Teoría social, espacio y ciudad

THE BOOK HAS seven chapters and is conceived as an introductory textbook to the main theoretical currents in urban sociology. In the introduction, the author makes a case for a distinct and separate branch of sociology which deals with social patterns of behaviour and institutions which are somehow directly linked to the city. The first chapter, which takes up one-quarter of the book’s length, looks at the city in history, where a search for social differentiation and diversity has been most evident. Using a social focus, the chapter traces the origins of urban populations back to Mesopotamia and Egypt but then concentrates mostly on the European city from Crete to the industrial city of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The next five chapters trace the evolution of sociological thought about the city, from the classical thinkers of the nineteenth century to the contributions of Latin American sociologists in the second half of this century. A relatively short chapter two looks at the concepts put forward by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, widely regarded as the fathers of sociology. Chapter three presents a group of thinkers which the author calls the “culturalist school”, comprising Tönnies, Simmel, Spengler, Wirth and Redfield; these authors saw the modern city as facilitating the emergence of values which represent a break from feudal thought. Chapter four examines the propositions of the Chicago ecological school, embodied in the thinking of Park, McKenzie and Burgess, among others; theirs are the first rigorous attempts “...to understand and explain the sociological effects of the process of capitalist urbanization, at a time of profound global changes” (p. 183). The French sociological school is the subject of the following chapter, where Marxian authors such as Lefebvre, Castells and Topalov, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, are given prominence. Chapter six is divided into two parts: the first traces the origins and evolution of sociological thought in Latin America as a set of propositions distinct from European or North American thinking, reflecting the emergence of a national conscience in the first half of the twentieth century (perhaps the best-known of these propositions is embodied in what is known as the “dependency school”). The second part of the chapter examines critically the propositions of the “marginalization school”, a set of observations about the origins and reality of poverty in Latin American cities. The book ends with a set of reflections about urban sociology today.