Social Networks, Social Capital, Popular Organizations, and Urban Poverty: a Research Note

Focusing on networks, social capital, and popular organizations represents a positive view of people’s capacity to overcome the debilitating constraints of urban poverty. Poverty may be rooted in market-generated inequalities, but the poor have the potential to mitigate these inequalities by individual strategies of self-help (networking), by using their social relationships to make up for their lack of human or material capital (the social capital approach), and by collective organization. We will review the research that explores this potential, but, first, we should note two possible limits to this community-centered perspective on alleviating urban poverty. One is the question of the extent to which the self-help and organization of the poor can mitigate economic inequality effectively without accompanying changes in market structure and economic policy, such, for example, as employment policy. While this issue is beyond the scope of this research note, it will be a necessary part of the discussion in the workshop. The second objection, which we do address in this note, is the extent that the cultural, social, and economic isolation of the poor from the urban mainstream inhibit their self-help, thus requiring the intervention of outside agencies, whether the state, political parties, or non-governmental organizations. The presumed isolation of the urban poor was the focus of the early studies of urban poverty in Latin America. For some commentators of the 1950s and 1960s the rapid urbanization of Latin America resulted in breakdowns in political stability, in family and community integration, and in the mental health of migrants. Oscar Lewis argued against the breakdown thesis, but substituted for it that of the culture of poverty, which stressed the fatalism of the urban poor surviving on the margins of the economy and without links to labor or other solidary organizations (Lewis, 1952, 1968). The marginality of the urban poor became an important element in the analysis and programs of the Latin American Christian Democrat parties of the 1960s, which advocated the remedy of popular promotion through various forms of cooperative organization. The disorganization, hopelessness, and needs of the poor made them, according to this analysis, potential supporters of populist and authoritarian politics, hindering democratic development (Vekemans and Giusti, 1969/70). These marginality perspectives, which continue to influence perceptions of urban poverty and its solutions, provide a reference point for surveying the research on networks, social capital, and popular organizations. In a recent review, Luis Beccaria, Laura Golbert, Gabriel Kessler, and Fernando Filgueira (1998) contrast