THE NETWORK NATURE OF FUTURE COMMUNITIES:

A PREDICTIVE SYNTHESIS

Barry Wellman

Research Paper No. 58

ENVIRONMENT STUDY under a grant from BELL CANADA

To be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems; August, 1973; New York City

Centre for Urban and Community Studies University of Toronto March 1973 THE NETWORK OF FUTURE COMMUNITIES: A PREDICTIVE SYNTHESIS

The persistence of communities

The end of "community" has probably been forecast ever since the development of the first cities. Cassandras have warned that the city's

increase in scale, density and heterogeneity over previous forms of settlement would bring an end to informal networks of people with common interests and a sense of group identity, taking pleasure and profit from each other's company. There were too many people to know, of too many kinds, and crowding would compress these individuals into masses. In North American cities, the pastoralist longings of intellectuals and the populace have perpetuated the prevalence of this view of the city as bringing about "the eclipse of community".1

Systematic empirical research has indicated that communities have pervasively persi~ted in their interests, despite the frequent rumors of their demise. People have continued to develop and maintain informal ties of support and sociability, and bureaucracy has come to supplement and not supplant more informal relationships. Indeed, sociological research has indicated that the sheer complexity of bureaucratic structures hc:efostered the establishment of informal ties which have often developed into communities.

Our own intensive analysis of an area of Metropolitan Toronto has demonstrated the widespread existence and importance of community ties and communities in present everyday urban life. We have found little to substantiate the

"myth of the lonely urbanites". Most people studied have important personal ties, these are frequently organized into systematic networks of relationships, - 2 -

and they are able to use their personal ties for assistance in stressful situations. In the light of this experience, it is difficult to forecast the imminent demise of communities in urban North America. However, social and technological changes may importantly affect the form and function of these communities. In the remainder of this paper, we shall discuss some likely changes.

The despatialization of communities

The persistence of community ties is predicated on the ability of members of a community to come into contact with one another. For many cen­ turies, this meant that communities were often confined to limited spatial areas - neighborhoods, quarters, turfs, etc. The same area might contain different, perhaps antagonistic, communities, but because spatially limited life was so intense, with all types of social ties concentrated in the same locale, different groups often attempted to take out exclusive claims to their turfs to reduce the possibilities of insecurity and antagonism. The development of usable rail-based transportation in the past century has facilitated the separating out of work-based communities from others. Airline systems have extended the geographical range of this separation even more, so that associates might be linked together in communities by continent-spanning ties. However, because of the mass basis of the systems, with limited nodes of entrance and exit, the movement away from quarters was limited to extending only quite specific ties, and extending them only to other dense nodes. The development of railway terminal hotels is being supplanted by the development of airport hotels as convenient gathering places. The scheduled, nodal, and high-cost nature of railroad and airplane travel meant that only purposeful and important journeys were likely to be undertaken. This meant that many types of community - 3 -

ties were still tightly linked to small localities.

The automobile as a means of personal transit has allowed far greater

flexibility. Density at terminal nodes is no longer necessary, and the

mutual accessibility of megalopolitan multitudes means that all sorts of

community ties can easily be maintained. Future additions to road networks

are being planned, often in conjunction with mass transportation systems.

The thrust of planning seems to be in increasing the speed and capacity of

existing trunk routes, in developing new high-speed routes between secondary

points, and in combining the flexibility of automotive-type personal transit

with the economies of mass, high-density trunk transit.

Such changes will all enable urbanites to maintain corranunity ties

that are only marginally constrained by spatial limits. Our own research has

shown that to a great extent ties with "intimates" - those outside your house­

hold to whom you feel especially close - are not very constrained by locality.

Only 13% of the intimates of the Toronto urbanites we are studying live within

the same neighborhood as the respondent (most within the same block); only about 25% even live within the same borough. About one-quarter do not live within the boundaries of Metropolitan Toronto, although we suspect that many live within reasonably close proximity.

The expansion of the transportation system will mean that personal face-to-face ties can be easily maintained with even less spatial constraints.

The spatial limits will vary with the type of community tie. For intense and important ties, there may be virtually no boundaries on occasions in which community members have to gather personally: the birth or death of a loved one, or an important business conference. Other communities, in which ties are not so intense and compelling, will be more sensitive to the ease and cost of spatial mobility. Most likely, there are different classes of community - 4 -

with different spatial limits. How far will stamp collectors go to get

together as compared with members of a religious sect?

In our own research, we found that some intimate-community members

maintained their ties primarily by telephone. Either the spatial distances

were so great as to discourage more personal contact, or the community members

were able to provide support, sociability or service to one another without

personal contact. Such ties were no doubt initiated by personal contact,

but are now, for the most part, maintained by telephone. The important thing

is that they are known to be there, they form an important part of each

other's psychological life-space, and many are mobilizable in times of need.

With high rates of geographical mobility the maintenance of community

by such non-face-to-face means may become increasingly more prevalent as

families disperse because of life-cycle changes, and neighbors move away to

become friends. The possible development of videophones, with the addition

of visual to auditory stimuli, would greatly facilitate the maintenance of

cormnunity ties without personal contact. The development of economic

"conference" type calls will facilitate increased non-face-to-face interactions

among multiple members of the connnunity.

A model for such a network is the specialized one of over-the-counter

(O-T-C) stock trading in which a great amount of information is conveyed to

brokers across the continent by the NASDAQ computer-based telecommunications

system. Such a system "works" because of the great standardization in the

information being exchanged and the minimal need to know other information about fellow members of the network. One does not need to know much more about the others (even their names) than that they can deliver (or pay for) the shares bought (or sold). But even here, personal communication to get

"inside" or specialized information is necessary for successful membership - 5 -

in the corcununity of 0-T-C brokers.

It is not necessary that far-flung ties be close ties to be useful.

Mark Granovetter has shown in his research that prospects for obtaining jobs

are greatly improved if a person has a diverse network of people to whom he

or she is only weakly tied - not close friends, relatives or close business . 2 associates. The people to whom a person is close tend to know of the same

job openings (or lack of them) as he does. On the other hand, people in

roughly the same occupational sphere to whom he is only weakly tied tend to

be a more mixed lot, with access to a greater variety of information about

many different job possibilities. Therefore, for job hunting, there is a

latent, real community of members who know each other but just barely enough

to help each other out in job acquisition. They are not people with whom a

person is in frequent intellectual or social contact, but they are members of

an urbanite's corcununity nevertheless. The expansion of the economic range of

long-distance corcununication will expand the geographic range for which such a corcununity will be viable for a given socio-economic group, and it will similarly open up new ranges of opportunity to maintain such communities for lower-income people.

We forecast that there will be increasing use of non-face-to-face media of communication. It is most likely, though, that contact will be maintained through a mixture of face-to-face and indirect means. It is not likely that there will be development of systems that will provide all the information - cognitive and sensory - or the flexibility in altering relationships that face-to-face relationships provide. The possibilities and limits are expressed in Isaac Asimov's speculative novel, The Naked Sun, in which all contact is by very sophisticated teleconununication, including love relationships, with the singular exception of procreation. - 6 -

Telecommunications should be important in maintaining contact among

community members in between meetings, especially when the cost of physically

coming together is not perceived as worth the content of the message. When

group interaction can be easily accomplished by telephonic means, then the

maintenance of less intense communities (i.e. recreational stamp collectors)

should be facilitated; there should be less need even for intimates to get

together in person, despite the ease of spatial access discussed before, and

it will become possible to introduce new members to entire communities without

personal gatherings. As envirorunental concerns appear to be more focused

around transportation than communication developments, the enhancement of the

cormnunity capabilities of telecommunication systems may be of more strategic

importance than the transportation developments discussed earlier.

The increase of specialized communities

The more constrained people are in those with whom they can be in

contact, the more limitations there will be on the development of specialized

communities. If a person is limited in his contacts to those people he can

reach in his neighborhood, then his community ties will be limited to those

which he can share with his fellow neighborhood members.

Increase in spatial mobility and communications capabilities not only

engenders the despatialization of communities, it facilitates the establishment

and maintenance of communities focused around more narrowly-specialized

interests. If a person has a special passion in an esoteric field, such as

modern dance, it is quite unlikely that others who share that passion will

live in the neighborhood or work in the same place. The only way that ties with people with similar interests can be maintained - informing each other about the next new dance group that is going to come to some obscure, - 7 -

unpublicized auditorium and then gathering there - is through telephonic means and a high level of flexible personal mobility in the metropolis.

Such a group indeed gathers at times. But if you are a specialist in an esoteric field of work, such as the mathematical analysis of transportation networks, and are baffled by a problem, for example, good advice is usually not gained by trotting down the hall to talk with someone out of touch with what you are doing. It is gained by picking up the long-distance telephone to talk with someone who has similar concerns and helpful knowledge and whose advice you know you can trust. He or she may live half a continent away. In such instances, the more esoteric the field, the more far-flung the community of people who are in it and are interacting with each other. such interaction will be greatly enhanced with improvements in the high-speed transmission of bulk information.

The increase in the scale of urban areas, coupled with the projected improvements in transportation and communication media, means that there should be a concommitant increase in the number of people shari~g a like interest.

While interactive cable systems have often been proposed as means of easily uniting dispersed people with the same special interest, their undeniable usefulness in facilitating community development will be limited by the tech­ nological fact that members of the "audience" can only dyadically feedback to the central communication point and not directly interact with each other.

The movement of women into other than housewife roles, accompanied by the institutionalization of day-care, will create another source of potential recruits into specialized communities, apart from the overall demographic increase. Specialized communities which had heretofore lacked a critical mass to develop into something more than an agglomeration of people with similar - 8 -

interests will thus be in a position to develop. The scale increase is also accompanied by an anonymity not likely to be possible in local communities, so that those whose specialized interests are deviant by community standards will have an easier time in contacting one another, remaining unnoticed, and maintaining a community.

The sheer increase in scale may provide something of a countertrend to the despatialization of communities discussed earlier in this paper. There will probably always be some cost to physical mobility, and if modern dance groups become popular in many different localities instead of one metropolitan­ wide community of interest based on current small numbers, many such communities should spring up in different localities.

The force of this localization trend should be vitiated, however, by the tendency of specialties to become subspecialties. That is, when only one small community of people with a shared interest exists, the sharedness tends to be emphasized at the expense of differences within the group, in order to hold the community together. With an increase in numbers, though, more than one group may become viable. Fission may occur on the basis of sub­ specialization, as ease of contact throughout the metropolis enables tlenow­ divided communities to retain their members. This is a phenomenon frequently observed among doctrinaire political and religious groups at the present time.

Thus, the increase in access, in person and by telephone, coupled with the marked increase in scale of communities, are all conducive to the development of new specialized communities, and the enhanced maintenance of currently precarious communities of shared interests. This phenomenon is likely to be accompanied by an increased differentiation of ties between individuals in the metropolis. Those communities based upon strong emotional - 9 -

ties will probably continue to have much face-to-face contact among members.

Those communities in which the exchange of information is the predominent reason

for interaction will be better able to stay linked, for the most part,

telecommunication. Whereas before they may have shared more than one interest

or activity, the development of specialized communities is likely to weaken holistic communal ties and encourage the fragmentation of communities.

The multiple communities of modern urbanites

In the mythical pastoral village to which cities have always been compared, there was always only one community. That is, not only were all the villagers linked with one another, they were linked to each otherby many ties: e.g. kinship, friendship (and enmity), work, and mutual assistance. We have seen that in North America communities will be increasingly non-local and specialized in character. This has two important fragmenting consequences, as compared with the holistic pastoral community. It means that each urbanite will not know the members of each of his other communities. It also means that there will be less tendency for there to be communities encompassing all of a group of urbanites' social relationships; in terms of the kinds of interpersonal ties they comprise, communities will tend to be boutiques rather than supermarkets.

The involvement of North Americans in a variety of community ties and communities will enable the creative use of contacts made in each of these communities. People will be able to bring the resources gained through member­ ship in one community to bear on problems in another of their communities. To take a typical example that has recently emerged in Toronto: a person's close relatives might fearfully let her know at a get-together that a high-rise development is planned for the relatives' heretofore low-density street. It - 10 -

is possible that among the people this person sees in her neighborhood is a competent, ideologically-motivated city planner who is willing to work with her relatives' neighborhood group in blocking the development. Only her close community ties with her relatives, and her and her relatives' ties with their respective neighbors were able to get the city planner in touch with a group in need of his services. When abortions were difficult to obtain, women 3 frequently acted in this manner.

Thus, membership in many communities enables one to perform a brokerage role in bringing together people who are in different co:mmunities, but who are not themselves linked to each other. Often a person has a certain amount of strong interpersonal ties and a certain amount of weak ties, organized into a multiplicity of personal communities, and when information is needed, people often become important switching points in getting knowledge or support from one community to another. The importance of strong ties is that a person asks many things of the people to whom he is tied in such personal communities even without frequent contacts; the advantage of weak ties is that they tend to be diverse, and when help is needed, a person can use many ties in a number of communities for the best leads. ,

Membership in multiple communities is not likely to fragment one's personna to such an extent as to be dehumanizing. An important countervailing tendency is for community ties initially formed on the basis of a single role relationship to become more diffuse over time. Thus, business associates come to be friends, and friends tend to get jobs for one another. The separate ties of married men and women often come to be shared. With the development of new interests, the abandonment of old, and the expansion of role-relationships, the multiplicity of a person's communities will necessarily be often in a state of - 11 -

stable instability.

Being involved in multiple communities has the implication that member­

ship in any single community is less important to a person's life. Although communities will also differ in their meaningfulness and importance to an

individual to avoid domination by the obligations, norms, and social relation­ ships of a given community. Other options for involvement in other communities will remain open to him if the demands of a given community remain oppressive.

Similarly, as a single commurqty loses its claims to all or most of its members' allegiance, it will become more of a special interest group and less of a wide-ranging force. At present, communities composed of racial or ethnic members who are being discriminated against retain their strength because of the lack of alternatives to which people born into the community can turn. If prejudice and discrimination significantly lessen, then there would be added opportunity for members of such subordinated groups to develop multiple community memberships.

The persistence of neighborhood communities

When people thought of urban areas primarily in spatial terms, then there was a general tendency to equate neighborhoods with communities. This tendency has persisted to a great extent in urban North America and is closely related to the pastoralist myths discussed earlier. However, while the greater ease of spatial accessibility and the increasing use of telecommunications to maintain community ties will doubtless lessen the importance of the neighborhood as a community for many, neighborhoods will still remain for many others a viable community, albeit one among many, of greater or lesser importance depending on the individual's social circumstances.

For some, involvement in neighborhood communities is quite high. They - 12 -

play important roles in the assimilation of newcomers to the city. An in­

migrant or an immigrant is likely to move into an area in which his kindred

live. There, he is more apt to have specialized services close at hand which

have been attracted to the neighborhood by the very presence of people like

himself. It is especially in enclaves composed of immigrants from very

different cultures than the prevalent one that communities will be confined

within neighborhood boundaries and the closest approximations to "urban

villages" are likely to occur.

Those who are less mobile, for any reason, are more likely to have the

neighborhood as one of their important communities. In our own research, we

have found that families with children are especially prone to neighbor.4

Childless adults, on the other hand, use their apartments as headquarters

and care little about who lives down the hall. Parents often choose neigh­

borhoods in which their children will have access to the "right" companions.

They depend on sorting processes to make these neighborhood communities

relatively homogeneous with respect to socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and

perhaps life style. At present, a child's mobility is limited by his inability

to drive aµ tomobiles, and often by his inability to make intelligent use

of public transit systems when available. The comprehensive development of

public transit systems, coupled with basic instruction in map-reading at an

early age, might reduce the age of neighborhood dependence to eight from

sixteen. Having already demonstrated a facility with telecommunications

devices, these children and their families would be able to participate more

fully in despatialized, multiple communities.

We are finding in our research that people who neighbor a good deal also often have important other communities extending far beyond their local areas. We have found no association between neighboring a lot and maintaining - 13 -

non-spatial communities. Many people are closely tied to a multiplicity of

communities extending throughout the urban area and are also good neighbors.

Only a small minority are h~avily involved in only neighborhood affairs.

However, most retain at least a minimal involvement in order to foster informal

social control and to take advantage of what only proximate ties have to offer -

the proverbial borrowed cup of sugar and all of its analogs.

The foreseeable intensification of the trend away from the neighborhood

as the principal generator of communities makes it likely that "New Towns"

(and the even more ambitious "satellite cities") will prove in fact to be

"New Boroughs". Even the most comprehensively planned community cannot withstand the trend to despatialization and multiple community membership, although it may afford significant improvements in the quality of one's local life. Similarly, there is much evidence of the decreased viability of smaller regional centers. The multiple communities will be more directly influenced by national cultures, as concommitants of the processes discussed here. Thus, the persistence of communities is easily foreseeable, but the shifts in their form and function might mean that in 2001 the communities will be even more amenable to social mapping, rather than spatial mapping, than they are today.

Cautionary epilogue

The preceding discussion has been essentially catastrophe-free in its discussion of future trehds. Two foreseeable catastrophic developmen~s may greatly alter the actual manifestation of communities.

First, an energy crisis may so greatly increase the cost of personal transportation as to encourage the redevelopment of neighborhood based communities. Such a trend would not be all-pervasive, however. Mass transit, more efficient in its use of energy, would permit the dispersion of activity, but around densely-packed nodes. Telecommunications would presumably also be - 14 -

less affected by such a crisis, and would contribute significantly to the

maintenance of despatialized communities of the sort discussed in this paper.

Second, we have written of the future of communities as if there would

be minimal social barriers to physical mobility. However, a high level of

racial, ethnic, social class or life-style tension in North America may see

the increased use of the local areas os fortresses from "outsiders" on the part of both dominant and subordinate groups. This would intensify the development of the local areas as communities, both as a means of informal social control and because people might not go elsewhere as frequently.

Although there might still be significant community interaction transcending local area boundaries, this interaction would be strictly channeled into those other areas in which the actors would feel safe, comfortable and "at home". - 15 -

REFERENCES

1. STEIN, MAURICE, 1960. The Eclipse of Community. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press; WHITE, M. and WHITE, L. 1962. The Intellectual Versus the City. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press. MARX, LEO, 1964. The Machine in the Garden • New York, Oxford Univ. Press.

2. GRANOVETTER, MARK, 1973. The strength of weak ties. Am. J. of Sociology.

3. HOWELL, NANCY, 1969. The Search for an Abortionist. Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press.

4. GATES, ALBERT s., STEVENS, HARVEY and WELLMAN, BARRY. 1973. What makes a good neighbor? Paper to be presented to the annual meeting of The American Sociological Association, New York.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful for the advice and assistance given by

fellow members of the "Community Ties and Support Systems" project:

Paul Craven, Alberts. Gates, Ann Shorter, Harvey Stevens, Deborah Tannenbaum

and Marilyn Whitaker. Many of the ideas in this paper grew out of inter-

actions with D.B. Coates, Leslie Howard, Nancy Howell, William Michelson,

Charles Tilly, Lorne Tepperman, Jack Wayne, Harrison White, and fellow

participants in the conference on "Networks," sponsored by the Mathematical

Social Science Board; Camden, Maine, June 1972.

The preparation of this paper was supported by the Environment

Study, sponsored by Bell Canada. Additional support for the research discussed

here has been provided under Province of Ontario Health Research Grant No.

P.R. 196, and by the Laidlaw Foundation, using data originally collected under

the auspices of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. This support is gratefully acknowledged.