Finding the city in sociology: Broadening and deepening the geographic scope of the urban and inequality literatures

Abstract

Cities have long been the object of fascination within sociology. Key portions of sociological literatures on inequality and globalization, for instance, have focused on urban spaces as essential sites for the production and reproduc-

Toward a sociology of global comparative placemaking

“…These approaches differ from explaining how bounded urban communities work using ecological metaphors to examining the service‐provision shift in cities and its economic consequences to demonstrating how conspicuous consumption changes the look and use of urban landscapes. More broadly, these approaches are utilized to explain how political economy shapes urban organization, relations, identity, and movement (Walton, 1993) and/or the way living in neighborhoods reproduces inequality (Prener, 2020; Ren, 2018).…”

“…Integrating these frameworks with US scholarship is key to creating a robust global sociology of comparative placemaking. This sociology would understand space—and cities in particular—as both setting and critical object of analysis (Prener, 2020). I ask us to consider the following studies to imagine what a multi‐method and comparative analysis of placemaking across contexts can tell us about the relationships between—and inside of—the urban, the nation, and the world.…”