Bridging social capital and intersectional alliance: Towards an integrated framework for interpreting urban solidarity

This article develops a theoretical framework for analyzing urban solidarity by bringing the concept of social capital into dialogue with the feminist notion of intersectional alliance. While social capital has long been used to examine relational resources embedded in networks, it has often been criticized for utilitarian and economic reductionism. Conversely, the concept of intersectional alliance foregrounds political commitment and solidarity across difference, but remains analytically under-specified. The article argues that integrating these two perspectives allows solidaristic cooperation among heterogeneous actors to be analyzed as a relational configuration that combines political orientation with relational mechanisms of cooperation. The paper reconstructs the genealogies and limits of both concepts and compares them across three analytical dimensions—motivations, purpose, and solidarity—before proposing an integrated framework that seeks to contribute to urban studies by offering a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing solidaristic relations in cities. The objective of the integration is twofold: first, to politicize social capital by mitigating its utilitarian tendencies and emphasizing the often-overlooked dimensions of power and conflict; second, to operationalize the concept of intersectional alliance, making it analytically useful for investigating the resources activated within social relationships. In doing so, the framework provides a theoretical lens for examining urban solidarity, where heterogeneous actors stabilize cooperation under conditions of spatial proximity and conflict.