Weak Ties: The Urban History of an Algorithm

Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1361.

Eytan Bakshy et al., “The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion,” in Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW ’12 (Lyon: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), 519–528, ➝.

See Laura Kurgan et al., “Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm,” e-flux Architecture, October 2019, ➝; Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer, and Hito Steyerl, Pattern Discrimination (Lunenburg: Meson, 2018).

For representative examples of the prevailing approach in urban sociology, see: Mark E. J. Newman, Networks: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24.

Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

Ibid.

Ibid.

Langley Carleton Keyes, The Rehabilitation Planning Game: A Study in the Diversity of Neighborhood (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).

Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” 1375. Charlestown, according to the 1950 U.S. Census, is similarly majority white, with 98.69% of residents being white, comparable with the West End which has 98.76% white residents. These neighborhoods have slightly higher percentage of white residents than the city of Boston as a whole (95.19%).

Ibid.

Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers; Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), xv.

Ibid., 323.

Ibid.

It is worth noting that in The Urban Villagers, Gans discloses that he had considered quitting the research to join the efforts of the Save the West End Committee which struggled to mobilize against the relocation. Gans’s discomfort comes through in the book, and the lengthy study he submits to the Boston Housing Authority entitled “An Analysis of Redevelopment and Relocation Planning for the West End of Boston,” reproduced in the book. But perhaps it can be more deeply understood from letters to his activist-interlocutor Joe Caruso, preserved in The Herbert Gans Papers at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia University. In these exchanges, Gans urges Caruso to continue to cooperate with the Harvard team contributing to research on the West End, constantly negotiating the instrumentalizing logic of his work, that by accepting the demise of the neighborhood he can contribute to a ground-breaking study introducing the psychology of a vulnerable population facing relocation to a traditional medical audience. It is this context that must be reaffirmed when understanding Gans’s positionality towards the West End.

Writing also on the West End study Chester Hartman gives context for this comparison between the patterns of life among West Enders and those of a typical middle class household when he writes: “‘Slum’ is a loaded, often class-biased term, oblivious to or ignorant of different, and legitimate, ways in which indoor and outdoor spaces are used and perceived.” By studying the West End in its own terms, we should understand Gans’s project as in part a critique of the predominant assumptions undergirding most urban planning at the time which aimed to obliterate forms of everyday life that did not neatly fit within white middle class frames of reference. Chester W. Hartman, Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning (New Brunswick: Center for Urban Policy Research, 2002).

Gans, The Urban Villagers, 39.

Herbert J. Gans, “Gans on Granovetter’s ‘Strength of Weak Ties,’” American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 2 (1974): 524–27.

Samuel Zipp, “The Battle of Lincoln Square: Neighbourhood Culture and the Rise of Resistance to urban renewal,” Planning Perspectives 24, no. 4 (October 1, 2009): 409–33.

Boston City Planning Board, General Plan for Boston: Preliminary Report, December, 1950 (Boston: City Planning Board, 1950), 39.

Ibid., 42.

Ibid., 43.

See Gans, The Urban Villagers; Boston Housing Authority, The West End Project Report: A Redevelopment Study (Boston: Boston Housing Authority, 1953), ➝.

Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 and Wendell E. Pritchett, “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain,” Yale Law & Policy Review 21, no. 1 (2003): 1–52.

Zipp, “The Battle of Lincoln Square.”

Jane Jacobs, “Foreword,” in Hartman, Between Eminence and Notoriety, xiii.

Gans, “Gans on Granovetter’s ‘Strength of Weak Ties.’”

Gans, The Urban Villagers, 104–105.

In his definition of the strength of interpersonal ties, Granovetter notes that “ties discussed in this paper are assumed to be positive and symmetric; a comprehensive theory might require discussion of negative and/or asymmetric ties, but this would add unnecessary complexity to the present, exploratory comments.” Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

Ibid., 1378.

Sandra Susan Smith, “‘Don’t Put My Name on It’: Social Capital Activation and Job‐Finding Assistance among the Black Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 1 (2005): 3.

“Introduction,” in The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, eds. Mark Newman, Albert-László Barabási, and Duncan J. Watts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–8, ➝.

Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 208.

Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” 1364.

Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” 204.

Ibid., 204–205.

In our previous work, we revealed that homophily emerged from analyses of white residents’ attitudes to bi-racial housing projects within the U.S.–projects which were similarly part of “slum clearance” efforts. Sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton coined both homophily and heterophily, in “Friendship as Social Process” they focused exclusively on measuring and explaining homophily within “Hilltown.” According to Lazarsfeld and Merton, gender and race-homophily was almost 100% in Hilltown. Based on the answers to three questions—“who are your three closest friends?”; “do you think public housing should be bi-racial?” and “do you think that the races get along in Hilltown”—they argued that values drove homophily. Liberal, where liberal meant those who believed that housing projects should be bi-racial and the races got along, over-selected liberals; and illiberals, where illiberals responded no to these questions, overselected illiberals as close friends. To make this argument, they ignored the responses of all the black residents and the white ambivalents, those who believed that projects shouldn’t be bi-racial but admitted that the races did get along--the largest category of white residents. Born in a housing project, and built on the premise of (bridging) racial difference, the concept they coined and theorized has gone on to play a decisive role in network analysis and science ever since. What started as a description of social life, has become an axiom, and now, a prescription through the algorithms which design our social media environments: we are, and supposedly want or even ought to be, connected to those who are similar to us. For more on this work, see: Kurgan et al., “Homophily,” 2019; Apprich et al., Pattern Discrimination.

Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” 1361.

Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, eds. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).