Searching for Community : Melbourne to Delhi

This book offers a community-centred study of cities stretching from Australia to India, including Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Colombo, Singapore and Melbourne. It proposes that the study of communities in cities is vital to understanding how they can sustain themselves given their unprecedented global growth. The book asks such important questions as: how can we build adaptive capacity to meet new global challenges? Can a focus on community help address questions of ecological sustainability and social justice, when the global war on terror is creating widespread fear of strangers and others? Can a re-assertion of community help address rising rates of crime, social tension and new forms of marginalization in globalizing cities? The case studies presented in this book are so heterogeneous that some will find it impossible to identify common threads. However, there are important unifying themes. They demonstrate that many people still yearn for a sense of community, and that in a rapidly globalizing world people living in different countries now have more in common than they did in the past. At the same time , it has become increasingly complex to create inclusive and nurturing communities in a world of global flows. This will raise major challenges for policy makers and community leaders in the future. The volume offers a new way of cutting through old debates about the relevance of community. The achievement of community may be rare, but the case studies demonstrate that the search for belonging, for a sense of community, is persistent and ubiquitous. (jacket)