An interesting couple of paragraphs and illustration on ‘neighbourhood networks’ taken from Urban Flotsam (CHORA, Rotterdam, 2001).
A neighbourhood network is a soft structure, it covers a great extent of the urban environment without any visible physical installations. It can be a very efficient system in a city undergoing radical changes in its administrative structure, a city out of control. Each person and each group of people works as a nodal point (a kind of fold in the social tissue) and the trajectories through different horizons initiate communication networks which go through the different strata of the social structure of the city.
Navigating from person to person, through the different strata, another map of the city appears – a map of relations, of networks, of soft structures that maintain an identity, a cohesion, necessary in the current state of uncertainty, but acting as seeds for the next state of development.
Infrastructures of Autonomy 