Social networks in the city, or the urban condition of coexistence

Abstract

The present work brings an alternative approach to the possibility of designing coexistence in the city. It proposes that before conceiving and designing the spaces of coexistence, we need to understand the urban conditions to promote the recognition of differences of groups and classes in concrete spaces. It develops an approach able to identify different patterns of spatial appropriation deeply related to social networks formation: the spatialisation of practices and bodily movement. In turn, they constitute patterns of encounter and controlled possibilities of communication at the heart of the emergence of social networks. The paper aims to address processes of real-time segregationin our cities, unveiling roles of space in generating convergences and divergences of different socialities in urban experience.