Loughborough University
Browse
23543.pdf (114.17 kB)

Determinants of social capital: prioritising issues for holistic urban sustainability assessments

Download (114.17 kB)
conference contribution
posted on 2016-12-21, 12:55 authored by Cletus Moobela, Andrew Price, Peter J. Taylor, Vivek Narain Mathur
The concept of social capital is gaining increasing recognition as a concomitant for social and economic development. Robert Putnam's (2000) exposition of the crucial correspondence between the decline of social capital on one hand and the economic lives of American people on the other received wide acclaim at home and abroad. Contemporary literature on development studies is equally replete with references to the World Bank's subscription that social capital has an important role to play fostering sustainable development. There is a general agreement among proponents of social capital that well-governed cities which exhibit strong economic growth do so because of their high stocks of social capital (Portes, 1998). There is also a similar realisation that the design and form of cities, neighbourhoods and individual buildings have significant implications on social capital as they can affect the way people interact and bond with each other and the sense of community among individuals (Dannenberg et al, 2003; Lindström et al, 2003). The fundamental premise is that some urban designs encourage social ties and informal contact among residents while others violate the evolutionary pattern of civicness within the urban existence. The aim of this paper is to identify and examine the key determinants of social capital within an urban development context. This should set the platform for a predictive model of social capital, which will enable the incorporation of the concept in a holistic urban sustainability assessment framework. The paper argues that social capital is a subject of self-organisation, whose evolution to higher levels can be catalysed by the prevalence of a critical balance in the design of the physical urban environment.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the UK’s EPSRC Sustainable Urban Environment – Metric, Models and Toolkits for Whole-life Sustainable Developments (SUE-MoT) programme.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Conference Proceedings: SUE-MoT Conference 2007: International Conference on Whole Life Sustainability and its Assessment, .

Pages

- ?

Citation

MOOBELA, C. ... et al., 2007. Determinants of social capital: prioritising issues for holistic urban sustainability assessments. IN: Proceedings of 2007 1st Sustainable Urban Environment: Metrics, Models and Toolkits (SUE-MoT) conference: International Conference on Whole Life Sustainability and its Assessment, Glasgow, Great Britain, 27-29 June 2007.

Publisher

SUE-MoT

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2007

ISBN

9781905866137;1905866135

Language

  • en

Location

Glasgow, U.K.

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC