Networked Urbanism: Social Capital in the City

Urban researchers have studied social capital as processes that both divide and unify urban dwellers, but contemporary urban changes associated with residential space decentralization, employment and service provision have led to a new kind of urban life. Therefore, the nature of social order in the city is again under discussion. The authors of this book suggest that subjecting social capital to urban critique should be an advance in the understanding of contemporary spatial processes and inequalities.

Social capital can be defined as a range of individual and collective benefits, ranging from good health and personal income to democratic cultures and low crime rates. Some literature also indicates that the capacity of voluntary association shown by a social group is both an indicator of social capital and a driver that leads to beneficial effects from it. Yet other authors claim that the popularity of social capital is due to the way it provides a neoliberal account of the social, packaging it as a beneficial and bounded form of capital that can then be evaluated alongside other kinds of capital in measuring and accounting processes. While the latter criticism might be true, the authors of this book understand social capital as a concept that gets sociological concerns into the stronghold of economists, policy makers and political scientists.

The 11 chapters focus on two major topics. The first is the relationship between social capital, social networks and exclusionary mechanisms, inspired by both the need to relate social capital to matrices of power and inequality and by the need to explore fully how the actual ties and relationships that bring social capital about are spatially and socially organized. Scale also matters in these analyses: trust, bonds and connections are relationally constructed in ways that problematize the idea that any specific part can be bounded as a discrete “social capital” variable set in the urban space. Two scales of social capital are addressed: one based on inter-personal ties and the other – more emerging and diffuse – based on the sprawling and splintering character of the networked urban globalized world.

The second topic is space. Most researchers have not addressed explicitly the relation between space and social capital. Especially in policy circles, measures of social capital are all too easily abstracted from place and constructed as aspatial measures and indicators. But several authors argue that this prevents a real understanding of how social capital is currently under change, precisely due to the radical urban reconfigurations that take place worldwide. The city space is not a container but a condition where social capital is produced in and through places, following Henri Lefebvre’s ideas. Hence, stretched, globalized and distant social relations of today’s city-regions and splintered urbanism need to be included in the contemporary analyses of social capital.