housing estates has resulted in changes to the urban social order. The academic community has identified the deterioration and disappearance of placed-based ties within urban neighbourhoods. The rise in property-led civic actions that originated in Chinese commodity housing estates provides a potential linkage between urban community formation and local civic action. The homeowners use local social networks and local civic capacity to confront property infringements by either public or private forces. Such linkages have rarely been investigated from either theoretical or empirical perspectives; at least within the Chinese context. This thesis begins to fill this gap by developing a conceptual model for understanding and exploring the urban community formation through local property-led civic petitions that has been occurring in Chinese commodity housing estates. A network analysis approach was deployed in four embedded cases situated within two cities, Nanjing and Huai’an. The formation of urban communities in Chinese commodity housing estates was evaluated by exploring the importance of local social capital and how it evolved through the multiple steps of four civic petitions. The data for this research was drawn from an analysis of the four civic petitions’ documents, semi-structured interviews with key actors and questionnaires delivered to local residents within the four case study commodity housing estates. The research highlights how community development can be enhanced through local civic petitions. Although the level of community formation and development amongst the four case studies is different, they all demonstrate that there is an important role for civic petitions to play in promoting predominantly local neighbourhood based social capital through the development and enhancement of local social networks. The conceptual model used herein illustrates the mutual affecting influences that exist between local social capital and local civic action, and highlights the influential mechanisms that exist in developing a stronger sense of neighbourhood. This is argued, is enabled by the interplay that occurs between the involvement of local residents, and the behaviour of petition opponents and arbitrators to the application of local organisational social networks. It is concluded that place based civic petitions with commodity housing estates could play a role in helping to recreate a place-based community life, which has been eroded in recent years.