When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, my husband drove the family to see San Francisco one day. It was the most beautiful and inspiring big city I had ever seen.
We stopped at the bookstore on the way home and I bought a bunch of books related to my interest in urban planning and read them while convalescing. One book was a collection of excerpts from various urban planning tomes. Another was a book called Seeing like a state. Another was about The Clemente Course in Humanities.
https://www.clementecourse.org/
To me, community development is about the people more than the buildings or infrastructure. Those things are not unimportant, but they need to serve the people. So I was also interested in the psychology of how the state relates to the needs of the people and how you develop human capital.
Human capital is developed in part with education. Jobs and other social connections also matter but education is one of the things that tends to separate the privileged from the underprivileged.
When I homeschooled my sons, I used to talk in online forums about teaching my kids a humanities education and defined it as being about learning to effectively cope with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of one's own humanity.
Humanities also gets called Liberal Arts. In spite of its current poor reputation, Liberal Arts was so named because the idea was that it was education that was empowering and freeing. It was, in a word, liberating.
My dream college back when I was a teenager, that I never got to attend, has a Great Books curriculum.
https://www.sjc.edu/