Community Assessment

A fair part of what I have been doing at the internship over the last six months involves Community Assessment. In particular we are assessing community readiness to adopt initiatives from community-based organizations. Rather than detail the minutiae of my daily activities I am going to be discussing a couple of central questions in the next few posts

How do we define communities?

Under the construct that I use, communities are defined as a type of social network bounded by geography and held together by culture. This, however, doesn't mean at all that any geographical unit can be defined as a community. For example, we couldn't fairly assess the "Southwestern US" community. There comes a point where diversity and size break down our understanding of what a community is. If that example was a bit too much of a rhetorical exaggeration, then I will tame it down a little. If the city of phoenix were to be described as a community, could it be fair? I would argue "no" as there is an assumed level of cohesion between community members that I don't think is justified. The diversity of people in the area causes a breakdown of the construct. Also this makes it difficult to assess communities that share a culture but only a general geography. For example, since I have moved here, I have noticed a fairly high number of people from Eastern Europe (The Balkans, Romania, and Russia in particular). However, there is no well defined part of town that I have noticed them in. I have spoken with a Romanian man who estimated the population to be around 40,000, but well dispersed throughout the Valley. So what then of my question?

It seems to me at least, that understanding communities as a geographically bound, social network has broken down for this area. First, because of the way that we have decided to settle into an area. Ethnic culture clearly isn't the primary factor that we use to decide to move into the area. Also, geography plays a smaller role in diminishing our communications (e.g. commercial, symbolic, verbal). This means that even if we were to define a community within an area like Phoenix, there is perhaps too much "static" coming in from other communities to clearly understand it alone. I have developed no clear address to this issue other than these key points:
-Communities in the traditional sense may not easily exist in an area such as this
-Economics is a primary motivator in settling patterns
-We live in politically defined areas more so than geographically defined ones (e.g. city/county boundaries)