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The Connected City: How Networks are Shaping the Modern Metropolis
Abstract
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.
... Cities are often described as complex networks from which locations emerge and that these locations are created through the interactions and movement of resources within these networks (Batty, 2013;Salat, 2017). Furthermore, the way that goods and information flow across a network is governed by the connectivity of the network and is often dependent on the structure of the connections, such as how the parts are connected, how many connections there are and the strength of these connections (Neal, 2013). In terms of resilience, connectivity is a crucial parameter, as the lack of connectivity is often the cause of failure of particular functions after a perturbation (Ahern, 2011). ...
... Connectivity is also an important consideration in building the adaptive capacity of a system. This is because the size, strength and structure of the network determines how information and resources move within a system (Neal, 2013;Salat, 2017). A lack of, or breakdown in connectivity can result in delays in information flows, which result in the system not having sufficient time to respond or adapt to a disturbance (Ahern, 2011;Salat, 2011). ...
... In the graph theory, a graph or a network is the mathematical abstraction that represents the relationship between objects through nodes (also called vertices or points) and links (also called arcs, edges or lines) (see Figure 3.4). In the traditional graph theory, which was later been taken up in social networks theory, the graph (hereafter referred to as the network) of interest is a non-spatial network (Neal, 2013). ...
Cities are one of humanity’s crowning achievements. However, as cities and regions grow, they become more interconnected and complex while adapting to an ever-changing social, political, and natural environment. More recently, cities have to deal with increasing uncertainty which is brought about by radical changes such as social, economic and political instability, climate change, environmental degradation and global health crises. Under such circumstances, urban planners and designers have realised that the current planning and design approaches are often inadequate to deal with the rapidly changing and increasingly complex environments (Hes and Du Plessis, 2015).
In response to these challenges, resilience thinking has been proposed as an alternative paradigm to challenge the current ‘business and usual approach’ (Walker and Salt, 2006). Resilience thinking embraces uncertainty and encourages planning with and for change. Moreover, because of these qualities, urban resilience is rapidly being viewed as one of the critical factors to achieving the goals of sustainable urbanism (Salat, 2011; UN Habitat, 2016a). Consequently, the rate at which urban resilience concepts have been included in many plans, strategies and assessments has steadily been growing (Zhang and Li, 2018). However, despite the growing acceptance of urban resilience in the urban discourse (Coaffee and Lee, 2016), the spatial aspects of urban resilience have been neglected. More specifically, there is still very little understanding of how the physical form of cities impacts their overall capacity to adapt to change, and therefore, their potential resilience (Feliciotti, 2018; Garcia and Vale, 2017; Romice et al., 2020).
In response to this gap in our knowledge, this study investigates the relationship between the urban form and the manifestation of resilience in cities through addressing four research objectives. First, this study explored how urban form impacts and contributes to the potential adaptive capacity of cities. Secondly, it sought to develop and test a methodological protocol that can describe and assess the potential spatial adaptive capacity of any location within a city. Third, through the application of the protocol on case studies, this study set out to extract a range of typologies that reflect the morphological traits most likely to improve a city’s spatial adaptive capacity. Fourth, using the created typologies, this study proposed a range of urban design principles to promote urban forms that can contribute to more spatially resilient urban settlements.
To address these research objectives, six directives for spatial resilience, which contribute to the formation of spatial-morphological resilience, were derived from a review of urban resilience and urban design literature. Additionally, the conceptual relationships between the directives were explored using a conceptual framework. To operationalise the framework a Spatial Resilience Assessment (SRA) protocol was proposed. The SRA protocol included two sub-protocols which incorporated new and existing methods and metrics that are used to (a) assess, at multiple scales, the extent to which each spatial resilience directive is present for any location within a study area; (b) to evaluate the relative spatial adaptive potential of a location and (c) to extract the morphological typologies that are most likely to improve the potential spatial adaptive capacity of a study area.
Through the application of the proposed SRA protocol in two case studies, Manhattan (NYC) and Hong Kong, this study not only identified which locations within each case study had higher spatial adaptive potential but was also able to extract the morphological qualities of the best performing areas though the creation of the spatial adaptive urban types for each case study. Through the application of the protocol, this study produced over 100 maps per case study as both a quantitative assessment of the quality of the adaptive potential of an area, but also as a means of visually exploring the physical manifestation of the concept of spatial resilience through the morphology of the city. The results from both case studies suggest that variation in the size, shape and configuration of the constituent elements of urban form can greatly impact the potential adaptive capacity of a location. In addition to geometric and configurational characteristics, the relative position of a location (plot or building) within the broader urban context also plays a role in the locations multi-scale adaptive potential within a city. The finding of this study were summarised into a set of spatial resilience urban design principles that, could be used to guide the development and transformation of urban settlements to be more spatially resilient.
... The rapid growth of research in this area has led many to seek structure and clarity through typologies and categorization. For example, Neal (2013) proposes making sense of urban network research by thinking about differences and similarities across the macro-, meso-, and micro-scales, while Derudder (2006) suggests differentiating empirical approaches focused on corporate organization from those focused on infrastructure. These typologies are helpful for organizing the now large literature on urban networks, but the linkages between the subfield of urban networks and the broader field of urban studies remain unclear (Derudder & Neal, 2018). ...
... The significance of city-regions and metropolitan areas further rises in recent decades, as they are becoming "globalization's new urban form" (Harrison & Hoyler, 2015). As with the analyses of economic and social networks, the studies of governance networks in cities and regions concern multiple spatial scales, such as macro, meso, and micro levels (Derudder and Neal, 2018;Neal, 2013; see also Koliba et al., 2011). Metropolitan or city-regional governance networks are at the meso level, often related to the coordination of city-regional projects, infrastructure, plans, and services (e.g., Barrutia & Echebarria, 2010;Rode, 2019). ...
... Studies at various analytical levels often entail different empirical approaches (Neal, 2013). As noted above, "networks" have been used in different fields to characterize emerging governance processes (Berry et al., 2004;Blanco, 2013;Klijn & Koppenjan, 2012;O'Toole, 1997;Ramia et al., 2018; see also Koliba et al. (2011) for a survey of relevant theories and terms in public policy and administration). ...
This special issue of the Journal of Urban Affairs brings together a series of 10 papers that illustrate the range of ways that networks can be used to better understand cities and communities. They employ a wide range of network methods, in a diverse sample of places, at different scales, to answer thorny questions in urban studies. However, together they highlight how network approaches can shed new light on three broad areas of urban inquiry: the nature of community in urban areas, the role of scale and form in urban economic development, and the potential for coordination in fragmented and polycentric regions. In this synthesizing paper, we use these papers to explore how a network approach offers new ways of thinking about these issues. We also use them to guide reflection on two questions: are networks an essential concept in the urban study toolkit, and how can the utility of networks for urban studies be extended further?
... Urban road networks are a type of spatial network where nodes represent cities, and highways that connect them are the links or edges of the network [42][43][44]. Urban road networks have been used to study city to city migration [45], historical and geographical features of the network [46][47][48] and local and global indicators, such as connectivity, centrality, hierarchy, clustering and others [43,[49][50][51][52][53][54]. They have also been used to analyse proximity or the directedness of the network or the geometric design of its roads [42,55]. ...
... Urban road networks are a type of spatial network where nodes represent cities, and highways that connect them are the links or edges of the network [42][43][44]. Urban road networks have been used to study city to city migration [45], historical and geographical features of the network [46][47][48] and local and global indicators, such as connectivity, centrality, hierarchy, clustering and others [43,[49][50][51][52][53][54]. They have also been used to analyse proximity or the directedness of the network or the geometric design of its roads [42,55]. ...
City population size is a crucial measure when trying to understand urban life. Many socio-economic indicators scale superlinearly with city size, whilst some infrastructure indicators scale sublinearly with city size. However, the impact of size also extends beyond the city’s limits. Here, we analyse the scaling behaviour of cities beyond their boundaries by considering the emergence and growth of nearby cities. Based on an urban network from African continental cities, we construct an algorithm to create the region of influence of cities. The number of cities and the population within a region of influence are then analysed in the context of urban scaling. Our results are compared against a random permutation of the network, showing that the observed scaling power of cities to enhance the emergence and growth of cities is not the result of randomness. By altering the radius of influence of cities, we observe three regimes. Large cities tend to be surrounded by many small towns for small distances. For medium distances (above 114 km), large cities are surrounded by many other cities containing large populations. Large cities boost urban emergence and growth (even more than 190 km away), but their scaling power decays with distance.
... Multifaceted nature of city builds on complexity, an object of study referenced as urban networks [22,23] or urban system [24,25]. The growing scholarly works dedicated to pursue this line of research expands to different directions with diverse focal points, making a consolidated definition and workhouse for urban networks hard to delineate. ...
... The growing scholarly works dedicated to pursue this line of research expands to different directions with diverse focal points, making a consolidated definition and workhouse for urban networks hard to delineate. An attempt to formulate the spectrum of urban network employs heuristic identification spanning over three layers [23]. Firstly, micro-analytical approach specifies intra-city networks, for example the impact of street network on pedestrian flows, neighbourhood walkability, and potential interaction [26]. ...
Mobility cross spatial units represents the embodiment of how people manage activities between locations along temporal sequences. Spatiotemporal pattern nevertheless interacts with the socioeconomic characteristics of respected origin (push factors) and destination (pull factors) which widely discussed in spatial interaction literature. Observing this dynamics at higher spatial resolution allows us to entangle multifaceted nature of city, its complexity as a system or network, and the way it shapes movement of people. This study explore the extent interconnected elements of urban system or urban networks, in parallel with the appearance of external shock namely COVID outbreak, may affect estimation of mobility flows. To improve predictive power, gravity model is extended to urban system model by augmenting the complexities of urban network based on micro-analytical approach (intra-city networks). Our findings reveals better performance of a more complex urban system model as to compared with gravity model. Here, we leverage stratification in mobility by specifying mobility flows with respect to income status of respected areas. The occurrence of COVID outbreak followed by lockdown measure increases intra-class mobility, indicating the coupling between socioeconomic distance and geographical distance. Flows between areas with similar economic ranges are more predictable than the one of different level. Furthermore, the presence of pull factors is more affluent than push factors in determining mobility regardless the severity of external shock.
... On the other hand, hundreds of quantitatively focused world city network (WCN) research papers have generally used social network analysis (SNA) metrics to understand city-region centrality within global networks of service firms (Derudder et al., 2010;Neal, 2012), industry sub-sectors (Wall and Van der Knaap, 2011), or country-specific networks . Betweenness centrality is the most common measure in determining brokerage in city networks, identifying the nodes (places) most often on the shortest path between two others. ...
... We apply a firm-based approach inspired by previous WCN literatures (cf. Neal, 2012) emphasising the influence that multinational firms wield in creating ties between distant city-regions through inter-and intra-organisational networks. The data and code necessary to replicate the analyses of this section are available at: https://bit.ly/3q3wLxk. ...
Brokerage is an increasingly relevant function of city-regions within diverse economic network structures. In this paper, we identify cities whose brokerage roles are defined by their network positionality within the global corporate network using linkages between headquarters and subsidiary locations. Applying Gould and Fernandez’s framework of five potential brokerage types, we supplement understandings of brokerage as a network position by unpacking the diversity of forms brokerage assumes as a process. City-regions are conferred economic advantage through their brokerage roles that close structural holes in inter-urban firm networks resulting from a range of domestic and international brokerage roles.
... As we have just reviewed, Network Science is both a methodological approach and a theoretical framework for understanding complex systems (e.g., Neal, 2013). As such, it can flexibly represent different information through network nodes and their connections. ...
... This brings us to the important question of why: Why use Network Science to represent these individual differences in bilingual language usage? There is a longstanding debate among network scientists (much like corpus linguists) as to whether Network Science is merely a methodology to quantify complex systems, or more of a theoretical framework to understand complex systems (Neal, 2013). The present work draws on both capacities to characterize and quantify the complex relationship between bilingualism and social language use. ...
Recent work within the language sciences, particularly bilingualism, has sought new methods to evaluate and characterize how people differentially use language across different communicative contexts. These differences have thus far been linked to changes in cognitive control strategy, reading behavior, and brain organization. Here, we approach this issue using a novel application of Network Science to map the conversational topics that Montréal bilinguals discuss across communicative contexts (e.g., work, home, family, school, social), in their dominant vs. non-dominant language. Our results demonstrate that all communicative contexts display a unique pattern in which conversational topics are discussed, but only a few communicative contexts (work and social) display a unique pattern of how many languages are used to discuss particular topics. We also demonstrate that the dominant language has greater network size, strength, and density than the non-dominant language, suggesting that more topics are used in a wider variety of contexts in this language. Lastly, using community detection to thematically group the topics in each language, we find evidence of greater specificity in the non-dominant language than the dominant language. We contend that Network Science is a valuable tool for representing complex information, such as individual differences in bilingual language use, in a rich and granular manner, that may be used to better understand brain and behavior.
... For instance, in a classic paper using network-analytical methods, Pitts (1965) shows how the emergence of Moscow as the dominant city in Russia can be explained by the city's centrality in Russia's medieval transport networks. There are several indictors of centrality in a network and all depict a different property of a node's role (Freeman 1979;Neal 2013 provide more thorough introductions). The three most common are: ...
... Hence when these centrality measures are used, a hypothesis about the causal mechanisms that these mathematical constructs represent needs to be formulated first. It is for this reason to caution using overly complex centrality measures as these can be difficult to interpret in terms of causal mechanisms (Neal 2013). It is clear that Brussels is the most central node in the Belgian urban network and Ghent and Antwerp are important hubs. ...
... Step 1: Text corpus selection An important question is which text corpus is being used, as this is likely to affect outcomes to a considerable extent. Recent applications of the toponym co-occurrence method have used Wikipedia (Neal, 2012;Salvini & Fabrikant, 2016), newspapers (Hu et al., 2017;Janc, 2015;Zhong et al., 2017) or websites found through search engines such as Google and Baidu to explore web content (Devriendt et al., 2008;Liu et al., 2014). However, as indicated by Meijers and Peris (2019), search engines or a single newspaper source all suffer from potential biases and are not necessarily sufficiently representative to obtain a comprehensive view. ...
Cities relate to other cities in many ways, and much scholarly effort goes into uncovering those relationships. Building on the principle that strongly related cities will co-occur frequently in texts, we propose a novel method to classify those toponym co-occurrences using a lexicon-based text-mining method. Millions of webpages are analysed to retrieve how 293 Chinese cities are related in terms of six types: industry, information technology, finance, research, culture and government. Each class displays different network patterns, and this multiplexity is mapped and analysed. Further refinement of this lexicon-based approach can revolutionize the study of inter-urban relationships.
... However, we remember the rise and fall of numerous other concepts such as 'creative city' (Florida, 2002;Li and Duan, 2018), 'eco city' (Kenworthy, 2006), 'global city' (Sassen, 1991;Knox and Taylor, 1995), 'digital city' (Coucleis, 2004), and 'ubiquitous city' (Greenfield, 2010). There are also urban concepts that focus on the technical and economic aspects of cities, such as the 'network city' (Castells, 2010), 'connected city' (Neal, 2013), 'industrial cluster' (Porter, 1990), 'regional innovation system' (Sonn and Kang, 2016;Braczyk, Cooke and Heidenreich, 1998), 'technopole' (Hall and Castells, 1994), and 'learning region' (Morgan, 2007). ...
Concepts like 'creative city', 'world city', and 'eco city' arrive with loud celebration, but fade in just a few years. In recent years, 'smart city' has been a buzzword. As each fad emerges, urbanists debate its meaning and implications. However, why so many urban concepts circulate at all is rarely focused on. This study attempts to answer this question based on the Marxian view of the built environment as a fixed capital. We focus on the differences between the built environment and other types of fixed capital, and show how these differences render capital circulation in the built environment sector more fragile. We claim that such fragility cannot be fixed within the circuit of capital, so external intervention is necessary and deployment of catchy urban concepts is a resorted method of such intervention.
... The emergence of big data has provided researchers with large volumes of individual behavior, that, for privacy reasons, is aggregated as place-to-place connectivity, effectively expanding the concept of extensibility to define groups of interconnected places (as described in Neal, 2012). Studies using these types of datasets have found that places with wealthier, more educated, and more resourceful populations tend to have more farreaching ties. ...
Individuals connect to sets of places through travel, migration, telecommunications, and social interactions. This set of multiplex network connections comprises an individual’s “extensibility,” a human geography term that qualifies one’s geographic reach as locally‐focused or globally extensible. Here we ask: Are there clear signals of global vs. local extensibility? If so, what demographic and social life factors correlate with each type of pattern? To answer these questions, we use data from the Neighborhood Connectivity Survey conducted in Akron, Ohio, State College, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (global sample N = 950; in model n = 903). Based on the location of a variety of connections (travel, phone call patterns, locations of family, migration, etc.), we found that individuals fell into one of four different typologies: (a) hyperlocal, (b) metropolitan, (c) mixed‐many, and (d) regional‐few. We tested whether individuals in each typology had different levels of local social support and different sociodemographic characteristics. We found that respondents who are white, married, and have higher educational attainment are significantly associated with more connections to a wider variety of places (more global connections), while respondents who are Black/African American, single, and with a high school level educational attainment (or lower) have more local social and spatial ties. Accordingly, the “urban poor” may be limited in their ability to interact with a variety of places (yielding a wide set of geographic experiences and influences), suggesting that wide extensibility may be a mark of privileged circumstances and heightened agency.
... Current research on human settlement assessment reflects the spatial and temporal characteristics of human settlements but Frontiers in Environmental Science | www.frontiersin.org May 2022 | Volume 10 | Article 893876 2 cannot directly measure the external impact of urban human settlements (Zachary, 2012). In this study, an urban network model was developed to explore the competitiveness of urban human settlements. ...
Resource-based urban agglomerations often encounter greater challenges in the sustainable development of human settlements. The aim of this study is to propose an approach to the coordinated development of competitiveness by analyzing the interaction of human settlements competitiveness (HSC) in resource-based urban agglomerations. Through the compound evaluation model of HSC and urban network analysis, this study finds: 1) the HSC measure increased from 35.12 in 1990 to 52.15 in 2015 and showed a downward trend from 2015 to 2019, with an average value of 47.82 in 2019; 2) The change trend of the relevance network density is the same as that of the HSC, while the difference network density reaches the lowest value of 0.441 when the HSC is the highest, indicating that the HSC of the urban agglomerations has improved to a certain extent but is more unsustainable, and 3) Communities in the relevance network are obviously bounded by the borders of provinces or urban agglomerations, while the communities in the difference network are differentiated into two types: high-competitiveness and low-competitiveness. Using the theory of "co-opetition" to analyze the sustainable development path of resource-based urban agglomerations, the study believes that a coordination mechanism and a guarantee mechanism for benefit distribution should be established between urban agglomerations to curb local protectionism, and promote regional dislocation development. The development gradient level also should be established within the urban agglomeration to narrow the gap between HSC of cities, and innovative development should be the core of promoting industrial transformation and upgrading.
... The hierarchy of the largest Q value is selected to obtain the final community structure. The three centrality indicators (degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness centrality) were measured to seek the potential characteristics of each airport community (Neal, 2012). The value of centralities of each community was the mean of the centrality of component airports which obtained by igraph package in R. ...
... At this point, a central challenge is the lack of data on the intercity linkages that constitute the fundamental building blocks of the urban network. Researchers have overcome this obstacle by adopting alternative approaches based on the existence of infrastructures that enable a movement of resources between cities (such as airports), or on the pattern of interactions between corporate headquarters and their subsidiaries and partners (Neal, 2012). The former methods are, notwithstanding, better suited to the analysis of urban networks integrating large cities (mainly the so-called world cities network), but are comparatively less applicable when the interest lies in small and medium-sized cities. Meijers et al. (2016) explore how the position of a city in regional and international/national networks influences the presence of metropolitan functions typically associated with local size. ...
This research assesses the empirical relevance of geography as a driver of the position of the nodes within a city network. We first propose a measure of the strength of network ties between municipalities based on the observed migratory flows and compute network centrality indexes to characterize the degree of
embeddedness of each place. Second, we filter the network ties to account for the fact that a nonnegligible fraction of the flows is induced by geographical proximity and, therefore, do not accurately
measure the strength of the relationship between places. The empirical results (data from Spanish municipalities for the period 2001–16) suggest that network ties between municipalities, beyond those directly related to geographical proximity, explain, on average, about a third of network centrality.
... e myriad of independent agents working and interacting in a city results in a macrostructure that is unlikely to have been deduced if one was to simply examine component individuals, the hallmark of complex systems. is is especially true given that these agents are embedded in nested subsystems, such as infrastructure, governance, and ecosystems, each of which is a complex network of interacting parts [4]. e intractability of modeling the multilayered complexities of cities has given rise to the view of cities as complex systems [5][6][7][8][9][10] and the growing application of complexity economics [11]. ...
A well-developed perspective in the study of urban systems is that cities are complex systems that manifest as networks of interdependent economic units. These units might be occupations, industries, labor skills, patent technologies, etc. Much research has focused on describing the nature of these networks, quantifying their links, and suggesting applications for policymakers. In this paper, we examine the US skill network, focusing on the relationship between network centrality and economic performance. Here, nodes are represented by individual labor skills, and edge weights are derived from the colocation pattern of skill pairs among 384 US metropolitan statistical areas. The centrality of skills, using three centrality measures, is then aggregated to the occupational and metropolitan level. We find that occupations with higher skill centrality are associated with greater annual salaries, and metropolitan areas with higher skill centrality have higher productivity rates. Overall, these results suggest that the application of traditional network metrics to this view of cities as complex networks can offer new insights into the dynamics of regional economies.
... Despite this attention, it is hard to quantify or precisely define the importance of network embeddedness for individual cities. While studies repeatedly show the importance of a city's embeddedness in large-scale networks of all kindsfirms, capital, knowledge, people, goodsfor its performance (Taylor, 2003;Bel and Fageda, 2008;Neal, 2013;Meijers et al, 2016), how such networks' importance compares to local factors is largely unknown. Some time ago, scholars argued that local factors still seem to substantially outweigh network effects (Boix and Trullen, 2007), but it appears that the importance of network externalities is growing as the connectivity of places has been rapidly increasing in the past decades. ...
Multicentric urban regions have become the dominant mode of urbanisation in Europe, yet urbanists lack a framework to capture and describe the unfolding spatial organisation in the process of metropolitan integration. This chapter builds on the concepts of ‘borrowed size’ and ‘agglomeration shadows’ to investigate the new interactions and interdependencies between the cities making up multicentric urban regions, with particular emphasis on the benefits and the costs of this integration and patterns of uneven development. It has remained unclear why one city profits from metropolitan integration in the sense of borrowing size, whereas another may face the agglomeration shadows of nearby cities. This chapter explores and empirically substantiates this novel framework of borrowed size/agglomeration shadows by examining cities in the Randstad Holland, identifying factors with which positions in the ‘agglomeration shadow’ or positions of ‘borrowing size’ are associated.
... Fortunately, complexity science has begun to mature to the point that it is enabling researchers to move beyond lingering obstacles to a fundamental understanding of regional systems. Here we adopt the framework that regions are complex adaptive systems [6][7][8] and that they exhibit a key attribute of such systems, namely internal networks of interdependent components [9][10][11]. As the internal connectedness of those networks increases, it can impact the ability of information and resources to move more Urban Sci. ...
Urban systems, and regions more generally, are the epicenters of many of today’s social issues. Yet they are also the global drivers of technological innovation, and thus it is critical that we understand their vulnerabilities and what makes them resilient to different types of shocks. We take regions to be systems composed of internal networks of interdependent components. As the connectedness of those networks increases, it allows information and resources to move more rapidly within a region. Yet, it also increases the speed and efficiency at which the effects of shocks cascade through the system. Here we analyzed regional networks of interdependent industries and how their structures relate to a region’s vulnerability to shocks. Methodologically, we utilized a metric of economic connectedness called tightness which quantifies a region’s internal connectedness relative to other regions. We calculated tightness for German regions during the Great Recession, comparing it to each region’s economic performance during the shock (2007–2009) and during recovery (2009–2011). We find that tightness is negatively correlated with changes in economic performance during the shock but positively during recovery. This suggests that regional economic planners face a tradeoff between being more productive or being more vulnerable to the next economic shock.
... These locations are gateways that surrounding small regions are connected to and that intermediate flows between their local economy and distant places (Derudder et al., 2010). More recently, the idea that such cities, regions, or countries are brokers of network flows has gained popularity in research on global networks of organizational control Neal, 2012;Sigler, 2013). Brokers in networks are important agents that bridge otherwise loosely connected parts of the network and thus can control flows (the tertius gaudens orientation) (Granovetter, 1973) and can also facilitate new connections (the tertius iungens orientation) (Burt, 2004). ...
Cross-regional mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transfer control and diffuse knowledge across space, which facilitates the integration of business systems. We analyse about 40,000 cross-regional acquisitions in Europe completed between 2003 and 2017 and distinguish innovative and non-nnovative M&A. Both types of deals cluster into communities constituted by countries or groups of neighbouring countries. However, an increasing proportion of deals connect different communities, especially for innovative M&A. More populous and richer regions host more acquiring and target companies and thus broker communities. Research and development expenditure and skilled human capital are additional factors favouring brokerage of regions by attracting acquirers.
... Trade-offs between local and non-local knowledge and their effect on innovation have been analysed by previous research (e.g., Autant-Bernard, 2001;Neal, 2013;Kang & Dall'Erba, 2016). ...
The paper offers a multilevel understanding of the effect of brokerage on regional innovation. We develop a typology of regional networks based on the extent to which the inventors of a region connect the otherwise disconnected group of local inventors (internal brokerage) or connect the local network with other regions (external boundary-spanning). Using data on regional innovation performance and co-inventing networks within and between US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) between 2000 and 2014, we show that configurations balancing high (low) internal brokerage and low (high) external boundary-spanning lead to higher innovation performance than those where brokerage occurs at both levels of analysis.
... In recent years, especially during the restrictive regulations of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have increasingly used OSNs to maintain social relationships and interact globally [63]. Some of these OSNs allow the formation of virtual groups of people (online communities) who interact with each other and share common values, beliefs, behaviors, interests, personal preferences, and other characteristics [64,65]. In most online communities, the majority of users never contribute (90% in [66]), a small group of users account for almost all network activity (1% in [66]), and the rest of the users (9% in [66]) contribute minimally, which implies the existence of user roles. ...
Understanding the complex process of information spread in online social networks (OSNs) enables the efficient maximization/minimization of the spread of useful/harmful information. Users assume various roles based on their behaviors while engaging with information in these OSNs. Recent reviews on information spread in OSNs have focused on algorithms and challenges for modeling the local node-to-node cascading paths of viral information. However, they neglected to analyze non-viral information with low reach size that can also spread globally beyond OSN edges (links) via non-neighbors through, for example, pushed information via content recommendation algorithms. Previous reviews have also not fully considered user roles in the spread of information. To address these gaps, we: (i) provide a comprehensive survey of the latest studies on role-aware information spread in OSNs, also addressing the different temporal spreading patterns of viral and non-viral information; (ii) survey modeling approaches that consider structural, non-structural, and hybrid features, and provide a taxonomy of these approaches; (iii) review software platforms for the analysis and visualization of role-aware information spread in OSNs; and (iv) describe how information spread models enable useful applications in OSNs such as detecting influential users. We conclude by highlighting future research directions for studying information spread in OSNs, accounting for dynamic user roles.
... Cities has gained growing attention in the research agenda of both regional and innovation studies (e.g. Cooke, 2001;Florida, Adler, & Mellander, 2017;Johnson, 2008;Neal, 2012). ...
Brokers play a critical role in the evolution of innovation systems. However, accessing and diffusing knowledge into the system imply costs and requires capacities. Using patent data to analyze inter-city networks in Latin America, we revisit the debate on the benefits and costs of knowledge networks. We identify broker cities, differentiating between intra-regional and extra-regional connections, and we estimate the effects of brokerage on patenting outcomes between 2006 and 2017. Our findings reveal that cities holding a central position in the network show higher patenting activity; however, being broker, particularly bridging Latin America with extra-regional cities, negatively influences patenting outcomes.
... Progresses in this direction are now anticipated from several directions: the expanded computing capacity and new algorithms enable to handle more precisely the statistical treatment and visualization of the structure and evolution for very large networks (Rozenblat and Melançon 2013). Concepts and methods for social network analysis rapidly develop as demonstrated in a few previous works developing applications to cities (Pflieger and Rozenblat 2010;Neal 2013) as well as in several chapters of the present book. Sophisticated simulation methods help in identifying the key processes that connect the communication networks and the development of systems of cities (Raimbault, 2018). ...
... At this point, a central challenge is the lack of data on the intercity linkages that constitute the fundamental building blocks of the urban network. Researchers have overcome this obstacle by adopting alternative approaches based on the existence of infrastructures that enable a movement of resources between cities (such as airports), or on the pattern of interactions between corporate headquarters and their subsidiaries and partners (Neal, 2012). The former methods are, notwithstanding, better suited to the analysis of urban networks integrating large cities (mainly the so-called world cities network), but are comparatively less applicable when the interest lies in small and medium-sized cities. Meijers et al. (2016) explore how the position of a city in regional and international/national networks influences the presence of metropolitan functions typically associated with local size. ...
This research assesses the empirical relevance of geography as a driver of the position of the nodes within a city network. We first propose a measure of the strength of network ties between municipalities based on the observed migratory flows and compute network centrality indexes to characterize the degree of embeddedness of each place. Second, we filter the network ties to account for the fact that a non-negligible fraction of the flows is induced by geographical proximity and, therefore, do not accurately measure the strength of the relationship between places. The empirical results (data from Spanish municipalities for the period 2001–16) suggest that network ties between municipalities, beyond those directly related to geographical proximity, explain, on average, about a third of network centrality.
... Despite this attention, it is hard to quantify or precisely define the importance of network embeddedness for individual cities. While studies repeatedly show the importance of a city's embeddedness in large-scale networks of all kindsfirms, capital, knowledge, people, goodsfor its performance (Taylor, 2003;Bel and Fageda, 2008;Neal, 2013;Meijers et al, 2016), how such networks' importance compares to local factors is largely unknown. Some time ago, scholars argued that local factors still seem to substantially outweigh network effects (Boix and Trullen, 2007), but it appears that the importance of network externalities is growing as the connectivity of places has been rapidly increasing in the past decades. ...
... Rapoport's [2] human-environment formulation described reciprocity in which people shape the environment, and places influence people. According to this theory, people and places cannot be conceptualized without each other; individuals construct places as a consequence of everyday social practice, and spaces have an impact on people's cognition, behavior, identity, and the whole construction of the self [3][4][5]. ...
The research presented in this paper describes an evaluation of the impact of spatial interventions in public spaces, measured by social media data. This contribution aims at observing the way a spatial intervention in an urban location can affect what people talk about on social media. The test site for our research is Domplatz in the center of Hamburg, Germany. In recent years, several actions have taken place there, intending to attract social activity and spotlight the square as a landmark of cultural discourse in the city of Hamburg. To evaluate the impact of this strategy, textual data from the social networks Twitter and Instagram (i.e., tweets and image captions) are collected and analyzed using Natural Language Processing intelligence. These analyses identify and track the cultural topic or “people talking about culture” in the city of Hamburg. We observe the evolution of the cultural topic, and its potential correspondence in levels of activity, with certain intervention actions carried out in Domplatz. Two analytic methods of topic clustering and tracking are tested. The results show a successful topic identification and tracking with both methods, the second one being more accurate. This means that it is possible to isolate and observe the evolution of the city’s cultural discourse using NLP. However, it is shown that the effects of spatial interventions in our small test square have a limited local scale, rather than a city-wide relevance.
... Istotną rolę w city resilience odgrywają zatem badania sieci powiązań miejskich i przepływów zachodzących w ramach tych sieci, ale także umiejętność odbierania i interpretacji sygnałów wysyłanych przez te sieci, zapowiadających zbliżającą się sytuację kryzysową (Neal 2013). Można więc potraktować miasta jako złożone systemy adaptacyjne, samoorganizujące się pod wpływem wielokierunkowych sprzężeń zwrotnych oraz odpowiedzi na sygnały lub bodźce wysyłane przez różne elementy systemu. ...
Miasta na ścieżce rozwoju napotykają wiele różnego pochodzenia zagrożeń, ryzyk i katastrof, nazywanych ogólnie stresorami. Obecnie, w warunkach globalizacji, oprócz tradycyjnych zagrożeń pojawiają się wciąż nowe (globalne kryzysy gospodarcze, zmiany klimatyczne, zagrożenia terrorystyczne, pandemie, jak w ostatnim czasie Covid-19 itp.), których skutki często są trudne do przewidzenia. Sytuacja taka skłania do podejmowania działań, mających na celu unikanie lub łagodzenie efektów oddziaływania stresorów, a przez to zapewnienie trwałości rozwoju miast. Chodzi więc o budowanie city resilience. W niniejszym artykule miasto traktowane jest jako złożony, dynamiczny system, którego trwanie i rozwój zależy od odpowiedniego planowania działań na rzecz budowania odporności miast. Resilience rozumiane jest przy tym nie w kategoriach statycznych, ale raczej jako umiejętność elastycznego dopasowywania się czy adaptowania do zmieniających się uwarunkowań. Wskazywana jest sekwencja działań, które w procesach planistycznych powinny zostać zachowane, aby odpowiednio przygotować system miasta na potencjalne ryzyka i zagrożenia. Chodzi o identyfikację stresorów, badanie wrażliwości systemu miasta na ich oddziaływanie, analizę możliwych skutków działania stresora oraz przyjęcie konkretnej strategii działania. Podkreślane jest przy tym znaczenie redundancji, społeczeństwa obywatelskiego, analizy rozmieszczenia zagrożeń i ryzyk w przestrzeni miasta oraz ich zmian w czasie.
... Whether or not the Randstad is a functional entity is believed to be critical to its economic, social and environmental performance (Shachar, 1994;Lambooy, 1998;Meijers, 2007a;OECD, 2007). More generally, it has been suggested that f lows, and especially a city's embeddedness in these f lows, are critical to understanding its performance (Taylor, 2003;Hall and Pain, 2006;Neal, 2013). As regards this embeddedness, often, an analogy is drawn with firm networks: the potential importance of global economic networks in shaping a firm's competitiveness and performance potential has often been mentioned (e.g. ...
The attention given to the Randstad Holland as a key concept in urban and regional development strategies of the Dutch national government has come in waves over decades. This chapter presents a selection of some of the most important studies that have been exploring functional coherence in the Randstad at different points in time, culminating in an overview table in which their main characteristics. It discusses the studies from a conceptual and methodological perspective. The chapter considers general conceptual and methodological requirements that need to be adhered to when studying functional coherence in polycentric metropolitan areas such as the Randstad. The Netherlands became a unified state in 1815, but resembled the former federation of provinces until the start of industrialisation. The political landscape has become fragmented and populist parties have risen to prominence, particularly those on the right of the political spectrum. Researchers addressing functional coherence in the Randstad have drawn attention to the issues of multiplexity and individual-level heterogeneity.
... The transportation networks between cities can act as an indicator for the interactions between cities. To gain insights, we need the focus on the available infrastructure, the capacity of the network in terms of how much travel is possible, and the flow network indicating the actual interactions between the cities ( Neal, 2013). Figure 3 shows how the city network and the aviation transportation network interact. ...
Inaugural speech on the research topic: Introduction to aviation capacity and why we need to research this topic from a technical, social and business model approach.
... More importantly, a community/city grows as a system within a system of communities/cities (Berry 1964). Furthermore, 'systems' at different geographical scales and levels are also interacting with one another (Neal 2012). According to Batty (2013), cities should be treated as systems of network and flow instead of being simply viewed as places in space. ...
This book reports on the latest, cutting-edge scholarship on integrating social network and spatial analyses in the built environment. It sheds light on conceptualization and Implementation of such integration, integration for intra-city level analysis, as well as integration for inter-city level analysis. It explores the use of new data sources concerning human and urban dynamics and provides a discussion of how social network and spatial analyses could be synthesized for a more nuanced understanding of the built environment. As such this book will be a valuable resource for scholars focusing on city-related networks in a number of ‘urban’ disciplines, including but not limited to urban geography, urban informatics, urban planning, urban sociology, and urban studies.
... These interactions are governed by complex networks that are themselves adaptive, dynamic, and interconnected with each other [9]. Cities are thus complex networks of networks [10,11] and advancing knowledge of how cities function and respond to shocks requires a deeper understanding of the numerous interconnected networks both within and between cities. While networks such as roadways, power conduits, and resource flow patterns, are easily observable, we focus here on those interaction networks that are more cryptic and typically not revealed through direct observation. ...
Cities are among the best examples of complex systems. The adaptive components of a city, such as its people, firms, institutions, and physical structures, form intricate and often non-intuitive interdependencies with one another. These interdependencies can be quantified and represented as links of a network that give visibility to otherwise cryptic structural elements of urban systems. Here, we use aspects of information theory to elucidate the interdependence network among labor skills, illuminating parts of the hidden economic structure of cities. Using pairwise interdependencies we compute an aggregate, skills-based measure of system "tightness" of a city's labor force, capturing the degree of integration or internal connectedness of a city's economy. We find that urban economies with higher tightness tend to be more productive in terms of higher GDP per capita. However, related work has shown that cities with higher system tightness are also more negatively affected by shocks. Thus, our skills-based metric may offer additional insights into a city's resilience. Finally, we demonstrate how viewing the web of interdependent skills as a weighted network can lead to additional insights about cities and their economies.
In this paper, the network perspective is combined with the clustering theory to investigate the power structure, cooperation network, and spatial distribution of Chinese film clusters between 2010 and 2020. The top 20 grossing films are collected. Moreover, three types of network, including network between directors and companies, inter- and intra-firm network and inter-city network, are established on the basis of the social network analysis and the data processing in Python. In this paper, the imbalance between the power structure and the film resource distribution is demonstrated. In addition, it is revealed that small coteries exist in China’s film clusters. The above small coteries are more significantly connected under the network, while there are relatively sparse connections outside the network. Several emerging eastern cities (e.g., Hangzhou and Nanjing) have stood out, which may be conducive to reducing the absolute monopoly of Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai in the China’s film industry.
Educational tourism and urban spaces are complex and interwoven phenomena of the contemporary globalized world. The extended windows of time that students of higher education institutes spend in the host cities makes them more than mere visitors; they become part of the everyday life of the urban context. Nevertheless, the interdisciplinary relationship between urban studies and edu-tourism remains understudied in contemporary literature, especially considering emerging types of data that can provide new insights. This paper draws on volunteered geographic information to explore interactions between higher education students and their host cities. Geotagged Twitter data was analysed in terms of both spatial density and content. The study was conducted in two coastal cities of Cyprus. The analysis indicates tendencies for student interactions with spaces outside the university campuses—with the majority of tweets associated with non-educational interaction types and venues with diverse spatial signatures. This study argues that edu-tourism is largely associated with urban tourism and it is essential to consider these interactions in decision-making and urban planning to improve both the tourism industry and the urban spaces.
This paper examines the interaction of regional spatial patterns and multiscalar governance processes of water infrastructure systems and economic development networks around US cities following deindustrialization. Deindustrialization contributed to significant hardships in cities and their surrounding regions, such as increasing blight, ageing infrastructure and fiscal constraints. These challenges combine and multiply in central cities, often alongside population and economic growth in other parts of a metropolitan area. The study applies the emerging infrastructural regionalism framework to questions of how economic development networks and infrastructure systems are designed and governed to distribute value across the urban landscape. The comparative case study focuses on Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Providence, Rhode Island, where the cities’ water infrastructure systems represent two different responses to their changing position in the region. In both cases this analysis shows how governance is fragmented across supra-municipal scales and metropolitan institutions in ways that reduce the power of central cities and that enable uneven redevelopment. The findings inform how an equitable approach to governing infrastructure and development requires addressing regional biases in vertical hierarchies and reorienting public policies towards central cities. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2022.2047102 free eprints: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FBQ79V9BDHZICFRYSDN5/full?target=10.1080/21622671.2022.2047102
This open access publication examines the impact of connected and automated vehicles on the European city and the conditions that can enable this technology to make a positive contribution to urban development. The authors argue for two theses that have thus far received little attention in scientific discourse: as connected and automated vehicles will not be ready for use in all parts of the city for a long time, previously assumed effects – from traffic safety to traffic performance as well as spatial effects – will need to be re-evaluated. To ensure this technology has a positive impact on the mobility of the future, transport and settlement policy regulations must be adapted and further developed. Established territorial, institutional and organizational boundaries must be investigated and challenged quickly. Despite – or, indeed, because of – the many uncertainties, we find ourselves at the beginning of a new design phase, not only in terms of technology development, but also regarding politics, urban planning, administration and civil society.
Sustainable urban systems (SUS) science is a new science integrating work across established and emerging disciplines, using diverse methods, and addressing issues at local, regional, national, and global scales. Advancing SUS requires the next generation of scholars and practitioners to excel at synthesis across disciplines and possess the skills to innovate in the realms of research, policy, and stakeholder engagement. We outline key tenets of graduate education in SUS, informed by historical and global perspectives. The sketch is an invitation to discuss how graduates in SUS should be trained to engage with the challenges and opportunities presented by continuing urbanization.
Aborda-se a centralidade e a capacidade de gestão territorial da cidade média de Santa Maria em sua região de influência, utilizando como recorte a Região Funcional 8 de Planejamento, também conhecida como a Região Central do Estado Rio Grande do Sul. Revisa-se os conceitos de cidade média e gestão territorial e analisa-se os fluxos de gestão pública e de gestão empresarial, bem como seus reflexos na configuração e no funcionamento da rede urbana e dinâmica regional. Utiliza-se os dados secundários do Censo Demográfico (2000 e 2010) e os estudos REGIC (2007 e 2018) e Gestão do Território (2014) do IBGE referentes às formas que o Estado e o Mercado organizam o espaço regional. O conjunto de fluxos de gestão pública e empresarial, no território regional, tem contribuído para aprofundar a urbanização, complexificar as funções urbanas, ampliar a centralidade e o papel de comando da cidade de Santa Maria na região.
Brokers play a critical role in the evolution of innovation systems by accessing and diffusing external knowledge. However, while brokers’ activity allows benefits for the entire system, it entails costs for those who play the broker role. Using patent data to analyse inter-city networks in Latin America, we identify broker cities and estimate the effects of brokerage on patenting outcomes between 2006 and 2017. Our findings reveal that cities holding a central position in the network show higher patenting activity; however, being a broker, particularly connecting Latin American cities with the rest of the world, negatively influences patenting outcomes.
This paper focuses on international cooperation between European cities. We analyse the Urbact and Interreg C cooperation programs from 2000 to 2019, extracting data from the website “keep.eu” which collates European cooperation programs financed by the European cohesion policy. On one hand, we transform them into flow matrices and, on the other hand, we present them according to their topics. The results show that the cooperation network is both a small-world and a scale-free network structured on a core-periphery mode-land organised by central cities. From a spatial and political perspective, these central cities are often secondary cities. The concept of rescaling supports the idea that those cities use cooperation to counter their subordinate position in the European urban hierarchy. Network and thematics assessment show that Interreg C and Urbact are two different cooperation types. Analysis of the links reveals that most cooperation ties are ephemeral, but some links are more intense. Urban development and economic development are major thematics, and the growing importance of green development is also relevant.
City-regions are conferred economic advantage through their brokerage roles, which close structural holes between other city-regions that would otherwise not be connected within firm networks. Here, we identify city-regions whose brokerage roles are defined by their network positionality as intermediaries using flows based on ownership relations between headquarters and subsidiary locations. Applying Gould and Fernandez’s framework of five potential brokerage types, we find city-regions play one or more brokerage roles characterized by both global and domestic flows. Moving beyond understandings of brokerage as a position, we explain diversity in brokerage as defined by economic processes underlying urban networks.
With the rise of geospatial big data, new narratives of cities based on spatial networks and flows have replaced the traditional focus on locations. While plenty of research that have empirically analyzed network structures, there lacks a state-of-the-art synthesis of applicable insights and methods of spatial networks in the planning context. In this chapter, we reviewed the theories, concepts, methods, and applications of spatial network analysis in cities and their insights for planners from four areas of concerns: spatial structures, urban infrastructure optimizations, indications of economic wealth, social capital, and residential mobility, and public health control (especially COVID-19). We also outlined four challenges that planners face when taking the planning knowledge from spatial networks to actions: data openness and privacy, linkage to direct policy implications, lack of civic engagement, and the difficulty to visualize and integrate with GIS. Finally, we envisioned how spatial networks can be integrated into a collaborative planning framework.
The contemporary ‘digital age’ prompts the need for a re-assessment of urban planning principles and practices. Against the background of current data-rich urban planning, this study seeks to address the question whether an appropriate methodological underpinning can be provided for smart city governance based on a data-driven planning perspective. It posits that the current digital technology age has a drastic impact on city strategies and calls for a multi-faceted perspective on future urban development, termed here the ‘XXQ-principle’ (which seeks to attain the highest possible level of quality for urban life). Heterogeneity in urban objectives and data embodied in the XXQ-principle can be systematically addressed by a process of data decomposition (based on a ‘cascade principle’), so that first, higher-level urban policy domains are equipped with the necessary (‘big’) data provisions, followed by lower-ranking urban governance levels. The conceptual decomposition principle can then be translated into a comprehensive hierarchical model architecture for urban intelligence based on the ‘flying disc’ model, including key performance indicators (KPIs). This new model maps out the socio-economic arena of a complex urban system according to the above cascade system. The design of this urban system architecture and the complex mutual connections between its subsystems is based on the ‘blowing-up’ principle that originates from a methodological deconstruction-reconstruction paradigm in the social sciences. The paper advocates the systematic application of this principle to enhance the performance of smart cities, called the XXQ performance value. This study is not empirical, although it is inspired by a wealth of previous empirical research. It aims to advance conceptual and methodological thinking on principles of smart urban planning.
Bipartite projections have become a common way to measure spatial networks. They are now used in many subfields of geography, and are among the most common ways to measure the world city network, where intercity links are inferred from firm co‐location patterns. Bipartite projections are attractive because a network can be indirectly inferred from readily available data. However, spatial bipartite projections are difficult to analyze because the links in these networks are weighted, and larger weights do not necessarily indicate stronger or more important connections. Methods for extracting the backbone of bipartite projections offer a solution by using statistical models for identifying the links that have statistically significant weights. In this article, we introduce the open‐source backbone R package, which implements several backbone models, and demonstrate its key features by using it to measure a world city network.
The literature on nineteenth-century Newcastle city region is a narrative of industrial progress premised upon technological prowess. But there is another story to be told about the transformation of a relatively small northern town into a conurbation with the attributes of a modern city. This second process of ‘rounding out’ the city with social, cultural and political institutions to accompany the economic prowess is relatively under-reported. In this study, we follow 1,621 individuals and compare their record of being mentioned in the literature to their participation in 343 local institutions. The focus is directed towards those who are much more visible in the literature compared to institutional membership – ‘narrative heroes’ – and those with the reverse pattern, much more to be found in institutions than in the literature – civic builders. The two sets of individuals are discussed and reasons for their contrasting positions are suggested.
With their focus on human production and consumption activities, cities incur massive energy consumption and CO2 emissions. An intercity connection is a typical complex system in which the interaction between cities is crucial for developing low-carbon outputs within the urban agglomeration. This paper presents the construction of the CO2 emission network of an urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River middle reaches megalopolis, based on the gravity model. Combined with social network analysis (SNA), a multilevel analysis framework is proposed to deal with the complexity, spatiality, and visualization of the CO2 emission network with reference to the network features, structural equivalence, and the rich-club phenomenon. The following results emerged: firstly, the spatial structure of the CO2 emissions was characterized by low robustness and compactness, indicating disunity among the studied cities. Secondly, there was found to be a strong correlation between regionalism and intercity connections, with geographically close cities playing a similar role in the network. Thirdly, the “rich-club” cities, including Wuhan, Changsha, Xiaogan, and Zhuzhou, dominated the connections, covering more than 87.1% of the network in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis.
Family resilience refers to the ability of families to spring back or recover from a stress or challenge like poverty, unemployment, homelessness, or food insecurity. Humans have lived in communities throughout history because they can address key life sustaining problems like providing food, shelter, and protection better collectively than they can individually. Communities are, in short, human associations for problem solving. This paper argues that many larger social problems manifest themselves in families at the local level and that understanding communities can help promote resilient families. Communities, however, have been transformed by capitalist industrialization, and their problem-solving capacities have been challenged. Drawing on social capital theory and methodology, this paper focuses on how to conceptualize community so that it can address problem solving and promote resilient families. The key idea is to view communities as networks of associations characterized by norms of trust and reciprocity. These networks are important because vital resources are located in them, and how they are structured affects their ability to locate and mobilize resources to solve community problems. A number of network concepts and models are presented to illustrate how network structure influences problem solving. A case study of Springfield, Missouri, is provided to show how one community structured its networks to enhance problem solving.
本书试图为次级城市系统的发展方式建立一种新的思考模式。本书挑战了有关该主题的许多传
统思想，并呼吁政府改变对待国家、地区和地方发展政策和规划的方式，以支持更公平的地区
经济发展。它认为政府对于城市体系发展的支持需要采取系统的，扁平的方式。如果要使城
市体系更具韧性，繁荣并更加公平地发展，我们就必须引入一种新型的“战略架构”以支持
城市间合作发展并建立经济联系，从而为开拓新市场创造更多机会。
Keeping in mind that the fundamental task of local and regional governments is improving lives of their citizens, this paper considers the phenomenon of smart specialization as a tool that can be used to reach economic development and inclusion. Particular attention is paid to the impacts of smart cities on regional life through establishing smart city networks and mutual cooperation of various stakeholders. The issues associated with smart specialization are determined. At the same time, it is attempted to suggest the possible steps that could be taken by local and regional authorities to foster smartification. The multidimensional methodology approach is used for this study to increase its comprehensiveness and wider applicability of the concluding recommendations. The research is directly linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals that are actively promoted by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, so it is related to high practical and theoretical value.
As the Internet continues to grow, questions of accessibility and infrastructure equity persist. In the increasingly competitive telecommunications industry, profit-seeking firms continue to upgrade infrastructure in select market areas creating an uneven spatial distribution of access opportunities. This article utilizes a longitudinal database of Internet infrastructure development, highlighting fiber-optic backbone points of presence (POP) established by commercial Internet service providers to examine city accessibility to the commercial Internet. Results indicate that many larger metropolitan areas maintain dominant shares of telecom infrastructure, but several midsized metros are emerging as important centers for telecommunication interconnection.
The study attempts to test empirically and directly the causal link between interpersonal relations and social organization in China. It examines the patterns of interpersonal relations, and tries to find out how they are linked to the special systems of social control in China. The central question is to what extent and in what ways the characteristics of an individual's interpersonal network are linked to the characteristics of his or her work organization. Survey work conducted in the city of Tianjin in 1986 was concerned with questions on the respondents' social ties and the organizational features of their work units, specifically the provision of benefits and assistance. -from Author
A cartogram and multidimensional scaling of the network are presented. The spatial distribution and size of urban places in the two countries contribute significantly to the explanation of the observed interlocking directorate structure.-from Author
Technological development leads to new forms of primary group structure. It demands differential mobility which makes traditional primary groups hard to maintain. However, it also provides mechanisms which permit new types of primary groups. Thus, contacts among extended family kin can be maintained despite breaks in face-to-face contact; neighborhoods can exist despite rapid membership turnover; and friendships can continue despite both of these problems. This is possible because technology permits rapid communication over distance and rapid group indoctrination. It is hypothesized that because of differences in structure, neighbors can best handle immediate emergencies; kin, long term commitments; and friends, heterogeneity. Data from Hungary and U.S.A. are used to illustrate the point.
Three hypotheses are examined to account for trade linkages among communities. On the basis of ecological models of urban systems, position in the metropolitan hierarchy, functional specialization, and accessibility to early interregional trade routes are hypothesized to be important for current trade relations. The degree of trade is operationalized for each of 68 southern BEAs through the use of national data on inter-area commodity exchange. A trade index is constructed from these data which summarizes the volume of shipments/receipts, the range of products shipped/received, and the number of trading partners (product origin/destination communities) for each BEA. Bivariate analysis suggests that trade is related as expected with each community characteristic. However, differences in trade among communities with varying functional specializations become insignificant when the other constructs are controlled.
Control and coordination linkages are integral features of the system of cities, but few studies have directly measured them. This study examines the structure and degree of these linkages in the context of ecological theory. The results provide support for the hypotheses derived from the theory. Linkages are hierarchically organized, and the regional metropolis and higher-level metropolises at the national scale occupy pivotal positions as intermediaries for lower-level metropolises. Although national links are important, interurban links that include the regional metropolis and its hinterland cities remain a major factor in the system of cities even in a society that is often characterized as shifting from a local/regional to a national orientation.
Deals with interorganizational networks in the environmental movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. It draws upon literatures on collaborative governance, social capital, and communitarianism to explore the embeddedness of social movements in local communities. Social movements can be regarded either as an expression of community embeddedness, strongly rooted in specific territorial spaces and the associated systems of relationships, or as attempts to build broader networks, based on the identification with a specific cause, which cut across local community loyalties and relations. The chapter explores which of the two models is more conducive to collaborative governance. Organizations occupying different structural positions in the environmental network display different levels of propensity towards collaborative governance.
How does the level of dispersion of suburban public housing influence low-income residents' neighborhood relations? An in-person survey of 253 public housing residents in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, provides the data to address this question. Controlling for factors that predict neighborhood interactions as well as differences between scattered-site and clustered residents, the findings suggest that residents scattered among nonpoor households know their more diverse neighbors. Scattered-she residents know no fewer neighbors and are no less embedded in their neighborhoods than their counterparts who live in small clusters of public housing. They differ very little in the amount of aid received from their neighbors. However, they feel less emotionally close to their neighbors. The implications of these findings for the provision of housing for the poor in nonpoor areas are discussed.
Analyses how the development of the global system of cities has been linked to changes in the world economy since 1945. Focuses on the new international division of labour in the capitalist system and evaluates how changes in multinational corporations and specialized corporate services have contributed to the emergence of a hierarchy of world cities. Its dimensions are explored, with reference to the conflicts and contradictions inherent in it. Probable future trends in the international division of labour and the urban hierarchy are examined. -Editors
Reviews research on rank-size rule. Three goals are: 1) to trace major channels of research which have led to the present state of knowledge; 2) to query how much is known about the subject; 3) to identify issues in need of clarification before progress may be made. Discusses: 1) various definitions of the problem, showing that many widely held views are incorrect; 2) some of the specific theories advanced to explain the problems, highlighting their attractions and deficiencies; 3) empirical work on rank-size rule and its importance; 4) how much is known and suggests ways to learn more.-E.Turner
A 'model of decentralised concentration' has evolved in the region of Berlin-Brandenburg in response to the European principle of polycentric development for urban regions. The paper describes strategies which seek to implement this new regional planning guideline. The formation of an urban forum as a co-ordinating body has initiated a course of development which attempts to link aspects of both horizontal and vertical policy co-ordination within a framework of territorial integration (networking). The paper analyses this innovative instrument of urban and regional development. The authors focus on the process of co-operation, beginning with the looser form practised in the urban forum by the towns which participated and evolving towards defined contractual and institutional relations in the form of a networked urban workgroup. Finally, they evaluate the objectives achieved and the financial and legal instruments applied.
This paper analyzes the lending patterns of commercial banks in a major metropolitan area. The banks are studied in terms of their ties, through the members of their boards of directors, to networks of economic power and upper class social interaction within the metropolitan structure of the capitalist class. The central research question concerns whether the extent of a bank's centrality to these networks substantially influences the decisions made by each bank regarding the allocation of the capital it commands. While attempting to consider the broader social consequences of private economic power, the paper addresses three problems found in many recent studies of interlocking directorates: the general lack of attention paid to questions of social consequences as opposed to issues of structure; conceptual confusions central to explanations that focus on notions of "cooptation"; and the omission of measures on the dimension of economic power. The empirical analysis, dealing with the impact of class structure, economic power and institutional size measures upon the distribution of bank loan capital, reveals that the main determinants of lending are the class structure characteristics of banks as these are reflected in the network linkages of their boards of directors. In particular, banks whose directors are tied to numerous local corporations which represent major concentrations of economic power and, to a lesser extent, to the most exclusive upper class social circles are those most likely to emphasize concentrated lending to capitalist borrowers and, correspondingly, most likely to withhold capital from mortgage loans. It is also shown that these differences in lending behavior are not related to the profitability of the banks themselves. It is argued that these patterns are best explained by a model of capitalist class coordination in which dominant groups exercise their abilities to influence banks and corporations in ways that benefit their interests. These findings are examined in terms of the general economic stagnation and even decline of older urban areas.
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Although communication may take place more easily among people who share similar attributes and have similar attitudes and beliefs, such communication may be in large measure redundant: no new informtion enters the system. For the diffusion of new information, the existence of some “heterophilous” relationships seems to be a structural prerequisite. The following article offers evidence bearing on this proposition.
Introduction, 87. — I. Theoretical considerations, 88. — II. Statistical analysis: New York and Chicago, 90. — III. Comparison
of cities by size classes, 91. — IV. Conclusion, 94.
Dans son introduction et à partir du compte rendu de la littérature existante, l'auteur présente les diverses critiques des thèses de C. Wright Mills sur l'existence d'une élite aux commandes du pouvoir politique et économique des Etats-Unis. Si ces critiques ne contestent pas l'existence d'une telle élite, elles mettent en question son emprise sur le pouvoir en affirmant que sa cohérence n'est pas établie. Le travail de l'auteur a été largement consacré à la démonstration de la cohésion de cette élite par le biais de l'analyse de membres des clubs sociaux et des groupes de planification et de discussion fréquentés par cette élite.
La méthode utilisée était l'analyse des réseaux. Son intention était de démontrer que les mêmes hommes politiques et hommes d'affaires puissants fréquentaient les mêmes clubs en dehors de leurs fonctions officielles, confirmant ainsi un comportement social de groupe cohérent. Parmi les clubs étudiés se trouvent le "Bohemian Grove" et le "Ranchero Visitadores", tous deux en Californie. Les groupes de planification étudiés comprenaient le "Council on Foreign Relations", le "Committee for Economic Development", le "Business Council" et le "Brookings Institute".
L'étude présentée ici poursuit dans la même voie tout en prenant une base de données plus large (30 clubs, groupes de planification ou fondations) et une méthode d'analyse des réseaux qui fait ressortir non seulement la distribution des liens entre les individus, mais aussi le dégre d'enchevêtrement entre les divers clubs, groupes et fondations (voir "Table 1"). Cette méthode détermine aussi la centralité de chaque club, groupe et fondation par rapport à la population totale (voir "Table 2").
La centralité et le degré d'enchevêtrement indiquent que les clubs sociaux jouent un rôle fondamental dans l'univers social de cette élite et témoignent d'une très forte cohésion à l'intérieur de cette même élite.
L'auteur termine en suggèrant d'autres pistes de recherche pour poursuivre l'étude du fonctionnement de cette élite tant d'un point de vue sociologique qu'éthnologique.
This paper reports on a mental mapping exercise on Durham city undertaken by three population samples--residents, visitors and summer tourists. A classification of map styles by Appleyard is applied and amended; map complexity is strongly related to sex, class and familiarity with the city. Tendency to 'good figure' also shows a positive correlation with these variables. Nearly two-thirds of the maps adopt a non-conventional orientation, for which the direction from which the city was most often approached is offered in explanation.
Some assumptions common to traditional theories of the community are examined: (1) that social system boundaries are geographically
determinable; (2) that the units comprising communities are either humans or families; (3) that cooperation based on common
goals underlies community organization.
Suggested here is a conflict model of community structure and behavior that focuses upon interstitial groups linking elemental
groups and complex organizations to form the community system. Within interstitial groups social exchange and coordination
occurs between groups and organizations whose orientations are in potential conflict. This social exchange between elemental
groups, a consequence of the division of labor, is accomplished within interstices containing conjunctive relationships, and
it is here that conflict is managed, enabling the operation of complex social systems.
A dynamic model of the system of cities in an areally expanding space-economy is proposed. In the model two processes govern the dynamics of the system of cities: control of exchange of stock and physical movement of stock in the space-economy. An explanation is provided for the emergence of national, regional, and subregional metropolises as well as for the role of transportation nodes; central places are claimed to be only important at the lowest levels of the system of cities. Empirical support for the model is provided from case studies of the United States frontier.
This survey and field observation study replicates Donald Foley's Neighbors or Urbanites? (1952) in the same urban neighborhood twenty-five years later to test the dynamic hypothesized "loss of community" in urban life. Three indexes reflecting three dimensions of community were explored. "Local facility use" declined, "informal neighboring" showed no change, while "sense of community" increased. The latter two did not decline because the area has attracted residents who economically and ideologically "value" the changes which have occurred in the area and the resulting "ecological niche" which the area has come to occupy. It is middle-class, racially integrated and urban. Residents have consciously sought out this area because of these characteristics and have consciously attempted to create community in part through an active local community organization. Drawing upon Mannheim's distinction between utopia and ideology, the area is defined as a consciously created "ideological community."
A body of propositions relating community structural characteristics to decision-making patterns and to budget and urban renewal expenditures was tested using data collected in 51 American communities. From 22 different states throughout the United States, the communities ranged in population size from 50,000 to 750,000. Decision-making was investigated through questionnaires administered to a standard panel of community informants. An "ersatz decisional method" was used to identify actors initiating, supporting, opposing, and negotiating in four different issue areas. The degree to which actors overlapped from one issue area to the next and the total number of actors across all issue areas were combined in a measure of centralization of decision-making. As predicted, larger, more economically diversified communities with governmental structures favoring citizen participation had more decentralized patterns of decision-making. A decentralized decision-making structure, in turn, led to a higher level of community budget expenditures, and a larger urban renewal program. These findings generally supported our theory of the relationships between community structural characteristics and decision-making patterns, but contradicted our hypotheses regarding outputs.
Despite the ubiquity of air travel and the critical role of transportation in spatial processes, no sociological work on the consequences of aviation has been produced in nearly three decades. We analyze the relationship between the structure of the airline network and employment growth in 104 metropolitan areas. Using network methodology, we document the structural changes that accompanied the expansion of the airline system between 1950 and 1980. Using regression analysis and nonrecursive models, we assess the effects of these changes in the airline network on metropolitan employment growth rates, focusing specifically on employment in manufacturing and producer services. Results indicate that position in the airline network has pervasive effects on metropolitan employment growth and that changes in network position are a cause rather than a consequence of this employment growth. We conclude that the reorganization of the airline network has been a critical factor transforming and integrating the spatial economy of the U.S.
The currently popular research design of ranking a community's leaders according to their reputations for power is found to be seriously deficient as a technique for the study of a local political system. The frequent assumption that power is equally distributed for all issues results in inaccurate descriptions and in respondents tacitly basing "general power" rankings on a specific salient issue. It is difficult to avoid confusion between status and power without using questions so complicated and qualified as to be impractical in an interview. Even politically experienced respondents are unreliable observers. In any case influence rankings are not useful because: (1) there is no way to assess the relative power of top-ranked individuals compared to presumably less powerful persons without making unwarranted assumptions; (2) identification of leaders is not an adequate description of a political system; (3) the reputational method assumes a static distribution of power.
Formal political subdivision of space and areal functional organization rarely coincide. Recent political redistricting in England has recognized this asymmetry and reorganized political units in terms of city regions. A similar approach to that employed in studies preceeding the English legislation is applied to a study area in the United States and a similar methodology is employed. The datasets used to delineate urban spheres of influence and inter-settlement relationships include telephone flows, banking relations and newspaper circulation. The techniques of analysis include those of cartography, graph theoretic techniques and principal component analysis. The lack of correspondence between the functional and formal political spatial organization is demonstrated.
Although social network analysis has provided many measures of network position, these are rarely applied to spatial networks.
Sociological measures of network structure were constructed to reflect binary interactions and such measures were of limited
use in analysis of urban systems. Recently, several measures have been refined to accommodate the asymmetric continuous flaws
of people and information across space, making them appropriate for urban models. In this article, we evaluate the applicability
of graph theoretic measures to the urban system. We find that graph theoretic conceptualizations of centrality are consistent
with theoretical specifications of urban hierarchy. We then apply centrality measures to simulated and actual urban systems.
We conclude that such measures elucidate key substantive issues relevant to increasingly complex sociospatial structures.
Recent work in the study of community decision-making appears to be converging on a number of common theoretical and methodological strategies and assumptions. There still remain, however, important weaknesses in the overall theoretical framework and its implied methodology in directing research efforts. Attention is directed to a structural analysis of the community influence system that derives in part from Parsons. Several critical questions are raised concerning the identification of the relevant set of community influentials and the systematic description of their attributes as influentials and the ties that bind them into coalitions depending on the functional issue confronted. Recent advances in graph theory and smallest space analysis are used to examine the consensus-cleavage structure of the community influence system of Altneustadt, a small city in West Germany. Finally, a theoretical strategy and an empirical procedure are proposed for identifying community issues and tracing their impact on the formation of opposing factions and coalitions.
The concept of institutional completeness plays an important role in the study of ethnic communities in Canadian sociology. Using competing concepts of community as our framework for analysis, we (1) document the shift from an ecological to a network concept of community that occurs in urban and community sociology, (2) demonstrate that the current framing of the concept of institutional completeness rests on an ecological foundation, and (3) argue that shifting to a network concept of community produces a network reframing that extends the utility of the concept of institutional completeness by allowing us to apply it to both territorial and non-territorial communities. /// Le concept de l'état institutionnel complet joue un rôle important dans l'étude des collectivités ethniques dans la sociologie canadienne. À l'aide de conceptions concurrentes de la communauté comme cadre d'analyse, nous 1) documentons le changement qui s'est produit dans la sociologie urbaine et communautaire d'une conception écologique de la communauté 'à une conception de la communauté comme réseau, 2) démontrons que le concept actuel d'état institutionnel complet repose sur une base écologique et 3) affirmons qu'une reformulation du concept en fonction de la conception de la communauté comme réseau, ajouterait à son utilité en nou permettant de l'appliquer tant aux collectivités territoriales qu'aux collectivités non territoriales.
One difficulty with couching questions about community in network terms is the dearth of historical data on networks. This research begins to fill the gap by analyzing data collected in 1939 from residents of a square block in Bloomington, Indiana. Relatively weak relationships were more common than close friendships; residents knew about two-thirds of their neighbors by name, and had about 13 friends on the block; the densities of friendship networks in this neighborhood are similar to those reported in recent studies of unbounded networks. These findings cast some doubt on the presumption that past neighborhood networks were significantly more sociable than contemporary networks.
An ecological conceptualization of the world system of cities is proposed based both on an extension of the ecological rationale
for a national system of cities and on insights from world-system theory and research. The core concepts are divided into
five categories: (1) the key function, (2) hierarchy and dominance—the vertical dimension, (3) specialization—the horizontal
dimension, (4) interaction, and (5) dynamics. As a test of selected ideas, the dominance of core international financial metropolises
over peripheral South American cities is examined; the measure is the international bank headquarters—branch office link.
The hypotheses of ecological dominance were confirmed. The core metropolises dominate the peripheral metropolises of South
America, and within the core the upper level metropolises exert greater dominance than the lower level metropolises. The national
metropolises of South America are the key intermediaries with international metropolises, but the former have few links among
themselves. The world system of cities based on finance seems to be organized independently of national or world regional
boundaries.