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South Central Los Angeles is often characterized as an African American community beset by poverty and economic neglect. But this depiction obscures the significant Latina/o population that has called South Central home since the 1970s. More significantly, it conceals the efforts African American and Latina/o residents have made together in shaping their community. As residents have faced increasing challenges from diminished government social services, economic disinvestment, immigration enforcement, and police surveillance, they have come together in their struggle for belonging and justice. South Central Is Home investigates the development of relational community formation and highlights how communities of color like South Central experience racism and discrimination—and how in the best of situations, they are energized to improve their conditions together. Tracking the demographic shifts in South Central from 1945 to the present, Abigail Rosas shows how financial institutions, War on Poverty programs like Headstart for school children, and community health centers emerged as crucial sites where neighbors engaged one another over what was best for their community. Through this work, Rosas illuminates the promise of community building, offering findings indispensable to our understandings of race, community, and place in U.S. society.

Sociologists have been debating the idea of community for over a century with some continuing to suggest that it has no relevance in the contemporary world. Attempts to turn to other terms -such as 'social capital' - have not worked and many scholars have suggested that the desire for community has increased in a world of global insecurities. Gerard Delanty's work on the communicative construction of community is the best attempt to unpack the contemporary meaning of the word yet he underplays the dangers of community and he stops short of contemplating the ongoing importance of place. This article extends Delanty's conception of community formation by suggesting a distinction between grounded' and 'projected' communities. It draws on the author's research to highlight the importance of working more thoughtfully with the idea of community. It notes that the sociology of community has failed to take account of more than 40 years of community development practice.

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to propose an overall framework for brand community formation that separates antecedents that lead to the formation of a brand community from those outcomes that are associated with established communities.Design/methodology/approachThe authors approached this review through an interdisciplinary literature review that delineated psychological, structural and behavioral processes that underline the formation of the brand community, often illustrated by contemporary cases in the sport industry.FindingsThe findings outline 18 different constructs, categorized in three overarching dimensions, separating structural, behavioral and psychological constructs. The authors posit these 18 constructs are at the heart of brand community formation. These constructs provide managers with a guide to inform their efforts to form a new brand community.Originality/valueIt is emphasized that brand community formation is a complex process that is paradoxical in nature and requires organizations to balance a non-interventionist approach that would allow for consumer empowerment, with a pro-active approach that creates conditions for a successful brand community formation process.

Archaeologists are increasingly interested in studying the role emotions have played in past human decision making. This paper demonstrates how awe is under-appreciated within archaeology despite it being uniquely available to archaeological research given its connection to monumental architecture and communal rituals. Archaeological engagement with awe is particularly important as psychological research has demonstrated that it is a prosocial emotion that leads to the creation of more extensive and stronger social bonds between individuals. A novel interpretation of Poverty Point (USA) is provided to illustrate the importance of studying awe, as this massive earthwork site was built more than 3000 years ago through large-scale gatherings. Reconsidered as a place of awe, Poverty Point is recast as an emotional locale where larger social and cultural identities and relationships were formed.

Communities of Style examines the production and circulation of portable luxury goods throughout the Levant in the early Iron Age (1200–600 BCE). In particular it focuses on how societies in flux came together around the material effects of art and style, and their role in collective memory. Marian H. Feldman brings her dual training as an art historian and an archaeologist to bear on the networks that were essential to the movement and trade of luxury goods—particularly ivories and metal works—and how they were also central to community formation. The interest in, and relationships to, these art objects, Feldman shows, led to wide-ranging interactions and transformations both within and between communities. Ultimately, she argues, the production and movement of luxury goods in the period demands a rethinking of our very geo-cultural conception of the Levant, as well as its influence beyond what have traditionally been thought of as its borders.

Since the 2000s, urban regeneration projects have been actively implemented to address urban problems in Seoul. These projects not only help improve the environment but also make the community sustainable. Accordingly, a number of public community facilities have been created through public participation. In Seoul, since there are few existing communities that have been active in relation to public projects, there are many cases in which the government must find residents who could participate in such projects, form a new organization, and induce participation. This study analyzes such cases and identifies related characteristics. In particular, flexibly planning community participation can increase sustainability under these conditions in various communities within cities. Planning from a flexible perspective assumes that the occurrence and impact of participation may not be sequential and allows and induces community change. This study is useful in preparing planning strategies under similar conditions in the future.

Although emotions occupy an important place in Alevism, their representation in Alevi history and the present has not yet been sufficiently researched. This study addresses this desideratum and discusses the representation and codification of emotions on the basis of central representatives of Alevi poetry. The focus of this study is the conjunction of constitutive teachings with basic emotions. In the poems, religious beliefs that are considered constitutive are explicitly linked to emotions such as love, grief and anger. In this way, central beliefs become emotionally charged and correspondingly more accentuated. At the same time, the poems convey an emotional expectation to the target audience: various rhetorical stylistic devices are used to convey to the addressees how they should react emotionally to certain ideas, memories and beliefs. In this way, these emotions fulfil the function of feeling rules that must be observed in order to be part of the collective. The analysis of Alevi poetry suggests that emotions have been an important factor in the history of Alevism for social order, group formation and religio-cultural demarcation.

Cities are the planet's newest ecosystem and thus provide the opportunity to study community formation directly following major permanent environmental change. The human social and built components of environments can vary widely in different cities, yet it is largely unknown how features of cities covary with the traits of colonizing species despite humans being the ultimate cause of environments and disturbances in cities. We constructed a dataset from open‐source data comprised of 13,502 breeding season observations of 213 passerine species observed in 551 Census‐defined urban areas across the United States. We found that as a city became more compact with less sprawl it tended to support more migratory species and species with lower body mass, shorter lifespans, and larger clutches. We also found that species had lower body mass in cities with higher median income, and higher body mass in highly populated cities. Our results highlight the complexity of human‐dominated urban ecosystems, where human socioeconomic actions and everyday activities intermix leading to structurally heterogeneous environments that support the colonization of some species over others.

Identifying plant communities has been a central aspect of vegetation science for centuries, with emphasis on the distribution, composition, and classification of plant communities. This study aimed to assess how environmental variables influence plant community formation and vegetation dynamics in northwest Ethiopia. A systematic random sampling technique was employed to gather vegetation data from 50 plots, each measuring 20 × 20 m, arranged at 100‐m intervals along seven transects. In each plot, the encountered species and their percentage cover‐abundance were recorded, which were subsequently transformed into a modified Braun–Blanquet scale. Additionally, composite soil samples collected from 15 × 15 cm subplots were analyzed for 20 soil parameters. The Shannon–Wiener index was used to measure species diversity. Hierarchical clustering and ordination analyses (DCA and RDA) were conducted on the floristic and environmental data, respectively, using R software. A total of 69 woody plant species from 64 genera and 44 families were recorded at altitudes ranging from 2485 to 2747 m above sea level. The Shannon–Wiener diversity index (H) was 3.74, and the evenness index (J) was 0.90. These high species diversity indices showed ecosystem health, stability, reflecting effective species interactions, and resource utilization. Among 6 terrain variables and 14 edaphic factors, 12 of these environmental factors (altitude, slope, aspect, cutting, silt, pH, sand, organic carbon, organic matter, total nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium) were found significantly to ( p ≤ 0.05) explain the variation in species composition and community formation of four plant communities in the study area. The observed patterns of community formation underscore the need to design different conservation measures tailored to the specific environmental conditions at different elevations.

We investigate the problem of the formation of communities of users that selectively exchange messages among them in a simulated environment. This closed community can be seen as the prototype of the bubble effect, i.e., the isolation of individuals from other communities. We develop a computational model of a society, where each individual is represented as a simple neural network (a perceptron), under the influence of a recommendation system that honestly forward messages (posts) to other individuals that in the past appreciated previous messages from the sender, i.e., that showed a certain degree of affinity. This dynamical affinity database determines the interaction network. We start from a set of individuals with random preferences (factors), so that at the beginning, there is no community structure at all. We show that the simple effect of the recommendation system is not sufficient to induce the isolation of communities, even when the database of user–user affinity is based on a small sample of initial messages, subject to small-sampling fluctuations. On the contrary, when the simulated individuals evolve their internal factors accordingly with the received messages, communities can emerge. This emergence is stronger the slower the evolution of individuals, while immediate convergence favors to the breakdown of the system in smaller communities. In any case, the final communities are strongly dependent on the sequence of messages, since one can get different final communities starting from the same initial distribution of users’ factors, changing only the order of users emitting messages. In other words, the main outcome of our investigation is that the bubble formation depends on users’ evolution and is strongly dependent on early interactions.