Shopping For Community - Local Businesses As Features Of Social Inclusion?!

Increased ethnic diversity, a high degree of differentiation in income and education levels as well as lifestyles and related the socio-spatial changes have changed not only residential and commercial neighborhood structures, but also the range and level of local interactions and leisure time activities - with wide implications for neighborly coexistence.

As one result the social cohesion of inner-city neighborhoods and their residents is often seen as vulnerable. Whereas some of these problems are addressed by numerous neighborhood management programs,  sociology still needs to pay more attention to how what shapes local interactions, i.e. everyday social contacts and connections between and among various groups of residents, how these affect local social capital.

So far, the great majority of research on this topic has focused on narrow and well-integrated primary relationships among neighbors in residential settings and ascertains a loss of local social networks.

But these studies have mainly neglected the comparatively loose and unpretentious everyday interactions, particularly during leisure time activities as well as interactions in (semi-) public spaces and how both contribute to community building and social inclusion among residents.

Likewise, researchers have not given sufficient attention to the wide range of functions local small businesses and their employees play, including those which yield aspects of supply, sociability, local service and employment.

Claiming that shopping streets are significant places for forming proximity relations, the impact and meaning of shopping as both, leisure time and supply activities, for fostering local networks, mutual assistance, trust and local participation will be empirically assessed with the case of an exemplary shopping street in Berlin.

On the basis of on-spot observations and interviews with store owners, employees and customers, the paper presents empirical findings on the ways in which local shopping represents an important socially in- or excluding social practice that affect wider urban structures of inequality.