Planning for Social Environments

Around and through this open approach to exploration, novel methodologies such as the relationship between social capital and spatial use in urban areas can be considered for their potential to assist urban planners in understanding and evaluating the social impact of past, present, and future plans as a means of increasing the sophistication and effectiveness of urban planning strategies and eval [...] There are dozens of varying definitions of social cap- ital, but for this paper, the phrase “social capital” is intended to refer to the invisible network of social ties that enables individual agents to make use of the social resources of their networks,. [...] The meso level of social structure is strategic for improving research and policy tools that planners can use in developing strategies for city building that more fully integrate social implications in decision-making and resource-allocation processes including a much better understanding of the social impact of decisions. [...] Network analysis provides a formalized means of understanding those complex systems that are driven by both the structure (topology) and processes (dynamics) of various elements and compo- nents (including nested systems of systems) (Albert and Barabási 2002; R. Cohen and Havlin 2010), in this case social interactions in space and time that constitute the social infrastructure of cities (Friesen 2 [...] It is not necessary to understand all of the underlying mechanisms of social capital in order to make provisional assertions about meaningful knowledge of social resources held among a number of actors—we can gain insight about social dynamics without proof of a causal link (Cushing and McMullin 1989) between a given variable and social capital.