Community Development and Social Development

Abstract

As a pluralistic field of scholarship and practice, community development offers insights useful to social development, especially the realm of social work. Among these contributions, of particular interest are the ways in which place matters. Assessing conceptualizations of community and community development, this essay addresses the value of community development scholarship and offers recommendations for future research. The latter include paying more attention to demographic and socioeconomic characteristics and trends in relation to the population-level impacts from development initiatives.