Urban Studies, Vol. 38, No. 12, 2125 – 2143, 2001
Social Cohesion, Social Capital and the Neighbourhood Ray Forrest and Ade Kearns [Paper received in nal form, May 2001]
Summary. In current theoretical and policy debates concerning social cohesion, the neighbourhood has re-emerged as an important setting for many of the processes which supposedly shape social identity and life-chances. It is in this context of a renewal of interest in local social relations and particularly the deployment of notions of social capital that this paper offers a critical review of a wide-ranging literature. The paper explores initially and brie y the idea that societies face a new crisis of social cohesion and outlines the key dimensions of societal cohesion. The core of the paper is then devoted to an examination of where the contemporary residential neighbourhood ts into these wider debates, particularly in relation to the interaction between social cohesion and social capital. In this context, some of the key debates around the concept of social capital are outlined. In moving beyond abstraction, the paper also shows how social capital can be broken down into relevant domains for policy action at the neighbourhood level and how concepts such as social cohesion and social capital can be operationalised for research purposes.
Introduction Concerns with neighbourhood, community and social cohesion have a long history in social policy and sociology. Indeed, it was these issues which were at the core of sociology in the rst half of the 20th century. The rampant urbanisation of this period was seen to be producing a social order in which the traditional ties of community—shared space, close kinship links, shared religious and moral values—were being replaced by anonymity, individualism and competition. Chicago School sociologists were essentially concerned with these processes of adaptation to a new way of life of an increasingly urbanised and proleterianised population. Debates about the meaning and conceptual
robustness of terms such as ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’ have continued ever since. Moreover, empirical research in this area, given extra fuel every so often by new policy pre-occupations or changing academic fashions, continues to produce evidence which is inconclusive or partial. The extent to which traditional bonds of kinship and ties of community and neighbourhood are being replaced or simply complimented by new forms of association remains unclear. Moreover, such questions require speci city in relation to factors such as culture, life cycle and social group. But this is well-trodden ground and there would be little value in offering another review of the literature and
Ray Forrest is in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, 8 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 4TB, UK. Fax: 0117 954 6756. E-mail:
[email protected] and is Visiting Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Ade Kearns is in the Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, 25 Bute Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8RS, UK. Fax: 0141 330 4983. E-mail:
[email protected]. This paper was presented in an earlier form at the ESRC Cities programme Neighbourhoods Colloquium held at Liverpool University on 5– 6 June 2000. 0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/01/122125-19 Ó 2001 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080/ 00420980120087081
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evidence in this eld (see, for example, Crow and Allan, 1994). Nevertheless, we are it seems at another peak of interest in issues of neighbourhood and community and various pieces of new empirical research are underway or have been completed. The labels may have changed but the essential questions have not. Are locally based identities and social networks still important? Are they more important to some people than others? What is the role of the residential neighbourhood in social cohesion? How can terms such as social cohesion and social capital be operationalised in local urban policy and research? It is in this context of a renewal of interest in local social relations and particularly the deployment of the notion of social capital in urban policy debates that this paper offers a selective review of a wide-ranging literature. The paper is structured as follows. In the rst section, we comment brie y on the idea that societies face a new crisis of social cohesion and summarise the key dimensions of social cohesion. We then proceed to locate the neighbourhood within these debates. Some of the key debates around the concept of social capital are then outlined. Social capital is then broken down into its relevant domains to illustrate how these domains can translate into speci c neighbourhood dimensions and can be operationalised for policy action. The conclusions point to some of the shortcomings in current evidence and research and summarise different perspectives on the residential neighbourhood and its interaction with social cohesion and social capital. A Crisis of Social Cohesion? The problems of cities and particularly the problems of poor people in poor neighbourhoods in cities are at the heart of current concerns about societal cohesion. There is a common belief that there is less social cohesion now than in some (usually) unspeci ed period in British history and that disadvantaged areas suffer particularly from a lack of the qualities and elements which produce and sustain social cohesion—that
the poor in poor neighbourhoods are increasingly dislocated from mainstream society (Cars et al., 1998). However, as Pahl (1991) observes in a useful review of the relevant literature, the search for social cohesion and predictions of its demise have a long history. In the search for social cohesion there is a consistent tendency for some sociologists, both classical and contemporary, to become prophe`tes manque´s. They regularly af rm that there has been some fall from grace and that the morality of their times is confused and impoverished. The golden age of traditional morality is, typically, not very precisely described and nor, for that matter are the future consequences for society (Pahl, 1991, p. 345). As was indicated above, these occasional predictions of cohesion in crisis typically rest on assumptions that the social cement of a previous era is crumbling and that we are being collectively cast adrift in a world in which the previous rules of social interaction and social integration no longer apply. Just as we entered the age of the industrial city with the social fabric in apparent chaos, so too are we entering the informational age. Information technology, a new virtuality in social networks and a greater uidity and super ciality in social contact are further eroding the residual bonds of spatial proximity and kinship. But this perspective on the changing nature of social interaction may re ect a very particularised experience of social change—that of the wired-in intellectual more familiar with cafe´ culture and waterfront chic than with what Byrne (1997) memorably described as the ‘clapped-out industrialism’ experienced by many in Britain and elsewhere. On the contrary though, some commentators on the New Economy are predicting a renaissance of the neighbourhood as teleworkers seek diversions from their monitors in the local arena (Wiliam Mitchell, quoted in McClellan, 2000). The general point is that it is all too easy to underestimate the continuities in everyday life. In this context, Pahl (1991) comments that
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Most people live in narrow gemeinschaftlich worlds of neighbourhood and kin. Cosmopolitan intellectuals seem all too ready to forget or to deny the smallscale domesticity of most people’s lives (Pahl, 1991, see footnote, p. 346). And Turner (1991) makes a similar point in relation to the observed stresses and tension of modern urban life when he argues that while sociologists might successfully construct an index of social dislocation (by reference to homicides, rape, family violence, divorce and so forth) it does not follow that individuals or social groups would necessarily or automatically experience the everyday world as disorderly. The round of everyday activities—sleeping, eating, talking and cleaning the household—may remain relatively normal and stable despite considerable dislocation. (Turner, 1991, p. 18). In other words, theorisations of social change derived from observed macro processes of disorder, dislocation and social and economic transformation may underestimate the importance of the lived experience of the dull routine of everyday life and its role in undertaking “ongoing ‘repair’ work to normalise social relations” (Turner, 1991, p. 18). Mann (1970) echoed these views when he asserted that The ordinary participant’s social relations are usually con ned to a fairly narrow segment of society, and his [sic] relations with society as a whole are mostly indirect, through a series of overlapping primary and secondary groups. We may characterise his meaningful life as being largely in an everyday level. Thus his normative connections with the vast majority of fellow citizens may be extremely tenuous, and his commitment to general dominant and deviant values may be irrelevant to his compliance with the expectations of others (Mann, 1970, p. 435). Thus, for most people the degree to which they believe or not in core values such as ‘equality’ or ‘inequality’ may be fairly unimportant. Social cohesion is about getting by
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and getting on at the more mundane level of everyday life. For the purposes of this paper, the point to note is that it is the neighbourhood which is likely to be the site for many of these mundane routines and for the ongoing ‘repair work’ and ‘normalisation’. There may, however, be much repair work to carry out. Among the factors contributing to this new crisis of social cohesion are the breakdown of Keynesian capitalism, an end to the progressive recruitment of households to the traditional middle classes and the lifestyles and living standards associated with such status, growing inequality and social fragmentation and a perceived decline of shared moral values. Rising crime rates, the growth of organised crime, long-term unemployment and underemployment particularly among young people, rising divorce rates and lone parenthood are all taken as signs of an increasingly stressed and disorganised society—in Fukuyama’s terms, all features of the ‘great disruption’ which has been experienced by a majority of Western, industrialised societies (Fukuyama, 1999). The stability of the post-war era based on universalism, organised trade unionism, rising real earnings, the patriarchical family and relatively secure employment is giving way to greater individuation in welfare rights and insurance against risk, a widening gap between those with and those without the necessary credentials for the new informational age and the rise of less-secure and atypical forms of employment. As the role of the male breadwinner becomes increasingly compromised, so too does male identity. As the safety-net of the Keynesian welfare state is progressively eroded, more of the burdens of social reproduction are thrown back onto the family. At the same time, national identities and the legitimacy of nation-states are arguably undermined by globalising pressures and multilateralism. What does citizenship mean in a more multicultural and heterogeneous society, when the social contract between capital and labour has apparently broken down, when there is a growing gap between “the politics of representation and the politics of intervention”
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(Castells, 1997, p. 354) and where those inhabiting the same geographical territory may inhabit quite different social worlds (Reich, 1991)? Castells (1997) sees these same processes producing a dissolution of the shared identities which have been the social cement of existing social systems. The institutions and organisations which in the past were the source of these shared and legitimising identities are for Castells increasingly undermined and hollowed out by convergent processes of privatisation, residualisation and globalisation. Torn by internationalisation of nance and production, unable to adapt to networking of rms and individualisation of work and challenged by the degendering of employment, the labour movement fades away as a major source of social cohesion and workers’ representation. It does not disappear, but it becomes, primarily, a political agent integrated into the realm of public institutions. Mainstream churches, practising a form of secularised religion dependent either on the state or on the market, lose much of their capacity to enforce behaviour in exchange for providing solace, and selling heavenly real estate. The challenge to patriarchalism, and the crisis of the patriarchal family, disturb the orderly sequence of transmitting cultural codes from generation to generation, and shake the foundations of personal security, thus forcing men, women and children to nd new ways of living (Castells, 1997, p. 354). For Castells and others, these new ways of living involve a greater degree of discontinuity and risk in everyday life for many households and individuals with a higher incidence of job loss, illness, drug dependency, loss of earnings and assets and a more generalised precariousness (Paugam, 1995). In the conclusion to his three-volume work on the emerging informational society, Castells evokes the now-familiar image of an increasingly polarised society. Rather than an expanding and supposedly more cohesive
middle mass, the dominant image of social change for much of the post-war period in Britain, a set of common causal mechanisms associated with new technology and the reshaping of occupational structures and opportunities are driving different groups towards opposite poles in terms of income, assets and lifestyles. Two key questions are raised by these accounts of social change and declining cohesion. First, what might constitute a cohesive society and what are the processes which generate and sustain such cohesion? In a related paper, we have discussed the various dimensions of social cohesion which can be identi ed in the literature and linked these dimensions to policy at different spatial scales (Kearns and Forrest, 2000). In summary, and as shown in Table 1, social cohesion can emphasise the need for a shared sense of morality and common purpose; aspects of social control and social order; the threat to social solidarity of income and wealth inequalities between people, groups and places; the level of social interaction within communities or families; and a sense of belonging to place. By implication, a society lacking cohesion would be one which displayed social disorder and con ict, disparate moral values, extreme social inequality, low levels of social interaction between and within communities and low levels of place attachment. Secondly, given institutional changes which undermine forces of solidarity and cohesion, does the neighbourhood become more important as an arena in which citizenship is attained or experienced (to the extent that it is at all) and in which personal and shared identities are created and maintained? It is worth noting, however, as we have suggested elsewhere, that strongly cohesive neighbourhoods could be in con ict with one another and contribute to a divided and fragmented city. Equally, a society in which citizens had a strong sense of place attachment and loyalty to their respective cities could be in con ict with any sense of common national purpose, or macro-cohesion. Thus, whether society is said to face a crisis
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Table 1. The domains of social cohesion Domain
Description
Common values and a civic culture
Common aims and objectives; common moral principles and codes of behaviour; support for political institutions and participation in politics Absence of general con ict and threats to the existing order; absence of incivility; effective informal social control; tolerance; respect for difference; intergroup co-operation Harmonious economic and social development and common standards; redistribution of public nances and of opportunities; equal access to services and welfare bene ts; ready acknowledgement of social obligations and willingness to assist others High degree of social interaction within communities and families; civic engagement and associational activity; easy resolution of collective action problems Strong attachment to place; intertwining of personal and place identity
Social order and social control Social solidarity and reductions in wealth disparities
Social networks and social capital Place attachment and identity
of social cohesion depends upon what spatial scale one is examining and the relative strength of the countervailing forces operating at each scale. Equally importantly, the question presupposes that cohesion is everywhere virtuous and a positive attribute, which it may not always be. These are dif cult issues involving complex processes to be unravelled and are addressed in the remainder of this paper. Identity, Social Cohesion and the Neighbourhood Intuitively, it would seem that as a source of social identity the neighbourhood is being progressively eroded with the emergence of a more uid, individualised way of life. Social networks are city-wide, national, international and increasingly virtual. In the wired neighbourhood of the informational age and with ever-expanding possibilities for ‘indirect socialising’ (Guest and Wierzbicki, 1999), one might legitimately ask, “What connects people to one another in the same street?”. On the other hand, globalising processes may have the opposite effects. As the forces which bear down upon us seem to be increasingly remote, local social interaction and the familiar landmarks of the neighbour-
hood may take on greater signi cance as sources of comfort and security. Moreover, contrary to prevalent ideas of increased spatial mobility and a weakening of place attachment, Phillipson et al. (1999) argue that a lot depends on the nature of the temporal comparisons being made. Referring to the work of Davin (1993), they argue that many older people today have experienced a stability of residence that was much rarer in earlier generations. They go so far as to suggest that the relationship between people and places is perhaps even more important at the end of the 20th century than it was at the beginning (Phillipson et al., 1999, p. 740). The underlying point here is that there may be cohort effects in relation to the role of the residential neighbourhood in peoples’ lives. In this context, Fukuyama (1999) has speculated that, for a future generation, technology may lead to the reintegration of work and home. He suggests that it is if anything more natural and more in keeping with the experience of human beings throughout history that home and work should be co-located (Fukuyama, 1999, p. 277).
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This is clearly speculation beyond even nascent trends, but it does point to the need to think in terms of ‘neighbourhood transformed’ rather than ‘neighbourhood lost’ in our formulations. In his discussion of territorial identities, Castells (1997) explains the reasons for some of these contradictory views of social change. People socialise and interact in their local environment, be it in the village, in the city, or in the suburb, and they build social networks among their neighbours. On the other hand, locally based identities intersect with other sources of meaning and social recognition, in a highly diversi ed pattern that allows for alternative interpretations (Castells, 1997, p. 60). In other words, the local neighbourhood remains important as a source of social identity but there are many other sources partly dependent upon our individual and collective time-geographies and action-spaces within the urban arena. This view of the contemporary neighbourhood is close to Janowitz’s conception of the community of ‘limited liability’ (Janowitz, 1967) or Guest and Wierzbicki’s (1999) conception of ‘community mediate’. Urban neighbourhoods continue to perform important but more specialist roles in people’s lives in parallel with increased extraneighbourhood association. In other words, just as the role of family, work and other aspects of social life are being transformed, so too is the role of the urban neighbourhood. Its historic, primary role as an arena for extended domestic activities (shopping; clothes washing; etc.) is supplanted as these functions are performed either in the home or outwith the neighbourhood. At the same time, though, the neighbourhood may become more important as an arena for recreation and leisure. In a sense, the neighbourhood becomes an extension of the home for social purposes and hence extremely important in identity terms: ‘location matters’ and the neighbourhood becomes part of our statement about who we are.
Moreover, it is important not to see the neighbourhood as just a territorially bounded entity but as a series of overlapping social networks. We should not underestimate the importance of physical change, physical boundaries and local landmarks in creating a sense of belonging and identity (see, for example, Forrest and Kearns, 1999), but the differences between neighbourhoods may perhaps best be understood as the differences between the form and content of social networks. It is these residentially based networks which perform an important function in the routines of everyday life and these routines are arguably the basic buildingblocks of social cohesion—through them we learn tolerance, co-operation and acquire a sense of social order and belonging. Who and what we are surrounded by in a speci c locality may also contribute in important ways to both choice and constraint and, less tangibly and more indirectly, to notions of well-being and social worth. If, for example, the neighbourhood ‘speaks volumes’ about us, then we can posit that it is important for our sense of self-esteem.
Neighbourhoods and Neighbouring There is, of course, a difference between neighbourhood and neighbouring. As research has shown (see, for example, Forrest and Kearns, 1999), in disadvantaged neighbourhoods it may be the quality of neighbouring which is an important element in peoples’ ability to cope with a decaying and unattractive physical environment. In more af uent areas, however, neighbourhood may be rather more important than neighbouring—people may ‘buy into’ neighbourhoods as physical environments rather than necessarily anticipate or practice a great degree of local social interaction. This links to a more general debate about the extent to which strong local social ties are themselves a symptom of residualisation. In other words, neighbours and neighbouring retain greater importance for the poor and the elderly, while the mass of the population develop
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Table 2. Residents’ views of neighbourood social qualities, England (percentage of respondents within each area type) Area Type: (ACORN category)
Description
People in the There is a lot There is not People in the area are of community a lot of area are very not very/not spirit in community friendly at all friendly the areaa spirit
A. Thriving Wealthy suburbs B. Expanding Af uent, working, family areas C. Rising Young, prosperous inner-city areas D. Settling Middle-aged home-owning areas E. Aspiring Home-owning council areas and better-off, multiethnic areas F. Striving Council estates
43 34
5 6
62 45
39 54
22
12
39
60
41
5
52
49
37
7
43
56
35
9
38
60
Figures in this column are for respondents without relatives in the area. Figures in other columns are for all respondents. Source: Survey of English Housing 1997/98. a
new and more spatially diffuse networks (Guest and Wierzbicki, 1999). We remain relatively ignorant in Britain about differences in contemporary patterns of local interaction within different types of neighbourhood. The most systematic research relies on data produced for other purposes and is somewhat outdated. Sampson (1988), for example, used the 1982 British Crime Survey (BCS) to explore variations between communities in terms of local friendship ties, collective attachment and rates of social participation as measures of local integration. He follows Kasarda and Janowitz (1974) in employing a systemic model of community in which it is viewed as a complex system of friendship and kinship networks and formal and informal associational ties rooted in family life and ongoing socialisation processes (Sampson and Groves, 1989, p. 777). Sampson was particularly interested in both the macro-level variations across the sample clusters in the BCS and the contextual effects of residential stability on individual patterns of social interaction. His contextual measures include residential stability (the percentage
of residents brought up within a 15-minute walk of their present home) and local friendship ties (percentage of community residents who reported more than half their friends living within a 15-minute walk of home). Not surprisingly, perhaps, the strongest predictor of individual local friendships is length of residence: the longer you live in an area, the more local friends you are likely to have acquired. The latest available, and quite crude, evidence on area variations in neighbourhood social qualities comes from the Survey of English Housing and the Scottish Household Survey and is shown in Tables 2 and 3. This evidence points to a number of things. First, that romantic notions of active vibrant communities with spirit in poorer areas are misplaced—most residents in most council housing areas do not consider there to be a lot of community spirit in their areas (though one accepts that this might be a latent quality). Community spirit, interpreted as the capacity to act collectively as and when required, is rated higher in mature and wealthy home-owning areas, perhaps indicating the importance of a combination of material and social resources. People seem to draw a distinction between
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Table 3. Residents’ views of neighbourhood social qualities, Scotland (percentages of respondents in each area type mentioning the item as an aspect of their neighbourhood that they particularly liked) Area type: (MOSAIC category)
Good neighbours
Friendly people
35 30 34 44 37 35 28 20
31 26 26 27 26 19 20 24
High-income owners Middle-income owners Low income Better-off council Disadvantaged council estates Families in council ats Renting singles Singles and ats
Source: Scottish Household Survey, Bulletin No. 3.
community, neighbourliness and friendliness, with the latter being rated lowest in both England and Scotland. Indeed, it appears that you can have good neighbours in places where people are not generally very friendly. The results for England and Scotland suggest that there are low levels of interaction, acquaintance, courtesy and everyday kindness in local settings. Maybe these things are not a necessary or suf cient condition for collective capacity in communities, but on the other hand one wonders whether low levels of friendliness partly explain the poor assessments of community spirit in England and the modest rates of identi cation of good neighbours in Scotland. The other thing to note from the tables is the poor assessments of neighbourhood social qualities in gentri ed inner-city locations. We cannot tell from these data whether this is desirable or an unwelcome by-product of the social composition, environment or design in these parts of our towns and cities. More research is required to identify the in uences upon the nature of social life in such neighbourhoods, which are typical of the sorts of places sought in the government’s Urban Renaissance policy. Issues of neighbourhood cohesion and the implications for patterns of participation, care and supervision are bound up with issues of the quality and strength of the ties between neighbours. What does neighbouring mean? Is it about developing close
friendships, borrowing the odd tool or expressing the casual hello in the street? Do the very weak ties of casual acquaintanceship matter much in the scheme of things? Drawing on the work of Granovetter (1973), Henning and Lieberg (1996) report on an interesting study of a Swedish residential neighbourhood. Henning and Lieberg are interested in the role of weak ties between neighbours—that is, “unpretentious everyday contacts in the neighbourhood” (p. 6), They stress the continuing importance of the residential neighbourhood for groups such as children, elderly and handicapped people who are likely to spend signi cantly more time in and around the home than those in full- or part-time work. Henning and Lieberg’s study has a variety of cross-sectional and longitudinal dimensions. Among other things, their study suggests a continuing class dimension in the nature and signi cance of social networks in terms of strong ties. Speci cally, the local arena plays a more important role for bluecollar workers than for those from a whitecollar background. For the middle classes, the local arena is just one of many arenas. In general, however, people tend to have more strong ties outside the neighbourhood. However, when weaker ties are included, the picture changes. When mapping people’s weak ties, our ndings from 1993 show that people meet
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their neighbours and other people in the residential area fairly often but on a more super cial basis. Thus the concept of weak ties becomes important. The number of weak ties in the neighbourhood are three times greater than strong ties if one compares the mean values for the total number of contacts. The signi cance of weak ties was underlined by the inhabitants who stated that these contacts meant a ‘feeling of home’, ‘security’ and ‘practical as well as social support’. Only 10 per cent stated that these contacts ‘were of little or no importance’ (Henning and Lieberg, 1996, p. 22). For Henning and Lieberg, therefore, the signi cance of the neighbourhood is partly as an important arena for the development and maintenance of weak ties. These kinds of contact range in their terms from a nodding acquaintance to modest levels of practical help (taking in a parcel). These contacts are, however, not only an important source of general well-being, but may provide important bridges between networks of strong ties. For this reason, according to Henning and Lieberg weak ties are of particular importance for vulnerable and marginal groups. The issue of whether contemporary citydwellers are less likely to socialise with neighbours and the extent to which there are differences between social groups is addressed most systematically by Guest and Wierzbicki (1999). Using the US General Social Survey which asks about time spent socialising with neighbours or friends, they are able to provide both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Their evidence is, of course, limited to the US and it should not be assumed that their ndings are applicable elsewhere. Nevertheless, their analysis provides a useful and thoughtful corrective to more dramatic assertions about the declining role of neighbourhood. While the data con rm a general decline in neighbouring over three decades (1970s, 1980s, 1990s), the decline is not dramatic and neighbouring “continues to be an important activity for a
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sizeable segment of the population” (Guest and Wierzbicki, 1999, p. 109). The more marked pattern is that extralocal ties are increasing and becoming more dissociated from forms of local interaction. People are socialising both in and outside the neighbourhood, but they are differentiated activities. Elderly people and those outside the labour force show little change in their pattern of neighbouring and are apparently relatively more dependent on local ties. There is generally evidence to indicate an increasing distinction between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘locals’, but there is not a sharp polarisation— even cosmopolitans it seems spend time with neighbours. All this is consistent with the view of the neighbourhood as a social arena which continues to perform an important but increasingly specialised role. Context, Cohesion and Identity A primary reason for the renewed interest in neighbourhoods in contemporary policy debate is a concern with the contextual effects of neighbourhood— principally the social consequences of an increasing concentration of disadvantaged people in particular parts of cities. These neighbourhoods are not only seen as a social problem in their own right, but also as a more pervasive threat to the moral order or social cohesion of cities. Moreover, there is often an implicit view that what separates the ‘successful’ neighbourhood from the ‘unsuccessful’ is the degree to which there is social cohesion—the underlying assumption being that disadvantaged neighbourhoods lack the necessary ingredients which foster social cohesion. Contacts tend to be between people with networks which do not extend into the world of work. Because of high unemployment, high levels of lone parenthood and perhaps a high number of poor pensioner households, residents of poor neighbourhoods spend more time in their local areas than do residents of wealthier neighbourhoods. Thus, what Friedrichs (1996) refers to as the context effects of neighbourhoods may be particularly marked in the most disadvantaged areas. These con-
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text effects include the restricted opportunity structure of the neighbourhood (lack of formal and informal employment opportunities) and the development of deviant social norms—or at least social norms outside the mainstream. But how might we recognise a socially cohesive neighbourhood and would it be such a good thing anyway? The simplest observable measure would be of groups of people who live in a local area getting together to promote or defend some common local interest. This could come in various forms: organising the annual street party; petitioning for a better local service of some kind; the vigilante group organised to hound out some ‘undesirable’ resident; the street gang ghting its turf; poor people ghting for better housing; rich enclaves with guards and security cameras. There is the social cohesion of an ethnic majority imposing its rules and values on others. There is the social cohesion of restrictive covenants and of withdrawal from and defence against the world outside; such withdrawal and defence can occur among both rich and poor neighbourhoods, albeit for different reasons and with different consequences. As we suggested earlier, a city could consist of socially cohesive but increasingly divided neighbourhoods. There may be ethnic or religion-based cohesive communities living side-by-side. In such circumstances, the stronger the ties which bind such communities the greater may be the social, racial or religious con ict between them. Social cohesion at the neighbourhood level is therefore by no means unambiguously a good thing. It can be about discrimination and exclusion and about a majority imposing its will or value system on a minority. Moreover, the assumed ingredients for social cohesion may be lacking in precisely those parts of the cities which are apparently successful and problem-free. Baumgartner, for example, observed that People in the suburbs live in a world characterised by non-violence and non-confrontation, in which civility prevails and
disturbances of the peace are uncommon. In this sense, suburbia is a model of social order. The order is not born, however, of conditions widely perceived to generate social harmony. It does not arise from intimacy and connectedness, but rather from some of the very things more often presumed to bring about con ict and violence– transiency, fragmentation, isolation, atomisation and indifference among people (Baumgartner, 1988, p. 134). Such a statement about contemporary Britain requires new empirical investigation but it makes the important point that some of the features associated with neighbourhood stability and social order (such as turnover or extent of activity in local groups) are contingent rather than necessary. And it emphasises further the rather complex relationship between wider, societal cohesion and the strength of locally based networks and associations. The less robust and less deep-rooted are neighbourhood networks, the more stable and con ict-free may be the social order in which they sit. On the other hand, the neighbourhood—understood as overlapping social networks with speci c and variable time-geographies—is an essential part of the way in which people are socialised into that wider social order. We do not know enough, at least in the UK, about how these two phenomena co-exist, although time (their temporal relations) may add an important dimension to our understanding. The neighbourhood in which we live can play an important part in socialisation, not only through its internal composition and dynamics but also according to how it is seen by residents in other neighbourhoods and by the institutions and agencies which play a key role in opportunity structures. Thus, the identity and contextual roles of the neighbourhood are closely linked to one another. Residential identities are embedded in a strongly comparative psychological landscape in which each neighbourhood is known primarily as a counterpart to some of the others, and relative differences are probably more important than any single and widely
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shared social characteristic. As counterparts to one another, neighbourhoods seem to acquire their identity through an on-going commentary between themselves and this continuous dialogue between different groups and agencies shapes the cognitive map of the city and establishes good and bad reputations. These reputations may cling to some neighbourhoods longer than others. Moreover, the external perceptions of areas impact on the behaviour and attitudes of residents in ways which may reinforce cohesive groupings and further consolidate reputations. This is most evident in relation to what Suttles (1972) referred to as the ‘defended neighbourhood’ in which areas acquire reputations as places to avoid or places to rob. Recent research on regenerated neighbourhoods in the UK highlights how dif cult it is to shift perceptions of areas held both by intermediary agencies and by residents (Dean and Hastings, 2000). Anticipating the end-of-millennium commentaries on fortress cities and militaristic architecture of analysts such as Davies (1990) and Christopherson (1994), Suttles refers to the myriad of small defended neighbourhoods of the inner city. It is here that one nds vigilante community groups, militant conservation groups, a high incidence of uniformed doormen, and frequent use of door buzzers and TV monitors … What they indicate is the general apprehensiveness of inner city dwellers, rich and poor alike, and the necessity for each of them to bound off discrete areas within which they can feel safe and secure (Suttles, 1972, p. 34). These defended neighbourhoods have taken a new turn in the contemporary urban world. Some 8 million US citizens have retreated behind security fences and armed guards to defend themselves from the risks and uncertainties which lurk beyond in their neighbourhoods or ‘gated communities’— ‘context’ is assured and a different type of reputation reinforced. Here we have what has been referred to as the ‘commodi cation of community’ (Guterson; quoted in Lang and
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Danielsen, 1997) in which—in Blakely and Snyder’s (1997) categorisation—people are being sold community as lifestyle, prestige or security or some combination of all three. The hyperbole of lifestyle and choice may also mask the desire to avoid the contagion of proximity (or negative context effects). In these kinds of neighbourhood an inwardlooking cohesion of people with similar expectations, outlooks, levels of af uence or anxieties may co-exist uneasily with an exclusion of the world outside. And formal rules and regulation guarantee conformity— substituting for the informal social controls which may develop over time in a stable neighbourhood. In these neighbourhoods, you buy social cohesion rather than make it, fabricating a guaranteed neighbourhood context. Wilton (1998) illustrates how issues of context, identity and reputation come together as people try to exclude others/difference and maintain spatial control and boundaries. Using psychoanalytic theory (speci cally Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’ and Kristera’s notion of the abject), Wilton shows how the disturbance of outsiders is revisited by communities in neighbourhoods partly because individual and collective identities are threatened. He does this through an examination of community resistance to facilities for disabled people, but along the way he makes perceptive general remarks which illustrate how important defended homogeneous neighbourhoods can be to our sense of identity and ontological security. If we read the unheimlich as unhomely, what produces anxiety is an encounter in a place we think of as our own with people who don’t appear to belong. Yet the reaction we experience is not just because people are different and out-of-place. It derives from the fear that they might not be different enough (Wilton, 1998, p. 178). Wilton discusses the way in which ‘the proximity of difference’ and ‘transgressions at the scale of the neighbourhood’ can be a threat to the social order and a challenge to collec-
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tive and individual identities. Such desire for and consequences of residence among our own kind highlight the potential continuing importance of the neighbourhood, but do not auger well for urban policies seeking to create mixed-use, mixed-income neighbourhoods. There is a two-way relationship between homogeneous context and the role of the neighbourhood in identity. An important general issue is that of the extent to which the context effects of neighbourhood affect opportunity structures and life-chances (Rosenbaum, 1995; Galster and Killen, 1995). Some of the people who buy into gated communities may believe it to be literally a matter of life or death, but mainstream work has more typically focused on issues of health or incidence of crime. For example, the classic study by Shaw and McKay (1942/69) linked delinquency, inter alia, to neighbourhood disorganisation and saw some of the necessary policy options in terms of community development and physical upgrading. And recent work by Hirsch eld and Bowers (1997) attempts to link levels of social cohesion to patterns of recorded crime in contemporary Liverpool. Much of the available empirical evidence on these issues comes from research conducted in the US. In a useful assessment of recent work, Ellen and Turner (1997) conclude inter alia that, while we know a reasonable amount about whether neighbourhood matters, we remain relatively ignorant about how it matters and for whom. For Ellen and Turner, the empirical evidence shows that Various neighbourhood conditions appear to signi cantly affect a wide range of individual outcomes, at every stage in a person’s life and across social and economic dimensions (Ellen and Turner, 1997, p. 848). However, the causal links between neighbourhood factors and individual outcomes are complicated by the wide range of intervening variables. And it is evident, according to Ellen and Turner that, while neighbourhood matters to outcomes, it matters less
than parental factors such as education, income and employment. They go on to point out that from the US evidence at least No consensus emerges about which neighbourhood characteristics affect which outcomes, or about what types of families may be most vulnerable to problems in the neighbourhood environment. On these questions, the existing empirical evidence is inconsistent, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory (Ellen and Turner, 1997, p. 854). Moreover, the contextual effects of neighbourhood are likely to be very different for groups at different points in the family lifecourse—for pre-school-age children as opposed to teenagers, working adults as opposed to those in retirement, for families with children compared with childless couples. The question, ‘For whom does neighbourhood matter?’ remains then one which has only been partially addressed, as does the way in which neighbourhood cross-cuts other factors. On this latter point, Fischer (1982) in the conclusion to his study of personal networks in the contemporary city provides a useful summary. People’s position in the social structure— their educational and nancial resources, status in the labour force, ethnic membership, family commitments, residential locations, and so on—expose them to varying opportunities for forming personal relations and provide them with varying means for taking advantage of those opportunities. The woman who works outside the home, for example, meets an entire set of people, some of whom may become her friends, that is unavailable to the woman who does not work. (The latter has a somewhat easier time, however, getting to know her neighbours.) The working woman who has two children to care for has more dif culty making and keeping such potential friends than does the childless working woman. The man who has lived in several communities has had the
SOCIAL COHESION , SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
chance to meet many more possible friends than one who has lived in one place all his life, but whether the roamer holds onto his far ung ties or is alone in his new community depends in part on his income, family burdens, vacations schedule and so on (Fischer, 1982, p. 254). Residential location, the neighbourhood, intersects therefore with other dimensions of opportunity and constraint and thus varies the signi cance of any context effects. The Neighbourhood, Social Capital and Social Cohesion So far, we have discussed the general issue of social cohesion and the extent to which the residential neighbourhood remains as an important element in social identity, meaning and in the structuring of life-chances. The re-emergence of concerns with ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ and the links to social cohesion are, however, also enmeshed in a partial reconceptualisation of these issues within more general debates around the concept of social capital. There are two thrusts to the contemporary policy interest in social capital. The rst interest, and one particularly relevant to our focus on neighbourhoods, is the argument that social cohesion at the societal level may be derived from the forms and quality of social interaction at the local level. In this model of society, social cohesion is viewed as a bottom-up process founded upon local social capital, rather than as a top-down process. While the social capital of a community is not assumed to imply spatial propinquity or indeed a local rather than a national dimension, when operationalised for policy or research purposes it tends to take on a strong sense of local space, albeit with ambiguous and uid boundaries. Indeed, Jacobs’ (1961) reference to the conditions which contribute to ‘civilised self-government’ was precisely in relation to the dense social networks and living conditions of poorer, urban neighbourhoods. It is, of course, the work of Bourdieu (for
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example, 1986), Coleman (1988), Putnam (1993) and Fukuyama (for example, 1995; 1999) which has been most in uential in drawing the concept of social capital into widespread contemporary use in both academic and policy debates. As with social cohesion, however, overuse and imprecision have rendered it a concept prone to vague interpretation and indiscriminate application. For the moment Putnam’s well-rehearsed de nition will suf ce By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital … social capital refers to features of social organisation such as networks, norms and trust that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual bene t. Social capital enhances the bene ts of investment in physical and human capital (Putnam, 1993, p. 35). Indeed, much of the contemporary policy interest in ideas of social capital derives from Putnam’s (1993) in uential research which focused on the relationship between civic traditions, democratic participation and associational activity in modern Italy. From this work, he went on to argue that there was a close relationship between civic engagement in its wide variety of forms and democratic participation. The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government (Putnam, 1996, p. 65). His observation that more and more Americans were ‘bowling alone’ rather than as part of a team was for Putnam both a symptom and cause of widespread civic disengagement and a declining trust in government. The essential argument was that engaged communities produced cohesive societies of active citizens. The neighbourhood matters because what happens in the neighbourhood in uences our public and societal disposition. It should be noted, however, that this emphasis on community and, by implication, neighbourhood is only one context for the production and maintenance of social capital.
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Table 4. Social aspects of the neighbourhood, west-central Scotland, by tenure (percentages of respondents in each housing tenure, unless stated otherwise) Owners (n 5 1684)
Social renters (n 5 981)
Other people in the area a problem
16
37
Feeling part of the local community Very much A little Not at all
31 55 14
30 51 19
Mean number of people in the area with whom exchange small favours No-one with whom exchange favours
2.8 12
2.3 21
Source: Transport, Housing and Well-being (THAW) Study, 1997 – 2000, Glasgow and Clyde Valley Structure Plan Area.
Indeed, as Morrow (1999) has pointed out, ‘community’ was not the focus of Bourdieu’s concerns in his development of the concept of social capital. Rather, he was concerned with the routine practices of everyday life in relation to what Granovetter (1973) and others have referred to as ‘weak ties’—the more subtle and at times apparently super cial associations which facilitate and sustain social advantage. And critically, as Morrow again emphasises, for Bourdieu, social capital was underpinned by economic capital and the focus was on privilege rather than disadvantage. This is of some importance to contemporary concerns with the contribution of neighbourhoods and neighbouring to the production and maintenance of social capital. The emphasis on what disadvantaged areas may lack rather than what apparently successful neighbourhoods may possess has skewed empirical research, at least in the UK, towards studies focusing on neighbourhoods perceived to have problems. This produces, at best, a partial view of local social relations and, in the absence of studies of a wider range of neighbourhood types, makes it dif cult to draw conclusions about the particularities of neighbouring and associational activity in poor areas. Furthermore, such a focus obscures the role that available
resources and opportunities have in underpinning social capital in better-off neighbourhoods. One might say, ‘As well as who you know, what you’ve got is also important’. But how can we tell whether the residents of disadvantaged areas in Britain interact more or less frequently, or with greater or lesser intensity, or for the same or different reasons than the population generally? Recent evidence from a survey of adults in west-central Scotland, shown in Table 4, indicates (again) lower levels of neighbourliness in social housing areas compared with areas of home-owning. Twice as many council-sector residents as owners have no one with whom they exchange favours locally, and many more council tenants identify other people in the local area as a problem. Rather than building up social capital, there seems to be a signi cant problem of social isolation in the social rented sector, together with modest levels of engagement with the community in residential neighbourhoods, across all housing tenures, with only a third of residents considering themselves ‘very much’ part of their local community in a region renowned for its civic qualities. A second reason why social capital and the neighbourhood are of policy interest today is due to a revival of interest in ideas of ‘local community’ (Etzioni, 1993), self-help and
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mutuality as means to tackle area deprivation, disadvantaged and social exclusion. An in uential perspective on these matters is that neighbourhood decline sets in train a cumulative decline in social capital. Networks are disrupted and weakened, population turnover erodes familiarity and trust, and policies and initiatives aimed at reversing the decline are being implemented in a context of community disengagement and disillusionment. Putnam claims that Researchers in such elds as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the control of crime and drug abuse, and even health, have discovered that successful outcomes are more likely in ‘civically engaged communities’ (Putnam, 1995. p. 65). The implication is that poor neighbourhoods in general lack the necessary qualities of self-help, mutuality and trust which could assist in their regeneration—and this in part explains, and is a cumulative product of, their decline. In policy terms, the neighbourhood is seen as the receptacle for many of the informal resources of the ‘third way’. At the local level, mutual aid and self-help, facilitated by a diversity of loose ties and mediating community organisations, are used by people in excluded communities to provide solutions, springboards and alternatives (Burns and Taylor, 1998). Policy increasingly seeks to encourage such activities and solutions. At the societal level, ‘third-wayers’ argue that self-governance through mutual institutions ts the spirit of the times and can replace the decline in trust in traditional institutions, whilst boosting a sense of belonging at the same time (Leadbeater, 1997). This approach offers an attractive (and cheaper?) alternative for tackling social exclusion and regeneration, and illustrates another set of linkages between social capital and social cohesion. From a policy perspective, however, it is necessary to break down the concept of social capital into constituent domains, or manageable elements, in order to move from abstraction to implementation, both in terms of identifying phenomena which might be
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subject to purposeful change and in constructing a set of measures which can be monitored and (where appropriate) quanti ed. In work for Scottish Homes (Burns et al., 2000) which examined the impact of housing association activity on social capital within neighbourhoods we identi ed eight domains of social capital. Some of these domains (for example, safety) allow for the direct impact of a local agency on the level of social capital in an area. Others such as trust are more likely to indicate indirect effects. Table 5 lists the eight domains and links them with fuller descriptions which are in turn linked to the kinds of activities a local agency could be involved in at the local neighbourhood level. This is intended to illustrate the different dimensions of social capital and the way in which the concept can be disaggregated for policy purposes and for the development of research instruments such as structured or semi-structured questionnaires—just as in references to social cohesion, it is essential to transcend vague prescription and normative statements if we are to engage critically with the exploration of social capital and neighbourhoods. And yet, in contrast to the two previous perspectives on the utility of social capital, Fukuyama (1999) offers observations on the apparent paradox between increased associational activity and declining levels of trust and civic engagement. Taking issue with some of Putnam’s research ndings, Fukuyama argues that it is not the decline in associational activity in the US which may be a factor in reduced levels of democratic engagement and institutional disillusionment, but rather the key factor is the changing nature of associational activity. Contrary to Putnam’s view that Americans are associating less, Fukuyama draws on evidence which suggests that associational activity is on the increase but is of a qualitatively different kind—typically single-issue focused and often locally (our emphasis) based. Activities of this kind, according to Fukuyama, have a small ‘radius of trust’. Unlike, say, membership of a church or a trade union, these new associational forms bind together small num-
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Table 5. The domains of social capital and appropriate neighbourhood policies to support them Domain
Description
Local Policies
Empowerment
That people feel they have a voice which is listened to; are involved in processes that affect them; can themselves take action to initiate changes
Providing support to community groups; giving local people ‘voice’; helping to provide solutions to problems; giving local people a role in policy processes
Participation
That people take part in social and community activities; local events occur and are well attended
Establishing and/or supporting local activities and local organisations; publicising local events
Associational activity and common purpose
That people co-operate with one another through the formation of formal and informal groups to further their interests
Developing and supporting networks between organisations in the area
Supporting networks and reciprocity
That individuals and organisations co-operate to support one another for either mutual or one-sided gain; an expectation that help would be given to or received from others when needed
Creating, developing and/or supporting an ethos of co-operation between individuals and organisations which develop ideas of community support; good neighbour award schemes
Collective norms and values
That people share common values and norms of behaviour
Developing and promulgating an ethos which residents recognise and accept; securing harmonious social relations; promoting community interests
Trust
That people feel they can trust their co-residents and local organisations responsible for governing or serving their area
Encouraging trust in residents in their relationships with each other; delivering on policy promises; bringing con icting groups together
Safety
That people feel safe in their neighbourhood and are not restricted in their use of public space by fear
Encouraging a sense of safety in residents; involvement in local crime prevention; providing visible evidence of security measures
Belonging
That people feel connected to their co-residents, their home area, have a sense of belonging to the place and its people
Creating, developing and/or supporting a sense of belonging in residents; boosting the identity of a place via design, street furnishings, naming
bers of like-minded people contributing to, and symptomatic of, what Fukuyama refers to as the ‘miniaturisation’ of community and morality. One example he offers is the case of a family joining a neighbourhood watch organisation that patrols local streets because there has been a sudden rash of burglaries. The neighbourhood watch serves as one of Tocqueville’s schools of citizenship and constitutes a new group that would be counted as part
of the broader civil society. Its members learn to cooperate with one another and thereby build social capital. On the other hand, the reason that the organisation exists in the rst place is as a result of crime and the distrust that people in the neighbourhood have for those in the broader society who are making them feel insecure (Fukuyama, 1999, p. 88). In this second model of society, social cohesion is not a bottom – up process; local
SOCIAL COHESION , SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
social capital remains within the local arena without positive societal spillover effects. This is also an example of what Portes and Landolt (1996) have referred to as the ‘downside of social capital’, in which associational activity can be divisive and exclusionary. The shared values can be those of suspicion as in Mann’s (1970) example of the Dobu Indians’ shared values of treachery and suspiciousness and anxiety. As illustrated by Fukuyama’s example of the defensive neighbourhood watch group, it should not be assumed that associational activity which contributes to the creation of social capital is necessarily inclusive or outward-looking. Moreover, close family ties, mutual aid and voluntarism are often strong features of poor areas. It is these qualities which may enable people to cope with poverty, unemployment and wider processes of social exclusion. But, as Portes and Landolt (1996) point out, There is considerable social capital in ghetto areas, but the assets obtainable through it seldom allow participants to rise above their poverty (p. 20). Social capital, then, is important not for its own sake, but for what one does with it, or can attain by it, as with other forms of capital. The current fashionable search for evidence of, and measures to enhance, the stock of social capital in a neighbourhood needs therefore to have a sensitivity to the different forms of social capital that may exist with different purposes. Coping with social problems is not the same thing as overcoming them and renewing neighbourhoods (the government’s current priority in urban policy) will not necessarily reform society. Concluding Comments This paper has had a number of aims. First, it has set out to situate the neighbourhood within more general debates about social cohesion and social capital and to illustrate how contested and complex these discourses are. Secondly, it has provided a selective review of evidence on the extent to which
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neighbourhoods and neighbouring remain an important dimension of contemporary urban life. In doing so, it has emphasised the need to differentiate between social groups, lifecourse stages and cultural differences. Moreover, it has shown that most of the systematic research in these areas has been undertaken in the US and the conclusions drawn can only be cautiously transferred as research questions to be posed in other national and cultural contexts. Thirdly, it has been argued that, in the recent revival of interest in issues of community and neighbourhood, the tendency has been to focus almost exclusively on disadvantaged and poor neighbourhoods. This re ects research driven by a policy agenda rather than one which seeks to provide a more rounded view of neighbourhood dynamics and in particular the similarities or differences between neighbourhoods. As Morrow (1999) points out, one of the dangers of such an approach is that concepts such as social capital become part of ‘de cit theory syndrome’—something lacking in individuals or communities—rather than a useful heuristic device for structuring what used to be termed ‘community studies’. A fourth aim has been to offer a translation of concepts such as social cohesion and social capital into their constituent parts. This has identi ed the key aspects of interaction between the two concepts and has shown how they can be operationalised for research purposes and policy action. Finally, the paper has approached the idea of ‘neighbourhood’ from different perspectives—all of them resonant with the contemporary world. There is the neighbourhood as ‘community’—the local domain of friendships and casual acquaintance which, according to the available evidence, appears to remain as an important dimension of our everyday lives. There is the neighbourhood as ‘context’—particularly in the negative sense of social reputation, labelling, ill health and the development of perverse social norms and behaviour as responses to social exclusion. At the other end of the social spectrum, there is the neighbourhood as
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‘commodity’—a domain of safety and security, of compatible lifestyle packaged and sold as a walled enclave. This is internal cohesion at the expense of external relations—local cohesion in the context of wider social fragmentation. And this links to the idea of the neighbourhood as ‘consumption’ niche. What we consume and who we consume it with are increasingly important parts of the social cement of contemporary urban life and this is re ected in the increasingly sophisticated classi cation of neighbourhoods in terms of consumption patterns and lifestyle groups. This again reinforces the need to embed conceptions of social capital in a more general exploration of human, cultural and economic capital, all within a wider audit of neighbourhood resources and dynamics.
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