Unincorporated area
In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not governed by a local municipal corporation; similarly an unincorporated community is a settlement that is not governed by its own local municipal corporation, but rather is administered as part of larger administrative divisions, such as a township, parish, borough, county, city, canton, state, province or country. Occasionally, municipalities dissolve or disincorporate, which may happen if they become fiscally insolvent, and services become the responsibility of a higher administration. Widespread unincorporated communities and areas are a distinguishing feature of the United States and Canada. In most other countries of the world, there are either no unincorporated areas at all, or these are very rare; typically remote, outlying, sparsely populated or uninhabited areas.
Community cohesion
Other academics claimed that community cohesion was being used as part of a new politically inspired approach to, firstly, shift the agenda towards one of assimilation of minorities and, secondly, move away from the focus on inequalities and disadvantage. McGhee (2005), for example, challenged the notion of the cosmopolitan identities and associated it with the then politics of New Labour. He suggests that "identity, culture and tradition are seen as conducive to prejudice, antagonism, polarization, mistrust, hatred and overt (fanatical) loyalty associated with preservationist or past-orientated orientations" and that emotionally hot patterns of identity are being replaced by "a calmer cosmopolitan mentality which is characterised by flexibility, ‘cool’ loyalties and thin patterns of solidarity." Burnett (2004) saw the debate in the same political terms as McGhee and similarly detected assimilationist tendencies in the reform of the notion of identity and suggested that the then New Labour Government used both the idea of community cohesion and the idea of communitarianism as a "bridge between the concept of citizenship (and its obligations) and ever widening notions of criminality." He believed this amounted to the conjuring up of a fear of a "new moral order." Burnett’s later comments (Burnett, 2006), however, acknowledged that community cohesion policies did also put an emphasis on the need for majority White majority communities to change. McGhee (2008, p53)is also concerned about what this change of direction means in practice and for example, sees attempts to develop the use of English language on a more pervasive basis as an extension of the Government’s ‘linguistic nationalism’ which focuses on the "easiest signifier of sameness and difference," rather than it being a means by which diverse communities can communicate and interact. Harrison (2005)takes a similar view, fearing assimilation "in which the entrenched barriers and values of white communities pass relatively unchallenged (Harrison, 2005, p. 91)."