Describes community planning as an empowering professional practice. Compares the empowerment practices of process-focused and product-focused planning. Uses stages of rational comprehensive planning and stages of community empowerment as the context. (SK)

The example of Chicago's Humboldt Park, where there is reluctance to use political action in response to gentrification, shows the limitations of communitarian conceptions of community building, which emphasize self-help and consensus building but fail to acknowledge the need for political articulation of rights-based demands. (SK)

Although much of the community development work undertaken by women in Northern Ireland could be described as community relations, women's reluctance to use that label has led to neglect of their significant contributions. A more inclusive definition of community relations is needed. (SK)

Three years' observation of a community development project on a council housing estate in England, focusing on housing issues, produced a qualitative assessment of the process of the project at the management and community level. (JOW)

Discusses the increased interest in community development and the support for community-development training. Describes community-development training aimed at practitioners in the professional sector and at public servants in the bureaucratic sector. (JOW)

The Bristol (England) Festival against Racism illustrates the value of personal contacts and informal networking in developing community coalitions. The project resulted in a 12-step model for conflict resolution. (SK)

O'Gorman provides "Five Points for Reflection" on nongovernmental and community organizations in Brazil. Speyer and Tedrus discuss "Community Libraries: An Experience in Community Development in the Periphery of Sao Paulo." (SK)

Since the 1980s, community development in Australia has become professionalized and operates in a milieu of deregulation and privatization. Development workers struggle with questions of integrity and compromise and the contradictory pulls of modernism and postmodernism. (SK)

This taxonomy of effective community development approaches in service delivery, capacity building, advocacy, and social mobilization identifies the degree to which they can empower people. (SK)

Thought and practice from the green movement should be used to widen understanding of the environment and development of community projects for a sustainable economy and convivial communities. In turn, community development's expertise in democratic processes could inform environmental action. (SK)

In the 1960s-1970s, a paternalistic approach to community development yielded to client self-determination. The 1990s saw the rise of two new forms: liberal neopaternalism, in which interventions are not for individual development but prevention of harm or crime; and caring neopaternalism, in which interventions focus on the quality of existence.…

The social inclusion emphasis of recent British policy has renewed community development efforts for capacity building and civic participation. Funding remains precarious and the independence of the community development sector be continuously asserted. (Contains 26 references.) (SK)

Focuses on the community disintegration caused by violence and conflict in South Africa. Examines the need for social reconstruction and development and the challenges facing community workers in the changing social and political context. (SK)

Empowerment is a contested concept, an ideology creating new forms of control. Conceptualizing it as a multilevel construct is a step toward building a new hegemony for the working class, by raising consciousness of control, participation, shared vision, and ownership. (SK)

Community work is critical pedagogy because it is located at the interface of liberation and domination. Community workers are situated either as perpetuators of the status quo or as agents of transformative change. (Contains 29 references.) (SK)