Book Review: Handbook of Cities and Networks. Research Handbooks in Urban Studies by Neal, Z. & Rozenblat, C. (Eds.)

Abstract

From the research of people like William Garrison (geography, planning) and Harrison White (anthropology, sociology), various aspects of graph theory and network analysis —addressing accessibility and centrality of nodes, allocating new observations to groups or regions, and assigning flows to route paths—became known to social scientists by the late 1960s (Haggett & Chorley, 1969). Other studies, using matrix algebra, revealed how different processes might unfold over time across demographic, social, and economic systems (Gale, 1960; Keyfitz, 1977; Rogers, 1971). Subsequently, the network perspective has shed much new light on a variety of socioeconomic issues at the urban (or metropolitan) scale, including the matching of supply and demand in regional labor markets; the effects of first-, second-, and higher-order adjacency in spatial estimation; the price and location adjustments of spatial rivals in retailing; the nature of differential ties in migration streams and acquaintanceship circles; the role of hierarchy in the decisions, transactions, and information exchanges of agents; and the sizes of input–output multipliers in both intraand interregional settings. The modern study of connectivity among global cities began in earnest with Peter Hall’s reflections on the employment shifts recently seen in very large and influential places —especially London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo—where, by the 1970s, nearly all traditional manufacturing had departed “offshore,” most routine services had migrated to the suburbs or beyond, and various high-level functions (including producer and financial services), all still dependent on face-to-face contact and cheap communications, were becoming increasingly dominant (Hall, 1966). Follow-up research by John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor, and others traced the features and implications of these changes; here, Allen Scott (2001) provides a very useful summary. In the past two decades, global research has focused more on the various ways that public and private agents (e.g., firms, research labs, and universities) unevenly interact across space, both within and among large cities (Brenner, 2019; Storper et al., 2015). Until COVID-19, the general background was a period of ascendant globalization, albeit one with pauses, where the behaviors of agents evolved but generally adapted over time, even with the emergence of new and disruptive transportation and communications technologies (Baldwin, 2016). ThisHandbook, comprised of 29 chapters spread over five sections, is edited by Zachary Neal, a psychologist, and Céline Rozenblat, a geographer. The 53 contributors come from 14 nations, including the United States (20), United Kingdom (12), Australia (3), People’s Republic of China (3), France (3), and nine others (12). The disciplinary homes of these scholars are not noted but many have been drawn from the classics, spatial sciences (geography), mathematical ecology, and physics. Economists, perhaps trained in cliometrics, appear to constitute a surprisingly small minority. The book is sensibly organized, the writing is well edited, the mathematics is kept to a minimum, and the various discussions are usefully supplemented with numerous figures, many of which are in color. A hard copy print, whose price exceeds $300, is expensive but an e-copy, priced near $30, is entirely reasonable.