ancient cities

involving such physical objects as office towers,
neighborhoods, and plazas. As a subfield of the
social sciences, though, urban studies is awkwardly
positioned in relationship to economics,
sociology, political science, history, geography,
and anthropology. It is neither a full-fledged addition
to this list nor an alternative. Rather, it exists
as a parallel, and marginalized, institutional and
intellectual space.
With the passing of the societal upheavals that
marked the transition from agricultural to urbanindustrial
societies, the issue of the city as a source
of intellectual and practical discomfort had seemingly
been settled. In the 1960s, however, and
particularly in the United States, the cities became
increasingly unavoidable as a matter of public concern.
The contradictions of capitalist society
returned, and they were manifested in the cities.
Industrial restructuring after World War II transformed
the older manufacturing centers that had
defined modernity. Combined with an enduring
racial problem in the United States, this created a
national trauma. Poverty and racism seemed
endemic to the large, central cities. White households
fled to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s,
further dividing the country racially and geographically
and reinforcing disparities of income and
opportunity. (Similar conditions of urban decline
occurred in other industrialized, capitalist countries
such as England, France, and Canada, but not
at the same time or with the same severity.) The
city and its problems cried out to be addressed and
the United States mobilized for social reform, an
effort concentrated mainly in the legislative initiatives
that occurred as part of the presidency of
Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969). Funding for
research into urban problems rapidly expanded.
The federal government, city governments, and
philanthropic bodies such as the Russell Sage
Foundation allocated significant funds to urban
research. In the late 1950s and 1960s, for example,
the Ford Foundation distributed grants to universities
to develop urban research centers that would
explore solutions to the problems of the inner cities.
These centers included the Urban Studies
Center established in 1959 at Rutgers University
and the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban
Studies that in the same year merged urban studies
programs from the two universities. The University
of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and Columbia
Urban Studies
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University, among others, were part of a growing
interest in engaging the surrounding communities,
often in conjunction with governmental urban
renewal activities but also in support of the university’s
civic responsibility.
Yet, the sheer complexity of the city overwhelmed
researchers and scholars. Limiting one’s
attention was a necessity, and yet, willful disregard
of one or another facet of the urban condition
seemed irresponsible. Complexity had to be eliminated
for focused studies to take place, but doing
so stripped these studies of the realism that made
them relevant. What was clear was that the traditional
disciplines were unhelpful. Sociology
(despite its roots in the University of Chicago’s
Department of Sociology in the 1920s and that
department’s interest in the city) had set aside its
urban concerns just as political science had abandoned
its Progressive era focus on city governments.
Space was wholly absent from economics
and in both history and anthropology, space functioned
passively and as mere background.
Moreover, these disciplines—with the exception of
history—found complexity to be a threat to their
well-crafted consensus regarding the appropriate
object of disciplinary concern. Sensitivity to the
intricacies of people and places—history and anthropology
being exceptions—weakened the quest for
theoretical principles and thus had to be reputed.
Even geography—that spatial discipline—was fixated
on regionalism and awash in the particularities
of the natural environment, only engaging in a
sociospatial dialectic in the 1980s. Urban studies,
however, has never exploited these differences to
mount special theoretical claims. At the same time,
the social science disciplines have never accepted it
as an equal partner in the pursuit of knowledge.
Urban “sections” were established in a number
of professional organizations. The urban
anthropology section (now SUNTA, the Society
for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global
Anthropology) was established in the American
Anthropology Association in 1972. In 1973 the
American Sociology Association allowed members
to declare their interest in developing a Community
and Urban Sociology section. Urban Politics
became a section of the American Political Science
Association in 1986. And while historians of the
city were active in the American Historical
Association prior to 1988, only in that year did