Street children in Moscow: using and creating social capital

The paper analyses the strategies of homeless street children in Moscow con nected with the accumulation of social capital. Based on recent empirical r esearch, it looks at the involvement of children in non-criminal and crimin al subcultures as a way to get access to important networks and resources, and shows how young people use their social skills and appropriate subcultu ral norms and values in order to build alternative careers. It demonstrates that children's social background plays an important role in their traject ories in the urban informal economy and society, and that they should not b e viewed, as it is usually suggested in the social exclusion paradigm, as a single dispossessed mass which has fallen through support networks in vari ous risk scenarios. Research data is reviewed to provide evidence that Mosc ow's homeless children are resourceful and deeply social agents who find su rrogate families and ad hoc social memberships.