In an era when place making and place based management are the vogue, it feels somewhat risky to stand up among urban planners and claim that the community is not a place. After all planners make places, they are concerned with the quality of life in places so isn’t it reasonable that they treat communities as places? Places are, if you like, a planner’s canvas. Simplistically one might say that it is a planner’s job to make places that are nice to be in and which function effectively for the people who live and work there. More subtly, planners are often also interested in the sustainability of a place, by which they mean its economic base and its environmental qualities, and sometimes this concept includes social sustainability. Almost invariably however, discussions about social sustainability come back to a discussion about what is contained physically in the place – the buildings, the town square, the transport grid, etc.

At first sight, all appearances suggest that planners deal with community in terms of place. But lest you think that this is appearances only, I begin with a selection of demonstrations of the proposition that planning discourse abounds in the assumption that communities are place based.

The conflation of community with place in planning is so ubiquitous, and so clearly well intentioned that it almost seems churlish to point out that if there is one thing that a community is not these days, it is a place.