A passage of the book "The Just City", where Susan Fainstein quotes D. Harvey to draw attention to how the idea of "Community" is a double-edged value. At the same time a community provides its members with social support, it is also exclusionary.
" 'Community' has ever been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression. Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls) .... As a consequence, community has often been a barrier to rather than facilitator of progressive social change, and much of the populist migration out of villages (both rural and urban) arose precisely because they were oppressive to the human spirit and otiose as a form of sociopolitical organization". (David Harvey, 1997)
