What is a community? How is membership in a community determined for different individuals? How strongly are communities tied to specific spaces? And why do political manipulations of this concept pose a real danger?

In recent years, the term "community" has been actively used by various actors in urban environments, from activists to officials and developers. However, its meaning remains ambiguous. In her book, Talja Blokland offers a conceptual understanding of this term through the lens of various social relationships, aiming to bridge the gap between theory and practice in working with communities.

She attempts to view communities as a set of empirical practices that constitute the city itself, with all its power dynamics and forms of inequality. Talja Blokland is a sociologist and professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.