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
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)."