Social Capital, Race, and the Future of Inner-City Neighborhoods

Abstract

Social capital generally refers to individual, community, or familial networks that reflect substantive degrees of trust between the par ties, and can be used to build, facilitate, or maintain cooperation for mutually beneficial economic, social, or political objectives. Social cap-ital can take various forms.The concept of social capital has gained an explosive amount of attention in recent years in the fields of political science, urban affairs, and planning, as well as in the popular media.1 The American Journal of Planning devoted a symposium to this topic in 2004 titled, “Using Social Capital to Help Integrate Planning Theory, Research, and Practice.” The 1999 annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association was dedicated to the theme of social capital. A search on “social capital” in the papers database of the American Political Science Association shows that for the years 2003 and 2004 there were 1,079 formal presentations containing the phrase. This number surpassed phrases such as race (945), inequality (650), justice (992), injustice (262), empowerment (216), discrimination (570), and racism (182). Although it did not surpass the word “class” (1,119), social capital is now a key concept in research spanning many areas.KeywordsSocial CapitalCensus TractMutual FundPolitical ParticipationCivic EngagementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.