Introduction

Community work, in different forms, is a relatively common feature of social work in several European countries, although the concept itself was developed in Great Britain (Popple, 1995; Twelvetrees, 2008). Community work and social development aims to take advantage of citizens’ initiatives, preferences, abilities and often hidden and sometimes forgotten resources, in order to achieve social change improving the living conditions of groups of citizens. Usually, community work is not purely a spontaneous, bottom-up process; it is typically initiated by specific stakeholder and actors. Non-governmental organisations often initiate the process, while authorities and institutional actors remain in the background. In some cases, however, the authorities initiate community work.

The aim of this chapter is to show the problems that are associated with attempts to bring about community work in neighbourhoods subject to urban decay. Community work and social development in demoted areas are sometimes, at least partly, initiated by local authorities seeking cooperation with inhabitants. The chapter focuses especially on the difficulties professional social workers face in such situations. One major difficulty is caused by the multiple, often contradictory, roles and multiple loyalties of social workers.

The empirical base of this chapter is a case study conducted during a social development project in a disadvantaged urban area of a medium-sized Polish town. The degradation of the area is an effect of the transformation of the Polish society and economy after 1989 when the country left the socialist plan economy behind and started on the path of western-type economy. During the socialist era, state companies had a great part in delivering social welfare services, sometimes even including housing for the workers. All that changed after 1989, partly due to disappearance of many companies, and the duty of delivering social services was taken over by local administration and authorities. They were to large extent unprepared for this. The local authorities were not fully developed and were also forced to work with existing (and emerging) social legislation, which was rudimentary and under-developed.

Today social development projects in Poland are usually planned, initiated and implemented by institutions acting on behalf of local authorities that oversee and control the implementation of these projects. Thus, they are top-down actions, which the authorities can carry out using EU structural funds.