I read three of the reading materials, which push me to think about some basic questiones? What is city? Why it is important to research? How to do the research with the balance of special case and common theories?

Scott and Storper try to build a general theory of the urbanization process from the perspective of trade, production, which uses agglomeration as a mechanism leading to sharing public goods, matching people and jobs, learning from the flowing of information. But different cities are different because of their specific situation of locations, land use and human interactions. The combine the special cases and common dimensions together push me more to think about how to do the case study. Firstly, I should respect the unique of each city, thinking about the specific local condition of policy, cultures and level of economic. But I also need to think about how to link the empirical special case to a broad theoretical thinking on several common topic of urban studies.

Zukin and Martinotti use their own careers to inflect the situation of urban sociology in America, wish that urban researcher can contribute to progressive change in 21century. As a student in architecture but not sociology, what I concerned is how to understand the changing of environment from the sociology perspecitive, which not only care about the clients, aesthetics and economic development but the justice and freedom of human beings.