Cities

In the global era, the city has emerged as a strategic site for understanding some of the major new trends reconfiguring the social order. The city and the metropolitan region have become locations where major macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of global studies. Each of those major trends has its own specific contents and consequences. The urban moment is but one moment in their often complex multisited trajectories.

The city has long been a strategic site for the exploration of many of the issues confronting society. But it has not always been a heuristic space—a space capable of producing knowledge about some of the major transformations of an epoch. In the first half of the 20th century, the study of cities was at the heart of sociology. This is evident in the work of Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and most prominently the Chicago School, especially Robert Park and Louis Wirth, both deeply influenced by German sociology. These sociologists confronted massive processes—industrialization, urbanization, alienation, and a new cultural formation they called “urbanity.” Studying the city was not simply studying the urban. It was about studying the major social processes of an era. Since then, the study of the city, and with it urban sociology, gradually lost this privileged role as a lens for the discipline and as a producer of key analytic categories. There are many reasons for this, most important among which are questions of the particular developments of method and data in sociology generally. Critical was the fact that the city ceased being the fulcrum of epochal transformations and hence a strategic site for research about nonurban processes. Urban sociology became increasingly concerned with what came to be called “social problems.”

The worldwide resurgence in the 1990s of the city as a site for research on these major contemporary dynamics is evident in multiple disciplines—sociology, anthropology, economic geography, cultural studies, and literary criticism. In the global era, economists have begun to address the urban and regional economy in their analyses in ways that go beyond older forms of urban economics. Globalization has given rise to new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of sociocultural diversity. All of these are at a cutting edge of change. These trends do not encompass the majority of social conditions; on the contrary, most social reality probably corresponds to older continuing and familiar trends. Yet, although these trends involve only parts of the urban condition and cannot be confined to the urban, they are strategic in that they mark the urban condition in novel ways and make it, in turn, a key research site for major urban and nonurban trends.