Most of the readings on community planning thus far in the semester have expressed reoccurring themes of hardships, struggles to gain power and recognition,  and helplessness (as city projects continue to tear through neighborhoods). However, the articles by DeRienzo and Angotti offer a different perspective into the whole issue. Their articles take more of  an analytical and organized approach, focusing on the very definition of community and producing a recipe for successful community organizing efforts based on that definition. In contrast, previous articles tended to focus on the outcome of failed plans and posing possible solutions that didn’t have a strong basis of reasoning. With the community issue being as complicated as it is, these empty solutions just made the issue seem like it was going in circles. Although DeRienzo and Angotti don’t pose any specific plans to deal with community planning, their line of thought seems to contain a reasoning that can only prove to be beneficial for communities moving forward.

The main idea going into these articles is that before attempting to organize communities, you need to familiarize yourself with what you’re dealing with. This is an extremely important concept that’s significance often times becomes undermined. There’s more to a community than meets the eye. Angotti demonstrates three key points that compromise a community; commonality, interdependence, and collective capacity. He also highlights the role that power plays in community, saying that if a community were to die, so would the power that interplayed within it. He also goes as far as to say that if a community needs organizing, then there is actually an absence of community because a community cannot be sustained on organizing, but is sustained by the relations, networks, and processes that make it up. I thought this was a better way of viewing communities rather than the more simplistic definition that just tended to stamp any neighborhood as a community.