How City People Connect – A Practical Key to Unlock Urban Complexity

By S. Crawley

Photo by Christian Lueon Unsplash

Last time, we looked at why complexity is the new urban reality.

Navigating urban complexity requires us to change the way we engage with our cities. There are no blueprints, but remaining prayerful, curious, experimental, and collaborative will help us move forward.

This time, we're going to dive specifically into social complexity.

Why social complexity?

Because God's Kingdom is fundamentally relational.

God's very nature is relational. The Good News, at its core, is the invitation to step back into the childlike relationship our Father-King desires and has always wanted with us. The connection and flow of relationships are central to God's Kingdom and to discipleship.

Cities have changed the way people relate. The better we understand this, the better we are empowered to sow Kingdom seed that invites people into a renewed relationship with our Father-King.

Three Types of Social Connections

It can be helpful to think of our social environments being filled with one of three different types of relationships (or 'ties'):

1) Strong Ties are relationships with people who largely share our values, perspectives, and knowledge. They are also likely to have overlapping close friendships. We trust and depend on these people most and invest ourselves more in these relationships.

2) Weak Ties are relationships with people we know and may interact with. However, our social worlds don't significantly overlap, and our connection may not be very deep or frequent. These relationships still need to be nurtured, but doing so takes less time and energy than Strong Ties because there are fewer expectations in the relationship.

3) Potential Ties are other people who are in our social environment. We have no direct connection or interaction with them, but we could if we chose to.

Everyone has these three kinds of relationships in their worlds. But what do they look like in the city?

Social Connections in the City

Urbanisation has changed the ways humans interact - it’s called Urbanism (Oxford Dictionary definition: “the way of life characteristic of cities and towns“).

In traditional rural settings, the pool of people is limited and fairly stable. In many situations, everyone in the area is either a Strong or Weak Tie. Strong Ties form based on sharing the same physical space, being related to each other, and/or experiencing life together.

Urban environments are different.

In many cities, the number of people living in a square kilometre is much higher than a generation ago. Public transport allows us to maintain face-to-face relationships with people who are further away. Developments in communication technology mean we can interact with people all over the world.

Sociologists tell us that the number of Strong Ties is roughly the same in rural and urban settings. However, Weak Ties increase exponentially in an urban environment, and potential relationships are practically infinite. The bottom line is this: in urban environments, “social potential” is unlimited.

Social Stress & Opportunities in the City

Urban people are still relational and connected to others. However, their capacity for social connectedness is spread across a higher number of relationships. In a city, it is simply not possible to have a weak or strong tie with every person in your environment.

Urban dwellers live in a literal sea of people and are forced to decide who they will engage with and who they will screen out. This reality can lead to a lot of stress and mental health issues.

The positive side of city life is the greater freedom to find and choose social connections that are convenient, beneficial, or comfortable. There is a huge range of opportunities and potential for learning and exchanging ideas, finding work, doing business, creativity, and access to other resources.

Three Points of Urban Connection

To manage social overload and maximise opportunities, people tend to seek out relational connections in smaller clusters based on shared needs, interests, or causes.

1.       Shared needs include areas of perceived lack (single parents or isolated elderly people who are lacking emotional support), brokenness (workaholic businesspeople who are struggling to find balance in their lives) or hunger (students preparing for examinations leading to university).

2.       Shared interests include any kind of hobby or recreational pastime, such as sports, meditation, gaming, and Sherlock Holmes stories.

3.       Shared causes usually involve a common passion for bringing some kind of political or social change to part of the world.

David Broodryk coined the phrase "affinity groups" to describe the social clusters that form in this way. The foundation of the relationship is not shared history, geography or family ties but individual situations or preferences. People are often simultaneously members of several of these kinds of affinity groups.

An affinity group is like an urban village, which attracts individuals and relational groups who share a concern for the same thing. Although each affinity group is diverse, it also shares particular needs, characteristics, and culture which draws people together, creating and strengthening ties between people.

How Does This Help Us Engage the City?

God wants to bring shalom and healing to the entire city.

We often view the city in terms of geographic locations (e.g., suburbs or districts) or ethnic groups. However, these categories are too large. They usually contain multitudes of diverse social networks and are simply too complex to engage meaningfully at this level.

From a relational perspective, the city is actually a complex combination of many small relational networks that overlap, interact and interconnect.

Individually, we all can (and should) love and serve faithfully in the personal social spaces where God has placed and called us - our families, our workplaces and our neighbourhoods. However, our capacity for this kind of interaction is limited and if the group is small, we are less likely to find a critical mass of spiritual hunger that can grow and spill into other social spaces as we serve it.

“Affinity groups” give us an alternative way to look at the city, breaking social complexity down into Goldilocks-sized pieces—not too big to engage meaningfully, not too small to spread. As we prayerfully discern which urban village(s) God is calling us to serve, we can focus on serving that particular village according to its specific needs and culture. At the same time, we can serve the spiritual hunger that God stirs up and create spaces for people to relate to Him directly.

How might we do that? Where could we start? We will explore these questions in future posts.

Getting Practical

1. What geographic regions and ethnic groups do you see when you look at your city?

2. What do you see when you look at your city through the lens of “affinity groups”?

3. List the affinity groups that:

i. You are naturally connected with

ii. Are closest to your heart

iii. God has given you access to

4. What is God saying?

Discipling the Urban Harvest provides practical insights and encouragement to walk with God in multiplying discipleship in an increasingly urban world - growing as children of the Father, serving the communities He has called us to, and discipling those hungry to know Him.