Symposium on the ‘Future of Urban Networks’

10th Aug 2017

An Urban Studies Foundation co-sponsored symposium on the ‘Future of Urban Network Research’ will take place in Ghent between 18 and 20 September.

Research on the topic of urban networks now extends across many social and natural science disciplines (e.g. geography, sociology, engineering, physics) and over many scales of analysis from the intensely local formation of social networks among neighbours to the regional formation of transportation networks to the global formation of transnational economic networks. This rapid growth in the size, scope, and scale of urban network research has left the area invigorated, but without a clear agenda for future work. Specifically, there are two major questions confronting urban network researchers. First, which theoretical and analytic approaches in the extant literature have been successful and warrant further development, and which should be abandoned or require revision? Second, what existing topics warrant continued investigation and what new issues and research questions could benefit from an urban network perspective? With sponsorship from the Urban Studies Foundation, Michigan State University, and Universiteit Gent, this symposium will convene 40 established and early-career urban network scholars to answer these questions and develop an agenda for the future of urban network research.

Full details of the symposium are available here.