ancient cities

554 New Urban Sociology
deindustrialization, urban renewal, and gentrification
are part and parcel of the continuous reshaping
of the built environment in pursuit of profit.
According to Harvey, powerful real estate actors
invest, disinvest, and reshape land uses in a process
of creative destruction that destroys communities
and produces intense social conflicts and struggles
over meanings and uses of urban space.
Despite their different emphases, the work of
these critical scholars helped focus scholarly attention
on the capitalist system of for-profit production
generally, and class struggle and capital
accumulation specifically, as analytical starting
points for understanding the nature of urban redevelopment
and disinvestment. Although there was disagreement
among these scholars, they all rejected the
possibility of rational planning becoming the solution
to urban problems because the latter are intertwined
with class conflict and constituted by relations
of capitalist domination and subordination.
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed phenomenal
growth and institutionalization of the new urban
sociology in the United States and Europe; at the
same time, the paradigm became more heterogeneous
and interdisciplinary. In the 1980s, the work
of Joe Feagin and Mark Gottdiener together developed
a systematic conception of the new urban
sociology as a new approach to theorize and analyze
the interconnections between urban life and
wider macrolevel processes. A central characteristic
of Feagin and Gottdiener’s approach was a
sharp criticism of existing urban sociology in the
United States and a call to designate social conflict
and change as issues of special importance.
In the 1990s, Gottdiener and Hutchison developed
the term sociospatial perspective to describe
the new urban sociology paradigm, a term that
accents the society–space synergy and emphasizes
that cities are not simply population aggregates
but forms of social organization composed of
antagonistic social relations. They also use the
term to distance themselves from older Marxist
approaches that focus on processes of capital accumulation
and class struggle as major drivers of
urban organization and development. In particular,
the sociospatial perspective is eclectic and
attempts to take what is best from the several different
critical urban theories and avoid the endemic
reductionism that has characterized both traditional
ecology and Marxian political economy.
The sociospatial perspective does not seek explanation
by emphasizing a principal cause such as
transportation technology, capital circulation, or
production process. Rather, it takes a holistic view
of cities and metropolitan development as the
linked outcome of economic, political, and cultural
factors.
Although scholars recognize that the new urban
sociology has largely supplanted human ecology,
they have disagreed over the years over whether
the two approaches are totally antithetical and
incompatible. Overall, the work of new urban
sociology in the 1980s and later provided solid
theoretical foundations for empirically based urban
scholarship, which began to proliferate in the
1990s, including research on urban tourism and
culture, urban politics, and studies of how cities
serve as arenas and expressions of broader crisis
tendencies within national and global regimes of
capital accumulation.
Issues of Race and Real Estate
In the 2000s, scholars such as Feagin, Gotham,
and Squires and Kubrin argued for a more nuanced
and explicit consideration of race and racial
inequalities within the new urban sociology paradigm.
These scholars maintain that urban development
is a manifestation of the logic of capital
accumulation and can be traced to the continuing
significance of racial discrimination and segregation
as major organizing principles of cities. This
new analytical focus examines the ways in which
people are sorted into racial categories, how
resources are distributed along racial lines, and
how state policy shapes and is shaped by the racial
contours of society. Central to the concept of race
within new urban sociology is the idea that race
has an emergent and variable quality rather than
being a fixed or immutable group characteristic;
social groups are politically constructed and exist
as the outcome of diverse historical practices (e.g.,
programmatic organization of social policy, modes
of political participation) that are continually subject
to challenge over definition and meaning.
Of key importance for urban scholars are relations
between race and ethnicity and other bases of
social inequality, solidarity, and identity, such as
gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, generation,
language, and spatial location in the constitution