Читать книгу Future Urban Habitation - Группа авторов - Страница 36

In 1973, the American sociologist Mark Granovetter wrote about the ‘strength of weak ties’, noting that while cliques are bastions of support for in‐group members, a society made up of cliques ultimately fails to be socially cohesive. He envisioned instead a society made up of bridges linking cliques. In this context, weak ties are paradoxically ‘strong’.

Here, the ‘small world’ experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram (1967) are instructive. He began his studies by giving participants an envelope (or parcel) to be passed on to a particular target person (a real person in the USA). The rule required that participants pass the envelope/parcel only to someone they knew – a contact – someone they thought was better positioned to relay the envelope/parcel to the target person. As it turned out, the chain was more likely to be completed when envelopes/parcels were sent to weaker ties such as acquaintances and friends than to stronger ties like family members. Furthermore, assuming the target person was of a different race/ethnicity than the original participant, the envelope/parcel travelled much faster when it entered the hands of a contact/intermediary from the same racial/ethnic group as the target person.

The experiment illustrates the nature of the social world, as organized in terms of clusters; it also illuminates Granovetter's argument on the strength of weak ties as bridges connecting otherwise inward‐looking cliques. These bridges make inclusivity possible.

Singapore is a city of relations connected by bridges and, as such, is a model global city. But we should be cautious in our optimism. Cliques have been forming. A 2016 study I did on the personal communities of some 3000 Singaporeans, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, is illuminating (Chua et al. 2017). The survey was representative of the national resident population and comprised a slight oversampling of ethnic minorities to yield sufficient cases in their categories.