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This essay aims to examine metropolitan cities of Latin America with two aspects of the literature in anthropology, history, and sociology in mind. First, the essay addresses an imbalanced focus on cities in the USA and Canada by sketching the significance of migration, creation, and urban development in four major metropolises of Latin America. Second, in place of a framework of urban imaginaries, which has dominated the sociology of Latin American cities in recent years, I argue for a more precise notion of metropolitan imaginaries that better frames the creativity of particular cities and their level of integration into international and regional networks. With this more precise notion, I distinguish southern cities as highly connected places, which attract migrants and bring economic and cultural traffic to their shores, ports, plazas, and streets. They are lively centers of Atlantic modernity with connections that generate greater magnitude for creativity and, as such, bear international significance as places of architecture and urban design. In their informal settlements, impulses of organic creation further distinguish southern metropolises from their North American counterparts. The quality of international and regional connections distinguishes these cities from other urban centers in Latin America, a point underestimated in the literature on urban imaginaries. In this essay, I examine 19th and 20th-century Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Each is distinguished from most cities by the magnitude of migration, the diversity of their populations, and the connections they have to global and regional developments. Crucially, each one stands out for the quality and impact of their metropolis-making, particularly in creative architecture and urban design.

Commercial gentrification often accompanies residential gentrification. Both processes contribute to the real or perceived threat of displacement for longtime residents of ethnic enclaves experiencing gentrification. Cultural displacement is a related concern among residents who may experience a declining sense of ownership, control, or belonging as newer residents and commercial establishments move into their communities. Yet, other longtime residents experience an increased sense of safety as their neighborhoods gentrify and they may appreciate the new amenities gentrification brings. I highlight the symbolic significance of local businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods and identify two different patterns of longtime residents experiencing their communities as something alien to them—a phenomenon I call alienation from place. Alienation from place may be a product of social and cultural displacement or may be alleviated by changes to a neighborhood accompanying gentrification processes, a posteriori alienation from place and a priori alienation from place, respectively.

Since the inception of urban sociology, the “neighborhood” has served as the dominant context to capture developmentally significant youth experiences beyond the home. Yet no large-scale study has examined patterns of exposure to the most commonly used operationalization of neighborhood—the census tract—among urban youth. Using smartphone GPS data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study ( N = 1,405), we estimate the amount of time youth spend in residential neighborhoods and consider explanations for variation in neighborhood exposure. On average, youth (ages 11 to 17) spend 5.7 percent of their waking-time in their neighborhood but not at home, 60 percent at home, and 34.3 percent outside their neighborhood. Multilevel negative binomial regression models indicate that residence in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods is associated with less time in one’s neighborhood. Higher levels of local violence and the absence of a neighborhood school are negatively associated with time in-neighborhood and mediate the concentrated disadvantage effect. Fractional multinomial logit models indicate that higher violence is linked with increased time at home, and school absence is associated with increased outside-neighborhood time. Theoretical development and empirical research on neighborhood effects should incorporate findings on the extent and nature of neighborhood and broader activity space exposures among urban youth.

Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly American, cities on which much of urban sociology’s conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them in terms of a standard urban vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way of seeing. We need a vocabulary that is able to accommodate their different urban experience. This special issue contributes to the work of building that vocabulary. We select five keywords in urban sociology— eviction, segregation, suburbs, violence, and gentrification—and reconstruct them in light of the places we study (India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa). Our aim is to produce a set of keywords better equipped to travel South and, in the process, advance a truly global urban sociology.

Two previous English translations of this classic essay by Georg Simmel have been in wide circulation, shaping the worldwide reception of Simmel’s urban theory. Both rendered Simmel’s philosophical idiom in psychologistic terms, translating Seele (soul) as ‘psyche’ and Geist (spirit) as ‘mind’. With their overtones of behaviourism, earlier translations bear the clear mark of their time. This translation seeks to return, as much as is possible without sacrificing lucidity, to Simmel’s original idiom, in the hope that this will contribute to an imaginative rediscovery of this classic text. The introduction to the new translation gives an overview of the publication’s historical and intellectual context, its reception and influence, and the distinctiveness of Simmel’s approach.

This paper proposes a new theoretical perspective for understanding urban social spaces and their interrelations. In an effort to understand these multifaceted, complex relations, an inquiry committed to a flat ontology was deployed. Accordingly, we draw our theorization on the Lacanian ontological lack, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Laclau and Mouffe’s discursivity of social reality. Thus, we propose that urban social spaces are discursive and real entities with real and sensual qualities and constituted through specific relations. They are located within discursive social relations, where each urban social space has a “differential position” in an urban system of relations. Each urban social space has an “identity,” defined by its specific mixture of social groups and its specific real and sensual qualities. These qualities construct a sensual object with a specific sensual identity within the web of different urban social spaces. Therefore, urban social spaces are being made through multiple interrelations and are constituted through their location in a nexus of positions. The proposed framework that captures the interrelations among urban social spaces is based on three interrelated logics: the logic of difference, the logic of equivalence, and the fantasmatic logic. Understanding the relations of urban social spaces through these logics offers multifaceted social, political, psychological, and spatial illumination, details, and a more nuanced and flexible investigation of the formation and change of these spaces. Hereby, the city is conceived as comprised of spatiotemporal configurations where social spaces have social and political relations ranging from harshly antagonistic to inclusive and equivalent. This proposed framework informs both sociological and political realms of planning theory. It provides planning theory with new perspectives for understanding the city as a web of interrelated social spaces. Furthermore, it allows a more critical understanding of urban reality by illuminating inequality, injustice, antagonism, and the formulation of “otherness.”

Research often links gentrification to racial inequality. Nevertheless, scholars know surprisingly little about whether the racial composition of gentrifiers moderates the consequences of gentrification. Few quantitative studies compare the effects of gentrification across different racial groups, and those that do tend to limit their outcome of interest to housing. This paper represents perhaps the first ever large–scale assessment of the ways in which gentrifiers’ racial composition is associated with local retail development. Using data on retailers in over 500 U.S. cities between 2000 and 2010, the paper shows that retail development was significantly slower in neighborhoods gentrified by Blacks rather than Whites. Put differently, White gentrifiers gained a disproportionate amount of the retail development associated with gentrification. Scholars must acknowledge that the consequences of gentrification vary depending on the racial composition of gentrifiers, which is likely one reason why the field struggles to appropriately operationalize and measure gentrification.

Urban sociology highlights an important role that a city’s social infrastructure, or “third-places,” play in supporting healthy communities. Informed by social identity theorizing, this study explores when and why older adults engage with third-places and how a sense of wellbeing can be derived from their participation. Focus-group interviews were conducted with a sample of community-dwelling older adults ( N = 31) to examine the nature of one such third-place, a suburban neighborhood bridge club. Thematic analysis suggests that (a) the socio-spatial context of third-places can both enable and restrict participation, (b) third-places can support positive social identities (as bridge players, club members, locals), (c) enacting these identities in third-places facilitates a sense of wellbeing, and (d) third-places are potential connectors to the wider community. We discuss the policy implications for the development of age-friendly cities and the role of social identity processes in engaging with community groups in third-places.

It is evident from the daily lives of cross sections of the urban society that most working women choose to opt for public transportation. Regrettably, during the course of their commute, they are susceptible to verbal, physical, psychological and financial harassment at the hands of their fellow travellers and bus operators. Underreporting ensures that cases of this kind do not surface in mainstream media. In the recent past, to the best of the knowledge of the researcher, very few studies have been conducted around the world on this subject in general, and in India in particular. Hence, the present research assumes significance. In this connection, an attempt has been made to measure the prevalence and nature of harassment suffered by women using public transportation in Chennai city in victimological perspective. A convenience sample of 530 women riding public transportation was identified and data was collected from them using a self-reported questionnaire. The findings revealed that around 35 per cent of all young women have been harassed in one of the forms mentioned above in the last six months. Further results and implications are discussed in the article.

In this study, the researcher has studied the family climate for adolescents in urban society in India. The typical urban family in India has modern lifestyle and is also technologically advanced. It is believed that these families are progressive in comparison to their rural counterparts. The present research work is aimed to study the family climate of adolescents from urban families in association with their gender. A total of 309 adolescents (163 boys and 146 girls) in the age group of 14–15 years were randomly selected from the secondary schools of Aurangabad, a city in Maharashtra state of India for the academic year 2016–2017. The tool used for data collection was family climate scale (FCS) developed by Dr Beena Shah and published by National Psychological Corporation, Agra, India. In this test, family climate means an interpersonal relationship between the parents and the child. The test assesses the family climate on 10 dimensions. Data were collected by personally meeting the adolescents. The collected data were analysed using chi-squared test. The study showed that more male adolescents had favourable family climate as compared to female adolescents and the difference was significant. Also, the number of female adolescents having unfavourable family climate was significantly higher as compared to male adolescents. The study concluded that the age-old gender bias is still very much prevalent in India. The boys are favoured and given a more conducive and positive family atmosphere as compared to the girls. Hence, there is a need for creating awareness to curb this bias and help the girls in the family to be treated at par with their male counterparts.

Critical scholarship on gentrification has contributed significantly to bolstering the rights of working-class residents against the forces that price them out of the city. However, working-class residents are not the only ones who suffer from dispossession and displacement with rampant hyper-commodification of urban space. Based on the case of Seoul, I examine how new agents—tenant shopkeepers—emerged at the forefront of challenging gentrification and successfully reframed the problem of gentrification. Within the new frame, the shopkeepers who make their livelihoods by using urban spaces are pitted against the property owners who attempt to profit at the expense of their tenants. Through this case, I ask ‘How can radical shifts occur in the ways that the problem of gentrification is constructed?’ My answer draws upon the framing theory in the social movement literature which identifies conditions under which a radical departure from institutionalized ways and social norms can transpire even when the radical shift means challenging the entrenched power structure—in my case, the property-ownership-based rights regime. I highlight the importance of further developing a gentrification scholarship on social change that unravels the rise of new locations of resistance, particularly at a time when the advance of gentrification seems inevitable.

Over the past 30 years, cities across the United States have adopted quality-of-life ordinances aimed at policing social marginality. Scholars have documented zero-tolerance policing and emerging tactics of therapeutic policing in these efforts, but little attention has been paid to 911 calls and forms of third-party policing in governing public space and the poor. Drawing on an analysis of 3.9 million 911 and 311 call records and participant observation alongside police officers, social workers, and homeless men and women residing on the streets of San Francisco, this article elaborates a model of “complaint-oriented policing” to explain additional causes and consequences of policing visible poverty. Situating the police within a broader bureaucratic field of poverty governance, I demonstrate how policing aimed at the poor can be initiated by callers, organizations, and government agencies, and how police officers manage these complaints in collaboration and conflict with health, welfare, and sanitation agencies. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centered on incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of move-along orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers to services and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.

‘The student experience’ is a formulation that will be familiar to many reading this article; increasingly the term has come to stand in for an imprecise set of values and practices around higher education study. Despite the fuzziness that characterises its use, ‘student experience talk’ has gained traction in education policy and rankings, academic research, and amongst students themselves. After initially drawing from Raymond Williams to situate ‘the student experience’ as a keyword across policy, marketing and educational domains, we analyse contemporary usage of the term in: (1) students’ own accounts of their engagements with the city in which they study; and (2) academic social science. A membership category when used by undergraduate students, the term serves to obfuscate a market logic in which achieving the student experience is an aspirational endeavour linking disparate place-based consumption practices in their university city. Drawing on the Bourdieusian distinction between categories of practice and categories of analysis, we argue that the contemporary deployment of ‘the student experience’ across popular and policy spaces does not mean that academics should import it uncritically into their analysis. On the contrary: the reification of this category of practice is precisely what has enabled the scramble for its attainment and management. Rather than allowing the embedding and normalisation of terms such as ‘the student experience’, the role of critical social science should be to unpack these muddled categories to avoid calling into being and reproducing what they seem to only describe.

Exploring residential segregation in the Gateway City with photographer Bryan Travis.

Indian cities as the melting pot of cultural heterogeneity exhibits the idea of a complex urban society with problems of acceptance of cultural diversity that often leads to contest for space and exclusion of the ethnic minorities especially women from these communities. While such exclusion takes many forms of discrimination, this paper provides an account of discrimination faced by the women from the North-East in Delhi. It provides estimates of incidents which suggest that the most common form of discrimination is ‘treating’ them as foreigners. Name calling, and denial of services, especially rental accommodation on the ground of food habits are the most common forms of discrimination. Some of the respondents have also reported that washer men refuse to wash their clothes. Furthermore, women migrants often face physical abuses in forms of unwanted touching, especially in the crowded places like local markets and public buses. Men too are bantered for their hairstyle and dressing sense. Central university campuses are not even free from these discriminatory practices. North-East Helpline (1093) partially helps in lodging complains, but problem sustains. At the end, the authors come up with the idea of ethnic sensitization and establishing special units in various institutions for tackling these problems separately.

The housing boom of the mid-2000s saw the widespread popularization of non-occupant housing investment as an entrepreneurial activity within U.S. capitalism. In 2005, approximately one sixth of all mortgage-financed home purchases in the United States were for investment purposes. This article develops a sociological account that links the geographic distribution of popular investment to the social and institutional organization of communities. Regression analyses of 1,566 municipalities from 2000 to 2006 indicate that non-occupant investment (but not conventional owner-occupant investment) occurred at significantly greater rates in places where local development institutions were organized in accordance with laissez-faire principles to a greater degree, where economic activities in other domains were less locally embedded in place, and where greater residential instability produced more tenuous connections between residents and places. The magnitudes of these associations suggest that social organization and cultural-institutional conditions were at least as informative as variations in housing price appreciation in shaping the incidence of investor activity during the bubble. Social organization also moderated the behavioral effects of price appreciation. The article advances research on locally-embedded bases of economic action by examining how community environments provide more or less fertile ground for mass-participatory housing speculation and instrumental orientations toward places as exchange-values.

Spatial inequality is an increasingly vital concept in urban sociology, capturing the inequitable allocation of resources across space. But it omits an important and often overlooked form of inequality that takes place at a more immediate and direct level, inhering not in the relationship between spaces, but within the fabric of place itself. This paper argues for “emplaced inequalities”—power imbalances that are manifest in the material, symbolic, and institutional frameworks that guide behavior in a specific urban setting. Drawing on a diverse body of research, I suggest an analytical vocabulary useful in describing and explaining emplaced inequality. At the center of this argument is the concept of the program—a pattern of social action that is endorsed or constrained by the social architecture of place. I then apply this vocabulary to an empirical case drawn from research on downwardly mobile suburbs in the New York Metropolitan Area.

This study specifies the relationship between civic associations and their effects on communities by analyzing how two forms of civic association—neighborhood development organizations and institution-based community organizing coalitions—impact poverty in neighborhoods and cities, and poverty segregation in cities. Some social scientists argue that civic associations are the key to well-functioning democracy, allowing people to collectively organize for the promotion of their common interests, but others argue that civic associations instead breed exclusion, leaving few communities in the position to reap their benefits. Results show that not all civic associations’ effects are equal. The form of civic association is vital in determining its effects. Place-based organizations help their neighborhoods, but not their cities, unless they are organizing in poor cities. Alternatively, identity-based organizations do not affect their neighborhood but do significantly decrease city-level poverty segregation. Longitudinal analyses of neighborhoods and cities from 1990 to 2010 provide evidence.

Creative activity and cultural facilities are routinely touted as markers and facilitators of successful cities and societies. This view is underpinned by the assumption that they contribute to local economic growth, foster a positive city image, and enhance urban quality of life. Creativity and the consumption of art are also well established as markers of social and cultural status, while access to, and the physical distribution of, cultural resources are also embedded in, and reinforce, forms of social difference. Understanding the intersection of the social and the spatial in the consumption and distribution of culture is important to both cultural and urban sociology. Using Sydney, Australia, as a case study and drawing on the findings of a major national study of cultural consumption, the article engages with the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu on the reception of art and the differential propensity of various social classes to go to art galleries and to appreciate art, to highlight social and spatial concentrations and fault-lines in arts participation. It also points to important theoretical and empirical nuances, including a weakening of the nexus between socio-economic class and cultural consumption that is occurring at the same time as the links between forms of cultural capital – education and art consumption – appear to be strengthening.

Largely overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline is a long tradition of research in criminology and urban sociology that considers how violence is regulated through informal sources of social control arising from residents and organizations internal to communities. In this article, we incorporate the “systemic” model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s. Using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofit formation, we estimate the causal effect on violent crime of nonprofits focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities. Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years, we estimate that every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.

The purpose, emergence, and accessibility of public restrooms in the U.S. have always involved battles over privacy, cleanliness, segregation, and legislation.

China’s household registration system (hukou) that assigns citizens into “rural” or “urban” status is a stratifying tool that shapes people’s social rights based on parents’ place of origin. This ethnographic research on inter-hukou couples suggests that the interlinked institutions of state and patriarchy construct differentiated and uneven marital power dynamics whereby inequalities are reproduced and/or transformed through everyday interactions. Rural wives of urban men are socially stigmatized and are treated by their husbands’ families as “unpaid reproductive workers,” depriving them of full membership in the urban family and the urban society. To resist overlapping oppression, rural women mask themselves as appropriate wives and filial daughters-in-law, achieving “urbanness” at the frontstage. At the same time, they secretly make gender alliances in both virtual and real spaces and lobby for their urban husbands’ support at the backstage, slowly eroding the dual structure of gender and hukou through...

With ongoing urban revolution, Chinese cities are experiencing an influx of migrants, whose integration into urban society becomes an unprecedented challenge. Using a recent survey in Shanghai and adopting a multilevel multinomial logistic model, this paper studies perceptions of social integration, comparing local residents with migrants. While migrants and local residents have very different perceptions of social integration, both individual-level factors and community-level factors such as residential segregation shape perceptions of social integration, and they shape migrants and local residents differently. In particular, residential segregation, especially migrant population size, tends to reinforce perceptions of social exclusion, which imposes challenges on social integration.

It is instructive to look at Pahl’s Whose City? from today’s perspective, though urban development and governance, in fact the very definition of the urban, have fundamentally transformed over these last 50 years. Comparing and contrasting the meaning of Whose City? then and now allows for a critical reflection of the changes neoliberal restructuring has wrought on urban landscapes and various stakeholders struggling over (the definition of and access to) the city. Such comparison helps to shed light on the (changing) role of urban sociology and urban theory in these transformation processes in general and on the ways in which critical urbanism has changed in response to these processes in particular.

The paper examines the work of groups established by chapters of the American Association of Social Workers in the 1920s to develop a systematic and empirically based understanding of the interactional dynamics of the interview in social casework. Now largely forgotten, this work had influence beyond social work. The paper goes on to explore the call by the Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess to use the ‘verbatim interview’ as a focus of common interest by sociologists and social workers.

This paper studies the mechanisms linking urbanisation and industrial SO2 emissions using panel data that enable us to trace the environmental impact of the urban transformation of China’s economy from a rural to a largely urban society. We provide evidence of stylised facts on spatial patterns and temporal changes of industrial SO2 emissions in China. Over time, industrial SO2 emissions show increasing levels in small and medium-sized cities but slightly decreasing levels in some large cities. The results show that urbanisation is one of the main driving forces behind emissions and the increase in the urbanisation level is likely to exacerbate emissions. Emissions are more sensitive to industrialisation than urbanisation, indicating that industrialisation remains a key industrial SO2 pollution contributor in China. Industrial emissions abatement policies in China should be designed by considering the spatial differences of emissions and the pace of urbanisation, although the increase of urbanisation is associated with benefits such as poverty reduction and economic growth. The reduction of industrial SO2 emissions requires coordinated approaches by adjusting the pace of urbanisation.

In this article, I theorize “complicit masculinity” to examine how access to capital, in other words, making or spending money, mediates masculine identity for un- and underemployed black men. Arguing that hegemony operates around producer-provider norms of masculinity and through tropes of blackness within a system of racial capitalism, I show how complicity underscores the reality of differential aspirational models in the context of severe un- and underemployment and the failure of the classic breadwinner model for black men globally. I draw on participant observation fieldwork and interviews with men from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s informal sector from 2008 to 2009. I investigate two groups of men: political propagandists (orators) for former President Laurent Gbagbo and mobile street vendors. Rejecting racialized colonial narratives that positioned salaried workers as “evolved,” orators used anti-French rhetoric and ties to the political regime to pursue entrepreneurial identities. Vendors, positioned as illegitimate workers and non-citizens, asserted consumerist models of masculinity from global black popular culture. I show how entrepreneurialism and consumerism, the two paradigmatic neoliberal identities, have become ways for black men to assert economic participation as alternatives to the producer-provider ideal.

Using the findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an inner-city football club, the article examines the relationship between superdiversity and understandings of human variation. It is argued that club personnel relied on what I have termed ‘granular essentialisms’ to make sense of their superdiverse surroundings. These were assertions about ethnicity and ‘race’ that resulted from sustained engagement across various categories of difference and saw these categories intersected in various ways, with notions of space and place being invoked in the process. This granular approach is compared with the attitudes to migration-related diversity encountered outside the inner city. I conclude that proponents of superdiversity should take greater account of the inequalities, tensions and prejudices evident in and around superdiverse areas if they are to construct a more comprehensive picture of the lived realities of contemporary cities and the understandings of ethno-racial difference which take hold there.

In recent years, three superficially distinct urban subfields have made parallel efforts to incorporate the city’s traditional ‘outsides’ into urban research. Urban political ecology, American urban sociology and postcolonial urban studies have made, respectively, ‘nature’, the ‘rural’ and the ‘not-yet’ city the objects of self-consciously urban analyses. I argue that these interventions are analogous efforts to hybridise city/nature, city/country or society/nature binaries, and that they have a common cause. Each is a response to a persistent ‘city lens’ that remains pervasive in urban practice, and whose assumptions are an increasingly poor fit for contemporary urban environments. This lens, ground in the context of the 19th century metropolis, interprets the world through a series of binary associations hung on the basic assumption that the city can be defined against a non-urban outside. I develop John Berger’s (2008 [1972]) idea of ‘ways of seeing’ as a heuristic for understanding this situation and, using the case of nature, show how the city lens encourages practitioners and some scholars to romanticise, anachronise or generalise when confronting signs of the not-city in the urban. I conclude by evaluating the limitations of hybridity as a solution to the problems of the city lens, and by outlining an alternative approach. I advocate for turning this way of seeing into a research object, and argue for the importance of an historical and process-oriented examination of the ongoing use of these categories even as critical urban scholars attempt to move beyond them.

Research in Urban Morphology has long been exploring the form of cities and their changes over time, especially by establishing links with the parallel dynamics of these cities’ social, economic and political environments. The capacity of an adaptable and resilient urban form to provide a fertile environment for economic prosperity and social cohesion is at the forefront of discussion. Gentrification has emerged in the past few decades as an important topic of research in urban sociology, geography and economy, addressing the social impact of some forms of urban evolution. To some extent, these studies emphasize the form of the environment in which gentrification takes place. However, a systematic and quantitative method for a detailed characterization of this type of urban form is still far from being achieved. With this article, we make a first step towards the establishment of an approach based on ‘urban morphometrics’. To this end, we measure and compare key morphological features of five London neighbourhoods that have undergone a process of piecemeal gentrification. Findings suggest that these five case studies display similar and recognizable morphological patterns in terms of their built form, geographical location of main and local roads and physical relationships between street fronts and street types. These initial results, while not implying any causal or universal relationship between morphological and social dynamics, nevertheless contribute to (a) highlight the benefits of a rigorous quantitative approach towards interpreting urban form beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Urban Morphology and (b) define the statistical recurrence of a few, specific morphological features amongst the five cases of gentrified areas in London.

This article presents a creative direction for public sociology: novel writing. Narrativity is embedded within much contemporary sociological work, and sociologists and novelists share a number of complementary approaches for understanding and interpreting the social world. This article argues that novel writing presents sociologists with a process and medium through which they can expand their work for a more public, engaging, affective, and panoramic sociology. Here, the historical development of sociological thought is considered as well as the recent progress of public sociology. Three key strengths of sociological novels are presented: promoting public sociology and interlocutor engagement; transforming knowledge exchange from mimetic to sympractic communication; and addressing issues of scope. Two recent sociological novels are discussed: Blue by Patricia Leavy and On The Cusp by David Buckingham, both published in 2015. Finally, two linked aspects for (thinking about) writing sociological fiction are explored: the concept of glocality and the methodology of ethnography. Employing creative mediums such as novels as public sociology may cultivate a wider, affective public engagement with significant academic ideas such as the sociological imagination. Sociological novels work to bring the local and global into dialogue, and may help achieve the scope and panoramic depth that sociology requires.

Standard American disciplinary history holds that the ‘founding fathers’, inspired by ‘great men theorizing European modernity’, created a sister discipline in Europe’s image. This article proposes an alternative history, which locates the founding of American sociology in the writings of ‘pro-slavery imperialists’ Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh. A methodologically nationalistic sociology of ‘race relations’, which isolates the study of race from issues of ‘general’ sociological concern, has substituted for sustained engagement with sociology’s colonialist and imperialist past. Racism has been made an anachronistic survivor in tradition, rather than a constitutive part of modernity. Rehabilitating this lost history is therefore vital for creating a new, global historical sociology, as is questioning the conceptual matrix that isolates the study of race and racism from issues of general sociological concern.

This paper is about the relationship between cities and brains: it charts the back-and-forth between the hectic, stressful lives of urban citizens, and a psychological and neurobiological literature that claims to make such stress both visible and knowable. But beyond such genealogical labour, the paper also asks: what can a sociology concerned with the effects of ‘biosocial’ agencies take from a scientific literature on the urban brain? What might sociology even contribute to that literature, in its turn? To investigate these possibilities, the paper centres on the emergence and description of what it calls ‘the Neuropolis’ – a term it deploys to hold together both an intellectual and scientific figure and a real, physical enclosure. The Neuropolis is an image of the city embedded in neuropsychological concepts and histories, but it also describes an embodied set of (sometimes pathological) relations and effects that take places between cities and the people who live in them. At the heart of the paper is an argument that finding a way to thread these phenomena together might open up new paths for thinking about ‘good’ life in the contemporary city. Pushing at this claim, the paper argues that mapping the relations, histories, spaces, and people held together by this term is a vital task for the future of urban sociology.

The smart city is often approached by its critics as a “system” that exploits optimal connectivity and efficiency for an urban society of control. Meanwhile, the actual operation of “smart city” assemblages in globalizing cities—characterized by development and breakdown, connectivity and disconnection—is seldom the basis of analysis. By focusing on the interplays between these dualities, this article aims to underscore the modalities of power and political possibilities of dissent in Istanbul, Turkey. Data-based smart city apparatuses are supposed to at once fix infrastructural breakdown and stabilize the socio-political order. However, during the Gezi protests of 2013, the integrated tactics of sabotage in urban space and data vandalism in the digital realm undermined both data control by the state and its political authority. Yet Gezi’s example also shows that hyperconnectivity, data motility, and virality by themselves do not necessarily lead to more meaningful participation in urban politics.

Gays come to the city; this is an old story. But how they come and what happens next, that is a newer story and one that informs Amin Ghaziani’s There Goes the Gayborhood? For urban scholars, those schooled in the classics of urban sociology in particular, the case of the gayborhood goes against the inherited analytic grain—in ways taken up with wide-ranging intelligence by a group of critics whose remarks follow this introduction. The distinctive demographic and cultural texture of a particular group has transformed the meaning of places and their occupants. Before there were gay people, there were “homosexuals” relegated to the “zone of transition”—the city’s social dumping ground where investments ceased while awaiting the higher and better uses to come. Granted some degree of refuge through this neglect, gay people’s beings could not be discussed much less be featured in urban analysis. The muck of deviance was residual. What a flip! In the new model of urban dynamism, gays come to be branded as creative heart. The ethnic groups and remaining subalterns may continue the trudge across the concentric rings and into the suburban sectors, but their distinctive potential dissipates as inter-mating and cordiality take their toll. There is, of course replenishment through the new migrants from around the world, sometimes celebrated for their “energies” (or at least cheap labor). But settlements of the other Americans—the great white washed—have become dynamically useless. The opinion surveys reveal that for no other group has public attitude so shifted as toward gays and lesbians—in an overwhelmingly positive direction. Indeed, the stigma system has almost been turned on its head: gays (the men in particular) are where it is happening. Good economic and networking cred comes from associating with their lifestyle, whether as gayborhood resident, once resident, or just part of the alliance. Of course, as Ghaziani notes, the US is not free of gay oppression, and some of it is systemic and violent. But the gayborhood, as it exists and is widely interpreted, sits as shining beacon: the ghetto on the hill not only for those whose sexuality makes them dream of such a place, but for anyone who dreams that powerful shifts in social and political life are possible.

This study examines health stratification in contemporary urban China in light of rapid internal migration and evolving socio-institutional arrangements in the society. Much of this has been linked to the hukou system or household registration system which has created a stratification system based on place of origin (rural or urban) and occupation (agricultural or non-agricultural). The research question was probed using a nationally representative survey. The results show that as a group, migrants in urban areas were healthier than urban natives, and residents with non-agricultural hukou were healthier than those having agricultural hukou. Institutional impacts on health status were largely indirect, as manifested partly through self-selective mechanisms of migration and partly through socio-economic stratification in urban society. Nevertheless, institutional arrangements had salient direct impacts on individuals' access to health resources, which were robust even after controlling for related demographic and socio-economic factors.

It is well known that family socioeconomic background influences childhood access to opportunities. Educational reforms that introduce new information about school quality may lead to increased inequality if families with more resources are better able to respond. However, these policies can also level the playing field for choice by equalizing disadvantaged families’ access to information. This study assesses how a novel accountability system affected family enrollment decisions in the Chicago Public Schools by introducing new test performance information and consequences. We show that a substantial proportion of families responded by transferring out when their child’s school was assigned “probation.” Poor families transferred children to other schools in the district, but at a lower rate than non-poor families, who were also more likely to leave for another district or enroll in private school. Most striking, we show that despite family response to the probation label, access to higher-performing schools changed very little under the new policy; students who left probation schools were the most likely of all transfer students to enroll in other low-performing schools in the district. Although new information changed families’ behavior, it did not address contextual and resource-dependent factors that constrain the educational decisions of poor families.

A neighborhood’s bars can help tell the complex story of gentrification, symbolic ownership, and public space in today’s New York City.

This is my last issue as Editor of City & Community, an appropriate place to thank those who wrote and reviewed for the journal during my two terms. It was a privilege to serve with the longstanding senior Associate Editors, Nancy Denton and Sharon Zukin, who provided wise counsel, intellectual guidance, and good sense. I am also grateful to the many Editorial Board members who contributed to making City & Community such an engaging, scholarly, high-quality publication. Managing Editors Sukriti Issar, Orly Clerge, Omar Pereyra, and Aaron Niznik ably organized the review process and made the lonely job of editing the journal more enjoyable. It has also been a pleasure to work with the staff at Wiley-Blackwell. Finally, thank you to the members of the ASA Section on Community and Urban Sociology for the honor of allowing me to read your work and learn so much from you over the past six years. To mark the transition, our newest Associate Editor, Karyn Lacy of the University of Michigan, kindly consented to solicit and edit a symposium of peer-reviewed essays on Detroit. The idea for this issue originated with William Tabb, who, with others in Michigan, has been exploring the idea of a Detroit School of urbanism. He recalled that the inaugural 2002 issue of our journal contained a debate over the existence of a Los Angeles School of urbanism, to complement or challenge the hegemonic Chicago School. In 2003, David Halle proposed the existence of a New York School of urbanism as well. Tabb pointed out that, in contrast to the Los Angeles and Chicago Schools’ shared emphasis on growth, Detroit—once America’s fourth largest city—exemplifies a class of declining cities. Presented with this astute observation, the Editorial Board members gave the green light to a special issue on Detroit. Although there is considerable urban scholarship on this city, much of it is written by historians, economists, political scientists, and planners, not sociologists. The historians look back at Detroit’s industrial heyday, the UAW and African-Americans’ struggle for equal rights. The planners look forward in search of a new industry or new governance arrangement that can restore Detroit’s grandeur. But perhaps surprisingly, urban sociologists have been reticent. Indeed, the University of Michigan’s Detroit Area Study, established in 1951, was never really about Detroit per se. On the 37th anniversary of the annual survey, conducted to teach graduate students how to do research, Converse and Mayer (1988, p. 9) wrote that if the

Scholarship in urban sociology has pointed to the reliance of city governments on ever–more market mechanisms for organizing social and economic policy. This form of governance involves prioritizing cities’ cultural and social assets for their value in a global competition of urban “brands,” each competing for new infusions of human and investment capital. At the same time, however, cities have been at the center of seemingly progressive policy efforts aimed at promoting innovation, sustainability, and creativity. These themes represent a newly dominant planning discourse in cities across the globe. While researchers have thoroughly examined how “creative classes” and “creative cities” may exclude everyday, working–class, or poor residents, new urban imaginaries focused on sustainability potentially imply less stratified urban outcomes. Analyzing two high–profile interventions in Buenos Aires, Argentina—a sustainable urban regeneration plan for the historic downtown, and the creation of an arts cluster in the impoverished south of the city—this paper argues that despite divergent narratives, creative and sustainable urban projects suggest similar policy agendas, planning assumptions, and relationships to market mechanisms. Increasingly, global policies, whose design and objectives may appear to contradict market logics, may have outcomes that further them.