Contributions of Social Capital to Best Practice Urban Planning Outcomes

Sustainable communities prioritise health, safety and equity among residents. These interdependent dimensions of community well-being require an integrative developmental and evaluation framework to highlight the connections essential for their development. We examine the utility of the social capital construct as a connective framework with the potential to assist urban planners in enhancing these attributes and the sustainability of communities in new or existing developments. Concepts of social capital are already utilised in urban planning contexts, however, we chart a novel approach and demonstrate that a combination of the bonding, bridging and linking dimensions of social capital can provide a comprehensive and multidimensional framework that overcomes the limitations imposed by popular, yet narrower concepts, such as social cohesion and social exclusion. The strength of this combination is that it not only explores connections between individuals and various resources within communities but also includes relationships with broader networks and decision-makers. In this way, planning processes can contribute to more recent notions of sustainable development that include governance as a fourth and essential pillar in quadruple bottom line approaches to sustainable development.