Do grids demobilize? How street networks, social networks, and political networks intersect

Abstract

Amid rapid urbanization in the developing world, there is growing interest in the effects of urban context on political behavior. An underexplored element of urban context is the built environment itself—the physical architecture and design of urban space—which can structure how residents interact both with each other and with the state. Drawing on street network data and an original survey from urban Ghana, I suggest that more gridded, orderly neighborhoods reduce the social interactions residents have with neighbors, lower embeddedness in political problem-solving networks, and depress electoral turnout. Rather than making residents more legible to state officials, gridded streets make the local state and political realm less legible to residents by reducing opportunities to forge politically valuable social ties in a context of clientelist politics. The paper demonstrates that greater focus is needed on built environments to understand the social structures undergirding grassroots urban politics.