Ties through place: socio-material network analyses in urban studies

In the interdisciplinary field of urban studies, the relevance of space and geography to social bonds is often assumed; our physical presence in the world informing a presumption of material sensitivity. However, the importance of urban space and morphology to social interactions has come into question with the rising ubiquity of communications technologies (Woods 2000). Concomitantly, rapid urbanisation, media consumption and rising mobility have helped to foster urban conditions in which hitherto clear identity markers, such as neighbourhood or ethnicity, have begun to have less bearing on how and where any individual self-identifies as belonging (Morley 2000). This chapter investigates these interactions between physical materiality and social connection in the formation of community in the contemporary ‘urban age’ (Burdett and Rode 2018). The chapter reports the socio-material subset of the findings of the Measuring Community in an Urban Age (MCiUA) study funded by LSE Cities. In that study we wanted to identify recent social scientific studies from the fields of sociology, urban studies, geography, psychology and computational analysis that have employed an understanding of social and or infrastructural networks to understand issues related to community and belonging. To do this, we undertook a quasi-systematic literature review at a heuristic level, methodically assessing relevant texts published from 2000 onwards. In this review, relevance of review materials took precedence over an exhaustively comprehensive assembly (Booth et al. 2016). Two databases were used for the search, LSE Library Database and Google Scholar. These databases are considered to have extensive collections as well as effective algorithms for returning relevant responses, and use of both is recommended for broad coverage (Brophy and Bawden 2005). In addition to the database searches, key references identified manually from previous research in related fields were used as material for the study, for generators of key words and for further citation links. The review used key search terms drawn from both the urban (neighbourhood, community, urban, city, spatial*, embed* and place) and network studies (social network*, ‘social network’, ‘social network analysis’ and ties) literatures in a variety of combinations. Owing to funding limitations and practical research constraints, only texts returned from these searches written in English were included in the study.