Social capital and the cities: Advice to change agents

In discussions of community building, politics, and social change, the term “social capital” is in serious danger of becoming a victim of it own success. It has taken on a circus-tent quality, piling all things positive and social underneath. While academic purists might disdain this as intellectual sloppiness, I take it as a rather encouraging sign that social capital is what Mark Moore would call “a powerful public idea,” something that fits so well into a larger conversation—about changes in public life and problem-solving, say—that it mobilizes people and institutions.1 This brief essay is to encourage a little carefulness, lest we march off (mobilize) eagerly in some unproductive, or even dangerous, directions. Having sounded a cautionary note, let me clarify that I find social capital a very useful concept and one very important for thinking through both the promise and peril of community building efforts around the world. Social capital illuminates topics as seemingly diverse as tenant management of public housing, parent involvement in schools, infant health, getting a job, surviving a divorce, and leveraging block grant funds to build affordable housing. I’ll make a few more claims: • Social capital is crucial to making devolution work. Getting it right (built) is not enough, but getting it wrong—losing more of the useful kinds of social capital—will be fatal to America and especially to its most divided cities, along with other parts of the world where decentralized decisionmaking is the trend. • Businesses have never thrived, nor economies flourished, without social capital. Such capital is probably not substitutable to any great degree, though, for the other kinds of capital (the myth of self-help). Rather, social capital makes the other kinds—land, labor, and investment—work well. It greases the gears of commerce, along with other areas of life.