Urban Sociology

Author: (French) Grafmayr / Xu Weimin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: The territorial reality of urban phenomena is ambiguous. As a social spatial form, modern cities still retain certain significant characteristics in most of their areas, such as population concentration, prioritizing built environments over natural ones, and so on. However, as a process, urbanization tends to have a broader impact on the entire social activity. This spreading process affects people's living conditions, lifestyles, and mental states, and even the few rural areas that we still label as "traditional" cannot escape its influence. In the face of increasingly blurred boundaries between "urban" and "rural," defining the research scope of urban sociology holds little significance. In a sense, cities are now everywhere, even if not physically, at least in social reality. Therefore, urban sociology is not purely the sociology of "urban phenomena." Although it spans the divisions of other specialized fields, it focuses strictly on the urban scale of various aspects of social life. It particularly examines how, in the urbanization environment, all aspects of social life unfold, coordinate, and interact with each other, while this urbanization environment is jointly created by all aspects of social life. However, the urbanization environment is also a common shell for all aspects of social life. Additionally, urban sociology is concerned with the ways in which urban/environmental gains and losses are constructed as objects, and these gains and losses shape the relationships between actors, institutions, and social groups in specific ways. Compared to territorial divisions, the boundaries of relevant disciplines are not always effective when discussing the "urban." This book will provide examples of convergence and coordination with other social sciences.