Definition and Nature of Community
There are different definitions and connotations of community. To the layman, a community is a place where one resides, works, and carry on his daily routines of life. To Olsen (1968), a community is a social organization that is territorially socialized and through which its members satisfy most of their daily needs and deal with most of their common problems. As used by both sociologists and geographers, community refers to any set of social relationships operating within certain boundaries, locations or territories. The term has descriptive connotations. It may refer to social relationships which are not locally operative but exist at a more abstract, ideological level. For example: the term “lesbian community” may refer to a collective of women sharing ideas and life style, but not necessarily residing together in the same spatial area.
In popular usage, the term has often been associated with positive connotations, as in the phrases “a sense of community” or “community spirit.” It is clear that the term is not only descriptive, but also normative and ideological.
Worslet (1987) suggested three broad meanings involved in theorizing about community. The first he describes as “community as locality.” Here the interpretation of the term comes closest to its geographical meaning of “a human settlement within a fixed and bounded local territory”. Secondly, he suggests that community denotes a “network of interrelationship” characterized by conflict as well as by mutuality and reciprocity. In the third usage, community can be seen to refer to a particular type of social relationships that possess certain qualities. It infers the existence of a “community spirit” or “community feeling.”
From these definitions, certain elements can be found in a community. These elements include a population or groups of people, an area or territory, a sense of interrelatedness or social interaction, and a sharing of commonness or bond. As a social organization, the community has a structure with members possessing interrelated status and roles for specialized functions. The members in a locality group which could be a neighbourhood, a barangay, a town, a city, or even a nation, carry on their respective roles to enhance their common goal of fastening solidarity and unity.
Some sociologists are interested in the study of the ecology of the community, i.e., of the individuals and their facilities in relation to the environment. Human ecology refers to the study of the development and organization of the community and spatial distribution in relation to the environment (Hawley 1950)
The Nature of the Rural and Urban Community
Although the Philippines at present is characterized by a trend towards urbanization, it is still a nation predominantly composed of barrios and barangays. A common way of classifying Philippine communities is the rural-urban dictionary. The German sociologist, Ferdinand Toennies, relates the rural communities to familistic and traditional gemeinschaft and the urban communities to the contractual and businesslike gesselschaft.
Rural communities are localities which are usually small having a homogeneity of culture and personal relationships. The occupations of the people are usually agriculture, fishing, and food gathering, and cottage industries. The Philippine rural communities refer to the 1,496 municipalities and 41,994 barangays (formerly called barrios). As Gelia Castillo (1979) puts it, the Philippines is a “land of barrios” and considered as “backbone of the nation because they provide urban areas with food and raw materials for industry. At present, however, due to modernization and advanced technology many towns and cities are undergoing urban transformation. The Philippines is thus still predominantly rural.
Urban communities refer to the cities or urban settlements characterized by size, density and heterogeneity, which in combination provide the basis for a complex division of labor and fundamental changes in the nature of social relationships. Inhabited central place differs from a farm or village by its greater size and by the range of activities practiced within its boundaries usually religious, military-political, economic, commercial, educational, and cultural. Collectively, these activities involve the exercise of power over the surrounding countryside. Nonetheless, the cities depend or the countryside for their basic subsistence. Hence, cities are powerful but dependent. Thus, Wirth (1938) defines a city as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially diverse people who do not directly produce their own food. The people engage in professional and technical services, skilled and semi-skilled occupations, businesses, commercial/industrial endeavors. At present, the Philippines has 113 chartered cities, including Metro Manila, known as the National Capital Region.
Cities have shaped human culture. The formation of cities contributed to the development of writing, the calendar, and organized scientific inquiry. Complex stratification systems, institutionalized religions, and the centralized state are also associated with the emergence of cities. In short, modern civilization is very much a product of cities and the urban societies characterized by high technology and modernization. At present, the more advance first world countries are in the so-called Age of Convergence of the Digital Revolution.
The Evolution of the City
The city evolved seven (7) periods or stages: (Light, 1985)
1. Nomadic Existence. Food gathering stage, hunting, fishing and forging for food.
2. Neolithic Period. Cultivation of plants and domestication of animals.
3. The First True Cities or Polis (6,000 and 5,000 B.C) Settlements in the basin of Nile, Tigris. Euphrates and Indus Rivers; emergence of powerful political kingdoms. e.g., Rome and Athens.
4. The Pre-industrial City. It refers to the limited feudal technology in the middle ages. (13th century to A.D. 1600) – it includes the pre-industrial cities of Thebes (Greece); Memphis (Egypt); Babylon (Iraq); Chengchaw (China); Khattushas (Turkey); Cordova (Spain); Constantinople (Turkey); Kyoto (Japan).
5. Industrial Revolution and Urban Explosion. (mid-18th century). Characterized by technological innovations, improved transportation and communication, increased production; business ideology.
6. They Metropolis. It refers to a metropolitan area, a geographical area with a large pollution nucleated together with adjacent communities which have a high degree of economic and social integration with that nucleus (Herbers, 1983)
In the Philippines, City of Manila is called Metropolitan City because it is the central city surrounded by other cities and suburbs which are economically, commercially, educationally, socially, and culturally linked with Manila as the central city. Manila as the central hub was the business and administrative center with the residential areas, suburbs, and small neighboring towns and cities were bought within the social and economic orbit of Manila.
7. The Megalopolis. It literally means supercity or the “great city.” – the merger of many cities and surroundings suburbs. Megalopolis is a developing urban form in which separate cities grow together, forming an interdependent entity. The most prominent megalopolis exists along the northeartern seaboard of the United States from Boston to Washington, collaterally referred to as Boswash, which includes the major urban centers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. Over 40 million people (9 fifth of the nation’s population) live in this sprawling belt. The merger of two or more cities to form supercities has created overcrowding in a small are which continues unabated and results in the crisis of the cities. This unplanned growth that has created themegalopolis is called urban sprawl.
