The Onward Sweep of Social Capital: Causes and Consequences for Understanding Cities, Communities and Urban Movements

Only a couple of decades ago urban movements were demanding, usually without much success, increased participation by the grassroots and a democratization of urban politics. Even though they staged what were perceived as ‘urban revolts’ (Castells, 1983: 65) and ‘backyard revolutions’ (Boyte, 1980), the structures of local decisionmaking did not open up very far; established interests in urban renewal hardly budged. Meanwhile, however, the movements’ demands appear to have become reality: the way politicians, urban scholars and activists in urban development now all highlight the importance of grassroots empowerment and citizen participation for dealing with urban problems makes it look as if success has finally been achieved. The topic of urban ‘exclusion’ is finally on the official agenda; policy-makers of all stripes apply not only the rhetoric of grassroots participation, but also a variety of programs addressing urban problems that seek to incorporate and harness community-based interests and local activism. What might appear as the fulfilment of earlier grassroots empowerment claims is actually part of a new mode of governance that has emerged in and for neglected and disadvantaged areas and communities. Their ‘exclusion’ is now described as having a new, more multidimensional character than that which inequality or segregation formerly described, and the need for new policies to address this problematic side of neoliberalism seems uncontested. The concept of ‘social capital’ plays a key role in these new policies, as it presumably connects local participation, based on horizontal networks and reciprocity, with such positive results as economic growth and democratic intensity, even — or especially — in distressed, excluded areas. Through examining the way ‘social capital’ has been deployed by researchers and practitioners in the field of urban movements and community development, this article reveals the powerful and in many ways effective role the concept is playing in framing the contemporary reconfigurations in local state-society relations, impacting especially on the trajectory of third or voluntary sector development. It does so by exemplifying a more general trend of dissolving social and political perspectives into economic ones, by painting a variety of different kinds of civic engagement into a single — positively charged — corner, and thereby creating a new framework for dealing with urban inequality and poverty that appears to involve mobilization from below but does so in an extremely circumscribed and biased way. Volume 27.1 March 2003 108-30 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research