Toward community engagement: Can the built environment help? Grassroots participation and communal space in Chinese urban communities

•This paper examines the relationship between communal space and grassroots participation in Chinese urban communities.•It draws on a city-wide household survey in Guangzhou.•This study performs Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) and negative binomial regression models.•Local residents' community participation is positively associated with social cohesion and the presence of communal space.•Communal space has positive effects on participation by facilitating the formation of social capital and place attachment

The scholarship in building community capacity by way of cultivating community social capital and community spirit through neighborhood design has spawned heated debates in urban and community studies. This paper contributes to this scholarship by examining the neighborhood contexts of grassroots participation in Chinese contemporary urban communities. In particular, it explores the relationship between neighborhood communal space and community participation, using a city-wide survey of 1809 households in 39 commodity housing estates in the city of Guangzhou.It is found that local residents' participation in community affairs is conditioned by both the social milieu (measured by the overall level of social cohesion) and the physical environment (indicated by effects of communal space) of a neighborhood. Notably, communal space exerts positive indirect effects on grassroots participation by facilitating the development of place-based social capital and neighborhood attachment. These findings point to a civic virtue of communal space and provide nascent evidence regarding neighborhood contexts of grassroots participation in urban China.