Knowledge Citizenship: A Social capital perspective

Social capital is concerned with the resources that individuals, community groups, institutions and organizations derive from their participation in networks. In particular, application of social capital models are increasingly important to social policy practitioners to engage with communities that enable them to better use community assets for development. Emerging approaches to develop urban communities now include holistic planning and urban capital systems through which even housing distribution facilitates neighbourliness and social cohesion in their communities. In this sense, like other forms of capital, social capital can be measured. To date, a considerable amount of social capital research has involved quantitative indicators positively associated with measures of wellbeing as health, longevity, level of education, personal security and prosperity, etc. However, these quantitative indicators might be questionable for researchers involved with complex concepts such as community and social development. In this context, this paper is aiming to explore dimensions of social capital expressed in citizenship drivers such as resilience, associativity, tolerance, and solidarity, as an outlook for urban social capital systems. This approach is relevant as it allows research that includes the social dimension of networks, and their role in social integrations and social cohesion. From that perspective, this paper will advance a Personal Knowledge-based Development (PKBD) perspective, as a context and case for comparison in the quest of Knowledge-citizenship characterization in the globalized scenario of knowledge societies.