A community is a group of people who share something — a place, an identity, a set of obligations. A community fracture occurs when that sharing dissolves. The people remain, but the community does not.
Fractures have many causes. Economic: the factory closes, and the town that depended on it disperses. Demographic: new arrivals change the composition of a neighbourhood, and the old community feels displaced. Political: a contentious issue — a school closure, a development project, a policing decision — divides neighbours into irreconcilable factions. Technological: television, then the internet, then social media replace face-to-face interaction with mediated connection, and the local community dissolves into the global one.
The dissolution of a community is rarely acknowledged until it is complete. People continue to greet each other on the street, to attend the same churches and schools, to shop at the same stores. But the sense of mutual obligation — the willingness to help a neighbour without expectation of return, to trust that others will do the same — erodes gradually. Then something happens — a crisis, a conflict — and the dissolution becomes visible. The community that seemed intact is revealed to have been dissolving for years.
See also: anomie, norm erosion.