After reading and learning much about failed and misplaces attempts to plan a community with the public in mind, it was refreshing to read sources that have a clear understanding that community planning needs to be based in a collective understanding of what community is.  As explained in DeRienzo’s pages, if we do not work from a grounded premise, we may find that we are in fact working to the detriment of those who we claim to be working for.  Essentially, we need to have a clear understanding of how and who we are helping in order to keep our efforts relevant to the issues at hand.  The goal is to be precise, not sloppy.  An extremely important point i found in the article is that the outside funders or protagonists in the case of community planning are likely to believe that the world just “is the way it is” and the only thing for communities that need rehabilitation to do is to learn to survive – but once these people lose their homes, they will understand that where they lived was not a community but just a housing cluster that had no interdependence.  I feel that this point emphasizes the importance of understanding how community works from the bottom-up rather than attempting to understand it “top-down” from the outside in order to make any real beneficial changes.  Another interesting bit DiRienzo notes is that it is possible to gauge a community’s health by how many institutions within it are controlled by the community and by whether the community feels a constant need to organize.  Additionally, the second type of community organizing he cites is exactly the kind that my group is dealing with in our project – the type in which a community organizes in order to discuss a specific issue that threatens to enforce political dynamics that made the proposal possible in the first place.  I found DiRienzo’s writing to be extremely well-organized, clear, and accurate in descriptions of things we find in our society.

Angotti’s chapter does well to explain the sources and bases of the issues of housing at hand before delving deeper.  He explains the value of tenure when it comes to housing and what displacement really is (when living in a home becomes impossible, dangerous, or otherwise due to various causes such as natural disaster but more importantly and predominantly unaffordability).  As I looked at Angotti’s chapter after reading DiRienzo, I had DiRienzo’s theories in mind as I observed Angotti’s discussions of urban renewal projects.  He asks an important question that may in fact be answered by some of DiRienzo’s explanation of community dynamics:  What knowledge and analysis will help community planners in developing their plans and linking them with political strategies?  This seems extremely relevant to our project in that we aim to investigate just that – how people inside of a community can use their perspectives to make a difference in community planning in their own areas.