COMPONENTS OF A COMMUNITY

A community can be described as a complex whole resulting from the combination of the
environment, people health, quality of life, and economics. The functionality of a community
depends solely of these key elements. Thus, the components of the community are as follows;
the environment, the people, the economy, the culture, health, and the quality of life.

People as a component of a Community

According to Puja (2016), a group of people is the most fundamental or essential component of
community. This group may be small or large but community always refers to a group of
people. Because without a group of people we can’t think of a community, when a group of
people live together and share common life and binded by a strong sense of community
consciousness at that moment a community is formed. Hence a group of people is the first pre-
requisites of community.

The Environment as a Component of a Community

Environment is everything that is a round us. It can be living or non-living things. It includes
physical, chemical and other natural forces. Living things live in their environment, they
constantly interact with it and change in response to conditions in their environment. In the
environment there are interactions between animals, plants, soil, water, and other living and
non-living things.
A community must have, and be confined within a particular geographic location. Any
geographical location is a combination of biotic and abiotic factors and materials – the
environment.
A group of people alone can’t form a community. A group of people forms a community only
when they reside in a definite territory. The territory need not be fixed forever. A group of
people like nomadic people may change their habitations. But majority community are settled
and a strong bond of unity and solidarity is derived from their living in a definite locality.
The environment as a component, influences lifestyle in any community setting and it is an
indispensable component that cannot be overlooked.

The Economy/ Economic System as a Component of the Community

Economics as a social science is chiefly concerned with the description and analysis of the
production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. Since communities are made
of people who will always seek means for survival and ultimately interact with their physical
and social environment, there must be some form of transactions daily, thus making the
community good for business too. The economics of many business depend on customer
loyalty, and customers in an identifiable community will be fiercely loyal to local businesses.
When anonymity is replaced with daily interaction and knowledge, a business can customize its
goods and services and truly serve the market. Convenience within an easy - to – reach
community is a benefit people will pay for (Phil, 2013).
Health as a Component of the Community

Health is the level of functional and metabolic efficiency of a living organism. In humans it is the
ability of individuals or communities to adapt and self – manage when facing physical, mental
psychological and social changes with environment. The World Health Organization (WHO)
defined health in its broader sense in its 1948 constitution as “a state of complete physical,
mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 2006).
Health is an important component of a community. The health of the community is a function
of their environment, and the people. A community cannot be described completely without
due reference to the health of its members.

Quality of Life as a Component of a Community

Quality of life (QOL) is the general well-being of individuals and societies, outlining negative and
positive features of life. It observes life satisfaction, including everything from physical health,
family, education, employment, wealth, religious beliefs, finance and the environment. A
community is not just a geographical location, but it rather implies physical closeness, and
relationships at a particular location which in-turn, adversely or positively improve the quality
of life of its members.

Culture as a Component of the Community

According to Macionis and Gerber (2011), Culture is defined as the social behavior and norms
found in human societies and communities. Culture is considered a central concept in
 anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social
learning in human societies.
Some aspects of human behavior, social practices such as culture, expressive forms such as art,
music, dance, ritual, and religion, and technologies such as tool usage, cooking, shelter, and
clothing are said to be cultural universals, found in all human societies. The concept of material
culture covers the physical expressions of culture such as technology, architecture and art,
whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including
practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature
(both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society. A
community is a small or large social unit (a group of people) who have something in common,
such as norms, religion, values, or identity.

TYPES OF COMMUNITY
A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed. One such breakdown
is as follows:

1. Location-based Communities: range from the

local neighbourhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole.
These are also called communities of place.
2. Identity-based Communities: range from the local clique, sub-culture, ethnic
group, religious, multicultural or pluralistic civilisation, or the global community cultures of
today. They may be included as communities of need or identity, such as disabled persons,
or frail aged people.
3. Organizationally based Communities: range from communities organized informally
around family or network-based guilds and associations to more formal incorporated
associations, political decision making structures, economic enterprises, or professional
associations at a small, national or international scale.

The usual categorizations of community relations have a number of problems: (1) they tend to
give the impression that a particular community can be defined as just this kind or another; (2)
they tend to conflate modern and customary community relations; (3) they tend to take
sociological categories such as ethnicity or race as given, forgetting that different ethnically
defined persons live in different kinds of communities —grounded, interest-based, diasporic,
etc.
In response to these problems, Paul James and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy that
maps community relations, and recognizes that actual communities can be characterized by
different kinds of relations at the same time:
1. Grounded community relations. This involves enduring attachment to particular places and
particular people. It is the dominant form taken by customary and tribal communities. In these
kinds of communities, the land is fundamental to identity.
2. Life-style community relations. This involves giving primacy to communities coming together
around particular chosen ways of life, such as morally charged or interest-based relations or
just living or working in the same location. Hence the following sub-forms:
1. community-life as morally bounded, a form taken by many traditional faith-based
communities.
2. community-life as interest-based, including sporting, leisure-based and business
communities which come together for regular moments of engagement.
3. community-life as proximately-related, where neighbourhood or commonality of association
forms a community of convenience, or a community of place.
3. Projected community relations. This is where a community is self-consciously treated as an
entity to be projected and re-created. It can be projected as through thin advertising slogan, for
example gated community, or can take the form of ongoing associations of people who seek
political integration, communities of practice[29] based on professional projects, associative
communities which seek to enhance and support individual creativity, autonomy and mutuality.
A nation is one of the largest forms of projected or imagined community.

In these terms, communities can be nested and/or intersecting; one community can contain
another—for example a location-based community may contain a number of ethnic
communities. Both lists above can used in a cross-cutting matrix in relation to each other.