Neighborhood Disorder, Social Capital, and the Making of Collective Efficacy in Shanghai

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Neighborhood Effects

Abstract

Neighborhood disorder has long been theorized to undermine collective efficacy, defined as the combination of social cohesion and informal social control. Yet, little is known about the social conditions under which physical improvements foster neighborhood connectedness. Drawing on two waves of the Shanghai Urban Neighborhood Survey (2017 and 2019) and deep-learning measures of neighborhood disorder extracted from Street View imagery, this study examines how changes in physical disorder relate to changes in collective efficacy, and how these relationships depend on pre-existing civic infrastructure. Civic infrastructure is captured through baseline levels of formal and informal social capital. Results of fixed-effects models show that reductions in disorder are associated with significant increases in collective efficacy, but only in neighborhoods with high baseline social capital. In neighborhoods with weak social capital, improvements in the environment exert little social impact. These findings extend collective efficacy theory by embedding it in a conditional-process framework, demonstrating that the social benefits of environmental improvement condition on the strength of existing civic infrastructure.

Authors

• Jia Miao, New York University Shanghai

• Yi Zhang, Xiamen University