Chase-Dunn’s Scholarship on Cities and Urbanization

Abstract

This essay is intended to be a hybrid scholarly and personal review of Christopher Chase-Dunn's contributions to urban sociology and urban studies more broadly. The essay points out that these contributions have been significant, and they have often been indirect via his influence on students and other of his professional associates. That I have been among those influenced by his work and by my association with him contributes to the personal tone of the essay. We will see that ChaseDunn's research featuring cities is strikingly expansive, both in terms the huge swathes of human history that it covers as well as its eagerness to embrace multiple academic disciplines-e.g., sociology, archeology, history, and urban studies-for both theoretical and empirical fuel for his scholarship. And, we will see that his scholarship on cities was fundamentally global long before "globalization" became understood as a ubiquitous organizing principle for human affairs.Globalizing the Study of Cities in Relation to "Development" Today, in 2017, it seems commonplace for urban studies scholars to take into account global processes and structures when their attention is focused on understanding urbanization and contemporary urban problems, such as gentrification, urban informality, social and spatial polarization-particularly by class, and race/ethnicity, slums and poverty, and urban economic