Urban sociology ultimately aims to study the city and the components which make up its complex social reality. Such an endeavor cannot be taken without first identifying the boundaries to a city – what is urban life in contrast to non-urban life? In my opinion, such a question requires an anthropological and historical approach in addition to sociology. No question of substance can be addressed in an academically linear fashion, anyway. In terms of how the readings approach this question, I do feel that some of the discussions seem too recent and discount the complexity and diversity of urban life back to the onset of agriculture. If cities present too much flux for a concrete definition, perhaps broadening the scale to include all examples of urban life could illuminate commonalities to understanding how cities form.
Park (1915) describes “ancient cit[ies]” as a fortress useful in wartime defense, whereas modern cities are centered around commerce and are ultimately derived from the marketplace itself. Free markets are what ended serfdom and provided freedom to the inhabitants of an area. Burgess (1925) describes the late transition from rural to urban in American cities in contrast to European ones, and in doing so emphasizes a cultural blindness to the indigenous civilizations that inhabited the continent prior to Europeans and what their permutations of urban life entailed (and in addition, how certain American cities have pre-colonial roots at their foundations).
When all definitions of urban entail modern and Western visions (“the skyscraper, the subway, the department store, the daily newspaper, and social work”) (Burgess, 1925, p. 37), the investigation of urban life becomes diluted and myopic. Zukin (2011) posits the question of the difference between being a journalist, anthropologist, ethnography, and making scientific knowledge and enacting social justice, though I’m not entirely sure what distinction is being made. Martinotti (2011) notes that urban sociology includes a spatial (and as such historical) component (p. 2), but what to what depth does this historical component delve? This historical depth is touched upon when Martinotti later notes that ancient cities also had profound technology (“walls, pyramids, aqueducts, [and] roads” (p.10)). Scott and Storper (2015) mention the over-emphasis on cities of the global North and argue that historically cities are the result of the redistribution of agricultural surplus yielding “political administration, ceremonial and religious pursuits, [and] craft production” (p. 10). At its core, such a definition could adequately define a modern city, as well.
It does seem that as discussions of urban life become more recent, they also stretch to include urban models from the past in order to fully understand the onset of urban living and the impacts that it has on populations.
-Christopher Ryan
