City Network

City networks are the connections between cities.

These networks can be of different nature and of different importance. In modern conceptions of cities, these networks play an important role in understanding the nature of cities. City networks can be physical connections to other places, such as railways, canals or scheduled flights. City network also exist in immaterial form, such as trade, global finance, markets, migration, cultural links, shared social spaces or shared histories. There are also networks of religious nature, in particular through pilgrimage.

The city itself is then regarded as the node where different networks run together. Some of these networks are more powerful than others, for networks of global finance are currently dominant. Some urban thinkers have indeed argued that cities can only be understood if the context of the city's connections is understood.


It has been argued that city networks are a key ingredient of what defines a city, alongside with the sheer number of people (density) and the particular way of life in cities.

Social networking
Types
  • City
  • Personal
  • Professional
  • Sexual
  • Value
Networks
  • Distributed social network
  • Enterprise social networking
  • Mobile social network
  • Personal knowledge networking
Services
  • List of social networking websites
  • List of virtual communities with more than 100 million users
Concepts and
theories
  • Assortative mixing
  • Interpersonal bridge
  • Organizational network analysis
  • Small world experiment
  • Social aspects of television
  • Social capital
  • Social data revolution
  • Social exchange theory
  • Social identity theory
  • Social network analysis
  • Social web
  • Structural endogamy
Models and
processes
  • Aggregation
  • Change detection
  • Collaboration graph
  • Collaborative consumption
  • Giant Global Graph
  • Lateral communication
  • Lateral diffusion
  • Lateral media
  • Social graph
  • Social network analysis software
  • Social networking potential
  • Social pyramid
  • Social television
  • Structural cohesion
Economics
  • Collaborative finance
  • Social commerce
Phenomena
  • Community recognition
  • Complex contagion
  • Consequential strangers
  • Friend of a friend
  • Friendship paradox
  • Six degrees of separation
  • Social invisibility
  • Social network game
  • Social occultation
Related topics
  • Researchers
  • User profile
  • Viral messages
  • Virtual community

Famous quotes containing the words city and/or network:

    “The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman:
    If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole
    world.”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    “A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
    —Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)