Cooperative Housing and Social Cohesion: The Role of Linking Social Capital

Abstract

The article examines the role of housing cooperatives for social cohesion in the city by introducing linking social capital which grasps the vertical dimension of social capital. Housing cooperatives represent a crucial intermediate level between residents and urban housing policy, thus providing opportunity structures for bottom-linked citizen participation. Drawing on the case of Vienna, a large-scale household survey and interviews with key informants provide empirical evidence on the importance of a form of social capital which links actors at different levels in the spatial hierarchy: residents, housing managers and political decision-makers. The findings add to our understanding of the opportunities and problems with resident participation in a policy field structured by multi-level governance. Our two-level analysis shows that the dominant model of governance, top-down as well as neoliberal, has structurally limited the room for participatory practices in cooperative housing. Nevertheless, we argue that professional housing cooperatives have a potential to give residents a voice beyond the neighbourhood. Their strong linkages with public decision-makers at different scales can help leverage ideas and resources of residents.

Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded with a grant from the WU—Vienna University of Economics and Business. The authors would like to thank Bianca Pizato, Dagmara Pogorzelska, Christina Reichelt and a group of WU students who helped in collecting and entering the survey data. Furthermore, we wish to thank our colleagues Stuart Cameron, Matthias Fink and anonymous reviewers for their fruitful comments which helped to improve the article.

Notes

1. Novy (1983) points to the “myth” that the early cooperative housing movement would have been able to grow and expand significantly through self-help, given their inherent scarcity of economic capital, compared with other cooperative sectors.

2. There are a small number of community-based housing projects in Vienna which are not historically linked to the Vienna settlers' movement. Thus, they have not been included in the analysis.

3. The traditional housing estates of community cooperatives are typically terraced house dwellings, situated at peripheral districts of the city. The typical housing stock of professional cooperatives and limited-profit corporations refers to higher density, flatted housing estates, across the city. For the latter two organizational fields, housing estates have been selected from districts 10, 11 and 23.

4. Eighty-seven per cent of respondents “rather agreed” or “totally agreed” that people in their housing estates get along well together. There were no significant differences in these results between the three organizational fields (n = 535; χ² = 0.982 (NS); 2df; p-value = 0.612).

5. Community cooperatives: n = 115; professional cooperatives: n = 197; limited-profit corporations: n = 235.

6. n = 429; χ² = 30.717***; 1df; p-value = 0.000.

7. n = 521; χ² = 62.319***; 4df; p-value = 0.000.

8. n = 189; χ² = 0.577 (NS); 4df; p-value = 0.966.