and is rooted in the natural communities of family or clan, usually very religious.
In short – social capital is strong, whereas the single person is weak. Social capital was, for example, quite well circulated in People’s Poland around the tower block estates – people borrowed flour and sugar from each other, and watched each other’s children. But these relationships and the trust implicit in them disappeared when the ‘real’ capital emerged. It is clear that – as Aihwa Ong writes in her latest book – capitalism (or better, neoliberalism) devours everything.21 Social capital, as a relic of the industrial society (and earlier) is also criticised by Richard Florida.22 The mere notion of inventing a creative capital and designating spaces for ‘outsiders’ (people who do not fit the standards of the conservative society) suggests that social capital is an outdated idea, and with all its ‘hard’ social ties a dangerous and harmful one at that. In fact, social capital actually has its dark side: gangs, the mafia, nepotism and ‘cronyism’. Social capital is often tied to the institutionalised religions and, while on the one hand religious communities can often lend a hand to those in need, they are also linked with intolerance, fanaticism and sometimes – at least symbolic – violence. It is no coincidence that Hamas in Palestine owes its popularity not so much to the armed struggle as to its charitable activities.23 A similar mechanism has led to the authority of the Turkish Justice and Development Party, or the two major parties in Northern Ireland: DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) and Sinn Féin. It is no wonder that Florida, who claims that the basis of ‘creative capital’ is tolerance (as well as talent and technology), sees social capital as a threat to urban development in the twenty-first century and more of a problem than an opportunity. So described, social capital would thus be associated with a territorially defined self-help and self-control society.
Maybe we would all be happy in a world where self-help and selfless benevolence prevailed over the religiously or ideologically motivated desire to control what our peers do, say and think, but social self-control is an inherent feature of social capital. It is hard to entirely reject or condemn this social self-control. Cases which have been reported in the press where children, people with disabilities, women or the elderly are abused for years by their families – with a total lack of interest by their neighbours, police, social services or anyone – show that social self-control is not just a case of looking for neighbours under the covers or inside closets, and that its absence can cost lives. Perhaps because of all these concerns and perspectives, social capital is a concept so difficult to define and unilaterally reject as a relic of the past that the relic as proposed by Florida – which is incompatible with liberal-democratic postindustrial (capitalist) social formations – seems to me an abuse. Tolerance, which is the foundation of a liberal-democratic consensus – and which Florida sees as a basic unification of ‘soft’ social bonds, and the soil from which creative capital may emerge (this point is very important because it demystifies Florida as a radical supporter of capitalism) – also has a disadvantage: tolerance often degenerates into indifference. Nobody will give you a hand in need. Nobody will react when you are abused. Nobody will help you for free. The advantage of tolerance is precisely its weakness; tolerance is emotionally cold. Tolerance does not result in pogroms but it rarely prevents them. The reluctance of liberals to embrace social capital is easy to understand. It does not necessarily translate directly into economic growth and sometimes blocks it, because each ‘good deed’ done selflessly is an anarchist attack on the GDP. Social capital affects the quality of life, but not necessarily economic growth. Social capital was used to fill the gaps left by the failings of capitalism during its industrial phase but today, when everything – even emotions and affection – must be bought or sold, it has become an obstacle to the development of capitalism. Here, postmodern and postindustrial Florida is different from Glaeser.
I am interested in social capital primarily in the context of space – so let us return to the City. Areas in which social capital is in bloom are the neighbourhoods most forgotten by God, people, and (thank goodness) planners and city officials. The neoliberal city does not have the available space for them and recent events in Copenhagen, relating to the sale and then destruction by the buyer of the historic house of culture in the district of Christiania, are proof of this. It is worth considering the aforementioned transition of the citizen into the consumer. The dominance of one-dimensional perceptions of the world – that only recognise the maxims of economic efficiency and GDP growth – makes any discussion about the City as a political community lose its meaning. Because if it is not your quality of life but the amount of money in your bank account that is the only measure of your being, any such discussion must lead to the admiration of the free market and neoliberalism. If the neoliberal model is not working as its followers would like it to, it is because these assumptions are not subject to discussion – it has no alternative. It can and must improve, but there is no rejection of its underlying problems. Neoliberalism needs the city as a space and an administration, but not as a community. It is not just the domination of economy over everything else: it is a new kind of rationalism that superimposes the market rules onto ‘everything else’.24 Terror of GDP and economic efficiency pervades all aspects of a city’s existence. Willingly or not, I come to the critique of capitalism. For now I shall leave it as an unspoken assumption, without specifying either the extent or the nature of this criticism.
Designing urban space, we can easily imagine the ‘neoliberal’ spaces – ones in which ‘public’ space is replaced by a ‘space of consumption’ (just count the number of free benches around parks and town squares, and then the places in the cafe gardens). We can also imagine a ‘social space’ – ‘social’ housing complexes like Park Hill council estate, built in Sheffield in the early 1960s and also Europe’s largest listed building, were inspired by the examples of Sweden, Finland and Germany. Perhaps we could also imagine a ‘creative space’ – though there are not many examples of such space. But can we actually imagine a democratic space? A space which each resident could potentially plug themselves into? The question is intimate – are we ourselves able to accept everyone? Social capital is linked to a specific spatial structure of cities. I mentioned in the previous chapter that ethnic neighbourhoods are the most spatially thick and dense in terms of interpersonal interaction. In his essay The Vital Businesses of Immigrants, Peter Elmlund wrote: “Racism is not the problem. On the contrary, the ability of immigrants to generate a varied economy of small businesses has the potential to revitalise declining cities. But the Swedish model, like others in Europe, is still dominated by large scale modernist planning, which creates forlorn suburbs, segregates people and strangles economic growth.”25 This explains (in terms of a single factor, of course) the relative success of immigrant integration in Britain, which succeeded (although not completely) in avoiding the errors of Modernist continental urbanism, and the surprising dramas of Parisian suburbs which culminated in an explosion of social hatred in 2005.
The ‘premodern’ spatial structure of cities in the UK (but also Chinese neighbourhoods in the United States), which allows them to cope much better with the ‘postmodern’ challenges of mass immigration, is in an interesting way connected to Jadwiga Staniszkis’ thesis about the greater efficiency of premodern methods of governance in the U.S. and China, in comparison with the ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ in Europe. Peter Elmlund is a traditionalist, yearning for historical, premodern structures, but reaching similar conclusions about the necessity of ‘dense’ spaces as the architects and city planners – whom one cannot in any way accuse of being traditionalists – such as the guru Rem Koolhaas. In his book Content he presents a draft for the CBD (Central Business District) in Beijing, where instead of the typical high-rise buildings he offers two types of structure – one recalling the classical quarters and the second being a megastructure. Both have something that the traditional office districts did not have: interaction densities.
So what is the significance of social capital in modern cities, and what might it be in Polis? Again, I quote Staniszkis: “It turned out that for the state to act, it needs a ‘social infrastructure of power’. Without this, it is powerless. This society, functioning as a community (local, as in the U.S., or more abstract, united by a common code of communication, such as in the Netherlands), and not guns, determine the strength of the state.” Social capital was necessary in the era of industrial capitalism,
