Social Inclusion at Different Scales in the Urban Environment: Locating the Community to Empower

Abstract

As area-based initiatives emphasise community empowerment and social inclusion programmes focus on place, this article compares participation in two ICT programmes in UK cities which sought to empower communities at different scales. Recruitment was better in a neighbourhood-scale project, a scale that enabled access to settings of public familiarity and helping/coping networks. However, the factors that promoted social inclusion during recruitment favour defensive collective action. A city-wide project facilitated transformative social learning by relocalising community more widely as a problem-oriented operational network. The two approaches could be combined, starting at neighbourhood level and then rescaling to reveal different affordances of social networks and stimulate different dimensions of technology appropriation.