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 majority of Americans live and work. Further, it argues that this four-community typology is logically dubious and empirically obsolete. If the field were redefined as a sociology of settlements, analytically more logical and substantively more relevant typologies could be developed. Another politically and organizationally more realistic alternative would split the field into four: a sociology of the city and one concentrating on other settlements, with a third field devoted to community studies, and the fourth to spatial sociology.