Deploying a Bourdieusian approach, this chapter discusses the importance of knowledge Capital in the field of urban community politics. In recognising the significance of knowledge as capital, I argue that various forms of knowledge have played a key role in the configuration of everyday urban community politics. The idea that we are now increasingly living in an information society, and partaking in a weightless economy, is part of the semantics of our times (Quah 1999; Carnoy & Castells 2001; Castells 2005; Webster 2014). Yet this idea has generally been applied to the corporate and government sectors, to its neglect in our understanding of the functioning of communities at the local level. Most literature on knowledge capital tends indeed to present a depoliticised account, mainly focusing on knowledge capital management in business corporates (Carr et al. 1998; Petty & Guthrie 2000). The focus of this literature has also been on how knowledge enables economic competitiveness and predictability for corporate organisations (Alraouf 2012; Salzbrunn 2013). The politicisation of knowledge capital only goes as far as highlighting the increasing significance of knowledge management for governments, or more broadly the state, highlighting how knowledge has been deployed in e-governance and various forms of biopolitics, such as the use of biometrics as a governance tool (Breckenridge 2005; Peters 2006; Foucault 2010). This corporate- and government-sector bias has meant the lack of any systematic attempt to analyse processes and politics of knowledge generation and articulation in the arena of community organisation and politics.

In light of this gap, I seek here to analyse the role of knowledge in the functioning of urban community organisations, in the configuration of urban community politics and, by extension, the operations of the urban ‘social economy’ (Amin et al. 2003). The capacity of community organisations and individual local stakeholders to create and utilise knowledge deserves attention in our attempt to understand local politics. At the centre of this analysis is the view that community organisations are spaces characterised by struggles to articulate and convert various forms of knowledge.