В плену «эффекта соседства»: социальный капитал и активизм в новых анклавных жилищных комплексах

For Russia, the emergence of the enclaved high-rise housing complexes on the outskirts of big cities is a comparatively new phenomenon. It is closely knit with the peculiarities of the domestic construction and housing policy. The inhabitants of these districts face the necessity to solve multiple issues related to substantial infrastructure problems. These include access to social services and public transportation, technical maintenance of the houses, territory beautification. The process of the solution to these problems may lead to the cooperation of the inhabitants. The aim of the article is to investigate the relationship between the social characteristics of the tenants of these condominiums in a large Russian city with their readiness to participate in the solution of the neighborhood problems, e.g. in the neighborhood activism. In particular, we focus on the relation between the neighborhood effect, measured as diverse configurations of the inhabitants’ social capital forms, and the neighborhood collective efficacy — the readiness to conduct a collective action for the sake of common neighborhood good. The study is based on the original data collected in a street poll of the inhabitants of three large enclaved condominiums in the outskirts of St. Petersburg (“Severnaya Dolina”, “Sem’ Stolic” and “London”). Statistical analysis included the simple bivariate statistics and logistic regression. The results confirm the main hypothesis that the features of the social capital of the inhabitants are related to their knowledge of and participation in the neighborhood activities. Authors accept the limitation of the study: we are unable to prove the causality of the discovered effect, especially taking into account its hypothetically endogenous nature.