A SOCIAL NETWORK of interacting individuals, usually concentrated into a defined territory.

The term has been very widely used and is applied in a wide range of (both academic and vernacular) contexts. It thus has a large number of separate (often implicit) definitions (Stacey, 1969) and as a consequence 'What community means has been disputed for even longer than the effects of place' (Bell and Newby, 1978): in the UK, for example, ETHNIC groups are often referred to as communities, irrespective of whether they occupy clearly identifiable TERRITORIES.

Bell and Newby follow Schmalenbach (1961) and define community as something more than the sense of belonging to an active social network - which they term 'communion'. Membership of a community involves 'a matter of custom and of shared modes of thought or expression, all of which have no other sanction than tradition': one belongs to a community, but may be conscious of that only when it is threatened. Thus community does not involve emotional ties, which are characteristic of communion: a community may stimulate such experiences, providing the context within which they can develop, but all communities are not necessarily in communion.

Interest in communities in sociology and SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY can be linked to the work of the CHICAGO SCHOOL, and in particular its evaluation of the social and behavioural consequences of URBANIZATION (cf. URBANISM) Tonnies's original concept of Gemeinschaft identified communities as particular types of social network (i.e. community as form of human association), and was not concerned with community as either a local social system or a finite, bounded physical location (i.e. a territorially defined social whole). Later workers brought the three together into an all-embracing definition, and thus stimulated the term's wide range of usages.

For the Chicago sociologists and their followers, the enhanced definition of community was consistent with their contrast of the (assumed) impersonality and social disorganization of urban life with the (also assumed) closely integrated social networks of rural areas, as expressed in their concept of a RURAL-URBAN CONTINUUM. Rural communities were presented not only as the norm against which urban societies could be compared (see URBAN VILLAGE) but also as the desirable condition: rural communities were integrated and stable and so not conducive to individual ALIENATION and social problems, whereas urban societies were much more disorganized, and potentially characterized by ANOMIE and thus widespread social disorganization. This glorification of the rural was associated with anti-urban sentiments, as in the GARDEN CITY movement in late nineteenth to early twentieth-century Britain (see Pepper, 1990): rural societies were good because their communities were in communion, whereas those in urban areas were not. Only later studies (such as Frankenberg, 1966) argued that whereas urban areas may lack certain positive characteristics relative to rural counterparts, they may also have their own positive features which are lacking from rural areas.

Community studies declined in popularity throughout the social sciences (except social anthropology) from the 1960s on. The introduction of the concept of LOCALITY in the 1980s suggested a returning interest in such local social systems to some observers, but Giddens (1984) nowhere equates LOCALE with community in his presentation of the former as central to STRUCTURATION THEORY.