Summary
Contents
The SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding.
Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension.
Key Concepts in Urban Studies:
Clearly and concisely explains the basic ideas in the interdisciplinary field of urban studies; Offers concise discussions of concepts ranging from community, neighbourhood, and the city to globalization, the New Urbanism, feminine space, and urban problems; Constitutes a re-examination of the key ideas in the field; Is illustrated throughout with international examples; Provides an essential reference guide for all students and teachers across the urban disciplines within sociology, political science, planning and geography.
Socio-Spatial Approach
Socio-Spatial Approach
The socio-spatial approach to urban analysis is the consequence of a paradigm shift that took place beginning with the late 1960s (Lefebvre, 1991). Prior to that time, the dominant view of urban processes among sociologists and geographers was called ‘human ecology’ (see Gottdiener, 1994; Gottdiener and Hutchison, 2000). Ideologically biased, human ecology grounded the relationship between social and spatial processes in a biologically based metaphor borrowed from the plant and animal kingdoms. Urban patterns of population dispersal and development were viewed as an adjustment process to the environment that is organic and adaptive rather than being the product of class, race and gender-based social relations stemming from a complex mode of social organization. Human ecology therefore, with its emphasis on adaptation, was particularly inadequate to the understanding of urban conflict during the 1960s ...
