Why Community Matters

Winner of the EDRA 2015 Book Award! Community Matters: Service Learning in Engaged Design and Planning explores issues that resonate with a diverse group of design and planning educators drawn to the challenge of supporting greater community building and empowerment while combining learning with practice. The book explores such questions as: How do we foster mutuality and reciprocity in community-academy partnerships? What conflicts, challenges, limits and obstacles do we face in our service-learning studios and projects? What evidence do we have of our impacts on students and communities and how are we responding? How are we being attentive to the contemporary environmental and societal issues? What is our role as both designers and agents of societal change? How are we innovating to enable greater capacities for individuals, future practitioners and communities? This book provides compelling evidence that educators should be adopting engaged pedagogies, research methods and theories through which they can bring together education, practice and scholarship at the boundary of community and academy.

Providing a new perspective on the undeniable relationship between education reform and democratic revitalization, Nicholas V. Longo uncovers and examines practical models in which communities play an essential role in teaching the art of democracy.

Community Matters is unique in its use of a contextualized, interactionist approach to analyze the nature and extent of community. Its theoretical discussion of community as process is expanded through the inclusion of arguments raised in political science and philosophy, and is balanced by descriptive analyses of a diverse selection of communities. This book helps bridge the divide between works of academic argument concerning civil society and community life and books explicitly focused on presenting practical information on what is and is not effective in community work. Community Matters shifts attention away from a conceptualization of community as a fixed evolutionary stage identified with specific types of settings, and instead provides numerous illustrations of the dynamic quality of social ties and community life. This book convinces readers that they can and should study community and community matters. A Burnham Publishers book

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources presenting both emic and etic views, this book offers an insight into aspects of social life among the Uyghur in pre-socialist Xinjiang and substantiates the concept of tradition which modern Uyghurs draw upon to construct their ethnic identity.

Communities are not static or stationary organisms. They are fluid and dynamic and change over time. The role of community development in the change and transformation of a community is critical to improving and enhancing the quality of life of the community and its residents. This book examines how community development changes a community and why that change matters, while also examining the relationship between community development and social capital. When a community improves its social capital, change can happen because people can leverage their networks to produce better results for themselves. This book also looks at comprehensive community development and collective impact models and several case studies that utilize these models. It also looks at how the transformation and revitalization of a neighborhood through new housing creates opportunities for people everywhere, and how effective placemaking strategies empower diverse groups of people in a community to reimagine their public spaces and the built environment to be more livable, walkable, creative, and sustainable while fostering greater connections with people in their community.

International, multi-disciplinary perspectives on the key question of community engagement in theory and practice in a diverse range of heritage settings.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.