A Quest for Structure and Agency within Urban Sociology

Sociology of Poverty: Quest for a New Horizon

It is the common end of the most diverse destinies, an ocean into which lives derived from the most diverse social strata flow together. No change, no development, no polarization or breakdown of social life occurs without leaving its residuum in the stratum of poverty. Thus, what makes one poor is not the lack of means. The poor person, sociologically speaking, is the individual who receives a...

Agency, structure, institutions, discourse (ASID) in urban and regional development

This paper presents the relations among agency (A), structure (S), institutions (I), and discourse (D) and their analytical relevance for socio-economic development. It argues that an adequate account of these relations must recognize their inherent spatio-temporality and, hence, their space–time dynamics. This is not an optional extra but a definite descriptive and explanatory requirement. Mor...

Some Problems of and Futures for Urban Sociology: Toward a Sociology of Settlements

Forty years ago, Manuel Castells asked whether urban sociology had a subject matter and whether the term urban still had meaning—and this article reopens these and related questions. It also wonders why today’s American urban sociology has concentrated on cities, especially big ones, concurrently virtually ignoring the three other types of communities—suburbs, towns, and rural areas—in which a ...

The Future of Urban Sociology

Structuralist Marxism, urban sociology and geography: reflections on Urban sociology: critical essays

Urban sociology: critical essays is largely a set of translations of articles on urban development, first published in French in 1968-72, and written by authors adopting a Marxist perspective. Chris Pickvance's collection was one of the first attempts to introduce to an English-language audience a new research tradition that profoundly influenced not just urban sociology but also urban, regiona...