The Sociology of the City

1) some important classical theorists:

Lewis Wirth: "Urbanism as a Way of Life"

Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”

Robert Park & Ernest Burgess: The City

Lewis Mumford: The City in History

--these guys focus on seeing urbanization as a kind of natural process, the city as a spontaneously evolving organism; hence linked to the grand theories of functionalism and symbolic interactionism

2) some important contemporary theorists:

Manuel Castells: The City & the Grassroots

David Harvey: The Urban Experience

Ira Katznelson: Marxism and the City

Saskia Sassen: The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo

Mike Davis: City of Quartz

--these guys focus on seeing the city as a constructed environment and marketed fantasy that systematically privileges some city dwellers over others, hence linked to conflict theory

3) some big points about urbanization:

a) urbanization is largely a modern phenomenon

b) the city historically as a place of disease & disorder

c) urbanization is the handmaid of industrialization

d) families prefer to live in suburbs, even if the price is long commutes to work; suburbanization often exacerbates residential segregation

--also forces us to think in terms of metropolitan areas (SMSAs) (e.g. Bloomberg, Phila Nonresident Tax)

e) there is an abiding pattern of ethnic succession in inner-city neighborhoods

f) typical urban residents have just as strong ties to others as do non-urbans

g) urban pathologies are not widespread, but are focused in particular areas

h) impact of urban life on attitudes (Simmel):

the importance of ‘acquaintance’

the blasé attitude

individuation and social masks

4) the new urban geography/sociology:

a) that social space and its arrangement shapes our interests, values, cognition

b) the deliberate creation, mythologization and marketing of urban space

c) the exercise of control over the structure and inhabitants of the city by capitalist interests, & the structure's control over us

d) increasing importance of cities--moreso than nation-states--as foci for transnational flows of people and for their symbolism

5) Mike Davis’s "excavation of the future" in Los Angeles

a) many features of American urban development/politics are present there in heightened form

--1) power in hands of private industry: aerospace, water utilities, real estate developers, hollywood—consider Bowl games today; PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC SPACE

--2) shifts in elite power follow shift in economic restructuring

--3) internationalization of class formation: those who vote vs those who work

b) the commodification and mythologization of place is more advanced there than in any other city: La-La Land, Hollywood, utopian and dystopian visions;

c)the use of ‘structure’—space allocation, object design—for social control

e.g., bus benches, garbage cans, surveillance equipment