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The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated
 
 

The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated (Paperback)

by Dave Clements (Author, Editor), Alastair Donald (Editor), Martin Earnshaw (Editor), Austin Williams (Editor)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Pluto Press (20 Oct 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0745328164
  • ISBN-13: 978-0745328164
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 44,908 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #56 in  Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Sociology > Family & Social Groups > Marriage & Family
  • See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Review

'The Future of Community is a much-needed challenge to the complacent and flabby orthodoxies currently dominating the debate. It asks all the right questions: What are communities? What's so great about them? How do they really thrive? How much can politics, architecture, technology or voluntary work destroy or help sustain them? What are the unintended consequences of well-intentioned but misguided attempts to bind society more closely? By asking these questions and often suggesting compelling answers, this book will lift the communities debate to another level.' --Julian Baggini, author of Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind

'This powerful book is an alternative to the tradition of swansongs to lost communities. It shows that official and semi-official 'community creators' can only construct fragile pretend communities that often reveal their deep distrust of citizens. It argues that, if ordinary people are left alone by those who think they know what's best for them, the possibilities of human co-operation and the building of new communities are greater than ever.' --Professor Dennis Hayes, Oxford Brookes University, co-author of Basildon: The Mood of the Nation


Product Description

We are constantly being told that communities are under threat, that we are losing a sense of community . This book finds that the notion of community in Britain is actually threatened by the very thing intended to protect it; relentless government and third party interventions bent on imposing their own forms of social cohesion on the population. There is no doubt that modern societies, underpinned by a ruthlessly competitive and individualistic economic system, have undermined ties of family, solidarity and commonality. However, when an idea of community is articulated it is almost invariably along conservative and reactionary lines -with unelected spokespersons unquestionably accepted as 'community leaders', and with formal contractual relationships taking the place of 'traditional' social order. The short, punchy articles in this book criticise attempts by the state and other agencies to correct the so-called collapse of communities. This book is for students and citizens looking to get beyond the hysterical rhetoric of the government and media to find out about the real communities of the 21st century.

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4.0 out of 5 stars You will be engaged. They just don't know what in., 17 Aug 2009
This book provides a much-needed critique of top-down political strategies to "heel our broken Britain", at the same questioning the extent to which a sense of community has actually broken down. There are undoubtedly problems, most clearly illustrated for me in the reluctance of adults to discipline young people in public (or to back me up on the bus when I've tried to discipline them). The government response to both real and perceived problems ranges from repressive legislation such as ASBOs to strategies to "engage" communities through volunteering, and heeling our "vulnerable" selves (and in the process shifting the blame from the social to the individual), or re-designing public space. However, as is argued, while the desire to engage communities seems sensible, the strategies on offer are often limited and patronising. Distrustful of grassroots community associations, the authorities only want us to engage on their terms. But devoid of a political vision of the good society they want to engage us in, this either ends up as engagement for its own sake, or, as some writers' point out, more to cohere the elite themselves. And no matter how innocuous state engagement strategies can seem, there's also often a level of coercion involved, as the desire to improve "wellbeing" inevitably leads to the politics of behaviour. However, all is not doom and gloom, as the positive experience of Brazilian immigration into the small Galway town of Gort shows, despite elite fears of the inability of people to interact normally left to their own devices; and as people's reaction after the 7/7 London Bombings shows "the capacity of individuals to take responsibility for themselves and to make common cause with others ... remains, and often asserts itself even under the most difficult circumstances."

This is an accessible and enjoyable read, made more so by being able to debate it with joint-editor Dave Clements at Manchester Salon earlier in the year. The 14 self-contained chapters (plus intro and conclusion) analyse specific but overlapping aspects oft he debates around the contemporary sense of loss of community; providing a great introduction to its subject, yet at the same time offering important insights into something that affects us all in one way or another. Communities may not be in great shape, but their far from dead.
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