Creating Community Supplement: Social Profiles of Local Communities

While local communities across Victoria face some similar challenges in the face of global change, they are very different from the point of view of geography, economy and social history. They are also diverse in the ways in which they respond to the mixture of threats and opportunities posed by global change. Local face-to-face communities are but one layer within the multi-layered structures of contemporary community life and, at the same time, they refract the influences of more extended social formations (James 2006). As discussed in Chapter 1, it is important to understand both the local specificities of social life taking place in different locales and the ways in which local communities are being constantly recomposed by broader social formations and influences. This chapter is designed to better contextualize the four local starting points from which we have examined the local–global character of contemporary community life: Hamilton, Daylesford, Broadmeadows and St Kilda. The chapter will profile the four local communities separately but to make these profiles comparable we have constructed them in a similar way; starting first with some observations that try to capture key features of the community, followed by a review of the area’s history. We end each profile with an assessment of key challenges facing that community based on our observations as social researchers and on available data on the demography of each community.