents and have services
which build community among them, such as
shared club houses and sports facilities. Not sur-
prisingly, they have both advocates and critics of
segregating older people into physically discrete
locations, most of which ban younger residents
and children, except as visitors. But proponents
praise the social capital built by shared spaces and
activities.
Gated communities, now proliferating in many
countries, range in size from small developments
to larger villages. They typically have limited and
guarded entrances and may be surrounded by
fences. It is assumed (possibly wrongly) that this
reduces crime, but it also increases the number of
4
rules and regulations residents must obey, many
to do with the appearance of property. Gated
communities are popular, with over 11 million
residents in the United States. They offer shared
amenities and, presumably, an enhanced sense
of community. They are, however, criticized as
exclusionary and catering to the affluent. In some
Latin American countries, Saudi Arabia, India,
and South Africa, gated communities are desired
for their assumed increased security as well as
their prestige. Critics of gated communities are
many, but so are their proponents. In possible
contrast, “intentional communities” are part of a
movement which has its roots in utopianism and
blossomed in the 1960s in the United States, but
continues to be a lifestyle of choice for a small
but significant segment of the population. Inten-
tional communities are those in which residents
live together with a common purpose, often
working cooperatively to create a lifestyle that is
typically eco-friendly, and based on shared val-
ues. They include rural villages, residential land
trusts, and urban housing co-ops, as well as com-
munities for particular groups such as Christians
or gays. The movement publishes a magazine,
Communities, which gives advice on establishing
and maintaining intentional communities.
In a perceptive book Lyn Lofland (1973)
discussed how in preindustrial societies most
people knew most of the people with whom
they came in contact on a daily basis. Strangers
were few and far between; however, in the
industrial city, we know very few people we
see in the course of a day with whom we are
acquainted. Most people we see are strangers.
Thus, while we may feel we live in a “commu-
nity,” we have evolved ways of interacting with
unknown people by assuming commonalities
with them. Subsequent critics have argued that
in fact current city dwellers no longer assume
or rely on community, but instead go “bowling
alone,” as Putnam (2001) warned. Putnam

described the decline of participation in civic
and other social groups during the period after
about 1970 in the United States. He notes that
voter turnout and membership in voluntary
associations, including churches, all declined.
Americans and other “Westerners” started to
spend more time on individual leisure pursuits
(movies, watching – not playing – sports) and
less on eating meals together, playing on teams,
and other communal activities. Americans gave
less to charities proportionately, and while the
rate of volunteering grew from 1970 to 1990,
most of the increase was due to people over
sixty years old. Trust in strangers decreased and
hitchhiking died. While community thrived
among some specialized groups (e.g., evangelical
Christians, self-help groups), overall people felt
much less connection to community, and what
Putnam (and others) call social capital declined.
Putnam attributes this decline in community to
such things as suburban sprawl and the replace-
ment of local shops with regional malls, the
increase in commuting to work alone by car, and
the increase in TV viewing. But, according to
Putnam, if we can rebuild social capital we will
be more prosperous, healthier, and happier. We
might do so by involving young people in mean-
ingful civic projects, making workplaces more
family-friendly, reducing commuting times,
using mixed-use zoning and pedestrian-friendly
streets. While Putnam’s arguments were not
wholly new, his book was influential in calling
attention to what may be a decline in feelings of
place-based community commitment in some
parts of the world in this century. Other advanced
industrialized and suburbanizing countries (e.g.,
United Kingdom, Japan, Australia) experienced
similar trends. In China the rapid growth of
cities caused by rural in-migration has disrupted
traditional rural communes, but new forms of
urban communities have evolved. Putnam’s work
generated considerable response, many people
C OMMU NITY
pointing out that while local neighborhood
participation may have declined, membership
in larger groups has grown. DeFilippis (2001)
is among Putnam’s critics, pointing out that
social capital without financial capital has limited
utility in community development.
Technology, at first the telephone, now the
Internet, has greatly facilitated the emergence
and maintenance of a great diversity of com-
munities, some place-based but many essentially
aspatial. The idea of geographically dispersed
community was central to Anderson’s (1983)
Imagined Communities in which he describes
ways in which people of a nation feel a sense
of belonging to a group which never meets in
person, but which is assumed to have certain
interests in common. While such communities
have territorial limits, they are imaginary in the
sense that the members of a nation may have little
in common and few mutual interests. Ironically,
perhaps, while Putnam and many others attribute
a major reason for the decline of community
to media (such as TV), Anderson attributed
the imagined communities of nations of early
modern Europe to the ability of entrepreneurs to
print books in the vernacular rather than Latin.
Early European states were thus able to find and
distribute ideas of nation in their own language,
leading to a decline in the belief of divine rights
and the beginning of modernity.
Ideas about community have been revolu-
tionized by the Internet. Today, it is probable
(at least in the United States) that citizens feel
more connected to online, virtual communi-
ties than to their place-based community. An
early discussion of some implications of this
was Rheingold’s (1994) The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rhein-
gold’s involvement followed from an online
discussion group (the WELL – Whole Earth
’Lectronic Link) in 1985. The group had grown
to over 8000 members by 1993 and while some
5
C OMMUN I T Y
met in the “real world” (San Francisco, nat-
urally!), most communicated online. By 1994
Rheingold noted that the Internet enabled
many communities, and allowed people to find
a date, sell a lawnmower, publish a book, and
conduct a meeting. He was largely optimistic
about the community-building potential of the
Internet, noting that it encourages the sharing
of interaction, interests, and passions. He argued
such interaction could challenge the monopoly
of mass media and invigorate democracy. But
he also presciently warned of the danger of
corporate monopolies in cyberspace and the
role of government in monitoring web content.
He understood the challenges to privacy that
the then new technology provoked, and which
remain today.
Since Rheingold’s initial book on virtual
communities, much scholarly work has been
devoted to understanding these new iterations
of community, with both praise and criticism of
their effects. While critics point out the loss
of in-person socializing (the many hours spent
in front of person-avoiding screens and the
stultifying tedium of much content), others note
the ability to connect with others with similar
interests (or problems) who are geographically
distant, the ability of invalids and other “shut
ins” to make meaningful contact, and even the
emotional benefits to being part of a network
of people coping with similar adversities such as
disease or disability. Similarly, while in-person
attendance at local community meetings may
have declined, civic engagement among espe-
cially the young has been encouraged by online
media. Online chat rooms provide possibilities
for interaction with others with similar inter-
ests and concerns. Emotional support can be
accessed quickly and cheaply, though not always
reliably. Renninger and Shumer (2002) praise
the opportunities for building diverse communi-
ties – from young girls to math teachers and other
6
learning groups – which online communication
facilitates.
While there are thousands of online com-
munities, virtual worlds are probably the most
interactive. Second Life, a virtual world run by
Linden Labs, has millions of members, although
most are inactive and regular “residents” number
about a million. Nevertheless, Second Life is
a “place” which emphasizes community and
enforces community standards (such as forbid-
ding intolerance, harassment, and “assault” – you
may not shoot or shove virtually when the res-
ident is in a safe area). Although teenagers may
join Second Life, much of its content is inap-
propriate for children and a rating system is used
to designate “adult” areas of the virtual world.
As its website claims, in Second Life there is
always someone to talk to, dance with, and learn
from. You can meet people from all over the
world without leaving your home. A children’s
equivalent is the game Minecraft in which
players manipulate digital landscapes to build
desired terrains either individually or in teams.
Minecraft has been downloaded 20 million times
and is quite addictive.
Changes in meanings of the word “com-
munity” from place/neighborhood to interest
group, often facilitated by online communica-
tion, are evidenced by data from Google’s Ngram
viewer. The single word “community” appeared
in books infrequently until the twentieth century,
but increased rapidly after 1950, with double
peaks in the 1970s and 1990s. (In Chinese the
word “community” peaked in 1920 and 1970.
In French and German there were marked
increases after 1940.) However, the term “Urban
Community” in English had a major peak in the
early 1970s (correlating with the passage of US
federal legislation related to community), while
the term “gay community” rose rapidly in the
1980s to the end of the century (and probably
continues to the present, though the Ngram

viewer does not cover the period after 2000).
Google Scholar shows over a million entries
under “gay community” while there are 1.5 mil-
lion for “women’s community,” 3.2 million for
“black community” (and 2 million for “African
American community”) and 3 million for
“white community.” Obviously, none of these
“communities” are constituted of people who
know each other, though they may (or may
not) have interests in common. Clearly, the
meaning of community has migrated from
primarily place-based association, or geograph-
ical community, toward that of mutual interest
or characteristic, while still often maintaining
its original territorial connotation. As Collins
(2010) argued, this shift from territory to interest
group has important political implications as
communities of various kinds now constitute
sites of political engagement and contestation.
The spatial or geographical meaning of com-
munity continues to be prevalent in the fields of
community mental health and community polic-
ing. The former are services which substituted
for care provided in mental hospitals, many of
which were closed in the mid-twentieth century
in a movement to deinstitutionalize mental
patients. Community mental health centers were
established to provide outpatient psychiatric
treatment to lessen the social exclusion of the
mentally ill. Though it has its critics and is
habitually underfunded, it remains the model
for mental health provision in both the United
States and United Kingdom, and assumes that
people are better off staying “in the community”
where social relations can be maintained. Simi-
larly, the notion of community policing, which
emerged in the late 1970s, encourages police
to develop good relationships with citizens and
key stakeholders in neighborhoods, to establish
neighborhood substations, conduct foot patrols,
and attend community meetings.
C OMMU NITY
The largest online “community” is proba-
bly Facebook, with over a billion members.
While Facebook publishes community standards
(relevant to terrorist threats, nudity, hate speech,
and the like), it also has “communities” within
it devoted to cooking or celebrities or whatever
generates interest. Facebook nurtures off-line
communities as it provides a way for friends
and neighbors to keep up with each others’
lives. It has been shown to enhance social capital
(among college students) and to build political
support for candidates. For geographers, the
location-based social networking site Foursquare
is of interest since it uses global positioning tech-
nology to locate members, enhance commercial
enterprises, and enable the meeting of friends
in real time/space. The rapid growth of online
communities and the geographical implications
of location-based networking is a fertile field for
further research (Erickson 2010).
If the meaning of community is stretched to
include online communication between people
who are gathering in a virtual space for political
change, one can argue that the various Face-
book/Twitter “revolutions” are bringing people
together both online and in the material world to
create sometimes radical social change. The first
such occasion was in Moldova in 2009 when the
Communist Party was overthrown for a coalition
government. Although public demonstrations
had been planned prior to the election, the role
of social media (especially Twitter) in effecting
the mass mobilization which happened in the
streets of Chisinau was partly responsible for the
political movement. The following year (2010),
Iranian “dissidents” hoping to foster change
used Facebook to rally support for the candidacy
of an opposition leader, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
The Facebook page was administered from
outside Iran, due to government censorship, but
nevertheless was able to organize defiant nightly
“Allahu Akbar” chants from rooftops in Tehran
7
C OMMUN I T Y
as well as various street protests. Ultimately, this
has not led to the change desired by government
opponents. It could be said that the Jasmine
Revolution (in Tunisia) was enabled by the
community-building potential of online social
networking.
In conclusion, as the notion of community has
expanded from place-based localities to interna-
tional connectivity, the geography of community
still matters, and Smith (1999) urges us to con-
sider the implications of community for ethics
and morality. Geographers are among those who
contribute to the development and strengthening
of real-world communities. In New York State,
the Syracuse Community Geography group pro-
vides geographical assistance to help build a more
just society, and geographers in many parts of
the world are offering their expertise and energy
to encourage ecologically and socially beneficial
communities.
SEE ALSO: Behavioral geography; Chicago
School; Emotional geographies; Friendship,
geographies of; Gated communities;
Geovisualization of social media; Home;
Neighborhood; New Urbanism; Social
geography
References
Alinsky, Saul. 1971. Rules for Radicals: A Practical
Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Random
House.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2010. “The New Politics of
Community.” American Sociological Review, 75(1):
7–30.
DeFilippis, James. 2001. “The Myth of Social Cap-
ital in Community Development.” Housing Policy
Debate, 12(4): 781−806.
Erickson, Ingrid. 2010. “Geography and Commu-
nity: New Forms of Interaction among People
and Places.” American Behavioral Scientist, 53(8):
94−207.
Gans, Herbert J. 1962. The Urban Villagers: Group and
Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. New York: Free
Press of Glencoe.
Gans, Herbert J. 1967. The Levittowners: Ways of Life
and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Lofland, Lyn H. 1973. A World of Strangers: Order
and Action in Urban Public Space. New York: Basic
Books.
Putnam, Robert D. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Col-
lapse and Revival of American Community. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Renninger, K. Ann, and Wesley Shumer. 2002.
Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change
in Cyberspace. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rheingold, Howard. 1994. The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York:
Harper-Perennial.
Smith, D.M. 1999. “Geography, Community,
and Morality.” Environment and Planning, 31(1):
19−35.
Further reading
Atlas, John. 2010. Seeds of Change: The Story of
ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty
Community Organizing Group. Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press.
Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope.
Cambridge: Polity.