In our third session, we discussed Thomas Bender's Community and Social Change in Urban America and then the discussion turned to the question of relevance to social work practice broadly construed. Much of the class discussion was devoted to how community was a good thing, maybe even an essential thing, maybe even a basic human need, such that community will always survive the transition from traditional society to modern, impersonal society.
People find new ways of being communual.
Community can be defined in many ways. Communities therefore traditionally imply personal bonds that unite people in a collectivity that is a geographically bounded. Examples include most prominently neighborhoods , towns and other places. Bender tends toward this definition in examining how community has changed in the United States over the years. There undoubtedly, as was pointed out in class, can be other types of communities, less tied to geographic territory and not bounded by geographic space.