Social cohesion revisited: a new definition and how to characterize it

Abstract

This paper provides a general overview on different perspectives and studies on social cohesion, offers a definition of social cohesion that is deeply rooted in current literature, and provides a framework that can be used to characterize social cohesion and help support resilient cities. The framework highlights the factors that play a substantial role in enabling social cohesion, and shows from which perspectives it can be fostered.

Keywords:

• resilient cities
• social cohesion
• survey
• social cohesion framework

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Xavier Fonseca is a researcher and PhD candidate at Delft University of Technology. He addresses sociotechnical challenges in societies in The Netherlands and Portugal via serious games. He is researching serious game design as a way to test whether meaningful social interaction can be fostered with implications for social cohesion. Current interests are on serious game design, game development, and research on HCI. Professional and academic experiences also include IoT and high-performance computing (e.g. embedded programming, multi-threaded highly optimized applications, multi-processor architectures, and GPGPU applications). His professional experience abroad covers Portugal, India, Germany and the Netherlands, as a result of which he has an extensive professional network.

Stephan Lukosch is associate professor at the Delft University of Technology. His current research focuses on designing engaging environments for participatory systems. In participatory systems' new social structures, communication and coordination networks are emerging. New types of interaction emerge that require new types of governance and participation. Enabled by technology, these structures span physical, temporal and relational distance in merging realities. Using augmented reality, he researches environments for virtual co-location in which individuals can virtually be at any place in the world and coordinate their activities with others and exchange their experiences. Using serious games, he researches on how to create effective training or assessment environments.

Frances Brazier is a full professor in Engineering Systems Foundations at the Delft University of Technology, as of September 2009, before which she chaired the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems Group for 10 years within the Department of Computer Science at the VU University Amsterdam. She holds an MSc in Mathematics and a doctorate in Cognitive Ergonomics from the VU Amsterdam. Parallel to her academic career, she co-founded the first ISP in the Netherlands: NLnet and later NLnet Labs. She is currently a board member of the NLnetLabs Foundation. She has over 200 refereed papers, has served on many programme committees, and is currently a member of 3 editorial boards – Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (Cambridge University Press), the Requirements Engineering Journal (Springer), and Birkenhauser's Autonomic Computing series.

ORCID

Xavier Fonseca http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0558-3172

Stephan Lukosch http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7203-2034

Notes

1. http://www.100resilientcities.org/about-us/, 100 Resilient Cities – Rockefeller Foundation (100RC).

2. http://www.100resilientcities.org/cities/, Member cities in the 100 Resilient Cities network.

3. https://www.resilientrotterdam.nl/en/rotterdam-resilient-city/, Main focus areas of Resilient Rotterdam.

4. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/national_identity, definition of national identity, last visited on 22 January 2018.

5. http://www.coe.int/t/dg3/, last visited on 22 January 2018.

6. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morality, definition of morality, last visited on 22 January 2018.