There are many approaches to community development, which has been described as an inherently ambiguous concept (Shaw 2007). In this presentation, we explore how community development is differently perceived, represented, and put into practice by actors from three community centres, all located in a city in northern Sweden. The community centres are all run by non-governmental organisations and share many features and challenges. They are, however, located in three demographically different neighbourhoods and rooted in three different strands of civic engagement in Sweden: the rural development movement, the tradition of popular education, and the so-called People’s Houses (Folkets Hus); community centres with roots in the 20th century workers movement. These affiliations, together with the centres’ geographical locations and varying demography, provide a broad range of discourses on community development, that the interview participants variously build upon, contest, and reinvent. Based on in-depth interviews and an ethnographic approach, the aim of the paper is to analyse how representatives and users of the community centres approach the issue of community development and civic engagement. Based on which operational frameworks (Kenny 2002) do the centers make sense of and work towards community development? How are the concepts community and development interpreted and put into practice? We have found three overarching frameworks, that to varying degrees – closely linked to the neighbourhoods’ place identities and socioeconomic status – imbue the participants’ narratives: the framework of community organising and community work, the pragmatic planning frame, and the framework of entrepreneurship.