Coping with urban shrinkage: the role of informal social capital in French medium-sized shrinking cities

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses current debates on the role of social capital in the context of urban shrinkage, by investigating the specific role of informal social capital. The results are drawn from qualitative studies conducted in two French medium-sized shrinking cities. The findings show that similarly to the institutional and collective forms of social capital analyzed in previous literature, informal social capital is also impacted by the changes affecting urban place in the context of shrinkage, and particularly weakened for elderly residents – especially women – and young professionals. At the same time, it constitutes an efficient resource, that helps residents facing shrinkage-related problems individually rather than addressing shrinkage itself collectively. Finally, the findings highlight the role of specific social actors such as community centres who, by providing institutionalized sources of social capital, foster the creation of informal social capital and allow us to address its unequal distribution and weakening. This emphasizes the need to reconsider current social capital-based planning strategies, from relying mainly on collective initiatives addressing shrinkage, to supporting institutional social actors in the creation of small scale, individual level social ties and interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban shrinkage
• shrinking cities
• social capital
• civil society
• medium-sized cities

Introduction

Since the mid-2000s (Oswalt 2005; Oswalt and Rieniets 2006), urban shrinkage has gained considerable importance on the European research agenda, and the phenomenon has become a key urban planning and policymaking issue. Shrinking cities have been defined as urban areas ‘that have experienced population loss, economic downturn, employment decline and social problems as symptoms of a structural crisis’ (Martinez-Fernandez et al. 2012, 214). In France, deindustrialization, suburbanization and the selective outmigration of younger and higher educated residents constitute the main drivers of urban shrinkage (Fol and Cunningham-Sabot 2010; Wolff and Wiechmann 2018). Former industrial regions tend to be particularly affected by urban shrinkage worldwide, and specifically in the French context, medium-sized cities are particularly concerned (in comparison to larger cities), with almost half of them experiencing decline (Guéraut 2018; see also Wolff et al. 2013). This translates into rising unemployment, impoverishment of the population, high residential and commercial vacancy rates, degradation of the built environment, and a diminishing municipal tax base. However, these consequences vary significantly across local contexts, suggesting that policies should be designed in relation to specific local needs (Wiechmann and Pallagst 2012).

The scholarship on urban shrinkage has placed large emphasis on seeking to understand its causes and consequences, relying predominantly on quantitative indicators analysed at European, national or regional level (e.g. Birch, MacKinnon, and Cumbers 2010; Hoekveld and Bontje 2016; Wolff and Wiechmann 2018). Another key concern in the literature has been with the governance and policy-making implications of the phenomenon at urban and regional levels, and more specifically planning responses to shrinkage (e.g. Batunova and Gunko 2018; Béal et al. 2019; Fernandez and Hartt 2021; Hartt and Warkentin 2017; Miot 2015; Paddeu 2017; Pallagst, Fleschurz, and Said 2017). To date, the social dimension of urban shrinkage has remained under-investigated, prompting a critique of the literature’s dominant economic and spatial lens (Guéraut 2018; Hackworth 2018). Yet, a deep understanding of the social dimension of shrinkage is critical if we are to take into account the impact of the phenomenon on those primarily concerned: local residents. A better knowledge of how shrinkage impacts daily experiences of place, social life and social networks is also vital for addressing the impact of shrinkage on residents’ quality of life and wellbeing in shrinking areas.

In recent years, the question of social capital in contexts of decline has attracted attention from economic, policy-oriented and sociological perspectives, respectively. This article draws on and contributes to the latter two. Measuring social capital at subnational level to explain regional disparities, economic geographers have often scrutinized social capital for its positive impact on growth (Beugelsdijk and van Schaik 2005; Li, Westlund, and Liu 2019; Muringani, Fitjar, and Rodríguez-Pose 2021), and its correlation with discontent and populist votes in declining areas (Rodríguez-Pose, Lee, and Lipp 2021). Policy-oriented and sociological approaches to social capital in contexts of decline then, consider social capital at individual, community and city levels, corresponding to the perspective used in this article. Embedded in the broader scholarly fields of urban shrinkage and community development, policy-oriented scholars examine how social capital offers solutions to shrinkage-related problems at city level, focusing on formal and collective sources of social capital such as civic engagement and associational activity (Hospers 2013; Meijer and Syssner 2017; Ročak, Hospers, and Reverda 2020; Schlappa 2016). Drawing on a historical interest of French sociology in working class communities and their place-based social capital (see in particular Bozon and Chamboredon 1980), the sociological perspective analyzes the role of social capital in helping residents to cope with deindustrialization at an individual level, focusing on informal sources of social capital such as kinship, friendship, trust and shared norms and values (Coquard 2019; Renahy 2005; Retière 2003). I argue that connecting the two perspectives can be fruitful, for a better understanding of how place change also affects social capital and an increased attention to its uneven distribution.

Connecting and extending these policy-oriented and sociological scholarly strands on social capital in contexts of decline, this article contributes to a more textured understanding of how urban shrinkage is experienced and negotiated at the local level, taking a micro perspective that emphasizes social processes. It interrogates changing forms of social capital in shrinking cities, asking: how are various forms of social capital changed, used and recomposed in contexts of shrinkage, and how does this differently involve residents and other actors?

While social capital has been defined in numerous ways, this article draws on Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992, 119) understanding of social capital as ‘the sum of resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutional relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’. For the purpose of this analysis, I distinguish between formal and informal social capital. I understand the former as the resources derived from belonging and active participation in institutionalized relationships such as associational activity, and the latter as resources obtained through belonging and participation in non-institutionalized (implicit, unsaid, unwritten) relationships that do not require formal or explicit acceptance into a group, such as friendships, neighbourly or family relationships.

I argue for an approach that sees formal and informal social capital as distinct but interconnected factors in how residents experience and cope with urban shrinkage. By doing so, I highlight the importance of accounting for weakening social capital in contexts of shrinkage, while unravelling how this process unequally affects residents. I emphasize the extent to which informal social capital can help residents cope with the consequences of shrinkage at an individual level. Finally, I argue that the weakening of informal social capital can be mitigated through its interaction with more institutional forms of social capital, provided that such supportive institutions are present.

The first section of this article analyses the emergent literature on social capital in the context of urban shrinkage and deindustrialization, combining insights from policy-oriented work and sociology to argue for a more explicit consideration of informal social capital in policy-making. The next three empirical sections draw on the results of qualitative research conducted in Nevers and Dieppe, two medium-sized shrinking cities in France. I first discuss how, in these contexts, the dislocation of social networks negatively affects residents’ social capital. Next, I analyze the role of social capital as a resource enabling residents to cope with the consequences of urban shrinkage and highlight the challenges facing residents deprived of this capital. The final empirical section underlines how local community centres provide alternative ways of building social capital for residents who are most affected by its weakening. I conclude with a reflection on how institutionalized and informal forms of social capital interact, the former reinforcing the latter in its role of helping residents cope with shrinkage-related problems.

Social capital in shrinking cities

This paper aims to establish a dialogue between two largely separate bodies of research, informed respectively by policy-oriented and sociological perspectives, which both seek to understand the role of social capital in the context of urban shrinkage. Policy-oriented studies of social capital in such contexts are characterized by three main emphases: they tend to focus on how social capital could enhance place-based development, and on more collective and institutionalized forms of social capital. In contrast, the more sociological literature focuses on how social capital is itself influenced by place-based developments, and emphasizes more individual and informal forms of social capital.

The first aspect characterizing policy-oriented social capital scholarship is its perspective on changing place through social capital, which it often approaches primarily as a (new) planning tool. Accordingly, studies of grassroot initiatives and civil society participation in shrinking cities highlight the importance of social capital for urban redevelopment strategies (Hospers 2013; Schlappa 2016). Meijer and Syssner (2017) for example, explore the role of linking social capital – which connects residents to more powerful institutional actors – for planning purposes. Similarly, the involvement of local communities in the design and production of projects is sometimes considered as a remedy to the tight financial resources constraining public action in shrinking cities and regions (Schlappa 2016). Finally, such studies show how specific types of social capital can directly influence the economy of an area, for instance as the presence of ‘entrepreneurial social capital’ increases the number of start-ups (Westlund, Larsson, and Olsson 2014).

Secondly, this policy-oriented scholarship tends to focus on collective forms and outcomes of social capital. That is, it generally investigates the capacity of groups of residents to act collectively to utilize the knowledge they have access to as a group, in order to achieve a common goal that will benefit both the group itself and the wider community. The underlying idea is that solutions designed with residents’ participation would be better tailored to local needs (Hospers 2017; Leetmaa et al. 2015).

Thirdly, the policy-oriented social capital literature focuses on institutionalized forms of social capital. That is, groups that have been formally recognized as a community actor, and/or acting in an intentional, organized fashion to achieve a specific, formulated (policy) goal. Such studies analyse, for example, various forms of civil society involvement through protest, participation or empowerment, and through cases such as platform forums (Haase and Rink 2012), or examine the co-production of a local strategic development plan by community members accompanied by consultants and researchers, and its implementation by a non-for-profit organization (Schlappa 2017).

Such studies tend to approach social capital instrumentally, as a collective resource that can be mobilized for urban development: they identify an involved community that is willing to engage in dealing with negative urban change, and that is also empowered, and able to participate in the maintenance and improvement of local quality of life. While such civic involvement presents obvious added value, especially in conditions of tightened financial resources, this policy-oriented approach also has several limitations. First, a strong reliance on civil society as a solution often works so as to legitimize and support austerity policies by transferring to residents the responsibility to carry out the work done by public actors and their private partners in wealthier or growing areas, raising issues of sociospatial justice (Kinder 2014; see also Béal, Fol, and Rousseau 2016). Another limitation concerns the unequal distribution of social capital across communities. Given that networks and the resources accruing from them are not distributed evenly across communities, basing policy on social capital implies the risk of unequally developed communities (Retière 2003). Finally, in the context of urban shrinkage, residents may not be willing or able to engage in collective initiatives directly dedicated at addressing urban shrinkage, either because economic survival is a more urgent priority, or because they became used to long-term shrinkage and don’t feel the urge to change the situation (see e.g. Ročak 2019). Collective social capital is also weakened due to a decline of trust in institutions, thus hampering collective action (Ročak, Hospers, and Reverda 2020). Because of these limitations identified in existing scholarship, policies aimed at urban redevelopment based on social capital are likely to be less effective, or just. I argue that connecting this approach to more sociological studies of social capital in post-industrial contexts, can be a fruitful approach to these shortcomings.

This second field of scholarship that I identify here is often framed in terms of post-industrial contexts. In practice, these are often contexts of urban shrinkage, although the concept is rarely foregrounded. This sociological work emphasizes how the changes affecting formerly industrial places have an influence on social capital, and tends to focus on individual and informal aspects of social capital. This informal social capital seems to provide individuals with concrete benefits, or feelings of belonging, that positively influence their experience of place.

A first interest within this sociology of post-industrial communities is to understand how people’s daily lives, life trajectories, experience and perception of place are influenced by their social ties. Rather than studying how a place can be changed through social capital, the emphasis is on how social ties matter and how they are impacted through the transformation of a place. Specifically, several studies of (post)industrial communities have shown that working-class residents’ social ties are strongly place-based – locally anchored and place-dependent – and that this rootedness in place is critical in their life trajectories and experience of their environment as its economy and demography change (Bozon 1984; Renahy 2005; Retière 2003; Sørensen 2016).¹

Through the analysis of the life trajectories of individual residents, and their embeddedness in the trajectory of groups or networks, these researchers approach the role of social capital mostly in terms of individual benefits. It highlights the personal benefits that social networks and sociability can bring to individual inhabitants of rural shrinking regions. For example, belonging to a group of friends gives access to ‘hustles’ and side-jobs that allow residents to supplement their income (Coquard 2019).

Importantly, this research focuses mostly on informal social capital. It analyses social relations that are not institutionalized and social groups which existence is not formalized (and which purpose has not been formally expressed either) and the resources that groups and individuals derive from such relationships. For instance, it explores friendships, neighbourhood ties, acquaintances, or family ties (Coquard 2019; Renahy 2005).

While attending more carefully to the actual everyday workings of social capital in contexts of shrinkage, this more sociological strand of research also faces a key limitation. Its focus on individuals who have the most informal social capital tends to obscure the processes of construction and use of social capital by inhabitants who have less of it. Through its informal workings, the place-based social and symbolic capital this research highlights provides the people who have it with access to additional resources, helping them cope with specific consequences of shrinkage such as employment decline, and improving their experience of place. However, such a resource is not equally distributed and this mechanism, which is beneficial for some, has negative outcomes for those deprived of this capital.² This mechanism can also be framed in terms of bonding social capital (Putnam 2000): the strong bonding social capital of some residents also functions as an important source of exclusion for others. Specifically, the place-based social and symbolic capital described in this literature seems to be unequally distributed across gender; with access to resources through informal networks observed primarily among young working class men and in masculine sociability (Coquard 2019; Renahy 2005; Retière 2003).

Against this background, in the following sections I draw on my findings to argue that policies aimed at addressing shrinkage-related issues might focus more directly on enhancing informal and individual social capital through the fostering of institutionalized and collective sources of social capital, thus helping residents to face shrinkage more effectively while seeking to balance the inequalities inherent in existing distributions of social capital. As my findings show, while informal individual social capital remains significant for some residents, its benefits are also limited. The latter are not scalable beyond the micro-level of individuals to the more collective level of the city, because of the unequal distribution of such capital, and of its weakening in the context of shrinkage. More institutional sources of social capital play a role in fostering individual and informal social capital for residents who are deprived of it. In the next sections, I demonstrate how this emerged from my data.

Case studies and methods

The analysis relies on the comparison of two medium-sized shrinking French cities: Nevers and Dieppe. They are representative of the two forms of decline affecting French medium-sized cities: while Nevers’ shrinkage is affecting its entire urban agglomeration, Dieppe is affected by a decline of its central municipality (Chouraqui 2021).

Nevers is a city of 32,990 inhabitants,³ located in the centre of France. It is the largest and capital city of its administrative department, the Nièvre, which is mostly rural and counts 207,182 inhabitants, with an average of 30 inhabitants per km². Historically, the city has fulfilled important economic, commercial and administrative functions for the department, concentrating public and private services while the surrounding towns had a more industrial character. Nevers’ population peaked in 1975, with 45,500 inhabitants, and has declined continuously since then, with the central municipality losing 27% of its population by 2017. This demographic decrease was accompanied by several waves of economic decline, as well as departure of public institutions such as the military garrison in the 1990s. Population ageing is more severe in the central municipality than in the larger city-region,⁴ median income is lower, and unemployment is much higher. Finally, it is important to note that Nevers is located in a shrinking department, which was already losing inhabitants before the decline of the city started.

Dieppe is approximately the same size as Nevers (29,080 inhabitants) and also lost 26% of its municipal population since 1975, but because of several factors, the decline of the city is less prominent. It is a port city, located in the coastal region of Normandy, and it is part of the Seine-Maritime department, the capital city of which is Rouen (110,145 inhabitants). Unlike Nevers, Dieppe is closer and better connected to larger cities, such as Rouen, Paris and Le Havre. The decline of the commercial port started in the late 1970s. With the development of containers, cargo ships became too large to anchor in Dieppe and the city suffered from the competition of Le Havre, Antwerp and Rotterdam, while the automation of port activities led to the sharp decline of port-related employment. In parallel, a large number of industries relocated or developed outside the municipality, on its outskirts (with strong fiscal implications). This disparity between the municipality and its periphery, which is more pronounced than in Nevers, is reflected at the level of the larger city-region, which has only been losing population since 2007. Dieppe’s periphery and department are more dynamic than the city itself, where the shrinkage is concentrated. Finally, Dieppe also differs from Nevers in its touristic activity, its stronger industrial history, and its communist political identity.

In both cities, two qualitative studies were carried out over interrupted periods of time between 2018 and 2021. The analysis presented in this paper draws mainly on 110 in-depth semi-structured interviews (mostly with residents) lasting on average two hours (74 in Nevers and 36 in Dieppe). The recruitment of participants was guided by a concern to diversify socioeconomic and geographical backgrounds, neighbourhood, residential status and type of residential location, opinion on local politics, age and gender. To that end, I followed a snowball strategy with different starting points: respondents to a survey I circulated on Facebook and in local newspapers, community centres, local policymakers, a service club, and my personal connections. The interview guide consisted of a detailed biographic section, and a thematic section centred around social ties and practices in the city, forms of attachment to place and perception of the city’s evolution. Participants of varying age, gender and socioeconomic background were interviewed, the majority of them residing in the central municipality, in different types of neighbourhoods (up-market, middleclass and mixed residential areas, social housing neighbourhoods and city centre), but women tend to be slightly overrepresented in the final sample. In addition, expert interviews were conducted with politicians, policymakers and employees of community centres. Fieldnotes were collected, recording observations made in public spaces or during events I witnessed, as well as documents, including newspaper articles, documents produced by community centres analyzing social vulnerabilities, and policy documents produced by municipalities. These were used in this analysis for contextual purposes. Data analysis followed a grounded, inductive approach, using Atlas.ti to code interviews, fieldnotes and documents.

Drawing on this material, in the next section, I analyse how residents’ social capital undergoes transformations in the context of impoverishment and outmigration caused by urban shrinkage, underlining the link between place change and changing social capital. I go on to explain how individual social capital constitutes a resource to cope with urban shrinkage for residents who possess this capital. In the final section of the analysis, I show how more institutionalized forms of social capital can be used to foster the creation of informal social capital to address its unequal distribution, highlighting the complementarity between both forms of social capital.

Urban shrinkage and diminished social capital

My findings shed light, first, on the relation between the changes affecting a place that is undergoing shrinkage, and residents’ informal social capital: the latter is weakened by place change, and residents are unequally affected. To illustrate this, I show how the changes caused by two aspects of urban shrinkage, outmigration and impoverishment, lead to a weakening of, and reduced access to, informal social networks. This result highlights the influence of place change on social capital, showing that urban shrinkage not only impacts collective and institutionalized forms of social capital (Ročak, Hospers, and Reverda 2020) but also its most informal and individual forms.

Outmigration and composition of social networks

One of the main threats facing inhabitants’ social capital is related to the selective outmigration of higher educated as well as younger residents, which is one of the main manifestations of urban shrinkage (Fol 2012). For the residents who remain, outmigration results in at least partial weakening and dismantling of local social networks. However, this impact is differentiated across social groups, such as older residents (60+) – especially single women – but also younger residents in their thirties and early forties, in particular newcomers.

As a result of youth outmigration, local family networks are weakened by the departure of children or grandchildren.⁵ This experience is common across classes but particularly frequent for middle-class residents, as higher education at university level almost always requires to move to a larger city. The departure of children constituted an important life change, which was often reflected in interviews through various concerns such as living far away from one’s children, considering moving away and leaving everything to be closer to them, or more rarely, the ‘luck’ of seeing them coming back to the city. Michelle for instance, one of my respondents, stressed her difficulty accepting that both her daughters were gone, illustrating a concern repeatedly heard in interviews:

Well, I know that if I had the means, if I could afford it, maybe I wouldn’t have stayed in Nevers. [My daughters] are both now in the Paris region, and I'm all alone here now. […] When I retired, I said to myself, well, I'll have to move on to other things, because all alone, it's deadly.

While children outmigration constitute the most common trajectory for families, it seems to imply a negative impact on the daily life of remaining residents particularly when intersecting with other types of difficulties. Older people – those whose children have left to study or work – tend to be more affected by this dislocation of local family networks. More specifically, people living alone are more affected than couples, and maybe because of different life expectancy, women were more frequently found to be in this situation. Those most affected by outmigration often experience its impact as increased isolation and loneliness.

While other studies noted that the departure of residents with higher education degrees could affect social capital because of the decreasing number of skilled residents (Ročak, Hospers, and Reverda 2020), my findings highlight the classed dimension of this process as well as its impact at a small scale, individual level. Since this selective outmigration concerns mainly people pursuing a higher education degree, it mainly affects the middle classes, while older working-class residents more often still have the children in the area and suffer less from this process. Besides, this reveals how the weakening of social capital is not just felt collectively, in terms of decreasing capacities to initiate community-led projects, but also individually, in terms of wellbeing and daily experiences of place.

Although youth outmigration mainly affects family networks and older residents, it has consequences on younger people too, and their social networks of friends, which also has implications in terms of access to mutual support mechanisms as well as social well-being. This arises from the difficulty of maintaining a network of friends, and establishing long-lasting relationships, in the context of a high geographical ‘turnover’ of young people. This pattern was less common among younger people in comparison with the disruption of social networks of older people, but it appeared in particular in the accounts of younger newcomers, as is illustrated in the following quote:

Wow, there’s a lot of turnover in Nevers, it's crazy, especially for people our age. […] They came here a little bit by default and as soon as they find something better they want to go back to their family or to a bigger city. […] And that’s a bit tiring.

Camille, the respondent quoted above, went on to list all the people she had met who had left, to go abroad, to move closer to their family, or to settle in a larger city. As a newcomer who had moved to the city where her husband lived, and who initially relied on her husband’s social network, she experienced the regular departure of new friends as a difficulty in her first years in Nevers.

As these examples illustrate, social networks undergo specific transformations in relation to outmigration, due to the departure of both younger locals and younger newcomers who temporarily settle in the cities for professional reasons. This youthful outmigration affects the characteristics and composition of local social networks, weakening them and making it harder for the remaining inhabitants to maintain strong social ties.

Impoverishment and access to social ties

Another factor making it difficult to establish new social ties and maintain existing social networks is the impoverishment of the population. In both case-studies, the issue of loneliness and isolation, in relation with poverty, regularly appeared in discussions and interviews. This echoes the link between increased precarity, reputation and embeddedness in local social networks in shrinking rural areas described by Coquard (2019). This topic was often mentioned by social actors in both case-studies, and sometimes directly by interviewees about themselves or others. Michelle, for instance, explaining her concerns with the issue of loneliness, described with precision this connection between economic and social capitals:

And then there's also what you can afford, […] because you know everything we do, you have to pay for. […] You want to play music, it's unaffordable, you want to do, er … , sewing lessons, it's very expensive. […] It also limits [what you can do] and the expansion of social ties, all that […] it's not easy. You have to juggle, you have to think, you have to … so well, you do, you go to the swimming pool, you go cycling, you go walking, you do activities that don't cost too much [laughs] […] so you manage, a little bit, to fill up the week.

Michelle explained how the drop in her financial means after her retirement reduced her opportunities for socialization. This is an illustration of how economic capital sometimes must be converted to create social capital (Bourdieu 1980). In Michelle’s case, accessing social capital required being able to afford a social activity. When economic capital decreases, it also impacts access to social capital and its benefits, often resulting in further impoverishment (see also Guéraut 2021). In the context of urban shrinkage and increasing impoverishment of the population, this mechanism of reduced access to social networks and opportunities for socialization due to reduced economic capital potentially affects a large portion of the population.

Although social capital is deeply affected by the place-based changes that accompany shrinkage, its weakening does not mean its disappearance. On the contrary, it still constitutes a resource for those inhabitants with the most social capital. As I outline in the next section, however, this resource tends to benefit individuals rather than the community as a whole.

Social capital as an individual resource to cope with urban change

Turning now to the role of social capital as a resource helping inhabitants to cope with shrinkage-related issues, this section demonstrates how, for individuals who have substantial social capital, the latter does constitute a significant resource. However, these benefits accrue at the individual rather than collective level. As such, social capital does not help the community as much as it helps individual inhabitants, and only those who possess substantial social capital. This finding undermines the view that social capital necessarily functions as a resource to solve collective problems (Schlappa 2017).

To illustrate this finding, I scrutinize the social and geographic trajectory of a specific respondent, Anthony, a man in his early thirties from a working-class background, who mobilized his social capital to compensate for the lack of economic and professional opportunities while privileging social well-being over socially upward (and geographic) mobility. His story is representative of how residents with high level of place-based social capital mobilize it to access resources at the individual level. Anthony’s case is remindful of the working-class young men described in several studies of deindustrialized French towns (Coquard 2016; Renahy 2005; Retière 2003), but also of the returning students of working class background studied by Gueraut (2017). As this is not a dominant pattern in Dieppe or Nevers, the case of returning students was not so frequent, although it was observed in both case-studies. Professional opportunities corresponding to higher education qualifications are more scarce in medium-sized shrinking cities, which makes young and highly qualified professionals more vulnerable to the lack of employment opportunities. In this context, Anthony’s strategy represents a good example of the resources deployed by those residents to face such difficulties. While his reliance on place-based social capital is characteristic of working-class resources and strategies (Retière 2003), middle-class returning residents tended to mobilize more often their cultural or economic capital to ensure a successful come-back.

The social upward mobility brought by Anthony’s higher education came with a geographic mobility that was imposed rather than chosen. After leaving the city to go to university, and starting his career elsewhere, he decided to come back to his hometown, Dieppe. His grandfather’s death made him realize that his social ties – family and friends – mattered more to him than his career. His return came at the cost of his professional trajectory: he had to give up his position as a high-school teacher to return, and found himself unemployed, with fewer professional opportunities accessible to him. Yet, Anthony possesses significant place-based informal social capital, thanks to his extensive network of friends and relatives. His family trajectory is also very much linked with local economic history, with a fisherman grandfather and a father who worked at the former local shipyard. While he was away, Anthony invested in his social connections and rootedness in Dieppe by returning regularly and finding a student job there. As a result, he maintained a very high stock of place-based social capital. On two occasions, both thanks to his family and friends’ networks, Anthony met the mayor, who later asked him to join the communist party’s list of candidates for the municipal election. He is now a municipal delegate and the local referent for his neighbourhood, acting as the link between neighbourhood residents and the municipality.

Anthony’s trajectory illustrates the role of social capital in coping with some of the consequences of urban shrinkage, in this case, reduced employment opportunities. With less professional opportunities open to him, he used his local social capital as an alternative resource to bypass this difficulty. In the end, returning to Dieppe meant a trade-off between different forms of capital for Anthony. Giving up his job meant a loss in economic as well as symbolic capital, as it also affected his social status. However, the move back to a shrinking city meant a gain in social capital, which he considered more important to his well-being. Moreover, he has been also able to convert this social capital back into symbolic capital. Indeed, his new political responsibilities confer social status and recognition, compensating for the social status associated with his previous profession.

This example, suggests that social capital can indeed help inhabitants cope with the consequences of negative urban change,⁶ but its benefits accrue at the individual level rather than at a collective one, departing from existing conceptualizations in policy-oriented social capital scholarship (Hospers 2014; Schlappa 2017). Rather than functioning directly as a tool to solve community-level problems, social capital is perhaps used more effectively at the individual level. Yet, as social capital is unequally distributed, this also means that some inhabitants do not have access to such a resource, which increases social disparities and exclusion. This example echoed other cases where residents’ relied on social capital in different contexts and to face different difficulties, in particular when confronted to increased loneliness caused by the departure of children, as will be illustrated below. In the next section, I argue that looking at different sources of social capital and at the action of institutional actors can help identify how to reduce inequalities in informal social capital.

Actors of social inclusion as a source of social capital

Shifting my focus beyond only informal and individual forms and sources of social capital, in this section I highlight an interaction between institutional and informal forms of social capital, where the former participates in the creation of the latter. The previous section emphasized how the individual benefits derived from informal forms of social capital, obtained through belonging to informal networks of friends and relatives, rather than to institutionalized groups of residents such as associations, NGOs or public actors. However, rather than suggesting a strict dichotomy between institutionalized and informal social capital, I argue that where informal social capital is lacking, its creation can be supported by actors providing institutionalized social capital.

In the context of urban shrinkage, where residents’ social capital, at the individual level, is generally impacted negatively in multiple ways, I observed that some traditional, more institutionalized actors of social inclusion and social life more generally played a key role in fostering informal social capital. Perhaps as a consequence of the threats facing informal social capital noted above, changes can also be observed regarding how informal social networks are established. More precisely, when some forms of informal social capital are weakened – such as that arising from the strength of family networks – individuals might rely on other, more institutional sources to accumulate it. To illustrate this point, I focus on the case of a community centre in Nevers, as one example of institutionalized actor of social inclusion. There, I conducted participant observation and interviewed several retired women living alone who were members of the centre.

The community centre is an institutional social actor whose explicit aim is to foster social capital. Because of the formalized aspects of both its existence and goal, it can be considered as a source of institutionalized social capital. The centre is funded mainly by the national agency for housing, family and living allowances, and the municipality. It offers activities such as cooking, sewing, informatic classes, but also organizes gatherings, to play games, have a coffee. Some members come only for a practical activity and are not interested in the broad range of socializing opportunities, while others come only for the latter. Among the members met during my time there, the women living alone were more often interested in these social events, while other members who could not afford the paid activities also came mostly for these social moments.

The centre offers a source of institutionalized social capital to its members, especially those who were particularly deprived of it. In the interviews, it appeared clearly that the community centre was a way, for many of its members, to meet people and make friends that is especially important for those whose local social networks and interactions are few. Further, some members experienced the primary benefit of going to the community centre – meeting people – as a way to start anew after a difficult life event such as an illness, a divorce or becoming a widow; the centre enabled the profound experience of rebuilding social capital after a period of isolation. Several respondents described, this positive effect of becoming more outgoing, opening up to the world and to other people by joining the community centre.

However, this new institutionalized social capital, generated intentionally through the centre’s activities, can be appropriated by individuals and turned into more informal forms. Indeed, it sometimes expands beyond the context of the community centre, opening to more diverse uses and benefits. Anne’s trajectory illustrates this well. A widow in her early eighties, she joined the community centre at her daughter’s suggestions, after having spent several years caring for her sick partner until he died. Through the centre’s activities, Anne met numerous new people and made three close friends, who she regularly sees at their respective homes or for activities outside the home. Thus, she was able to construct a new social network of friends thanks to the support of the community centre, and these social connections expanded beyond the events organized by the centre.

The benefits brought by these new social ties go beyond a more active social life. Several members had created a small but strong circle of close friends and support network thanks to the community centre, and regularly helped each other informally, for instance to buy groceries, drive each other, or check on each other in case of illness. Such support provided significant help for participants, who for instance could not drive or had a physical disability. As an example, it is often one of these friends who drives Anne somewhere when she needs it. Conversely, she describes how attentive she is to one of her friends, whose children left the city and whom she thinks is more isolated for this reason. She keeps an eye on this friend and makes sure she’s doing well. Hence, these institutionally forged social connections can lead to concrete, practical benefits in addition to increased social well-being.

This finding also highlights the interaction between informal networks and the more institutionalized and collective forms of social capital. By providing an alternative source of social capital, social actors such as community centres act as a kind of safety net in this context of weakening social networks. They facilitate the construction of informal social capital at the individual level by playing a mediating role and ultimately help to counterbalance the loss of individual social capital due to weakening social networks. This resonates with research in other urban contexts which show that neighbourhood facilities such as libraries and local social services have the strongest influence on predicting social capital (Curley 2010), highlighting the role of local social institutions.

Discussion

In this article, I have outlined a divergence in the focus of existing research on the role of social capital in contexts of urban shrinkage. Where a more policy-oriented literature tends to study collective and institutionalized forms of social capital, asking how it can be used to effect place-based changes, more sociological studies of post-industrial communities highlight the role of individual and informal social capital and how it is affected by the place-based changes. However, the policy-oriented literature focuses on a type of social capital with limited efficacy in contexts of shrinkage, while the more sociological scholarship identifies effective social capital mechanisms, which tend to work as an additional source of exclusion for individuals who are deprived of it.

My findings suggest that policy-oriented analyses of social capital, especially in shrinking contexts, might adopt a different perspective and objective, focusing on informal and individual forms of social capital and how to foster it through institutionalized sources of social capital. More precisely, I have shown how informal social capital enables residents to cope with some shrinkage-related difficulties at the individual level, and how institutional sources of social capital might help address the unequal distribution of such capital. Departing from contexts often represented in existing research, such as neoliberal or post-socialist cities, these findings are specific to a Welfare state context, where local social actors such as community centres receive financial support from national public institutions to carry out their mission.

Through the analysis of the interactions between informal and institutional, and individual and collective forms and sources of social capital, I have contributed to an emergent literature on the social dimension and experience of shrinkage that seeks to apprehend the phenomenon beyond its economic, spatial and governance aspects. Moreover, these findings help to extend the critique of growth-oriented planning in shrinking cities and regions (Fernandez and Hartt 2021), by analysing alternative wellbeing-oriented strategies. A logical progression of this work would be to investigate obstacles and enablers to the creation of informal and individual social capital through institutional sources of social capital.

These findings suggest several courses of action for interventions on social capital in contexts of urban shrinkage. First, approaches relying on collective social capital and civic participation to tackle shrinkage-related issues such as vacancy or degradation of the built environment, should not be the only strategy, in particular in contexts where this collective social capital is already weakened, because of their lack of effectiveness. Second, policies can instead capitalize on mutual support mechanisms derived from individual and informal social capital (from belonging to social networks), and focus on encouraging the construction of such social capital for the residents who have less. This could be done by supporting actors directly involved in the creation of this type of capital, such as community centres, but also other sport, cultural or charitable organizations. The outcome of such policy would not be a civil society involved in addressing the problems of the city, but rather stronger communities with higher solidarity and less isolated residents, ultimately tackling impoverishment, marginality and exclusion.

Especially in shrinking areas where the local government’s budget is likely to be declining, this is an important aspect to consider when setting political and financial priorities. These dimensions are also of particular importance in the context of rising discontent expressed in social movements and populist vote, such as the Gilets jaunes movement which significantly concerned small and medium-sized cities (Algan et al. 2019). Governments of shrinking areas tend to opt for traditional growth-oriented policies aiming at attracting external inhabitants and investments, with limited success (Pallagst, Fleschurz, and Said 2017; Schatz 2017; Wiechmann and Bontje 2015). Through this shift in financial and political priorities, and with the aim not to regrow the city, but to improve its quality of life for current residents, policies addressing shrinkage might become more effective. The challenge remains to achieve the balance, between such social priorities and other economic and spatial imperatives facing shrinking cities, in order to design a comprehensive approach to address urban shrinkage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No. 813803.

Notes

1 Retière (2003) gives an extensive description of this place-based social and symbolic capital specific to the most established fractions of the working-classes, which confers status and resources on them. What he calls capital d’autochtonie (autochthony capital) highlights the critical importance of these place-dependent social ties; however, Retière does not provide a clear definition of the concept.

2 These scholars do acknowledge the limitations of this informal, individual and place-dependent social capital due to its unequal distribution: Retière observes that ‘this capital […] contributes to the differentiation of the local working-classes’ (2003, 132), while Coquard (2019) clearly distinguishes between established working-classes on the one hand – people with a stable job, belonging to several interrelated networks and integrated in a very active social life – and on the other hand excluded, precarious and stigmatised working-classes.

3 All the figures are from the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) database, 2017 population census, and concern the municipal level unless otherwise stated.

4 Here, I refer to the French city-region perimeter termed ‘attraction area’ [Aire d'attraction des villes] by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), and defined as ‘a group of municipalities, in a single block and without enclaves, consisting of a population and employment centre and the surrounding municipalities in which at least 15% of the working population work in the centre’.

5 This aligns with existing literature on the selective outmigration of younger as well as higher educated residents (Rudolph and Cauchi-Duval 2021; Wolff et al. 2013).

6 This echoes observations previously made by Jean-Noël Retière (2003), Nicolas Renahy (2005) or Benoît Coquard (2019) about young working-class men in (post)industrial rural regions and small towns, revealing similar mechanisms at work in the context of urban shrinkage.