Neighborhood Technologies ― Media and Mathematics of Dynamic Networks

The publication examines the transdisciplinary actuality and genealogy of dynamic, locally defined networks. It stems from sociologist Thomas Schelling’s research on housing segregation in major US-American cities as a historical case study for its concept of Neighborhood Technologies. Henceforward, neighborhoods constituted a new research paradigm in which the complex macro-behaviors of a system and the non-linear dynamics of social collectives are generatively and procedurally put forth by rigidly defined microscopic neighborhood relations. Neighborhood technologies thus depict an intermediate or meso-range for the linkage of single local agents with the overall global dynamics of social networks in many different scientific disciplines – from Sociology to Biology, to Ecomomics and Logistics, or to Robotics or Neurology. The volume questions neighborhood principles on four levels: 1) How do local neighborhood relations affect global collective behaviors; what relations emerge between micro- and macro-perspectives? 2) How, when, and why have complex networks and their relations been built on local neighborhoods and “generated” instead of being “designed” or “constructed”? 3) How do neighborhood technologies operate as a “social principle”? 4) How do Neighborhood Technologies initiate novel scientific neighborhoods?

The book comprises contributions from Computer Science, Mathematics, Mathematical Sociology, Media and Culture Studies, Theater Studies, and Architecture. It explicitly endeavors to bridge the traditional gap between the “two cultures” (C.P. Snow) by its careful selection of scientists from the Natural Science with a transdisciplinary mindset, and techno-savvy researchers from the Humanities.