ABSTRACT
Introduction Social capital and its synonyms has captured the imagination of urban sociologists as it has that of other scholars. Indeed, community studies in many ways adumbrated the idea. The Chicago School of sociology championed the study of ‘natural areas’ and their internal organisation, group composition and cohesion. That tradition includes social capital theorist James Coleman (1988: S100-101), who situated social capital in the relations among persons, as well as William Julius Wilson, Robert Sampson and Mario Small who conducted much of the empirical research on neighbourhood variation in social organisation over the last 25 years. Despite a smattering of studies on these issues from Atlanta, Boston, Detroit and Los Angeles as well as the 42 communities of Putnam’s Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, the heavy research emphasis on Chicago neighbourhoods raises questions about the generality of those findings for other large cities. Indeed, recent research suggests Chicago is an outlier on some dimensions of neighbourhood organisation (Small and Feldman 2012). To assess how general the Chicago findings are, this chapter reports on the effects of poverty and racial/ethnic diversity on social capital in neighbourhoods of New York City.
