Hierarchies of Predominantly Connected Communities

We consider communities whose vertices are predominantly connected, i.e., the vertices in each community are stronger connected to other community members of the same community than to vertices outside the community. Flake et al. introduced a hierarchical clustering algorithm that finds such predominantly connected communities of different coarseness depending on an input parameter. We present a simple and efficient method for constructing a clustering hierarchy according to Flake et al. that supersedes the necessity of choosing feasible parameter values and guarantees the completeness of the resulting hierarchy, i.e., the hierarchy contains all clusterings that can be constructed by the original algorithm for any parameter value. However, predominantly connected communities are not organized in a single hierarchy. Thus, we develop a framework that, after precomputing at most $2(n-1)$ maximum flows, admits a linear time construction of a clustering \C(S) of predominantly connected communities that contains a given community $S$ and is maximum in the sense that any further clustering of predominantly connected communities that also contains $S$ is hierarchically nested in \C(S). We further generalize this construction yielding a clustering with similar properties for $k$ given communities in $O(kn)$ time. This admits the analysis of a network's structure with respect to various communities in different hierarchies.Comment: to appear (WADS 2013

Naming Racism: A Conceptual Look at Internalized Racism in US Schools

Internalized racism describes the conscious and unconscious acceptance of a racial hierarchy where whites are consistently ranked above People of Color. Although scholars across multiple disciplines have discussed this concept, the role of schools in instilling and perpetuating internalized racism within Students of Color has very rarely been examined. This paper is a conceptual piece that utilizes a Critical Race Theory framework to acknowledge the racialized experiences within classroom pedagogy, curriculum, and unequal school resources. We examine how these factors can negatively affect racial group-identity and contribute to internalized racism for Students of Color. Because internalized racism works to sustain educational and social inequity, this paper also explores ways that schools can function to break this cycle

Connected lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities? A scoping study to explore understandings and experiences of ‘community’ among LGBT people

This study examined understandings and experiences of LGBT communities, and assessed implications for health and wellbeing, employing a literature review, online survey and indepth interviews and discussion groups. LGBT communities are often understood as communities of ‘identity’ or ‘interest’. Study participants frequently used the term community to refer to groups of LGBT people (known to one another or not), whether physical, online or imagined through (shared) feelings of ‘belonging’. The study highlighted three key elements/foundations to LGBT communities: place/space, (shared) identity, and (to a lesser extent) politics. Participants and existing evidence highlights the importance of shared experiences of stigma/discrimination, and a resulting sense of ‘connection’. This does not negate the need to acknowledge/address diversity and inequality or exclusion. Safe spaces were identified as key to avoid ‘self-censorship’ regularly employed in wider society, though participants engaged with other LGBT people for a variety of reasons. Sensing/experiencing ‘community’ had clear links to reported wellbeing, including combating isolation, heightening confidence and self-esteem, and sometimes improving/maintaining physical health. However, potential ‘risks’ related to elements of community were also identified (e.g. alcohol/drug consumption). Caution is needed when the term ‘community’ is used in the singular and/or when it is assumed that LGBT people are more alike than not

Types and Systems of Actors in Regional Development: Their Function and Regulatory Potential

Differentiation of actors derives primarily from the distribution of power and wealth in a society, and thus it has always played an exceptionally significant role. However, as a consequence of the hierarchical organisation of the society this differentiation was noticeably asymmetrical. The non-equivalence of partial subjects/actors of regional development has led to the understandable domination of ‘deterministic’ relations and the plurality of interests and then to the dominance of ‘competitive’ relations. Only gradually do interactions of a cooperative kind successively break through the growth of mutual interconnections, linkages and necessity of social elements and partial systems, and thus the increasing of organic nature of (geo)societal systems. This will be finally illustrated through the difference between ‘symmetric’ systems of actors in developed countries and the ‘asymmetric’ global system

Cultural Paradigms in Property Institutions

Do “cultural factors” substantively influence the creation and evolution of property institutions? For the past several decades, few legal scholars have answered affirmatively. Those inclined towards a law and economics methodology tend to see property institutions as the outcome of self-interested and utilitarian bargaining, and therefore often question the analytical usefulness of “culture.” The major emerging alternative, a progressive literature that emphasizes the social embeddedness of property institutions and individuals, is theoretically more accommodating of cultural analysis but has done very little of it. This Article develops a “cultural” theory of how property institutions are created and demonstrates that such a theory is particularly powerful in explaining large-scale institutional differences between societies. Empirically, it argues that, in the two centuries before large-scale industrialization, China, England, and Japan displayed systematic and fundamental differences in their regulation of property use and transfer. It further argues that these legal and institutional differences are best explained by certain aspects of social culture, specifically by the criteria for sociopolitical status distribution. Some of these criteria are distinctly “cultural” in the sense that they were probably generated by the widespread social internalization of moral values, rather than by utilitarian bargaining. Cultural paradigms can exist, therefore, in property institutions. If we assume, as conventional law and economics urges, that individuals generally approach property use and regulation through a self-interested and utilitarian mindset, their pursuit of personal utility can nonetheless be constrained or empowered by cultural norms of status distribution that determine their relative bargaining power

Group Formation in the Long Tenth Century: a View from Trier and its Region

Unpaginated version of book chapter published in Christine Kleinjung and Stefan Albrecht (eds.), Das lange 10. Jahrhundert – Struktureller Wandel zwischen Zentralisierung und Fragmentierung, äußerem Druck und innerer Krise (Mainz, 2015), pp. 49–5

Spatial sustainability in cities: organic patterns and sustainable forms

Because the complexity of cities seems to defy description, planners and urban designers have always been forced to work with simplified concepts of the city. Drawn from natural language, these concepts emphasize clear hierarchies, regular geometries and the separation of parts from wholes, all seemingly at variance with the less orderly complexity of most real cities. Such concepts are now dominating the debate about sustainability in cities. Here it is argued that space syntax has now brought to light key underlying structures in the city, which have a direct bearing on sustainability in that they seem to show that the spatial form of the self-organised city, as a foreground network of linked centres at all scales set into a background network of mainly residential space, is already a reflection of the relations between environmental, economic and socio-cultural forces, that is between the three domains of sustainability. Evidence that this is so in all three domains is drawn from recent and new research, and a concept of spatial sustainability is proposed focused on the structure of the primary spatial structure of the city, the street network

Networks, Urban

For much of the twentieth century, urban networks was a term used by sociologists and others to describe social networks, their importance for bonding within communities and bridging between communities, and their relationship to the geographical mobility implied by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urbanization, mid-twentieth-century suburbanization, and late-twentieth-century globalization. This relationship is often assumed to be one in which social networks are threatened by geographical mobility. From sometime in the 1980s, in a context of globalization, network became a metaphor used across the social sciences to describe how people, ideas, and objects flow between nodes in a globalizing world, and urban networks became a term used by geographers and others to describe at least four more or less connected things: (1) archipelagos of world or global cities, in which centrality depends on networks of producer services and information and communications technology infrastructure; (2) this information and communications technology infrastructure, among other networked infrastructure, which has become unbundled in recent years, leading to fragmented or splintered cities; (3) other smaller networks of humans and nonhumans – actor networks – that help to maintain urban life; and (4) twenty-first-century social networks, characterized by their transnational geographies and relatively high levels of institutionalization and self-consciousnes

City networks in cyberspace and time : using Google hyperlinks to measure global economic and environmental crises

Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change