“The Rock is the Community”: Cocreating Social Capital, Nature, and Transcendence in Central Park, NYC

How do nature and community formation intersect in quintessentially urban New York City? In this ethnographic case study of Central Park, I show that park-based communities act as a rich source of affective social capital in the lives of their members. This sort of social capital is oriented around emotional ties and psychological support between group members, and often crosses demographic lines, distinguishing it from more traditional economic/rational choice and hierarchy reproducing models of social capital. Further, affective social capital and park communities themselves are not purely human creations, but rather the result of a process of cocreation, where humans and beyond human entities (lakes, rocks, landscapes, etc.) together facilitate experiences and interactions that nurture the parks’ social groups, groups that go beyond humanness as a boundary to the social world. To explain these phenomena, I offer a theory of transcendence based on the park’s social context as a “third place,” physical context as a greenspace, and normative/emotional context as a product of communal place-making to explain how park communities bridge demographic gaps and cocreate this affective social capital in collaboration with the natural entities they are enmeshed with.