Networks, class and place

This symposium examines the relationship between space, social class and social networks. Its aim is to encourage debate between different research traditions that have in recent years tended to work in relative isolation from each other. These three traditions of research are social network analysis (which has become very well known especially in the USA and Canada), class analysis (whose strongholds are in Europe) and urban studies (best represented by the tradition of work represented in IJURR). Although these three traditions were in dialogue from the 1950s to the early 1970s, they are now rather isolated. Network analysis and class analysis have both become increasingly quantitative and organized around internal debates, whilst urban studies tends to have adopted case-centered, idiographic foci. Although there are examples of work which continue to span these different traditions - for instance Roger Gould's Insurgent identities (1995) - there is a pressing need to renew the agenda of urban studies by encouraging further debate with current studies of class and social networks. Our symposium will consider how dialogue between these different traditions might be encouraged in a way that takes forward enduring theoretical concerns of urban studies. Our starting point is to recast debates about class and place in terms of a sensitivity to diverse kinds of networks. This allows us to see categories (such as class or ethnicity) as relational, the various ways that categorical networks are embedded in physical space, and how such physical spaces are made into social spaces as articulations of social relations.