“Community suggests a place and a space of commonality — sharing. Community also suggests difference — characteristics which distinguish one group from another, one individual from another. As Anthony Cohen has put it, community expresses a “relational idea that allows social groups to define and create boundaries between themselves and others.
Community, the profound sense of attachment that we have to place and to people, is as much about geography as it is about imagination. The maps we draw produce borders that we cross with our minds even as we defend the more closed and shadowy concepts of nation, province or locality.