Abstract
Reviewed by: Nicholas Wise, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Understanding community: Politics, policy and practice by Peter Somerville is an important text that builds on the theoretical and practical understandings of community, communities and community development. The book is organised into 10 chapters. Each chapter presents a number of key and critical conceptual approaches linked to the theme and focus of the chapter. Each chapter also incorporates at least one Box that offers further explanation in terms of practical advice or guidance to emphasise how an association operates or is organised, or presents case studies to help put theory into practice. There is also a summary, questions for discussion and a list of further important readings for educators and students to consider at the end of each chapter. Given this is the second edition of the book, there are three chapters that have been revised (with updated titles) to better focus the book to changes in theory and practice over the last few years—since the first edition was published in 2011. This review will briefly highlight the outline of contents in Chapters 1, 4–8 and 10 and then address the chapters that changed from the first edition (Chapters 2, 3 and 9). I relate some content from this book to papers in the special issue.
Chapter 1 outlines definitions and meanings of community and challenges us as readers to frame how community is perceived. The author discusses this around the significance and importance to place, addressing attachment and identity, which links to my interests (Wise, 2011, 2015), as well as power relations and scale. Chapter 4, governmental approaches to community, is concerned with dilemmas and neoliberalism. The content discussed relates to papers in this special issue by Maurício Polidoro and Daniel Canavese on Brazil and Brij Maharaj on South Africa. Chapter 5 builds on governmental approaches and cooperatives to assess the formation of partnerships by addressing issues associated with top-down and bottom-up approaches to community economic development. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 assess schools, health and housing, respectively. Schooling and health are priorities in any community, and the focus on education is just as important as on health so that residents are involved in co-production. Housing is always highly contested in the community literature based on inclusion and exclusion—led by gentrification and renewal. Chapter 10 offers a summary of chapter themes brought forward in this book and speaks back to how the examples in the United Kingdom are evolving and adapting with time, politics and changing policies.
To assess the amended chapters from the first edition, the issues, content and context presented are much in line with the special issue. Chapter 2 on, capital, class and community, and Chapter 3, political community under capitalism, put emphasis on evolving power relations and set the foundations for discussions of austerity that are further discussed in the following chapters in line with points made my Phil Higson in his paper. Social impacts and issues of inequality are becoming more prominent in the literature, and the discussion and cases presented in Chapter 2 clearly present how these critical issues are affecting communities in the UK and further abroad. Discussions of capitalism on the local working class relate to lead into Chapter 3 that extends the focus on politics, state power and profit. The author positions more recent discussion from the literature outlining neoliberalism and also goes into another issue of scaling up but is driven by profit motives and arguably can take away from more underlying sociological senses of community by focusing on economics and development. The other significantly revised chapter is Chapter 9, community policing, which puts emphasis on the local residents take command of their community to solve immediate pressing issues.
The book continues to be an important contribution that brings together critical aspects of community by integrating theory and practice so that students and readers can relate to the issues and topics presented. The revised sections put much emphasis on capitalism and neoliberalism, and these discussions extend to critical points addressed in several papers in the special issue around place, policies and power relations. The book has much interdisciplinary scope and theoretical points are contextualised in a manner that students from a range of social science backgrounds will find useful. For scholars focusing on community, it is a good reference bringing together contemporary debates to consider when framing arguments or looking for different critical perspectives to consider.