Community Building

2 Community Assets and the Community-Building Process Historic Perspectives

Community-building practice of the twenty-first century can gain much from an understanding of how the concept of community assets has been used in various action settings in the past. This chapter compares examples of scholars/practitioners’ writings about community assets in community-building practice from the present and the past. Intertwined with these examples are reflections on my experiences with what these days would be called “community building.” My conclusion is that, to be effective, community building must include processes that incorporate community assets. It is clear that community assets are crucial to community building and have been recognized as such since the 1950s. My view is that this is not a new idea, although it has been expressed differently through time. The specific disciplinary, ideological, and contextual situation of the scholar/practitioner no doubt results in different emphasis and focus. The most constructive path through this variation is to look for the common themes and to compile from the diversity a more richly nuanced conception of community assets, rather than attempt to find the “best” version. We can start the process with an important aspect of the topic, community itself. 25 2 Community Assets and the Community-Building Process Historic Perspectives John van Willigen 25 Anthropologists have been concerned with community in their research and action practices since the beginning of the discipline. The intensity and conceptual clarity with which anthropologists have dealt with community has varied through time. In the period following World War II until the end of the 1960s, anthropologists’ concern for community was especially intense. Many of the most frequently cited theoretical (Redfield 1955), methodological (Arensberg 1954; Arensberg and Kimball 1965), empirical (Banfield and Banfield 1958; Dollard 1937; Miner 1939, 1949), and practical studies date from the late 1930s to the 1960s. The emergence of the community study method (Arensberg 1954) encouraged much of this intensity. Both anthropologists and sociologists were actively involved in what could be thought of as the “community study movement.” Within anthropology, community study appears as a transition away from the use of “whole cultures” as the unit of analysis in the study of communities, marking the shift from historicalism to functionalism. Community studies focused on the culture and practices of people in named localities. The majority of the studies concentrated on rural places, often villages that were small and dense enough to allow some sort of interaction. The approach was also apparent in urban research in the framework of either a “neighborhood as village” (for example, Whyte 1943; Gans 1962a) or a social network (for example, Bott 1957). The concern with social space is evident in one very widely cited definition of that time, which stated that community is “the maximal group of persons who normally reside together in face to face association” (Murdock 1949:79). The community studies thread in anthropology and sociology was closely associated with a mode of social intervention called “community development practice” that emerged during roughly the same time. Community development had a special technical meaning. In the language of today, one would have to stress its participatory and community -building aspects; it did not just make physical improvements to the community. Projects not based on the community’s “felt needs” and not involving participatory community-building processes might be called “community development,” but community development practitioners viewed these as inauthentic, defective, and probably harmful. Classical community-development practice emerged from several John van Willigen 26 historic threads, including indirect rule and mass education in British colonial administration. Early special use of the term community development replaced the term mass education at a conference on administration in Africa organized by the British Colonial Office (Mezirow 1963:9). Similar ideas were expressed in US government-sponsored development through organizations such as the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) (Mezirow 1963). In addition, within the United States, there have been community development activities in the US Department of Agriculture/Land-Grant University–based Cooperative Extension Service, as well as in what was called “community organization practice” within social work. Another important thread is the work of Saul D. Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation. Expressed through various community organizations, such as Chicago’s Woodlawn Organization, and in a series of books (Alinsky 1946, 1971), Alinsky’s strategy was more confrontational than that advocated by those operating through the Cooperative Extension Service. The classic evolved statement on community-development...