Spatial Capital: Repeated Contact and Cooperation in Urban Ghana ...

While the world is rapidly urbanizing, many scholars and practitioners worry that urban communities lack the strong social institutions that support much of rural politics. In this paper, I theorize that shared spatial networks can substitute for the lack of shared social networks and drive prosocial behavior by creating an expectation of future contact. I test this hypothesis in urban Ghana, combining street data with mobility data to characterize neighborhoods by the degree of repeated contact at nearby street intersections. I demonstrate that respondents are more likely to report community cooperation in areas with higher levels of repeated contact, especially if they are an ethnic minority in their community. These results suggest that repeated contact substitutes rather than complements social embeddedness. I plan to complement these results with a survey experiment in urban Ghana to test the causal effect of repeated contact on the creation of social incentives to cooperate. ...