Delanty, G. (2010). Community. London and New York, Routledge.
This book explores the idea of community, tracing the origins of the idea within Western Utopian thought. He argues that the idea of community within modernity is linked to ideas of loss, recovery, and tradition. He discusses several different types of communities including: the urban community based on locality and belonging; political community based on communitarianism and citizenship; community and difference linked to varieties of multiculturalism; communities of dissent based on the idea of communication communities; the postmodern community based on the idea of the community beyond unity, the cosmopolitan community which is between the local and the global, and the virtual community which is based on belonging as communication. He concludes that contemporary community is a form of communication community that is based on new kinds of belonging which are no longer bounded by place but can include multiple communities based on religion, nationalism, ethnicity, lifestyles and gender.