Networks, urban

Abstract

For much of the 20th Century, urban networks was a term used by sociologists and others to describe social networks, their importance for bonding within communities and bridging between communities, and their relationship to the geographical mobility implied by late 19th- and early 20th-Century urbanization, mid-20th-Century suburbanization, and late-20th-Century globalization. This relationship is often assumed to be one in which social networks are threatened by geographical mobility. From sometime in the 1980s, in a context of globalization, network became a metaphor used across the social sciences to describe how people, ideas, and objects flow between nodes in a globalizing world, and urban networks became a term used by geographers and others to describe at least four more or less connected things: (1) archipelagos of world or global cities, in which centrality depends on networks of producer services and information and communications technology infrastructure; (2) this information and communications technology infrastructure, among other networked infrastructure, which has become unbundled in recent years, leading to fragmented or splintered cities; (3) other smaller networks of humans and nonhumans (actor networks) that help to maintain urban life; and (4) urban policy networks, through which urban policy circulates, becomes mobile, and gets deterritorialized and reterritorialized.

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ORCID for Nicholas Clarke: orcid.org/0000-0001-9148-9849

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