The Connected City

How Networks are Shaping the Modern Metropolis

Zachary P. Neal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136236655
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

The Connected City explores how thinking about networks helps make sense of modern cities: what they are, how they work, and where they are headed. Cities and urban life can be examined as networks, and these urban networks can be examined at many different levels.

The book focuses on three levels of urban networks: micro, meso, and macro. These levels build upon one another, and require distinctive analytical approaches that make it possible to consider different types of questions. At one extreme, micro-urban networks focus on the networks that exist within cities, like the social relationships among neighbors that generate a sense of community and belonging. At the opposite extreme, macro-urban networks focus on networks between cities, like the web of nonstop airline flights that make face-to-face business meetings possible.

This book contains three major sections organized by the level of analysis and scale of network. Throughout these sections, when a new methodological concept is introduced, a separate 'method note' provides a brief and accessible introduction to the practical issues of using networks in research. What makes this book unique is that it synthesizes the insights and tools of the multiple scales of urban networks, and integrates the theory and method of network analysis.

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INTRODUCTION

WHY CITIES? WHY NETWORKS?

This is, first and foremost, a book about cities. But, why write about cities? Because at least since the industrial revolution, people have been moving to cities in search of both opportunity and stimulation. The shift of the world’s population into cities—urbanization—is clear from a few simple statistics. In 1800, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in cities, but by 1900 this number had increased to 14 percent, and passed 50 percent in 2008. This number is expected to continue climbing, to 70 percent by 2050. The rapid urbanization of the population has been even more dramatic and complete within the United States, where 6 percent lived in cities in 1800, nearly 40 percent in 1900, and now over 80 percent. Clearly, then, cities are worth studying because they are where the majority of people are today.

But, cities are not just dense clusters of people. They are also dense clusters of all sorts of human activity including research, commerce, tourism, and culture. Indeed, even in the past, when the majority of people lived in the rural countryside, cities were still vibrant centers of activity. Major cities of the classical age such as Athens and Rome served as centers for religion and government, where pilgrims and concerned citizens traveled to worship and be heard. During the medieval period, cities and towns served as bustling marketplaces where local farmers and worldly merchants came together to offer their products for sale. Later, large institutions such as universities but also small ones such as coffee houses sprung up in cities during the age of enlightenment, which helped bring together like-minded individuals seeking to break with rural superstition in the pursuit of science. Even today, those living in small towns frequently visit cities to take part in their recreational amenities, for example, museums and parks, and to patronize their diverse commercial establishments such as unique shops and ethnic restaurants. So, cities are not just where the people are today; cities are where the majority of human activity has always been.

In addition to being a book about cities, this is also a book about networks. But, again, why write about networks, especially in a book about cities? The goal of this book is to demonstrate the answer to this question. Scholars have long recognized that cities play an important role in society, and have been trying to understand how cities work for centuries. Using networks to understand cities can be helpful in several ways.¹ First, networks can bring greater precision to existing theoretical concepts. For example, Robert Park’s classic description of the city as “a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate” becomes more concrete when we think about how an urbanite’s social network may include ‘work friends’ and ‘school friends’ who don’t know one another.² More recently, a complex topic such as globalization is more manageable if we think about it as simply the effect of distant places such as London and New York being connected to one another by networks of airline traffic or internet communication. Second, networks offer a different way of thinking about how the world is organized, and thus can help us consider new (and potentially better) answers to some old questions. For example, it is hard to understand what holds a neighborhood together if it is simply a group of people living in a particular area. But, thinking about a neighborhood as a set of people that regularly interact with one another sheds light on how neighborhood associations and block parties are possible. Finally, networks offer a way to bridge a major conceptual gap in the social sciences known as the micro–macro problem: how do little individual behaviors give rise to big urban phenomena. For example, while it is not immediately obvious how broad patterns of segregation throughout a city can arise from the behaviors of individual people, the linkage is easy to see when we consider the fact that each individual tends to form friendships with people who are similar to themselves. In examining a range of urban issues such as these from a network perspective, this book aims to explore and demonstrate how networks can be useful for making sense of cities.

What Are Networks?

The idea of networks has been around quite some time, and has been used in many different ways. In this book, networks are viewed as specific and observable patterns of relationships that can be directly or indirectly examined. Of course, these relationships might take many different forms, and they might connect people, or buildings, or cities. The key point is that, whatever the relationships are and whatever they connect, networks have a specific and observable content that can be studied. Focusing on this type of network represents a distinctive way of trying to understand the social world that directly focuses on these patterns or structures. Therefore, it is important to consider what it means to adopt a network-based approach to thinking about cities and urban life, and how it differs from other more traditional approaches.

Most social science research focuses on the attributes of the things being studied. In some cases these are objective characteristics such as a person’s age or a city’s population size. In other cases they are more subjective characteristics such as a person’s attitudes toward other racial groups or a city’s political climate. These individual characteristics are then used, perhaps with a methodology such as multiple regression or ANOVA, to explain some phenomenon. For example, a study on neighborhood diversity and openness might examine the ages and racial attitudes of a large sample of people in an attempt to understand why some communities are more welcoming of difference than others. Similarly, a study of urban unemployment might examine the sizes and political climates of U.S. cities to understand why some areas have fewer available jobs than other areas.

This traditional approach to studying the social world has become the standard for a number of reasons. The vast majority of existing data, such as that available from the U.S. Census Bureau, provides information about the characteristics of individual people, neighborhoods, or metropolitan areas. And, when existing data sources are insufficient, collecting additional data on the characteristics of individual people or places is relatively straightforward using surveys. Additionally, the methods used to analyze such individual-level data are commonly taught in introductory statistics courses, and are simplified using widely available software. But, this traditional approach suffers from two major shortcomings. First, it is categorical: it places things into predefined categories—a person’s age or attitude, a city’s size or political climate—and uses those categories to explain the world, even though we know the world is not so neatly organized into boxes. Second, it is individualistic: it treats each person or place as independent and isolated, even though we know that people and places are connected to one another through relationships such as friendship or political alliance.

Focusing on the networks or relationships that exist among people or places, rather than their individual characteristics, overcomes these challenges. Such a network-based approach, sometimes called structuralism because it examines the structure or pattern of relationships, does not depend on predefined categories and does not treat social creatures as independent. First, it is non-categorical: instead of grouping people and places into categories based on characteristics such as age or population size, adopting a network approach instead considers which people and which places interact with each other. Second, it is not individualistic but relational: instead of treating them as independent, a network approach recognizes that people and places influence one another through their relationships. To summarize, while traditional social science approaches concentrate on the individual characteristics of people or places to explain and understand the social world, a network-based approach concentrates instead on the complex patterns of relationships between these people or places.³

Although researchers have been thinking about and using networks for a long time—even longer than many of the more widely used approaches—they represent a significant departure from traditional social science.⁴ As a result, there are many misconceptions about networks and structuralism. Some believe networks are simply a quantitative methodology for data analysis. While it is certainly true that ‘social network analysis’ is often a numbers-based method for examining data, many researchers examine networks in more qualitative ways through interviews and other methods, focusing on issues such as how people think about and manage their social networks. Similarly, networks and structuralism more generally are not simply a methodology for analyzing data, but also a way of thinking about the social world; they are equal parts methodological approach and theoretical perspective. Another widely held misconception about networks is that they are complicated and abstract. Again, while some network analyses may be very complex, the basic ideas are really quite simple: relationships are important, and different patterns of relationships have different consequences in the social world. This book aims to demystify networks and network analysis, and to demonstrate that understanding them need not be rocket science. A final common misconception is that a network-based approach ignores other important contextual factors such as culture. Quite to the contrary, the networks—the patterns of relationships among people, institutions, and whole cities—are the context! By looking carefully at how people or cities are related to one another, we can often gain a better understanding of where ‘culture’ comes from.

Not a Book about ‘Networks’

While the previous section clarifies what networks are, it is also helpful to be clear what networks are not, at least as they are considered in this book. This book avoids viewing networks as a loosely defined, commonsense, or metaphorical notion that society is built up through connections between people who are related to one another as if linked in a network. The conception of networks as simply the idea that people are connected to one another, and that such connections are important, has been advanced by many scholars writing at different times and in different traditions. For example, German social philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883) argued that “society is not merely an aggregate of individuals; it is the sum of the relations in which these individuals stand to one another.”⁵ Similarly, American sociologist Charles Cooley (1864–1929) suggested that “a man may be regarded as the point of intersection of an indefinite number of lines representing social groups.”⁶ Finally, English anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) noted that “human beings are connected by a complex network of social relations.”⁷ While there is no question that such claims are true and are closely related to the topic of this book, they are also relatively obvious and are the basis of nearly all of the social sciences and humanities. As a result, they tell us very little about what networks are or how they work, frequently because they do not identify exactly who or what is connected, or how. To understand networks, it is important to observe, measure, and analyze them. This also requires recognizing that networks are not merely useful metaphors for how the social world is structured, but really are the way the social world is structured. Thus, this book adopts the stance that people and cities are not merely related to one another as if connected by a network, but are in fact connected to one another by real, measurable networks.

In addition to being used as a metaphor, the word ‘network’ is sometimes used to refer to things other than patterns of relationships. Often, a group or coalition calls itself a network, referring to the fact that its members are somehow connected to one another. For example, many organizations aimed at combating social problems, like those associated with globalization, have used the word ‘network’ in their name: Continental Direct Action Network, Third World Network, The Network of East–West Women. Similarly, groups of cities and city leaders that come together to solve common problems also frequently describe themselves as networks, including the Healthy City Network organized by the World Health Organization, the Creative Cities Network organized by UNESCO, and the Eurocities Network of major European cities. Although these people, organizations, and cities might be connected to one another by the patterns of relationships among them, simply calling something a network does not make it one.⁸

In other cases, the word ‘network’ is used as a verb to describe the act of ‘networking,’ or the deliberate formation of relationships to achieve a desired end. Often notions of networking appear in business settings, where individuals might attend networking events such as receptions and charity dinners to establish new business contacts and solicit potential clients. In other cases, politicians might be described as networking when they make public appearances and take an opportunity to shake constituents’ hands. And, the act of networking has now expanded beyond the corporate and governmental arenas; nearly everyone engages in some form of networking, facilitated by social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Such technology is used by people to form new relationships, to maintain existing relationships, and to rekindle past relationships, all in an effort to stay connected or to grow one’s social network. While networking, whether in person or online, is certainly important today, it is only a tiny sliver of the formal study of networks as a social phenomenon. In this book, the focus is not so much on organizations that call themselves networks or on networking to make friends and find clients, but on how these institutions and behaviors influence cities and life in them.

Finally, this book does not directly address the theoretical perspective known as Actor–Network Theory (ANT). Although it includes the word ‘network’ in its name, it shares little in common with the network and structuralist perspectives that are the topic of this book. ANT emerged in the French post-structuralist tradition, and initially focused on analysis of technological systems, where relationships among social actors such as people are considered, but also the relationships among the ideas they create and the things they use.⁹ The theory aims to explain how these people, concepts, and objects come to be related to one another, and how these relationships influence social interactions. Often the focus is on how things such as laws and other social conventions develop and acquire meaning through their relationships to people and other ideas. More recently, the ANT approach has been applied to the study of cities.¹⁰ Although this has become an influential approach to understanding how cities develop, it is not directly considered here, except briefly at the end of Chapter Four, where the networks of urban politics are contrasted with the politics of urban networks.

To summarize, although the idea of networks has been used in a variety of ways, and has even found its place in everyday talk, the focus of this book is relatively specific and not overly complicated: how do networks, as observable patterns of relationships, influence cities and help us understand life within them?

Theory or Methodology?

One unique feature of networks—indeed, one that is a common source of confusion—is its simultaneous role as both a theory and a methodology. In the social sciences an idea is often thought of as either theoretical such as ‘social class’ or methodological such as ‘multiple regression.’ However, networks offer both a theoretical framework for understanding the world and a methodology for using this framework to collect data, test hypotheses, and draw conclusions.

A number of excellent books have been written about networks as a methodology.¹¹ While they serve as useful reference guides, the trouble with methodologically focused books is that they are often boring to read and offer only limited applications that illustrate how the techniques can be used to answer interesting questions. Similarly, a number of equally good books have been written that use network theories to examine cities and urban life.¹² These often tell interesting and engaging stories about cities, and use the idea of networks to understand old issues in new ways, but they rarely explain the nuts-and-bolts of network methods.

This book aims to combine discussions of networks as both theory and methodology.¹³ The bulk of the text uses network theories to consider questions about how cities work and how urban life is organized. When a new methodological concept or technique is introduced, a separate ‘method note’ is included that provides a brief introduction to the practical issues of using networks in research. Just as with any complex methodology, each of these method notes ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Method Notes
• Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Why Cities? Why Networks?
• Part 1 Micro-urban Networks: Networks Within Cities
• Part 2 Meso-urban Networks: Cities as Networks
• Part 3 Macro-urban Networks: Networks of Cities
• Notes
• References and Suggested Reading
• Index