The Geography of Community : Understanding the Role of Geography in Building & Sustaining Healthy Communities

Abstract

With the rapidly changing and culturally shifting socio-economies and technologies of the last few decades, much attention has been given to the concept of community, its demise and fragmentation, and what can be done to build and strengthen it (consider Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, 2000, and Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging, 2008 & The Abundant Community, 2010). From “senses of community” to “community development”, “imagined communities” to “communities of practice”, from neighborhoods to nations, community has been examined from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives: sociology, psychology, geography, political science, urban affairs, planning, law, architecture, health, sustainability, and tourism, among numerous others. Cutting across much of this literature is explicit and implicit recognition of a geography inherent to community. This is seen in references to such things as space, place, scale, landscape, and the natural and built environments. This project examines the academic literature to identify, document, and acknowledge the myriad ways in which a geographic perspective and awareness enhances an understanding of community and efforts to build and support it.