Lamp Lighters and Sidewalk Smoothers: How Individual Residents Contribute to the Maintenance of the Urban Commons.

Research on collective efficacy in urban neighborhoods has focused predominantly on whether a community can regulate local behavior and spaces and less on how they do so. This study pursues the latter question by examining the social regularities that create collective efficacy, measured as the behavioral composition of a neighborhood (i.e., the extent to which each individual contributes to a social regularity). This perspective is applied to the database of requests for non-emergency government services received by Boston, MA's 311 system in 2011 (>160,000 requests). The analysis categorized custodians who have used the system to combat physical disorder in the public space (e.g., requesting graffiti removal) into two groups-"typical custodians" who have made one or two requests in a year, and "exemplars" who have made three or more. A neighborhood's collective efficacy in reporting public issues was identified through audits of sidewalk quality and streetlight outages. Analyses revealed a collaborative model of maintenance in which typical and exemplar custodians were each necessary and non-substitutable. A second analysis found that the two types of custodian were associated with different contextual factors, articulating two different pathways from demographic and social characteristics to collective efficacy, suggesting implications for theory and practice.