Communities+of+Place

From Chapter 2: “The Importance of Communities of Place,” pp. 37-40

More than thirty years before Robert Putnam popularized the expression social capital, Jane Jacobs was already using the expression and showing how it works on the neighborhood level. her writing is filled with stories about how social capital was created and then reinvested in the Greenwich Village neighborhood where she lived. She tells of neighborhood grocers who held spare keys to everyone’s apartment and even of saloon keepers who, paradoxically enough, looked out for the neighborhood children and often intervened in disagreements on the street before they turned into violent confrontations.

Writing at the height of the postwar suburban era, Jacobs vividly reminded Americans how rich and full life an be in a crowded city neighborhood, as long as that neighborhood is blessed with an abundance of social capital. At the level of the neighborhood, social capital is created and reinvested over and over again on a daily basis. People run into each other at the school or the supermarket. They have chance encounters in a restaurant or on a street corner. They set up business meetings or social engagements that they would not otherwise undertake, because they are in close proximity to one another.

In many cases, people select their homes or their business locations specifically for this reason—the ability to interact frequently with other people in ways they believe to be positive for their lives and their work. In this way, strong places can form the basis for both a healthy social life and a successful economic life, for both the individual person and the community at large.

Furthermore, a neighborhood is more likely to be successful if it has a series of varied environments—in particular, community gathering places that provide people with a backdrop for engaging in the informal community life required to build social capital. These gathering places may be schools, parks, community centers, stores, cafes, or even bars. By providing a neighborhood environment that both supports and affords respite from home and work, the gathering places nurture the networks of human interaction required for a well-rounded social structure to emerge. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg dubbed these locales “the third place,” noting that people need them to keep the office and the home in perspective. “In the absence of an informal public life,” he wrote, “people’s expectations toward work and family life have escalated beyond the capacity of those institutions to meet them.”

Successful neighborhoods are delicate mechanisms, however, that require maintaining a difficult balance between the familiar and the unexpected, between the formal and the informal, and—not least—between people who are in some way the same yet in some way different. Jane Jacobs’s grocer, for example, had to know all his neighbors well enough to be trusted with their keys, but not so well that he interfered with their daily lives.

Traditionally, such communities of place were built around some commonality among its residents so compelling that it created cohesiveness even when the individual members themselves were not exactly alike. The urban ethnic neighborhood, for example, contained people who were old and young, married and single, well-to-do and poor—all bound together by an ethnic identity (usually reinforced by religious practices) that all of them had in common. If such a neighborhood was often hostile to “outsiders” who were not part of the ethnic group, at least it contained a great deal of diversity within the group. [|GBreader.pdf]