The sites that have been chosen are thus not considered as unproblematic and self-contained communities from which the research begins.

A core aim of the project is to investigate how ‘community’ is defined by members of all sorts of communities. To do this we use a variety of research approaches in combination with an analytical research methodology .

At one level, a community may be understood in terms of council boundaries, religious affiliation or ethnic background, but these are not the only understandings of community. As the research project generates research materials—for example, photographs, histories, maps, narratives, questionnaires, audio material, and videos—all registered participants in the project from all sites around the world will be able to submit it to a communal research database and share their understandings of community.