ABSTRACT
In this chapter we develop a set of case studies of urban community formations among secondary school-age children in contrasting areas of the city of Liverpool, UK. We present and discuss a series of visual representations of the community contexts, drawing from public sources of data, space syntax Depthmap models of the local road network and ultimately from the participants’ perspectives of their community spatial contexts. We highlight the unevenness and diversity of these perspectives, involving many different sentiments applied to particular assets in the community spaces. Using a graph data frame structure, we were able to describe these assets in terms of their vertex identities within a network graph of community relationships. We have been able to observe their network relationships both geographically, based on fixed geo-coordinates, and in terms of their network functionality. This means that we can observe the degree to which a ‘central’ location for the community life, such as a sports facility, lies at the centre of their functional network. We also consider ways in which the centrality of a spatial asset might promote its value in terms of community formation. We have also been able to observe how the geographic and infrastructural parameters of community spatial context might have influenced the communities’ formations. We apply a weighting mechanism to the vertices, and use a force-directed format to represent asymmetries of their inter-relationships. Finally, we use these graphic tools to form an assessment of affordances for community formation in the spatial contexts we sampled.
