RELATIONSHIP, NETWORK, AND NEIGHBORHOOD: REVIEW ON URBAN COMMUNITY SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS AND ITS PROSPECT

Traditional urban communities alocal entities and community planning system have been facing great challenges coming with current globalization, urbanization, and socio economic transformation process. Social network analysis, as an emerging social science research paradigm focusing on relational network study provides worthwhile research perspective and methods for urban community planning and research under the context of transformation, by means of setting up an explanatory bridge between micro researches concentrating on individuals and macro researches on social structure. This pape provides a brief introduction to the developmen background, research perspectives and methods, a well as main research contents of social network analysis, and then systematically summarizes the overseas and domestic research achievements on social network analysis at the level of urban neighborhood community, which demonstrates the signifi cance of introducing social network analysis into urban community planning shown as breaking through the limitations of traditional community study dominated by functionalism and structuralism. In the end, the paper proposes some suggestions on the frontiers of urban community social network analysis in China.