The Community And The Citizen

The arts are situated at the centre of policies and programs seeking to make communities more creative, cohesive or productive. This book highlights the governmental, aesthetic and economic contexts which shape art in community, offering a constructive account of the ties between government, culture and the citizen.

Excerpt from The Community and the Citizen The important changes in our community life, and especially in our methods of self-government, that have occurred during the seven years since the present volume was first published, have made a revision desirable. In no particular, however, has the original point of view been departed from, nor the method of presenting the subject modified. The soundness of a point of view and of a method of elementary in struction in citizenship, which were novel seven years ago, has been abundantly confirmed by their wide acceptance and by visible results in the life of pupils and of communities. The only justification for the book, in its original or revised form, is in its point of view and method. It will be successful in the hands of the teacher in proportion as they are realized in the work of the classroom. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Drawing on fundamental ideas about the relationship of citizens to the public sphere, Richard C Box presents a model of `citizen governance'. Recognizing the challenges in the community governance setting, he advocates rethinking the structure of local government and the roles of citizens, elected officials and public professionals in the twenty-first century. His model shifts a large part of the responsibility for local public policy from the professional and the elected official to the citizen. Citizens take part directly in creating and implementing policy, elected officials coordinate the policy process, and public professionnals facilitate citizen discourse, offering the knowledge of public practice needed for successful `citizen gover

The titles in the Be An Active Citizen series encourage readers to take an active role in their community. The titles explore what it means to be an active citizen and how to participate respectfully in the democratic process.

Best-selling author and educator Jason Ohler addresses how today's globally connected infosphere has broadened the definition of citizenship and its impact on educators, students, and parents.

Politicians, citizens, and police agencies have long embraced community policing, hoping to reduce crime and disorder by strengthening the ties between urban residents and the officers entrusted with their protection. That strategy seems to make sense, but in Citizens, Cops, and Power, Steve Herbert reveals the reasons why it rarely, if ever, works. Drawing on data he collected in diverse Seattle neighborhoods from interviews with residents, observation of police officers, and attendance at community-police meetings, Herbert identifies the many obstacles that make effective collaboration between city dwellers and the police so unlikely to succeed. At the same time, he shows that residents’ pragmatic ideas about the role of community differ dramatically from those held by social theorists. Surprising and provocative, Citizens, Cops, and Power provides a critical perspective not only on the future of community policing, but on the nature of state-society relations as well.

Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship addresses community as the site of participation, production, and rights of citizens and brings to bear a profound critique of a collective process that has historically excluded working class communities and communities of color from any real governance. The argument is that the status of citizenship has been influenced by a society that emphasizes the role of property in defining legitimacy and power and therefore idealizes and institutionalizes citizenship from an individualistic perspective. This system puts the onus on the individual citizen to participate in their governance, while the political reality is that organizations and corporations and their interests have great power to influence and govern. The chapters present an exciting departure from the long-standing traditions of the social basis of citizenship. In Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship, Rodolfo Rosales and his contributors argue that citizenship is a communally embedded and/or socially constituted phenomenon. Hence, the unfinished story of American Democracy is not in the equalization of communities but rather in their ability to participate in their own governance - in their empowerment.