Community Action and Planning: Contexts, Drivers and Outcomes

Community Action and Planning: Contexts, Drivers and Outcomes, Edited by Nick Gallent and Daniela Ciaffi, Policy Press, University of Bristol, 2014, 304 pp., £70, ISBN 978-1-447-31516-2This is a long edited book consisting of a stamina-testing 17 chapters from a range of academics and practitioners involved in community planning. The twenty-plus authors develop their work around the interactions between governance, government, community activism and planning. One of the first things to notice is that the work is drawn entirely from developed economies, covering Spain, Australia, France, Scotland, Netherlands, USA, England, Italy, Canada, Germany and Norway. This is deliberate and provides a good deal of research, structured as it is in four parts that first frames the debate on community-based planning, next looks at the contexts and drivers for community action and then considers planning at the community level. The final section looks at scale, influence and integration.The first part has three chapters to provide a conceptual framework for the book. The editors, Gallent and Ciaffi, open up by outlining how the purpose is to examine community action in contrasting planning and local government contexts. This is followed by Rydin's chapter, which emphases the role of social capital in local communities, and then Matthews, who brings in the concept of time as a factor in community development. The second section has a more case-based approach laid out. I'm not sure whether it is by design or default, but Vila continues to show the importance of history in an analysis of the neighbourhood movements in pre- and postFranco Barcelona.In contrast, Kilpatrick et al. consider community health initiatives in small rural Australian fishing and farming communities. We return to an urban setting in the chapter provided by Messaoudene et al., who look at two low-income communities in Marseille, while the final chapter in this section, provided by Satsangi, considers volunteering, togetherness and community involvement in land-ownership in rural Scotland.Part three of the book provides a further six cases that demarcate between communitarian planning, which arises from community processes, and community planning derived from the actions of the state. In their work on the Netherlands, van der Pennen and Schreuders argue for a Fourth Way that mediates the 'contradictory rationales and patterns of working' (p. 136) between formalised state action and the more subjective experiences of community experience. In chapter 9, Dandeklar and Main compare a well-resourced and poorer community and show limited impacts from collaborative planning. Parker then looks at how a parish in England is brought into the planning process, drawing out lessons from the Localism Act 2011, which sits in contrast to Ciaffi's chapter of a five-stage community planning life cycle drawn from three cases in Italy. Wolf-Powers considers the way the state has, in effect, encouraged activism in New York housing, while Hamiduddin and Daseking provide a case on sustainable urbanism set in Freiburg. The work is concluded with four chapters in the final part of the book demonstrating how influence and integration is managed across administrative scale. Filion's chapter shows professionals administering power through a particular worldview, placing neighbourhood activism in a wider Ontario context. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.