The dark side of social capital: crime, development, and social regulations in Southern Italy

Although one could expect a growing interest on the influence of the several mafia organisations on spatial phenomena, little attention has been paid to the permeability of land use planning to illegal business. Instead, the control of space, and thus of spatial development, is a central feature of organized crime. The analysis of such powerful criminal organizations challenges common wisdom on the legitimacy of public regulatory power, and the This paper sketches an initial review of mafia-like criminal organisations in Southern Italy, through the recent flourishing academic and investigative literature, and offer some insights into a situated social analysis and the collective construction of negotiated space. Crime organisations have been fighting for years against the state in order to prevail in controlling the ‘territory’, i.e. space, movement, and local societies. Sicilian Mafia and Naples Camorra in particular, have always been reclaiming for themselves the control of space, in competition with the legal system of democratic jurisdiction. Scholars have employed the theoretical perspective on the social capital to conceptualize local communities acquiescence with organised crime. From this perspective, the paper investigates the implications of crime on social bonds, and the extent of ‘dis-regulating’ processes in spatial development. The control of space emerges as a main feature characterising the crucial challenge between crime and society. In particular, the paper pinpoints three more general remarks: space being the product of social processes, even criminal networks contribute to shape it, and to the setting of distorted spatial regulations; social capital plays ambiguously in such processes, being in part captured by parochial interests, and supporting multiple layers of dis-regulatory processes; ‘legality’ as space is a social product, but is also the levelling field of admissible conflicts, leading to the conclusion that the defence of ‘public space’ is the crucial starting point of all public policies against crime.