Social Networks and Political Processes in Urban Neighborhoods

In a comparative case study of six urban neighborhoods and their community organizations, interviews were conducted with all active members of the neighborhood associations and with random samples of community residents. Paradoxically, residents with close-knit neighborhood friendship ties were relatively unlikely to be informed about community associations, and their associations did a relatively poor job of representing their interests. Residents of close-knit neighborhoods, however, were more likely than others to exhibit a capacity for regulating their neighborhoods informally. The paper concludes that as neighborhoods in modem cities become less villagelike, the nature of their political capacities changes. But it is not necessarily true, as some have suggested, that their political capacities diminish.