Networked communities: an answer to urban alienation?

His analysis of urban tribes provides further evidence for the shifting quality of community formations in urban settings towards social networks. He, and others, critique Robert Putnam’s narrow interpretation of social capital.

Watters argues that “social capital comes from much more fluid and informal (yet potentially quite close and intricate) connections between people. It could as easily accrue among a tight group of friends yet still have an effect on the community at large”.

Community assets include the formal skills of individuals and the tangible associations and institutions in a given locality. However, the informal, proximity-based social clusters and intangible networks of weak tie relationships that people build and maintain through new media and network ICTs should also be considered.

How can these tacit and soft assets be elicited, connected, networked and harnessed to become “smart” assets in the service of both social and economic innovation in metropolitan areas?

West Australian urban planner Patric De Villiers describes urban renewal and new urbanism. In this context, networked individualism introduces challenges to conventional understandings of place and public places.

It opens up opportunities for architecture, city planning and urban studies to reconceptualise understandings of community and neighbourhood planning in the light of new media and network ICTs.

But before such a reconceptualisation can be achieved, there is a need for a theoretical and practical understandings of the freedom and constraints, and the social and cultural meanings that urban dwellers derive from their use of location-based ICTs.

Brendan Gleeson in particular  contends that in master-planned communities, traditional conceptual models of community development limit action to tangible places of public interaction such as kindergartens, public schools, parks, libraries, and so on.

This “build it, they will come” approach lacks engagement with recent community development and community informatics research findings that call for an engagement with yet unanswered questions around the significance of social networks in urban neighbourhood community building.

It also ignores both the human factors involved in urban renewal and socio-cultural animation of neighbourhoods, as well as the potential that media and communication technology can offer urban residents.

This resonates with developments in new media research which have moved on to analyse the new qualities of the “third wave” of community media. These include web-based systems such as indymedia, community networks and other location-aware “smart mob” technologies.

In this light, Nicholas Jankowski rightly argues there is an unfulfilled promise to establish theoretically grounded models, and a need to depart from simple dichotomies.