ABSTRACT
In 1931 Henry C. Beck created a map of London’s Underground tube network. Beck realized that a passenger could be moved around the network by making him or her follow a given sequence of stations, a sequence that has relative autonomy from the physical geography of the city above ground. Global and local, abstract network and concrete place are redundant categories because places are actively co-constructed through actant-networks which are always distanciated and ‘concrete, grounded, and real’ because they are a product of connections, relations, practices and performances. Place is traditionally viewed, with space and environment, as central to the project of human geography. Very little has been written about places as networks, let alone the distinctive topologies of networked places. The relational geographies of the excluded and marginalized who are cut offfrom the glamorous side of neo-liberal global networks to participate in quite different networks altogether.
