1 A framework for community and economic development Rhonda Phillips and Robert H. Pittman Community development has evolved over the past few decades into a recognized discipline of interest to both practitioners and academicians. However, community development is defined in many different ways. Most practitioners think of community development as an outcome – physical, social, and eco- nomic improvement in a community – while most academicians think of community development as a process – the ability of communities to act collectively and enhancing the ability to do so. This chapter defines community development as both a process and an outcome and explains the relationship between the two. A related discipline, economic development, is also defined in different ways. This chapter offers a holistic definition of economic development that not only includes growing businesses and creating jobs but increases in income and standards of living as well. Economic development is also shown to be both an outcome and a process. The community and economic development chain shows the links, causal relationships, and feedback loops between community and economic development, and illustrates how success in one facilitates success in the other. Introduction Community development has many varying defini- tions. Unlike mathematics or physics where terms are scientifically derived and rigorously defined, community development has evolved with many dif- ferent connotations. Community development has probably been practiced for as long as there have been communities. It is hard to imagine the Ameri- can colonies being successfully established in the seventeenth century without some degree of community development, even if the term had not yet come into existence. Many scholars trace the origin of modern community development as a discipline to post- World War II reconstruction efforts to improve less developed countries (Wise 1998). Others cite the American “war on poverty” of the 1960s with its emphasis on solving neighborhood housing and social problems as a significant influence on contemporary community development (Green and Haines 2002). As the following box shows, the origins of community development are actually very old. A major contribution of community develop- ment was the recognition that a city or neighbor- hood is not just a collection of buildings but a “community” of people facing common problems with untapped capacities for self-improvement. Today, community is defined in myriad ways: in geographic terms, such as a neighborhood or town (“place based” or communities of place definitions), or in social terms, such as a group of people sharing common chat rooms on the Internet, a national pro- fessional association or a labor union (communities of interest definitions).