The “Dream of the Neighborhood”: A New Model for Social Work?

Abstract

There is frequently a disjunction in relation to the selection of different classic methods of social intervention, as if the use of one or another was necessarily exclusionary. This article shows how the integration of three methods in a single intervention can take place without any methodological conflict if one begins from a theoretical mark or reference model that contemplates this possibility. After an introduction to the concept of the model in Social Work and its various applications, the article describes and analyzes the profound social transformation of two adjacent neighborhoods in the province of Albacete, Spain. It presents the process taken by the community and families, from which it extracts a series of conclusions and arrives at a questioning that invites continued research about this new mark of intervention developed by the so-called Dialogical Contract of Social Inclusion.