New frontiers facing urban sociology at the Millennium

Abstract

The article examines some of the major challenges facing urban sociology at century's end given its traditions and lineages. These challenges arise out of the intersection of major macrosocial trends and their particular spatial patterns. The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where these macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these trends are globalization and the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of speci c types of socio-cultural diversity. Each one of these trends has its own speci c conditionalities, contents and consequences for cities, and for theory and research. Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in distinct, often complex manners, in a way they do not in just about any other setting. The city emerges once again as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations as it was in the origins of sociology. Can urban sociology address these challenges and in so doing once again produce some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader transformation?

From Prisons to Penthouses: The Changing Images of High-Rise Living in Melbourne

“…Sassen (2000) too suggests that these wider structural changes mean that the city 'is once again emerging as a strategic site for understanding major new trends that are re-configuring the social order' (p. 143).…”

New Maps, New Questions: Global Cities Beyond the Advanced Producer and Financial Services Sector

“…This is because they link the global city to our globalizing society and thus to a specific historical phase. The world city concept, to the contrary, can be applied to every important city throughout human history(Castells, 2002, p. 554;Sassen, 2000 Sassen, , p. 150, 2007. InSassen's words (2007, p. 20), global cities are 'subnational places in which multiple global circuits intersect and thereby position these cities in several structured cross-border geographies'.…”

Measuring… What? Notes on Some Globalization Indices

“…It is at most possible to study internationalization in this way, but not globalization. In other words, the globalization measures currently available are vitiated by what has been variously called methodological nationalism , embedded statism (Sassen, 2000), or methodological territorialism (Scholte, 2000)-a perspective which distorts the essence of globalization precisely when its study begins, and which yields data that 'in the best of cases are irrelevant and in the worse misleading, or even false' (Beck-Gernsheim, 2004, p. 106). Evident, therefore, is the need to identify genuinely global indicators: ones, that is, which are not merely the sums or averages of national data (EU, 1998;Bhalla, 2002, pp.…”

“…The crucial feature of globalization, the one that distinguishes it from mere internationalization, is the pervasiveness of the phenomenon of deterritorialization (Sassen, 2000;Scholte, 2000;Giaccardi & Magatti, 2003). There was a substantial coincidence in the modern age between the concepts of 'society' and 'nation state', and the nation state was the natural container of economic, cultural and political processes.…”