Urban Social Capital: Civil Society and City Life

With a broad geographic range and interdisciplinary approach, this volume presents a uniquely comprehensive view of the norms and forms of contemporary city life, focusing on the processes of social capital (de)formation. Drawing on contemporary theory and research in social capital, political economy, urban planning and policy, social movements, civil society and democracy, and bringing together a range of case studies which includes and yet extends well beyond the US and Europe, it explore how social norms, networks, connections and ties are created and deployed under conditions of social complexity, inequality, cultural pluralism, globalization, and ethnoracial diversity and division characteristic of the urban milieu. The book also puts forward an innovative analytical framework for defining and explaining the core forms of urban social capital which draws on World Bank analysis and the editors own ongoing research to move beyond a network-theoretical approach and present a new typology of the forms of urban social capital.