ancient cities

Further Readings
Calthorpe, P. 1992. The Next American Metropolis:
Ecology, Community, and the American Dream.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
Chase, John, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, ed.
1999. Everyday Urbanism. New York: Monacelli
Press.
Duany, Andrés, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Alex Krieger,
and William Lennertz, eds. 1992. Towns and Townmaking
Principles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Graduate School of Design.
Duany, Andres and the Town Paper. 2008 and ongoing.
Timeline of the New Urbanism. Gaithersburg, MD:
The Town Paper. Retrieved May 27, 2008 (http://
www.nutimeline.net).
Katz, Peter. 1994. New Urbanism: Toward an
Architecture of Community. New York: McGraw-Hill
Professional.
Solomon, D. 1992. ReBuilding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Architectural Press.
Ne w Ur b a N so c i o l o g y
The new urban sociology is a major paradigm
developed in the 1970s and 1980s to challenge the
fundamental assumptions and explanatory
schemes of mainstream urban ecology and sociology.
Although there are differences among the
various theories that constitute new urban sociology,
several major assumptions define the paradigm.
First, it eschews strict demographic and
variable-oriented analyses and focuses attention
on the centrality of human agency and conflict in
the determination of cities and urban life. The
primary role of powerful economic actors, especially
those in the real estate industry, in building
and redeveloping cities is a predominant theme
and topic among proponents. Another core
assumption of the new urban sociology is that
metropolitan development and patterns of spatial
segregation are not inevitable but result from the
conscious actions taken by individual decision makers
in various class, race, gender, and community-
based groups, acting under particular historical
circumstances. In addition to the stress on human
agency, the new urban sociology focuses on
urban space as a constitutive dimension of social
relations and a material product (e.g., the built
New Urban Sociology
553
environment) that can affect social relations.
Moreover, the new urban sociology stresses the
importance of symbols, meanings, and culture in
shaping cities. This urban semiotic approach
involves the exploration of sociomaterial objects
and their constructed meanings as mediated
through a constellation of signs and symbols they
evoke and convey. Finally, the new urban sociology
emphasizes the importance of global transformation
as central to shaping life in all urban and
metropolitan regions. This global approach is
concerned with the influence of global political
and economic forces as well as national and local
patterns in shaping life in urban and metropolitan
regions. The new urban sociology seeks to illuminate
the web of complex relationships and interconnections
that constitute the interplay of the
local and global in the building of metropolitan
space.
Historical Evolution
The new urban sociology begins with critical
urban sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s, who
became dissatisfied with urban ecology and mainstream
urban sociology and developed a distinct
approach to urban problems. During the 1950s
and 1960s, urban sociology was dominated by
structural–functionalist assumptions and major
ecological themes and approaches. In the early
1970s, several Marxist social scientists including
Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Henri
Lefebvre, among other scholars, began to revise
Karl Marx’s ideas to explain uneven metropolitan
development, urban industrial decline, gentrification,
and suburbanization, among other urban
phenomena.
Castells proposed that urban scholars focus on
the collective consumption characteristic of urbanized
nations and the way in which political and
economic conflicts within cities generate urban
social movements for change. David Harvey, in
contrast, argued that the central issue in making
sense of cities was neither collective consumption
nor class struggle but capital accumulation.
Influenced by Lefebvre, Harvey argued that investment
in land and real estate is an important means
of accumulating wealth and a crucial activity that
pushes the growth of cities in specific ways. Processes
as diverse as urban disinvestment, suburbanization,