Networks in Place

Castells: The Space of Flows and Places

Beginning with The Urban Question (1977) and The City and the Grassroots (1983), Castells argued that the city was a site of emerging contestation of capitalism. But with the first volume of his trilogy, The Rise of Network Society in 1996, he arguably established both the term network society and the terms and trajectory of debate over its use. Castells’ central insight builds on Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: Society is increasingly organized through networks of information and communication. ² Castells theoretical edifice is vast and his central claims remain, in many respects, hard to pin down. The concern here is with his concept of the “space of flows” and the contrasting “space of places” which defines within his framework the problem of place. ³

Briefly, the space of flows grows from the larger concept of “networks of flows” that have developed at a global level, which is grounded in Castells’ argument that production, experience, and power are material forms that are connected via global cities that serve as hubs of finance, production, and power. These anchor points are the central nodes around which global production and consumption are organized; they give rise to a class of global cosmopolites who reside in world cities, shaping urban space, and traveling from node to node, defining a central aspect of global culture. The cities as hubs give shape to the world because they are the material embodiment of a new global space. This new global space takes the form of a network, and this network form transforms both space and time to create a “space of flows” across urban nodes and “timeless time.” ⁴

Despite its global breadth, the contrast between the space of flows and the “space of places” remains relatively undefined. The space of places is, in the end, all of those spaces that are not essentially linked to central networks of the space of flows of capital and power. As Stalder (2006) summarizes the contrast, Castells draws “a sharp distinction between the space of flows, as the space of the elites and socially dominant processes, and the space of places, as the space of isolated and increasingly powerless local populations” (p. 151). As Castells (2010) notes

the overwhelming majority of people, in advanced and traditional societies alike, live in places, and so they perceive their space as place-based. A place is a locale whose form, function, and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity. (p. 453)

More simply, most people live in places with boundaries that shape both what happens there and its meaning for residents and others.

This would seem rather uncontroversial. But places are embedded in the space of flows which is to say the space of the city defined by its nodal function. This sets up a sharp division between those urban spaces that are part of the “horizon of networked, ahistorical, space of flows” and every place else (literally). Castells (2010) claims that we are heading “toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are wrapped into different dimensions of a social hyperspace” (p. 459).

Of most interest here, Castells asserts in a 2010 introduction to Rise of Networks that cities have always been communication systems that increase chances of communication through physical contiguity. But the introduction of digital communication, allowing simultaneous communication, is what constitutes the space of flows. The communication affordances have driven unprecedented urban concentration, which is changing the urban form itself, a “new spatial architecture made up of global networks connecting major metropolitan areas and their areas of influence” (p. xxxii).

Furthermore, this accelerated process of urbanization has led to the formation of metropolitan regions (sometimes incorporating multiple metropoli) as a result of a dual process of decentralization and interconnection of towns and country. The metropolitan region has a multicentered structure, decentralized activities, residence, and services, and undefined boundaries extended by networks which he calls the universal urban form of the 21st century. His example of the Southern California “Southland” region is illustrative. It stretches from Santa Barbara to San Diego, encompasses 20 million people, connected by a networks of freeways, media coverage, and cable and wireless communication. At the same time, its individual polities are fragmented by ethnicity, age, and social networks. The Southland has “a functional and economic unity, but not institutional or cultural identity” (Castells, 2010, p. xxxiv).

The space of the networked society is defined by the networked connection between the local and the global. The global cities of finance, New York, Tokyo, London, are connected through the space of flows, but the areas contained within them (Queens, Kunitachi, Hampstead, or Brixton) are “very local” (Castells, 2010, p. xxxv), if marginal. This radical separation of global network spaces and the parts of the city that connect to them and the places where everyone else lives has both an analytic and political function in Castells’s theory. Analytically, despite naming a “space of places,” place actually has little actual function or structure at all. It becomes a kind of placeholder for everything, everyone, and everywhere not part of, or connected to a global elite. There is no actual topography of place in the city, neighborhoods and regions with varying populations, and the actual relations of neighborhoods and communities to the social power of urban elites fades into the background. The power of place and politics within place get lost.

Despite his adoption of the phrase “glocalization,” local place is never really given any real empirical or analytical form in the later work. The local, or place, becomes a residual category, for those either passed over by the global flows of networks, or set to the side to serve as nonknowledge workers. Those not at the top of the pyramid are assigned to places that are effectively nowhere, even when they are named.

In reading Castells, it is actually quite difficult to get an idea of what people in the city actually do, the form of their social relations, their actual networks, motivations, and action. The lower levels, the places in between, are really just way stations in his larger networked space of flows. In contrast, Wellman’s early research program does specify the role of networks in the city, the differences among places (to a point) and the blending of social life online and off-line into a new form of sociality in ways that could potentially fill the gap left by Castells.

Wellman and Networked Individualism

Wellman’s central concept of networked individualism grows from his analysis of concrete social networks in specific urban environments and therefore is closer to the dense realities of life in metropolitan places. Wellman was one of the first in the contemporary network turn to conceptualize the urban community as a network. His early reflections on the network city (Craven & Wellman, 1973) and studies of Toronto (Wellman, 1982; Wellman & Leighton, 1979) were central and original challenges to the traditional urban community paradigm. Networks of kin, formerly bound together in dense neighborhoods with face-to-face contact, were dispersing across the Toronto metropolitan area. They remained in contact via telephone, and this was the one of the first comprehensive and systematic analyses of what happens when strong ties begin to weaken in the face of spatial dispersion and changing needs for friendship and support.

Beginning with his influential research essay, “The Community Question,” Wellman (1979) asks how the large-scale division of labor under conditions of industrialization and bureaucratization affects the organization and content of primary group ties. His central argument challenges the assumption that “strong primary ties occur only in densely knit, self-contained solidarities” because scholars of community have “neglected the question of whether primary ties have been structurally transformed, rather than attenuated, in industrial bureaucratic systems” (pp. 1204-1205). However, this linkage recedes into the background over the subsequent 35-year arc of his research.

Contrasting “community lost” with “community saved,” Wellman attributes to Gans (1962), Jacobs (1961), and others the view that communities continue to provide resources of social support, sociability, and social control, but argues that it fails to consider whether, in fact, the new division of labor has transformed the structure of primary ties. ⁵

Wellman (1979) advances his own view of “community liberated” which maintains that densely knit primary ties remain important, but that they are no longer located in densely knit solidary networks. The separation of workplace, residence, and kinship has left urban dwellers with multiple social networks connected through weak ties. Transportation and communication have lowered the cost of maintaining ties over distance. A changing division of labor in industrial–bureaucratic social systems has changed the form of urban life: “[S]cale, density, and diversity of the city and national state . . . increase possibilities for access to loosely bounded, multiple social networks” (p. 1206). Wellman (1979) builds on Janowitz’s (1952) notion of communities of limited liability. The local area is no longer a starting point for analyzing community: rather “primary ties now tend to form sparsely knit, spatially dispersed, ramifying structures instead of being bound up within a single, densely knit, solidarity” (Wellman, 1979, p. 1207).

This trajectory will lead Wellman (1979) toward the concept of networked individualism as a social structural characteristic of a new networked society, driven by a new division of labor (parallel to Castells). But in this early statement, he remains cautious. He asks “Are there circumstances—for example lack of physical mobility or material resources, cultural differences—which can maintain dense, bounded solidarities?” (p. 1208). The assumption that solidary ties are not the starting point for analysis is not the same as asserting that they do not exist.

This recognition that the conditions for the creation of community and solidarity vary by resource and culture as well as network structure, and in turn remain at least relatively concentrated in place, tends to drop away as Wellman’s work moves forward over the next three decades. In “The Network Community: An Introduction,” Wellman (1999) continues to frame the question of the “structural integration of social systems and the interpersonal means by which members have access to scarce resources”(p. 3). He raises (but does not develop) the problem of network homophily by gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and race. Those with high mobility have cross-cutting ties with people with different social characteristics, those with low mobility are linked to more tightly bound clusters.

But communities have “moved out of neighborhoods to be dispersed networks that continue to be supportive and sociable” (Wellman, 1999, p. 26). This movement is linked to the very structure of public space. In a telling passage, Wellman (1999) argues “Unfortunately social network analysis has been better at studying the strong ties of personal, private community than at studying the weak ties and ecological juxtaposition of public community” (p. 30). But here, public community is identified with extended weak tie structures. This bridges the identification, which will become more prominent moving forward, of public community with “personal communities,” a concept that he introduces here, and which begins to crowd out other notions of communities of place and publics.

With “Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Networked Individualism” (Wellman, 2001) two important new ideas emerge. The first (parallel to Castells’s argument) is that technological developments in communication have allowed social networks to become the “dominant form of social organization. . . . The technological development of computer networks and the societal flourishing of social networks are now in a positive feedback loop” (p. 228). Furthermore, the very flexible structure of the less bounded, spatially dispersed networks creates the demand for the (then emerging) World Wide Web, as computer networks nourish the social transition from “little boxes to social networks” (p. 228). The second idea is that “Communities now transcend the group and locality” (p. 231) and that we are moving to an era of “networked individualism.”

Wellman presciently recognizes that the spread of computer networks—alongside broader bandwidth, wireless mobility, and global connectivity—are reshaping the very network social structure of society (although he is a bit sanguine about the disappearance of digital inequalities by class, location, and gender).

The major shift in his framework, however, replaces the community lost-saved-liberated trope with the idea that we have moved from “door-to-door” communication in the village and neighborhood, to “place-to-place” networks linking households in different neighborhoods to our emerging form of “person-to-person” networks.

Door-to-door networks (essentially place-based solidary communities) embodied, he argues, “triple inequalities” of resource differences between inhabitants, communities, and societies. They were replaced by place-to-place communities which individuals moved through while ignoring the places in-between. Tellingly, he argues that while differential real-estate values still distinguish neighborhoods, they are no longer important sources of community, simply “variable safe and salubrious milieus” from which people drive, telephone, or e-mail (Wellman, 2001, p. 233). Networks, in turn, change place-to-place communities, decreasing social control and commitment to others’ well-being, increasing the need to actively maintain fragmented networks of sparse ties, lowering the proportion of interaction based on ascribed characteristics, and increasing those voluntary ties based on lifestyle and chosen norms. The ability to choose among milieus increases as they are knit together by cross-cutting ties, which also increases both opportunity and contingency, globalization and uncertainty.

The rise of the Internet itself reinforces the stay-at-home tendencies of place-to-place relationships. “Globalization” develops as the Net makes it easy to contact both many neighborhoods and extend ties, both in numbers and across space. Most important, this leads to the rise of networked individualism:

The shift to a personalized, wireless world affords truly personal communities that supply support, sociability, information, and a sense of belonging separately to each individual. It is the individual and not the household or the group that is the primary unit of connectivity. (Wellman, 2001, p. 238)

Communities of choice are enabled, no longer constrained by distance. Social context is reduced to space. “Network switching” becomes the primary characteristic of person-to-person interaction.

Still, Wellman (2001) argues that strong ties remain and that face-to-face contact is imperative for maintaining them. Place remains necessary for advanced economies, for example, the “complex interplay of urban information, skills, goods, services, and networks” of Silicon Valley (p. 244). “Spaces continue to be places” and “Physical space continues to contain and shape interactions, providing opportunities and constraints.” But person-to-person community is its hallmark: “Each person is the operator of his/her personal community network” (p. 247).

Wellman’s research program was established before the widespread adoption of the Internet, so he was better placed than many others to trace its spread and its effects on networked social relations. His work and that of his students are among the most central sociological strands that allow us to trace the emerging effects of the penetration of multiple waves of networked affordances into the networks of everyday life.

The concept of networked individualism reflects an underlying reality for many residents of advanced countries, the process of increasing detachment from strong social networks and institutions, the “individualization” of social life in Beck’s term (Beck, 1992; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) as individuals rely less and less on the social support of kin and community, and more and more on their own personal networks. We cannot understand the social structure of the contemporary United States without the concept of networked individualism. But nonetheless, it carries certain problems and blind spots.

Wellman’s critical targeting of “community lost and saved” was a justifiable criticism of the sociological tradition that idealized forms of community involving dense ties and local knowledge that were undergoing a rapid transformation in the postwar era. Wellman wanted to demonstrate that this was no longer empirically tenable in the face of the dispersion of kin and strong ties and the new forms of weaker connection that people were adapting.

It was not simply that those scholars who maintained the importance of older forms of community were missing an important element of contemporary social transformation. Even in Wellman’s early work, there is a normative connotation that the emerging “personal communities” are a new and better form of liberated community in which individuals gain freedom by establishing weak connections with others less constrained by obligations of family or place-based community.

Fischer and Voluntary Community

Claude Fischer’s research program on urbanism, personal networks, and community structure offers an important counterpoint to Wellman’s in two major respects. First, from his major statement, To Dwell Among Friends, Fischer (1982) argues that structure and form of residential community is a central element in shaping personal networks. Fischer (1982) seeks to systematically compare the personal relations of those living in large communities with those living in smaller ones, holding that “community size leads to a variety of distinct and intense social worlds” (p. 11). Like Wellman, he emphasizes that cities do not lead to the loss of social contact and support, but rather to the voluntary construction of personal networks that serve as the focal point for the construction of overlapping social circles in his “subcultural theory of urbanism.” Cities provide the density of both type and interaction that makes it more likely that “pluralistic mosaics of ‘little worlds’” can form.

While choice does increase with the scale of urban residence, constraint hardly falls away. Fischer understood (like Wellman) that we are entering an era in which people were able to seek individual fulfillment and social support through looser networks, differently constructed from the strong ties of kin and family. Individual fulfillment was something that people would seek more and more as the opportunity arose, and it would more likely arise in the city. Many people did seek the relative anonymity or freedom to start over that the urban environment promised. Fischer argues that place matters in a dual sense: place in social structure and place as locality.

Nonetheless, for Fischer choice is always anchored in structures of opportunity. Network freedom of choice is neither random nor equally distributed. Fischer (1982) finds that the most salient personal characteristic affecting respondents’ networks is education leading to “broader, deeper, and richer networks” (p. 251) and more education predicting fewer kin ties. Income (controlling for education) also led to more nonkin ties and more support. Stage in life cycle and gender were also significant. Fischer (1982) is straightforward in assigning the order of relations: “[P]ersonality dispositions toward smaller or larger networks operate within such structures of opportunity and constraint” (p. 254).

But place itself also matters. Urbanism matters in part because of self-selection: those who migrate to cities—the young, immigrants, the affluent—prefer them. Urban residents choose to live in cities, where urban subcultures can thrive, and have many fewer relatives and more nonkin in their networks. Those who remain in smaller towns and rural areas are older, more likely to be White and native born, and less affluent. On the other hand (as we will discuss shortly), some urban residents, the poorest, particularly of color, are locked in the cities by a severe lack of choice.

Fischer’s account is much richer than can be presented here. But his theory of the subculture of urbanism focused on the problems of publicity, privacy, and community. He has continued this strand throughout his work, culminating in Made in America (2010) where the tension between individualism and community first outlined in his subcultural theory of urbanism is developed historically.

Briefly, he argues that despite a more consistent attachment to local community than the decline of social capital arguments suggest, overall, social change in the 20th century United States has worked against neighborhood solidarity. Americans have looked outside their neighborhoods for support (when they had that choice). Summarizing his data-grounded, historical research: “Americans became more rooted and vested in their local communities, but more thinly involved in them. Residents’ interests, activities, and ties grew at a greater rate outside the locality than they did inside it . . . ”. While most Americans “found it increasingly easy to both invest in and withdraw from their local communities as their needs dictated,” the major exceptions were poor, Black, Americans (Fischer, 2010, p. 149). Although space contracted (in line with both Castells’s and Wellman’s arguments), Fischer argues that it is noteworthy that Americans sustained as much neighborhood involvement and political mobilization as they did.

Voluntary individualism, the movement toward “loose connections,” (Wuthnow, 1998) or associations of limited liability combined with continuing propensity to associate in place, is essential to understanding the form that civic and democratic organization takes in the contemporary United States. By remaining focused on social structure, particularly choice and constraint, and emphasizing that the structuring of social networks is tightly bound by both education and income and place, Fischer offers a more realistic foundation for understanding the possibilities of civic and democratic action in the 21st century United States.

Place-based communities—the exurb, the suburb, the town, the city, and the metropolis—continue to shape and to a significant extent determine the life structures and life chances of Americans. The social ecology of the city and community continues to have a determinate effect on life chances, patterns of opportunity, as well as individuals’ networked structures, and by extension political life.

Networked individualism is a real and growing phenomenon, but needs to be understood in at least two contexts. How networked individualism functions, and for whom and with what effects depends in no small part on one’s place in the division of labor and class structure. But to be located in class is also to be rooted in a particular kind of space, the rooted space of residence, or place.

Sampson and the Constraints of Place(s)

Robert Sampson’s Great American City (2012) is an exemplary analysis of the space and place of the American metropolis. He argues that there are certain “neighborhood facts” that structure contemporary urban life. First, there continues to be considerable inequality between neighborhoods, particularly along the dimensions of race and ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Second, these factors are connected: Concentrated disadvantage often coincides with geographic isolation by race or ethnicity. Third, crime and health-related problems are bundled at the neighborhood level and are predicted by neighborhood characteristics (poverty, racial isolation, single-parent families, residential housing instability). Fourth, what is true for the lower end of the spectrum is also true at the other: Social indicators at the upper end are also clustered geographically.

Furthermore, these factors are not simply brought into interaction with one another. Rather, continuing the theoretical line of the original Chicago School, “the larger idea is that if neighborhood effects are not merely the reflection of individual characteristics then presumably they stem from social-interactional and institutional processes that involve collective aspects of community—emergent properties, in other words” (Sampson, 2012, p. 47). Neighborhoods have durable properties that are not simply built up from individual factors below, but are emergent, with continuing structuring effects on the interactions that take place within and between them.

For Sampson, the decline of community has been confused with the decline of place. Community may be disorganized and may or may not be characterized by relations of solidarity. But neighborhoods as places have enduring physical and social effects beyond the degree of felt solidarity. Sampson following Suttles (1972) argues that there is a cultural principle of difference, in which residential groups are defined in opposition to each other. This difference is “layered onto the ecological landscape” (p. 51). From this, Sampson (2012) draws the larger inference that one of the mechanisms of enduring spatial inequality is homophily, the tendency of people to live near and associate with people like themselves and to distance themselves from dissimilar others. He calls this “the demand side of inequality,” a “spatial form of hierarchy maintenance” (Sampson, 2012, pp. 54-55). This spatial hierarchy is racial, and, more specifically, is part of a system that reproduces inequality that continually suppresses the life chances (or lives) of the African American poor. We will return to this argument again in considering the possibilities for civic and democratic action in the city. But first, we address the analytic core of Sampson’s argument.

First, Sampson is formalizing the argument for an urban social ecology, one whose parts are (a) rooted in space; (b) interconnected via networks; and (c) whose interrelationships create an interconnected whole (the urban social ecology) that is, both greater than the sum of its parts (including individual and group networks) and dependent on them (and action within and between them). That is to say, this ecology is emergent from the actions of its constituent members, who are not individuals (although individuals, of course, exist, act, have effects) but neighborhoods.

Second, these neighborhood units are not only spatial, but are places, centers where action produces meanings that have consequences over time, not least consequences in the form of generalized perceptions of the neighborhoods themselves as crime ridden or disordered. These perceptions are sustained over time and themselves shape action at the level of individuals, networks, neighborhoods, and the ecology of the city as a whole. More simply, neighborhoods are places that produce meaning, and these meanings have large, structural, consequences over time.

Third, Sampson articulates the ways that homophily can become a central mechanism for the reproduction of spatial inequality. While there has been some discussion of homophily in the field of urban communication (Neal, 2006, 2012) and within Wellman’s work a recognition that homophily is a driver of “personal communities” (we might say a central mechanism of their construction), Sampson has placed this mechanism at the heart of spatial inequality. If homophily is a substantive tendency of human association, then the construction of a robust civil society, or as Sampson asserts, even a minimally equitable urban framework, requires that we pay close attention to how it works at the macro-level. What are the conditions under which homophily as the simple tendency to affiliate with like others tips into self-segregation? From the other side, evoking Simmel and Blau, what are the conditions under which cross-cutting, homophilous social networks (or ecological enclaves) can serve an integrating function?

The question of whether and how the social ecology of the city makes social integration possible (and whether it should) leads a second set of questions: What sort of civic politics in and of place might emerge at the intersection of higher level constraint (the place of the urban environment in the network of flows), the meso-level constraints of the urban ecology and inequality, and the varying tendencies of individuals to substitute network for place when they can.

The Civic Politics of Place

In this review, we find four very different concepts related to the civic politics of place with very different, at times opposing, implications. Castells’s theory is largely agonistic, in which place is not much more than an area for contestation for urban social movements. Wellman’s work largely sidesteps civic life, other than as a form of social capital, but implicitly suggests that place and community have come to matter little, other than as potential starting points for dense tie networks that become increasingly dispersed. Fischer remains concerned with the associative and voluntary foundations of American society, while demonstrating that Americans selectively (but not wholly) withdraw from association. Sampson addresses civic life in the city head-on, with a full theory of the relations among neighborhood, collective efficacy, networks, and civic action.

Castells (2007) argues that power relations are fundamentally shaped by communication, but his understanding of power is as an agonistic, zero-sum game, the structural capacity of an actor to impose his will over others. His basic paradigm is of the formation of “power” and “counterpower” although the institutional structure and dynamics among actors remain vague. Explicitly invoking a Gramscian understanding of civil society, he argues that new power relationships and new institutions coevolve (through a power/communication nexus) toward a concept of the “common good” that allows those with diverse interests to “live side by side without self-destroying” (p. 258). If this unstable equilibrium sounds a bit like a truce in the war of each against all, it is because there is no articulated concept of power as capacity building in place. Social movements “rooted in urban space through occupations and street demonstrations” actually take place in the “free space of the Internet” (Castells, 2012, p. 221). He argues that this decentered structure maximizes chances of participation. But how the civic infrastructure of cities becomes rebuilt, much less developed into the capacity of varying actors in differing cities and regions to transform their space and place through politics remains unclear.

Wellman, in contrast, does articulate the process through which actors construct the networks of their everyday lives, to obtain a variety of social goods, including support and social capital. A more realistic view of the world, at least of North Americans, does emerge, in which the network becomes both the means for sociability and, effectively and increasingly, the end as well. Wellman’s work is not arrayed against civic action in place. There is just little sense of how it develops or whether and how place matters. From his own accounts, especially his middle-period Toronto studies, it is fairly clear that kin and friends in the metropolitan region remain at the core of the working- and middle-class social networks that he studies. In the later work, personal communities and networked individualism stand in for place. It is not clear whether Wellman would argue that civic action in place does not matter. Rather, personal communities seem to be able to persevere regardless of their relation to place.

Wellman articulates a central phenomenon of middle-class life in advanced societies. Those with the freedom (in material resources, place-based resources, and time) to construct their own “personal communities” will do so, and this will lead to at least a partial withdrawal from the constraints of place-based community. But in his later work, these constraints fade into the background, so that it appears freedom from place is representative of a general population.

Fischer’s choice-constraint model of voluntary individualism more explicitly articulates the tension between freedom and constraint in place. From the beginning, his studies were designed to find variation in community structure in relation to personal network structure. Furthermore, he captures the basic ambivalence of the tendency to opt out of community: the fact that Americans continue to feel that they need community, and desire it, even when it is individually rational to pull back into personal networks as a substitute for it. Both Wellman and Fischer articulate a historical trajectory (although for Fischer it is modest; for Wellman a sea change) that moves the broad middle classes further in the direction of the withdrawal from community when they are able to choose.

Sampson’s understanding of the effect of networks of place on civic action is quite different. His theory, of the interaction of place, urban ecology, and civic action is rich and complex, and can only be briefly described here. In brief, he articulates a theory of collective efficacy combining social cohesion (collective action) and shared expectations for control (efficacy). Sampson demonstrates that community-level variations in social control contribute not only to variable crime rates but to broader capacity for civic action at the neighborhood level.

In an extension to “civic society,” Sampson, McAdam, MacIndoe, & Weffer-Elizondo, 2005), based on the extended analysis of more than 4,000 collective action events, importantly including both civic participation and protest, find first, that collective civic engagement has changed rather than declined, and its sources are now “organizational and spatial rather than interpersonal in nature” (p. 675). Also, and importantly, only 15% of events uncovered were of the protest type: the majority concerned charity, education, the arts, children, the environment, and local government policy. This further indicates that a theory of civic action in the city that is overly focused on protest and contestation is, at minimum, missing the majority of civic activity on the ground in neighborhoods and misconstruing both its nature and effects.

In a modern, urban extension of Tocqueville, Sampson argues that community-based organizations organize from the ground up and are alive and well. In one of his most striking findings, Sampson (2012) argues that “collective civic action is concentrated ecologically and better explained by the density of community organizations than individual social ties or membership in traditional civic groups” (p. 181). Sampson firmly places sources of civic action in neighborhood places and at the organizational level. Personal networks matter for a sense of efficacy, but collective efficacy, measured by results lies at the level of the neighborhood, community, and larger urban civic ecology.