Unincorporated area
An unincorporated community is one general term for a geographic area having a common social identity without municipal organization or official political designation (i.e., incorporation as a city or town). There are two main types of unincorporated communities:Due to differences in state laws regarding the incorporation of communities, there is a great variation in the distribution and nature of unincorporated areas. Unincorporated regions are essentially nonexistent in seven of the northeastern states. All of the land in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, and nearly all of the land in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont, is part of an incorporated area of some type. In these areas, types (and official names) of local government entities can vary. In New England (which includes five of those eight states, plus the less fully incorporated state of Maine), local municipalities are known as towns or cities, and most towns are administered by a form of direct democracy, such as the open town meeting or representative town meeting. Larger towns in New England may be incorporated as cities, with some form of mayor-council government. In New Jersey multiple types exist as well, such as city, township, town, borough, or village, but these differences are in the structure of the legislative branches, not in the powers or functions of the entities themselves.
Community cohesion
Indeed, "Promoting Social Cohesion: Implications for policy and practice" takes as its starting point the need to reconceptualise community cohesion as social cohesion in order to emphasise structural conditions and equality targets. The suggestion that community cohesion did not take full account of inequalities from the outset is contradicted by the formal definition adopted by the LGA (see above). The idea of a simplistic link between disadvantage and prejudice and discrimination is also contested by Cantle (2012). It is also contested by Thomas who dismisses this charge in the first academic study based upon real evidence from the operation of cohesion in local communities. The assertions were also contradicted by the Government policy commitments given during the earlier development, particularly the annual series of "Building Opportunity, Strengthening Society" reports from 2005. The commitment to tackling inequalities and "making social justice visible" was also reaffirmed by the review of community cohesion conducted by the Commission for Integration and Cohesion in 2007 and in the Government’s response to it made the following year.