Social exclusion and network
geographies
Margaret Grieco,
Professor of Transport and
Society, Napier University
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• Conceptual presentation
• Based upon recent primary research including
amongst others:
Road User Charging, Workplace Parking
Levies and Social Inclusion/Exclusion Gender, Ethnicity and Lifecycle Perspectives
for DfT @
http://www.tsu.ox.ac.uk/research/impacts.html
• NEAT grassroots transport forums
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• and past research into social network structures
and long distance travel:
• Keeping it in the family: social networks and
employment chance. Tavistock 1987
• Worker's dilemmas: recruitment, reliability and
repeated exchange. Routledge, 1996.
• At Christmas and on rainy days: transport, travel
and the female traders of Accra. Edited with N.
Apt, and J. Turner, Avebury, 1996.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• Our knowledge of the subject is extremely
limited and very partial in its character
• Our maps of social networks are very
imprecise and tend to be focused on
personal stars.
• Mapping the social network structure of a
total community or neighbourhood or any
substantial structure has never been
undertaken.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• Our understandings of the
interrelationships between process and
geographical barriers in social exclusion is
weak. We have some broad brush
understandings of extreme situations such
as the Catholic/Protestant divide in
Northern Ireland but the detail of how
territorial discourses operate and are
maintained in social network and travel
geography terms is scant.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• The task is to take advantage of the new
information communication technologies in
constructing more precise overall network
records of neighbourhood functioning
rather than simply focusing on the
personal social networks of interviewed
individuals.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• Moving the HATS approach developed at TSU
Oxford into an electronic format which enables
network information to be stored, related and
connected would permit a view of the presence
or absence of deeper connections which govern
social exclusion.
• Put simply the individual‘s knowledge of their
network geography is never complete.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• In case this suggestion of the move to the electronic is regarded as
outlandish, it is worth pointing out that the use of new technologies
is being to used track travel patterns for the whole of Graz, Austria
• http://senseable.mit.edu/projects/graz/graz.htm
•
„> Real-Time Graz
Mobile Landscape Graz in Real Time harnesses the potential of mobile
phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the
city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity.
Because it is possible to simultaneously 'ping' the cell phones of thousands
of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given
moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking
tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens. The
polis is thus interpreted as a shifting entity formed by webs of human
interactions in space-time, rather than simply as a fixed, physical
environment. Mobile Landscape provides a platform upon which the
contemporary city can register the flux and traces its self-constructing and
open-ended nature. „
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• Graz indicates that there are new
methodologies abroad which are relevant
to the issue of social exclusion and
network geographies.
• The Dft Social and network travel project
makes a good case for studying network
geographies as a robust base for transport
and travel policy but its scope was limited.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• The linking of activity and mobility biographies to
the network geographies now establishable by
modern ict methodologies appears to be a
useful next step.
• There is unlikely to be simply one relationship
between social exclusion and network
geography.
• Long distance migrants in the inner cities are
likely to have international network geographies
but these geographies are not the same as
those of a businessman nor do they represent
inclusion.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• Hypermobility at one income level is likely
to denote engagement in different social
processes to hypermobility at another.
• We have no good benchmarks on social
exclusion and network geographies: it is
time we began to focus on developing
methodologies to do so in order to address
the issues of social exclusion which have
already featured so prominently in France.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• In terms of network geographies and
social exclusion, we need to address the
issue of direct and indirect accessibilities.
It may be that where indirect accessibilities
exist – others perform the functions
associated with travel for the individual,
household or group – a limited personal
network geography is not an indication of
social exclusion.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• It is at this point I would challenge Granovetter‘s
characterisation of the strength of weak ties:
indirect accessibility, I would suggest, is rarely
the product of weak ties. The performance of a
service for another, in line with classic
anthropological thinking, is an indicator of the
strength of a tie and a tie strengthening exercise.
Ties may commence as weak but in the context
of the performance of services they strengthen.
The greater the service, the greater the
obligation of reciprocity whether it be direct or
take the form of generalised net exchange.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
• To summarise, our existing knowledge base is weak and
requires strengthening through the commissioning of
direct research.
• There are new tools available and being developed that
should be harnessed in the charting of the relationship
between social exclusion and network geographies.
• We should be careful to make sure that we move beyond
personal network geographies, that we address issues of
direct and indirect accessibilities and that we do not get
too captivated by an ideology of free and open contact or
a shallowly characterised world of weak ties. In a world
of well functioning weak ties, social exclusion should
disappear not persist.
Social exclusion and network
geographies
Margaret Grieco,
Professor of Transport and
Society, Napier University
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To contact:
m.grieco@napier.ac.uk
mg294@cornell.edu
m.grieco@tu-bs.de