Community Development

Historical Influences on Community Development

It is difficult to determine the actual origin of the field of community development. For some, it might be the settlement houses of the early twentieth century. While beginning in the UK, the model spread to North America fairly quickly with the founding of the famous Hull House in Chicago by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in the late 1800s. The settlement house model was premised on the practice of a residential community worker in an immigrant neighbourhood who could both develop immigrants’ abilities to adjust and succeed in their new city and influence city policy to support these new residents.

[Page 140]A second origin was the post–World War II expansion of programmes to influence the development path of the Global South. With the rise of a community development policy in the United Nations, various nongovernmental international aid programmes and institutions, such as the World Bank, became associated with the term community development, even though many such programmes imposed top-down mandates for certain kinds of capitalist-friendly development, and the accompanying fiscal policy. At the same time, a number of US academics became involved with agriculture-related community development in the Global South.

In the 1960s, community development became more political. Critiques of top-down development models, destructive industrial-agricultural models and dis-empowering outsider-controlled processes gradually gave way to small-scale, locally controlled practices. Informed by books such as E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and the global reaction against industrial agriculture, community development also became more influenced by community organizing models that emphasized building local power as a foundation for community development.

As the protest wave of the 1960s and 1970s subsided, community development lost some of its politicized edge but retained an emphasis on small-scale local interventions. In particular, government funders and private foundations in US cities engineered a shift to defund politically successful community organizing groups in favour of organizations that did not threaten the existing balance of power. This strategy led to the rise of community development corporations (CDCs)—usually neighbourhood-based non-profit organizations that emphasized local housing or economic development. Such ‘bricks and sticks’ organizations concentrated on physical development, building housing and business storefronts in disinvested neighbourhoods.

Such technocratic approaches were criticized for not considering the need to empower neighbourhood residents, instead of just building business storefronts and housing. As CDCs went out of favour, funding for them decreased, and many folded or merged. A cheaper alternative, called capacity building, then expanded into the 2000s. Capacity building remained relatively depoliticized, however, and emphasized building community capacities to self-manage service organizations, run businesses and guide local development rather than to reshape the political-economic structures that created the problems to begin with.

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