Fractured Social Networks in The Inner City
I grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo; a city that to many exemplifies post-industrial urban decay. I’ve heard statistics about my city, like how it ranks among the poorest cities in the country with more than thirty percent of its citizens living below the poverty line, or how since 1955 the city has lost more than sixty percent of its manufacturing jobs.
But growing up in the suburbs it’s easy to forget these facts. My friends were the children of professors and lawyers and doctors. My public high school had a new astro-turf football field, and new computers every few years. On summer nights, my friends and I would stay out late into the night, riding around the neighborhood on our bikes, while only half a mile away the murder rate was four times the national average.
I don’t think that this was a unique experience. Many of us who grew up in suburbs have difficulty empathizing with the people who live on “the other side”. There’s a clear failure for information about these conditions to flow out from the inner city. But in the case of Buffalo, it’s easy to find one culprit for this lack of cultural understanding.
Attached is a screenshot from http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/ of Buffalo. Every dot on the map represents the permanent residence of an individual. Blue dots represent white individuals, red dots Asians, green dots African Americans, and orange dots Hispanics. Running through the middle of the map is Main Street, which forms a cultural and physical barrier between races. Every time that I look at this map (which I do surprisingly often) I’m taken aback by how clean this line is. Even without the street labels, the break between colors is so crisp that anyone would be able to point out the divide.
With this construction in place, we’re left to wonder on its societal effects. Imagine the underlying social network that spans this map; the links of friendship that naturally form between neighbors and coworkers as similar interests and passions draw individuals together. Consider the limits that are placed on such networks by the introduction of cultural barriers, especially when these barriers are accented by physical separation (i.e. segregation)
Consider those individuals who live deep within these neighborhoods. They have few opportunities to develop relationships with others outside of their groups. They may live, work, shop and socialize entirely within these ethnically homogenous areas. The local social network becomes stratified as individuals within these enclaves become more likely to form bonds with other members of the same enclave.
Perceived and real social barriers between these groups may create a “rich-get-richer” effect. If individuals within one community perceive that there may be some sort of negative benefit for forming relationships with people outside of their group, then those individuals are much less likely to do so. This, in turn, can propagate an information cascade that promotes the creation of similar enclaves in future generations.
If we continue to analyze gentrification though the lens of network effects, can we propose solutions to limit its spread and to mitigate its effects? As we’ve learned in class multiple times, small changes in a graph’s structure can have serious effects on the movement of information through the network (i.e in information cascades). Specifically, I would like to make the conjecture that the addition of a few key edges between major groups could promote the creation of many more. If we leverage “rich-get-richer” to reverse the momentum of social stratification, then it may be possible to promote cultural understanding between groups in the city.