This week’s reading made me wonder what kinds of questions are the right ones to be asking in the field of urban sociology. Even the most basic line of inquiry– what is a city? can be unpacked to reveal layers of problematic reasoning and complicated understandings of the question. I find it intriguing yet unsurprising that the more recent articles (Zurkin, Martinotti, Scott and Storper) focus on a theoretical and economically framed understanding of the multiplicity and enormity of such a task. Scott and Storper insist on surpassing the specificity of cities to establish a superstructure framework for understanding the mechanisms by which similar environments are created (namely, the segregation of neighborhoods,) and I found similar resonances in the Zurkin and Martinotti articles, and a strong sense of sociopolitical urgency in the DuBois abstract.

Who has the right to occupy space, and how do social power structures organize and dictate these rights? This is one question that I found occurring repeatedly, often subtly, in these readings. The discussion of the urban land nexus in Scott and Storpor’s article provides a useful entryway to this questions, as they discuss it in terms of a economically-determined urban mosaic. We see one example in the government-sponsored and white-only suburbs mentioned in the DuBois article. Zukin’s denunciation of “loft-living” (where workers are ousted from their spaces to make room for wealthy apartment-renters) also raises a similar question, and, in a roundabout way, so does Burgess’ interpretation of Chicago’s rings of habitation. Space in cities, where there is an a priori density of population, is highly politicized, but in many of these articles, is treated as equally psychological and moral as it is political (DuBois p5, Burgess p41, Park p35.) How do communities in a position of superstructure power manipulate questions of morality to justify these segregations and ousting of immigrants, different races, and otherwise marginalized groups? The Park and the Burgess essays articulate a moralizing stance on poverty and the poor distanced from understandings of economics and much more concerned with problematic investigations into immigrant mores and moral underpinnings. How do we formulate the right question to effectively answer this problem of the privilege of space?