A Statistical Meta-Analysis of the Neighborhood Design Elements on Social Capital

Following the decline of social capital after the spread of urban sprawl, in the last two decades in various fields, including urban design and planning, growing empirical studies have been conducted to examine the relationship between "built environment" and "social capital. These studies have different and sometimes inconsistent and contradictory results, and researchers do not have comprehensive and sufficient information about the results of findings obtained from all researches. The purpose of this research is to classify aspects of the built environment related to social capital at the neighborhood scale and to find their effect size on social capital. to investigate the main purpose of the research based on meta-analysis method, keywords related to neighborhood design elements and social capital were searched in ISI Web of Science and Scopus databases from 2000 to 2019. After identifying and screening the articles, based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 33 articles were included in the meta-analysis. After extracting the statistical data of each article, social capital data were coded in two behavioral and cognitive dimensions and neighborhood design elements data were coded in building, density, land use, street and public space dimensions. After analyzing the results using CMA (V.2) software and checking the heterogeneity between the studies with the I2 test, the random model was used to extract the average effect size.Therefore, among the neighborhood design elements the street dimension (ES=0.306) and then the land use dimension (ES=0.120) have the highest impact on the behavioral dimension of social capital and the public space dimension (ES=0.2) has the most significant impact on the cognitive dimension of the social capital.