This work includes introductory material on the community with emphasis on the inner city, prefaces to each group of readings, the readings themselves, and bibliographies. The book presents readings on topics that are central to an understanding of social change in the inner city. The first section, on the city as community and as bureaucracy, provides background to the other three, on education, police, and welfare. Each segment of readings includes three types of literature: (1) a descriptive selection, using traditional concepts; (2) an article about an issue or a case study; and, (3) a conceptual article, mainly theoretical. The order chosen fits in with the conception that experience is essential to learning. Thus, the description of an issue or problem begins with widely held assumptions; then, learning requires a discussion of these issues from a novel point of view. Finally, one task of the theorist is to take the concepts that delimit an aspect of the real world and to show that another set of concepts can lay bare the skelton to reveal a familiar problem to be quite different when the rhetoric and assumptions of familiarity are removed. (Author/JM)