Social Capital

Definition

Social capital names the network resource — accumulated relations of trust, mutual aid and acquaintance — through which people become attached to places. In this wiki the concept enters through Røe's Skjettenbyen study, where it is the mechanism of the paper's central finding: "The meaning of Skjettenbyen and the everyday sense of place revealed in this study is the kind that develops over time when people build social capital" (Røe 2015, p. 538, abstract). The inhabitants' attachment runs through "the friends and strong and weak ties they had developed while living at Skjettenbyen. These relations, and the formation of local place-based social capital, were often associated with the interior road systems and 'micro-places' of the area" (pp. 546–547).

The source gives the concept its two canonical tie-forms in concrete testimony. Strong ties: Emma's small road — "I think it is five families who have been living here all the time. We are about the same age, and we have become very close, and we help each other… You may go away for a holiday, and somebody will go into your dwelling and water your flowers, and take in the mail… So we have become friends even if in the beginning we were just neighbours" (p. 547). Weak ties: "And I have many [people] that I know… That is people I stop and talk with in the shop, without being together in other situations. However, this is one of the reasons for staying here, to be able to pop into a neighbour" (p. 547). The concept is temporal (it accumulates over residence — "the mature sense of place that develops over time when people build social capital and 'collect' biographic memories," p. 547), spatial (it lodges in micro-places, not the estate as a whole), amplifiable by trouble ("The problems were common for all… And that created a feeling of community," p. 546), and reconstructable by biography ("For others, those who have been raised in Skjettenbyen, such social (biographical) capital may be reconstructed from the time they lived there," p. 548). In the paper's conclusion it is the counter-mode to elective belonging: for inhabitants without the architects' cultural capital and habitus, "the sense of place-based belonging was more general, and social capital seemed to be of greater importance" (pp. 547–548).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Røe ingest; the concept's theoretical canon (Bourdieu, Coleman, Putnam, Granovetter's weak ties) awaits a direct source — note that Røe uses the term empirically without citing its theorists.

Key Thinkers

• Per Gunnar Røe — the wiki's account: place-based social capital as the mechanism of mundane belonging; strong/weak ties testified rather than theorized (2015).
• Kim Dovey — the concept's theorist in this wiki's second source: social capital as one of Bourdieu's capital forms, embedded in built form as "spatially structured patterns of social encounter"; bonding/bridging as the built-environment distinction (interiors bond, neighbourhoods bridge) (2010).

Related Concepts

• micro-places — the concept's spatial form: social capital as place-based, lodged in the interior road systems and small roads of a housing area.
• elective-belonging — the concept's counter-mode: belonging elected through cultural capital vs belonging accumulated through residence.
• home — the affective yield: "to be able to pop into a neighbour" as a stated reason for staying — the home extended into the road's social reach.
• practiced-place — the process frame: ties built by repeated practice (the shop encounter, the watering of flowers) are practiced places at the social scale.
• the-social — the Arendtian backdrop: the social as the realm of behavioural conformity; Røe's social capital is its benign, sociological cousin — the web that holds a suburb together. (Community itself has no page yet — logged as a gap: community here is produced through shared problems and accumulated ties, not through design intention.)

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the concept's founding source: the abstract formula ("the kind that develops over time when people build social capital," p. 538); the ties and the interior road systems (pp. 546–547); Emma's strong-tie and weak-tie testimonies (p. 547); the trouble-amplification (p. 546); the biographical reconstruction (p. 548); and the habitus contrast — social capital "of greater importance" for those without the context-specific cultural capital (pp. 547–548).
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's theoretical canon and its built-environment grounding — the direct source this page awaited: "Social capital is a resource which inheres in social relations or networks of family, friends, clubs, school, community and society… a collectively owned resource based on reciprocity"; Putnam's bonding/bridging distinction ("'Bonding' reinforces solidarity and identity as it excludes difference… 'Bridging' establishes weaker ties and builds open networks of acquaintances"); and the built-form thesis: "Social capital is embedded in the built environment where it is sustained and reproduced by architectural programmes as spatially structured patterns of social encounter… Bonding is more common in building interiors (families, clubs, etc.) and bridging more common in neighbourhoods and larger organizations" (pp. 34–35). The settlement register: "Informal settlements generally have high levels of social capital due in part to the solidarity of poverty but also to the bond formed by collective opposition to the state" (p. 84) — "The public spaces are materially poor but socially rich" (p. 96); the village/urban/suburb gradient of capital mixes (p. 36); the enclave warning — "Enclaves, security zones and boundary-control techniques often generate privileged forms of social capital" (p. 39); and the design dilemma — "The segmentation of space enables and constrains the production of social capital" (p. 39). Dovey supplies exactly the theoretical canon the Røe register lacked: Bourdieu's definition, Putnam's tie-forms, and the built-environment thesis. See micro-places, elective-belonging, habitus.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the concept's direct Putnam citation and its built-form translation: the interiorization diagnosis — "people are increasingly pulling away from group activities, such as block parties and neighborhood picnics, and internalizing themselves within the household structure—much to the detriment of the 'social capital' of the community" (p. 40, citing Bowling Alone) — with the built forms named as its infrastructure: the sidewalk "part of a public/private transition zone in front of the house where socialization is more likely to occur" (p. 68); the cul-de-sac's "small 'territorials'" against through streets that "allow more opportunities for social interaction" (p. 67); front porches "symbolizing hospitality and connection to the greater neighborhood" (p. 19); commons maintained by "informal neighborhood cooperative efforts" without homeowner associations (p. 73); and J.C. Nichols's homes associations "to maintain neighborhood morale" (p. 30). Where Røe gives social capital's empirical formation and Dovey its definition, Wentling names the design instruments that build or bleed it — and documents their postwar dismantling as a cost story (decks cheaper than porches, wide streets without sidewalks, pp. 64, 111). See cul-de-sac, porch, micro-places.
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the concept's coinage-era formulation and its destruction-account: "If self-government in the place is to work, underlying any float of population must be a continuity of people who have forged neighborhood networks. These networks are a city's irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated" (p. 138). The concept here is fiscal before it is sociological: networks as accumulated capital (built by "working relationships among specific people… the hop-and-skip links" that weld districts, p. 137), destroyed by turnover — "Real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least. Severed from their relationships, they are destroyed as effective social beings" (p. 137); the statistical-people footnote naming the only populations that behave as interchangeable statistics — "one of our fairly homogeneous and ingrown nomad societies, like Beatniks, or Regular Army officers and their families, or the peripatetic junior executive families of suburbia" (p. 138n). Salisbury's gloss on clearance supplies the destruction mechanism: "It tears out the churches. It destroys the local business man… it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair" (quoted p. 137). Where Røe watches social capital accumulate in micro-places and Dovey defines it, Jacobs accounts for its depreciation — clearance as capital liquidation. See unslumming, micro-places, privatised-public-space.
• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the concept's squandering register and its accounting problem: "By such measures, a culture's social capital is systematically squandered" (p. 112) — the school-closings audit in which "genuine neighborhood schools to which children could walk or bicycle" were closed, community use of schools dropped 43 percent in two years under new fees, and schools "built when taxpayers and parents were still permitted to take pride in them have been disproportionately doomed because their generous corridors and handsome lobbies exceed mean-spirited formulas for allowable square meters of building space per student"; and the accounting register: "'human capital,' 'social capital,' and 'cultural capital'… represent concepts about real and powerful assets, more indispensable for wealth creation and well-being in modern societies than traditional bankable capital — but difficult or impossible to handle in traditional accounting terms" (p. 137) — the concept entered as an unsolved problem of professional accounting (see self-policing), its Toronto budget puzzle (the composters: capital costs or operating expenses?) unresolved in the city's own books. Jacobs's speaking relationships — "thoroughly informal, thoroughly intangible, and probably the most important" community resource (p. 35) — supply the concept's pre-analytical, un-monetized form (see community-resources).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Røe uses "social capital" without citing its theorists. Which canonical version does his usage match — Bourdieu's (capital convertible from social connections), Coleman's (closure and norms), or Putnam's (civic community)? Does the choice matter for the design implications?
• Can design seed social capital or only host it? The interior road system and the interaction-across-pedestrian-tracks layout correlate with the ties — but Emma's ties also formed through delayed schools and shops (planning failure). Is failure the best social-capital programme?
• Is the trouble-amplification thesis compatible with the stigma finding? '2013 Ghetto Skjetten' was trouble that produced fear and avoidance (Sarah's "Skjetten was scary") as well as mobilization — what distinguishes capital-building trouble from capital-destroying stigma?
• Does biographical capital (the raised-in resident's reconstructable ties) survive the estate's physical renewal, or is it terrain-dependent — and what does that imply for adaptive-reuse of mass housing?