Communities, Complexity, and the ‘Conchoration’: Network Analysis and the Ontology of Geographic Units

Abstract

Abstract Whether to treat regions as distinct, bordered entities or meshes of borderless flows has long been a debate for geographers. This paper uses the methodological and conceptual insights of network analysis to argue for an approach to regionalisation that treats them neither as perfectly enclosed nor perfectly borderless. By comparing the many contested readings of ‘community’ in geography and the social sciences to the operational definition of a ‘community’ in graph theory, I extend historic questions about the spatial definition of human communities and describe how network analysis can offer insight about the texture of human geography. A case study, using network data about commuting in the New England region of the US, shows how these algorithmically‐detected regions are both stable and fluid at once. The paper proposes the term ‘conchoration’ to describe the ontology of emergent, functionally whole regions which are nevertheless perforated and interdependent.

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