Introduction: the background

Community development emerged as a professional practice in the UK during the 1950s and 1960s. Early contestation about its identity emerged around the extent to which it could be seen as a form of social work, urban planning or agricultural extension, or whether it had a distinct identity of its own. Prior to the 1950s, three distinct strands of practice could be perceived: in work by colonial extension officers (explicitly as part of an educational paradigm, implicitly within a framework of political control: see Batten, 1957; Colonial Office, 1958), as an extension of trades union activism (often by unemployed workers: see Hannington, 1936) and as ‘community-building’ with a social focus, usually in post-Second World War social housing areas, including some of the UK's new towns or overspill estates (National Council of Social Service (NCSS), 1962).

What these approaches broadly have in common is a focus on the situation of the poor and attempts to build their capacity to articulate their own needs. Yet, despite this emphasis on poverty and disadvantage, there was little serious attempt to locate community development within a class-based understanding of the unequal distribution of income, wealth and power. So-called ‘radical’ community organisation such as that espoused by Alinsky (1969) – an influential US-based urban organiser whose writing circulated widely throughout the UK during the 1960s and 1970s – and some of the US War on Poverty projects (and Rein, 1967), tended in fact to be pluralist in their orientation: the poor simply needed to be helped to organise in order to gain their fair share of resources. Moreover, much early US literature emerged from an explicitly social work paradigm or from more generalised social welfare interventions (for example, Biddle and Biddle, 1965; Kramer and Specht, 1969; Cox et al,1970), and this may partly explain why Alinsky's work appeared at the time to be rather more radical than it actually was. Although some North American literature – which British community workers tended to rely on until the mid-1960s – had begun to theorise community development as a distinct practice, dominant definitions (such as Ross, 1955) ‘continued implicitly or explicitly to stress a class-less view of society, the community and, by extension, community work’ (Craig, 1989, p.7).