Urban Sociology

Urban Sociology

The concerns of urban sociology are in some sense reflected in the works of the founding fathers of the discipline. The transformations in industrial society that interested Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, are changes associated with urbanization and the transformation of societies from rural to urban-based. Important social processes, as the advent of class-consciousness for Marx, or rationalization for Weber, take place in city settings. But urban sociology itself—the sociological study of the causes and consequences of urbanization—dates back to the early twentieth century, and is most often associated with North American sociology, and with the Chicago school (Jan, 363).

From the 1920s on, sociologists associated with the University of Chicago developed a number of important early theories and studies and developed a distinctive ethnographic style of sociological research of urban problems. Famous early works include close observation of urban cultures and subcultures. Louis Wirth developed the approach to urban sociology that studied “urbanism as a way of life.” He was concerned with distinctively urban ways of sociability and interaction, which included for him a high degree of impersonal contact and a markedly rationalized approach to personal relationships. Robert Park's urban ecology approach sought to understand patterns of location and mobility in cities as result of competition between groups, as one might find in natural ecosystems. Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis (1945) challenged the urban ecology approach by showing that the distribution of black populations in ghettoes in the city of Chicago was a result of willful acts of exclusion and violence and not natural, competitive forces (Wirth, 1-24).

A new urban sociology was developed in the mid-1970s by scholars influenced by critical traditions in social science, most specifically Marxism and Marxist sociology. Conflicts in cities since the 1960s forced sociologists to rethink approaches to urban sociology to include social movements, riots, and other conflicts as central to urban settings, and Marxist approaches that emphasized economic exploitation and domination proved germane. The Research Committee on Urban and Regional Sociology of the International Sociological Association is considered a central organization in these developments.

Much of this work was published in its journal The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. A hallmark of the new urban sociology was its attention to the economic and political context under which cities developed and the role of cities in capitalist processes. Manuel Castells, who's Urban Question (1977), is considered one of the central texts of this body of work, concentrated on the role of cities in capitalist accumulation, consumption, and in guaranteeing the reproduction of labor for production. Christopher Pick-vance, William Tabb, Michael Smith, and Jean Lojkine advanced the understanding of the relationship between capitalist modes of production and features of the city. Urban sociologists concerned with questions of race relations and exclusion in the city, as Doug Massey and Nancy Denton, and John Logan and Harvey Molotch have also carried out studies in ways influenced by the new urban sociology. Related changes in the field of geography were also influential at the ...