1
Introduction

Some people may have roots and others may have routes, but all do community. In Köpenick, a district in the south-east of Berlin, a few 30–50-year-olds, mostly men, meet at the Old Forestry, the stadium of their football team 1. FC Union; their casual public behaviour and visible familiarity with one another suggest long-term understandings of the place and its shared history. They do community as a ‘public doing’, inside and outside the stadium: they greet old acquaintances, chat, inquire about friends of friends and old schoolmates, and drink beer. While they make their way into the stadium with their annual passes, they move alongside groups of distinctively stylish ‘new’ Berliners, male and female. These ‘new’ Berliners come to the match too, now that the second league's team seems to be something of a cult. The first kind of people are clearly rooted; their narratives of place and their performance of local identity construct a community. They contrast with the ‘new’ Berliners, who have adopted the city as their own for the time being, as they are en route. These fans compare notes on the ‘feel’ of the stadium in East Berlin, evoking other leagues, in other cities and in other countries, which also draw strong local crowds. These ones have routes; their narratives of place and their performances of temporarily local identities construct a community too, but one of a very different type – at least in the eyes of a sociologist.

Community as a concept, Hamilton writes (1985: 8), ‘provides both a means of encompassing a wide variety of social processes and an idea which has much more than a technical meaning, for it refers to symbols, values and ideologies which have popular currency’. Community manifests itself in the details of everyday life. Society transforms, but people ‘continue to place a high value on what they call communities’ (Charles and Davies 2005: 672). By giving value to communities, they hold imaginations of what they are. As Anderson argued in his influential book Imagined Communities, ‘all communities […] are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson 1991: 6). But how do such imaginations occur as social figurations? We may ask people where they feel they belong or what they perceive as their community; but, after having done that, we still have gained little understanding of the processes and mechanisms that bring about such communities and our experiences of them. We know that ‘place’ assumes a certain meaning (or not) in such perceptions, but we don't know how. How does community, as it is imagined, come about in, or as a form of, social practice?

Recent scholarship on belonging has aimed to theorize the meaning of place for people's sense of belonging anew in times of increased mobility. Yet talking about where one belongs is one thing; experiencing belonging through practice is quite another. For this reason Benson and Jackson (2013: 794) have emphasized the need to incorporate performativity into discussions on belonging: ‘People do not merely select a place to live that matches their habitus; rather, places are made through repeated everyday interactions and interventions that work both on the neighbourhood and the individual.’ A sense of belonging is not simply a feeling, but the outcome of practices, especially of performances, or social practices ‘in front of others’ (Helbrecht and Dirksmeier 2013: 286). Urban spaces provide important stages for such performances (ibid., 283). This small book explores the idea of community as urban practice.

As more and more people do not live where they were born and routes, for example diasporas, can become a source of connection and togetherness, the construction of what ‘community’ means is increasingly diverse, dynamic and contested. Yet the long-time residents of Berlin Köpenick sense that ‘community’ has changed. What can be observed at the Old Forestry resonates with what happens in other places.

Italian Americans in New Haven, Connecticut, experienced that their ‘community’ had changed. Initially a community of Italian immigrants working in New Haven factories, the neighbourhood underwent decay when Italian Americans moved to the suburbs. Displacement when a highway was built across the area meant the end of local attachments through daily practices. The migration of African Americans from the South of the United States to northern cities transformed its demographics further. Today Italian Americans come back to celebrate their lost community and heritage at parish feasts and local festivals, distancing themselves from white middle-class residents who have since moved in and gentrified the neighbourhood (Blokland 2009a). ‘Native’ Dutch older women in Hillesluis – a Rotterdam neighbourhood where most men used to work for a shipbuilding factory closed long ago – now share with people from over 50 nationalities a shopping street in which all butchers have turned ‘halal’. When they complain that they cannot buy pork chops anymore, these women, too, express the feeling that their ‘community’ has changed (see Blokland 2001). Some may even hint that a crisis is afoot. A lot was not right under the East German regime, but collective memories include the notion that community was more cohesive and more supportive and that, notwithstanding all the control from the Stasi and the effect this had on trust, people held together; and this kind of community is now lost. The Italian Americans opted for single-family homes with lawns and white picketed fences when they could afford it; but they believe that the solidarity of the old neighbourhood has never been replaced. Poverty reigned and religion and politics caused clashes in Rotterdam's Hillesluis in the years before the Second World War, but ‘we used to be more one’ is a well-known comment.

Is this all just nostalgic lamenting about a lost community? Nostalgia and community go hand in hand, as nostalgia gives meaning to current experiences of self and identity. According to Field and Swanson (2007: 11),

popular cultural myths […] most significantly […] provide people with the vocabulary and beliefs to understand and cope with a myriad of challenges within the city. Our sense of self and identities are in the process of becoming through continuity and discontinuity, sameness and difference, belonging and displacement, private and public presence.

(Field and Swanson 2007: 11; see also Lasch 1991: 120)

Popular imagination, which includes nostalgic representations of the past, shapes identities and gives agency. As Leydesdorff (1994) has argued in her study of the memories of a community of Jews in Amsterdam before the Second World War, constructions of the past serve more of a role in the here and now than they do by reflecting how things used to be. Similarly, Fentress and Wickham (1992: 126) note that ‘the way memories of the past are generated and understood by given social groups is a direct guide to how they understand their position in the present’. The very existence of such shared narratives shows that community is still a ‘public doing’ – as Jenkins (1996) put it, notably in a small book on identity – if only ‘constituted symbolically’, as the reconstruction of a community that no longer exists (Charles and Crow 2012: 400; see also Morgan 2005: 563–4). Through nostalgia, fragmented communities can be performed as cohesive and unified: nostalgia ‘becomes a means of making connections’ (Savage et al. 2010: 117) and shapes narratives of place-based belonging (ibid., 156). So I would say: no, the narratives of East Berliners, Italian Americans or Rotterdammers are not just nostalgic lamenting about a lost community.

In the examples above, narratives of the past serve as public performances that show us that community may have changed but is all but lost: what is lost – or, better, has been transformed – is the one-to-one fit of ‘a community’ with ‘a place’. Communities overlap in large cities, may not even be geographically fixed, can consist of occupational groups or religion or a location on the internet rather than be geographical (Charles and Crow 2012: 400). As Konings, van Dijk and Foeken (2006: 4) show in the case of African cities, links with the wider world, even across a nation's border, have gained importance. Hence imaginations of communities may have referents to localities, but people increasingly do not stick to the places where they were born and raised and form connections across large distances. However, in laypersons' use of the term ‘community’, this transformation of the connection between community and place comes across as if community itself was lost.

Yet the need for community seems everywhere. Urban planners need to work with ‘the community’; policy interventions need support from ‘the community’; activists organize protests on behalf of ‘the community’. Housing movements and civil rights movements organize protests through ‘community’ in cities like Mumbai or São Paulo. Identity politics, including concerns to ‘be heard and recognized rather than subsumed in a homogeneous liberal democratic citizenry’ (Macdonald, Edwards and Savage 2005: 596), resurrect an interest in community. Often problems with ‘community’ are ‘held responsible for aspects of social life which worry people greatly, including loneliness, crime, fear and disorder’ (Day 2006: x). Political uses of ‘community’ can homogenize categories into community. When a man with a Turkish migration background stabbed a teacher in a school in a Dutch city a few years ago, politicians requested a statement from the leaders of ‘the Turkish community’. Similarly, as described by Werbner (2005: 747), the riots by young South Asian Muslims in Oldham and Bradford, deindustrialized towns in the north of England, led to calls on the ‘Asian community’ to ‘integrate’. Werbner continues:

It is significant that the Bradford or Oldham communities that were said to lack leadership and cohesiveness were not conceived of as exclusively Asian or white – they included both, obliterating difference. What was thus racialized, pathologized and indeed criminalized, was the internal social cohesiveness and cultural distinctiveness of the ethnic community, and secondarily, of the white working class communities […] adjacent to it.

(Werbner 2005: 748)

In initiatives for, actions in the name of, or appeals to communities, time and again, the term ‘community’ comes up. Whether positive or negative, it is used to point to an entity that is cohesive, hangs or sticks together, and has clear boundaries. Most often, those boundaries are thought to be social in the sense that the end of community is where networks end, and geographical, or limited to a certain area. Community is thus a widely used term. It has the convenience of being imprecise and loaded with positive connotations, a social ‘something’ that we cannot be against (Williams 1976: 65–6; Etzioni 1995; Tam 1998 – all quoted in Day 2006: 14).

This imprecision, the moral connotation and the political currency of the term may also be the reasons why today's urban scholars, like other social scientists, are reluctant to use it. Whereas they have few reservations about other fundamentally contested concepts, especially concepts that are clearly on the left of the political spectrum, ‘community’ seems to put them off. It is out of fashion, even old-fashioned, maybe inherently conservative. The new terminology in urban studies is instead one of belonging, home, attachment to place and identity. I speculate that this change of terms sometimes has clear conceptual reasons, but at other times reflects a fear to touch words or themes that matter to the residents of Berlin's Köpenick, of the General's Square in New Haven or of Hillesluis in Rotterdam but are not easy to position within the dominant critical urban studies. The problem with community is that it is always political – always intensely connected to power – but not by definition politically at home in either critical urban studies or urban studies of a more conformist – if not conservative – character. Only because, in social sciences, the original approach to the idea of community has associated it with ‘organic’ and natural features does this entity seem to ‘inevitably […] belong more with the social order of the past’ and is it equated with ‘situations of stability and persistence’, so that the discussion has a bias in a conservative direction (Day 2006: 6) and ‘change [has] become constructed as its enemy’ (ibid., 8).

Too often, ‘community’ has been used to cover less benign political practices, to define outsiders and scapegoats, to make moral appeals for support for or participation in actions that harmed other groups and individuals; and it has functioned as a vehicle for power and its exercise in processes of nation formation (Anderson 1991). Politically it may suggest cohesiveness and homogeneity at the expense of openness to change and diversity. In its academic history, the term too easily suggests cohesiveness and homogeneity in a way that does not quite fit the contemporary world of mobilities and diversity. When ‘encounters with strangers and cultural differences are inherent components of daily life’ in the city (Dirksmeier, Helbrecht and Mackrodt 2014: 300) and this is how many urban scholars see the world (Amin and Graham 1997; Valentine 2007; Vertovec 2007), maybe other concepts, such as ‘belonging’ or ‘place identity’, have become more useful. And so much has been written about community that one may ask whether there is anything left to add. Already in the 1950s, Hillery (1958) listed 94 definitions of community. Over 35 years ago Stacey (1969) was wondering whether community is a useful abstraction at all. To Stacey, making ‘sense of belonging’ by placing it at the core of community makes community a residual concept (ibid., 134). Indeed definitions of community often imply a sense of belonging, as they include communal interests and identities, often linked to specific locations (Watt 2013: 226). With all the problems surrounding the concept of community, one may wonder whether it is a useful concept for urban studies. If it cannot be defined outside normativity, if it cannot be measured easily, if we cannot agree on what it means, maybe it makes more sense to throw it out altogether. Do we really need another book on community, then? I think so; and here is why.

First of all, community continues to manifest itself in the details of everyday social life. Many social transformations, often summarized by container concepts like postindustrialization, globalization or late modernization, have affected the ways we relate to other people in time and in space, under the time–space compression (Harvey 1989). Bauman (1990: 38–42, in contrast to Gans 1962: 104) points out that physical proximity – say, living in the same neighbourhood – and mental proximity are not the same thing: ‘mental or moral proximity consists of our capacity (and willingness) to experience fellow feeling: to perceive other persons as subjects like us, with their own objectives and rights to pursue them, with emotions similar to ours and similar ability to feel pleasure and suffer pain’ (Bauman 1990: 40). But people, and not just those who feel a loss, ‘continue to place a high value on what they call communities’ (Charles and Davies 2005: 672). Especially in highly and rapidly changing cities, we seem to wonder who is still included in a fellow feeling and how boundaries that separate those who are not included are being drawn.

Second, ‘community’ has high currency in social policy and politics, especially when it becomes the secret weapon against all sorts of ‘evils’, from neighbourhood disadvantage, poverty and unemployment to child behavioural problems and crime in cities. Turning to community-based solutions can be seen as conservative politics – a retreat from national problems (Fisher and Romanofsky 1981: xii). In such policies, community becomes the equivalent of a type of social cohesiveness in families, neighbourhoods and cities that should provide the social capital and collective efficacy to make problems go away (on social capital, see Blokland and Savage 2008; on urban change and social capital, see Blokland and Rae 2008). Neighbourhoods do not all have to be village-like, but in policy and politics, as well as in certain parts of academia, the consensus seems to be that some sort of public life of social capital is necessary for neighbourhoods to remain liveable (Lofland 1989: 90). Urban scholars cannot just turn their backs on the concept and dismiss it as part of the neoliberal project (van Houdt and Schinkel 2014). While it may well be very true that a call for sustainable communities, for example, is a neoliberal discourse or that pleas for stronger communities are a form of neoliberal responsibilization (ibid.), policies will not change as a result of academics' registering that. If politicians and policymakers are going to communicate with ‘communities, they need someone to communicate with’ (Taub et al. 1977: 433) even though residence may be less and less a source of community in people's everyday performances. Urban problems in everyday life are now too pressing, so that we cannot wait for the rest of the world – that is, the world outside circles of radical urban scholars – to become enlightened about the pitfalls of neoliberalism. Systemic change may take a while to happen. Hence, for the time being, we may also – and I say also, not instead – want to spend some time carefully dissecting the connection between community and place implicit in such policies, so that we can productively criticize the spatial determinism of such approaches (see Gans 1991 on spatial determinism).

Third, globalization is rapidly changing urban life. Under the banner of ‘comparative urbanism’, urban scholars are making the claim that they are trying to move away from their Global North orientation to a more global way of seeing the urban world (Robinson 2016). We thus need to reflect on the way community is understood thus far. At first it was firmly grounded in villages and neighbourhoods, in a mosaic of social worlds that were fixed, bounded and immune to the influences of ‘the outside’, as if they were constructed only locally and not relationally embedded in the wider world. This understanding of community long dominated the British strand of community studies, as exemplified by Frankenberg's (1957) Village on the Border – the study of a Welsh village seen by its residents as a community united through kinship, acquaintance and isolation (see also Pahl 2005: 625). For Frankenberg, ‘community’ could be operationally defined through social coherence, locality and community sentiment (Morgan 2005: 642). He approached it as a locally bounded entity, the internal structures of which could be studied and described, especially by applying ethnographic methods. This approach shows similarities with the stream of community studies that used anthropological methods to analyse the social structures of ‘entire’ places in the United States, of which Lynd and Lynd's (1929) Middletown is the most famous. We will see that there is also an analogy with community studies of the Chicago School.

Yet social transformations not only affected the ‘self-esteem’ of communities (Pahl 2005: 632), such that people would feel that they entered a time of lack of community – even though, as Pahl (ibid., 633) points out, that formation may only have existed in people's minds in the first place. The rapid social changes also produced a need to rethink community as a sociological concept and to move away from the morphological understanding of it that could be found in these early community studies. Epstein (1964, quoted in Hannerz 1980: 145) made this point in his study of Luanshya. The alternative towards which scholarship on community moved focused on social networks and social capital (Pahl 2005: 649), or on what is called personal communities, which provided, at least in Morgan's assessment, ‘a more accurate reflection of the way we live now rather than analyses based on geographical areas’ (Morgan 2005: 652). As Bell and Newby (1974: xlvii) observed, ‘it was gradually realized that common location in the physical structure of a community could only be a starting point for an investigation and few sociologists could read this factor as the sole independent variable’.

Recently innovations in the study of community have turned to elective belonging (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2005; Watt 2009). While this line of research captures mobilities and routes in relation to place, it narrows community down to a personal matter, as I will discuss later.

The present book shows that these perspectives provide important insights into processes of place making but do not suffice. They do not help us understand how communities are imagined as collective and cultural figurations. I purposively use the rather abstract notion of ‘figuration’ here. From a relational sociological perspective, a figuration is ‘a generic concept for the pattern which interdependent human beings, as groups or individuals, form with each other’ (Elias 1987: 85; on relational sociology, see Tilly 1998 and Emirbayer 1997). To understand community as a cultural and collective entity, this book argues, it is necessary to see it, in Jenkins' (1996) words, as a set of public practices (see also Roy 1994: 154). Recently urban sociologists and geographers have developed a renewed interest in public practices or performances (Benson and Jackson 2013; Dirksmeier et al. 2014). I do not believe that addressing the social from a theoretical angle of performance is a new enterprise. But I believe that using ‘performance’ – a public practice – as a tool to think with enables us to sharpen our theoretical understanding of community in a globalized, urban world.

Hence I aim to develop here a modest theory of community as urban practice. As we will see, neither the normative content of solidarity and togetherness nor the type of ties in which people engage in their networks exhaust the contemporary understanding of community in a global urban world. I propose to think about community through the lens of various forms of social relations – from fluid encounters to durable engagements – rather than to assume that certain types of relationship – say, with neighbours, family, friends – form the backbone of community. I will argue for an understanding of community that turns away from reifying it as a spatial concept. Instead, urban community as a set of public doings may, but does not have to, find its anchoring in neighbourhoods. Where it does, it may not include all local residents without making such a community problematic. This, then, enables scholars to study the relevance of community within the variety of relations in the city (Hannerz 1980: 72), as a set of empirical practices that make up the city, including its power relations and exclusions. We then no longer have either to assume, idealistically, that neighbourhoods are our contemporary communities or to lament, nostalgically, that they have ceased being that. And, even when we no longer see communities as themselves localized, community can still be urban:

In whatever terms people are set apart from each other or thrown together according to other principles of organization, those who end up in the city also rub shoulders with each other and catch glimpses of each other in their localized everyday life.

(Hannerz 1980: 99)

In what follows I first show that the old concepts of classical sociology and urban studies still heavily influence our (and also my) thinking about community but must be criticized on various counts: their focus on industrialization and class, the contrast they draw between the urban and the rural, the romanticism they evoke. I then discuss the trend in community studies to move away from morphological understandings to personal communities construed as networks of weak and strong ties. I do realize that some of you may find this a dull exercise. It has become increasingly fashionable to jump into academic discussions with ‘original’ arguments of one's own, right away. However, I cannot do so. Everything I argue is directly based on my (selective) reading of what scholars have said about community before me. So, whether you like it or not, I am going to take you through some of their ideas first. I argue that, in the context of community as practice or performance, what has been labelled ‘absent ties’ should be included in our theory; thus the network perspective alone provides useful insights but does not suffice. The understanding of community as a personal matter of network ties sits uneasily with the symbolism of a cultural understanding of community. Moreover, it can do little with what I will define as the ‘public familiarity’ produced by ties that are other than personal.

Yet, as I show in chapter 3, these other ties are especially important under conditions of globalization, in which practices of community respond to a ‘risk society’ (Beck 1986) or to a society in which social bonds become brittle and insecure, in ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000: 169–70). Here ontological insecurity expresses itself in insecurities about the local (among other kinds). Bauman uses the metaphor of a liquid society because ‘liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape’. Liquids constantly change: ‘patterns, codes and rules to which one could conform, which one could select as stable orientation points and by which one could subsequently let oneself be guided […] are nowadays in increasingly short supply’ (ibid., 7). While some, especially middle-class urbanites, may define their social identities and place connections through performances of elective or selective belonging, others develop transnational identities that question the connection between community and one single place. Or they identify across ethnic boundary formations, including through practices of exclusion that are at least symbolic – and possibly also social, in the sense that they help to hoard opportunities (Tilly 1998). Such exclusions, then, bring our attention to power, perhaps the most ignored aspect of community – except in political science debates on community power. Such debates do not deal with the power to exclude from community but rather consider community as a place and study political power within it (for an overview, see Harding and Blokland 2014: 32–6).

‘Community’ sounds nice and it is hard to argue ‘against’ it per se; but chapter 4 shows that a concept of power is integrally needed for the study of community, and in a different way from how it appeared so far. Especially when the community as practice involves collective actions with claims regarding urban space, the hierarchy of places that characterizes the city becomes a hierarchy of communities and identities, furthering discriminations and opportunity hoarding. This, I argue in the final chapter, opens a door to saying that community always implies boundary work. Less clear is how such boundaries are drawn when community involves not the neighbourhood, as the according to its definition, and not only social networks. If we see ‘community’ as a cultural concept, the sets of public practices that constitute community and the ‘public familiarity’ that they create become central to our discussions. In a liquid, globalized urban world, this means that the categories on which such practices are based are constantly in flux. This opens up new avenues for exclusion, but also for progressive social change.

Finally, the reader should be warned that all the unsourced quotations in Chs 4, 5 and 6 come from my own interview notes and other raw research material.

Series page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1
Introduction