The majority of research in urban sociology tends to favor the study of urbanization, the development and growth of cities, over urbanism, the way of life in cities. Here, I identify a strand of urban sociology that explicitly focuses on the latter and introduce a theoretical framework for investigating culturally significant urban places. The urban culturalist perspective consists of six domains of research:1) images and representations of the city; 2) urban community and civic culture; 3) place-based myths, narratives, and collective memories; 4) sentiment and meaning of and for places; 5) urban identities and lifestyles; and 6) interaction places and practices. These distinct but related domains collectively provide a framework for addressing culture-place relationships in cities by offering a clear window into the ways that pepole use places as part of their cultural repertoires and how those repertoires can affect a city's social and physical environment.

This article is about a place that does not exist, yet. It is about residents' perceptions of redevelopment plans involving the reconstruction of a defunct neighborhood firehouse. Interviews revealed the residents' "collective imagination" as they actively envisioned potential future outcomes for a firehouse-turned-community center. When asked about the needs of the community, interviewees discussed the current conditions of their neighborhood (the present), its history (the past), and how they would like to see it change (the future). This corresponds well with George Herbert Mead's ideas about temporality. I argue that connecting the identity of a place to a sociological understanding of time (especially Mead's) is a necessary step for gaining a better understanding of the subjective side of urbanization and ultimately creating a better vernacular knowledge base for urban redevelopment plans.

No abstract

Though urban sociologists tend to study the growth and development of cities, there is a venerable yet often marginalized tradition that addresses the embodied experience of urban life. Studies of urban experiences have recently begun to flourish due, in part, to the rise of sensory scholarship. Recognizing the connections between urban experiences and sensory stimulations provides nuanced ways to explore the actions and interactions between individuals and their relationships to and with urban places. Relying on a diverse literature of recent studies that focus on cities as dense sensory environments, this article shows the significance of studying city life at the experiential and sensory levels. First, a few seminal early works are discussed, with specific emphasis on Georg Simmel. Then, each of the five bodily senses and their correlated sensescapes -seescapes, soundscapes, smellscapes, tastescapes, and touchscapes -are presented in order to show individuals and groups use their senses to experience and make sense of the city. The article concludes with a brief discussion of methods and few suggestions to encourage future analyses of the everyday embodied and emplaced practices and interpretations of being in the city.Most urban sociologists -as well as geographers, political scientists, economists, and scholars from equally important fields that contribute to the inter-and trans-disciplinary literature of "urban studies" -tend to study cities with a wide-angle lens, especially those studying globalization, global cities, and transnational urban networks. There is, however, a venerable yet often marginalized tradition that puts the experience of urban life at or near the forefront of analysis. Some of the first sociological studies, as well as literary depictions, of city life focused on the ways that budding industrialized cities affected the social psychological dynamics of urbanites (see Lees 1985;Strauss 1968). Despite a few notable exceptions, the actual experiences of being in the city -at the bodily, sensuous, or existential levels -have often been assumed rather than assessed through careful analysis and interpretation. This lacuna is shrinking; however, in large part because of the studies discussed herein.From the most mundane to the most spectacular, pure and unmediated experiences are difficult, if not impossible, to study empirically (see Davis 1997). One's narrative of their experience is always filtered through cultural expectations and norms of storytelling (Gubrium and Holstein, 2008). This should not halt the quest for understanding experiences in general and urban experience in particular. Stories are not any less real than the raw data of facts. "The factual accuracy of a story is often less important than the purpose of the story or the way that it is used" (Borer 2006b, 187). Fortunately, scholars have pushed forward, developing various ways to study social experiences without reducing them to the cognitive mechanisms and brain functions that can only be detected by MRIs and other sophi...

The micro-foundations of the American culture wars can be located by investigating informal accounts, narratives, and other forms of public discourse. We focus on the accounts of selfproclaimed Christian believers who are Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fans in order to uncover the nuanced ways they address the internal conflict between their religious beliefs and their leisure practices. Because American culture consists of multiple moral orders, individuals seek answers to questions about right and wrong in a great variety of social fields, including popular culture. By analyzing the accounts of Christian MMA fans who purposively use the Internet as a confessional device for claims making, we show that the culture wars are as much about conflicts within individuals as they are about conflicts between them. The culture wars are experienced by individuals offering and being offered confessional accounts of morality. We argue that these accounts and related boundary work are externalized products of an internalized culture war.