ancient cities

of urban space and uneven development. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, it is clear that
cities and metropolitan areas are organized along
racial lines as well as shaped by socioeconomic
inequalities.
One of the major accomplishments of the new
urban sociology has been to reconceptualize the
real estate sector as a secondary circuit of investment
that is relatively autonomous from the primary
circuit of manufacturing. Initial work by
Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey drew attention
to the use value and exchange value of real estate
and the crucial distinction between the primary
and secondary circuits of capital investment. The
primary circuit involves capital moving in and out
of manufacturing and industrial production,
whereas the secondary circuit refers to capitalist
investment in land, real estate, housing, and the
built environment. Over the decades, the theoretical
richness of Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s arguments
have inspired scholars to investigate capital flows
into and out of the real estate sector, identify the
crisis tendencies and contradictions of the secondary
circuit, and fashion new theoretical and analytical
tools to examine real estate processes and their
linkages with uneven metropolitan development.
Recent research on the secondary circuit eschews
a conception of real estate as a by-product or outgrowth
of industrial capitalism and theorizes the
real estate sector as having an intrinsic quality or
sui generis character that forms an independent
sector of the economy. Conceptualizing and analyzing
the dynamics of the secondary circuit suggests
a theory of circulating capital that emphasizes
the irrationalities of the circulation process and the
systemic crises that periodically affect real estate
markets and cities. On the one hand, real estate
can aid capital accumulation, if it is a profitable
avenue for commercial investment and a source of
mass consumption in the case of homeownership.
On the other hand, real estate can be a barrier to
capital accumulation, when its enduring qualities
render it outdated and anachronistic, or when
financing needed to construct, sell, and rehabilitate
it are unavailable.
Insofar as possible, capital seeks to eradicate
local peculiarities and place distinctions that characterize
the buying and selling of commodities and
thereby eliminate the spatial barriers to the circulation
of capital. It is this duality, or inherent
New Urban Sociology
555
contradiction, between immobile properties and
mobile capital that defines modern capitalist
urbanization and uneven development that is a
central topic of theoretical and empirical research
within the new urban sociology paradigm.
Contemporary Challenges
Today, the new urban sociology is at a crossroads.
Diversification, specialization, and fragmentation
define urban research as a variety of new approaches
and paradigms call attention to the novelties of
current urban trends and upheavals. The open and
variegated theoretical landscape is transforming
urban studies from a field dominated by a few
paradigms and their delimited theories to one in
which heterogeneity and intellectual fragmentation
dominate the paradigm wars. In addition, a plethora
of turns, including the postmodern turn, the
cultural turn, and the linguistic turn, have emerged
as major challenges to the dominance of the new
urban sociology paradigm. Some theorists have
asserted that paradigm-based research is largely
irrelevant in a world dominated by hybrid theories
and interdisciplinarity. Others argue that the passage
of time and the heterogeneity of the new
urban sociology have made it impossible to define
the paradigm, given that it is not clear what is
“new” about the paradigm because many of its
theoretical assumptions were formulated in the
1980s and before. Two principal forecasts for the
future of the new urban sociology emerge from
these critiques.
One pessimistic view is that defining questions
that are the distinctive domain of new urban sociology
is an essentially fruitless and theoretically
outmoded endeavor. This view celebrates fragmentation,
discontinuity, and diversification
trends and argues that the most interesting
research is likely to emerge at the interface of
disciplines. In contrast, an optimistic interpretation
is that the new urban sociology will continue
to animate urban studies, drive new
research agendas, and influence debates on globalization
processes and change in cities. For
proponents of this perspective, the new urban
sociology paradigm should take new directions
and seize the opportunities afforded by interdisciplinarity
while acknowledging that disciplinary
boundaries are still important.