Urban Sociology
Lec 2: 04/01/2024: Urbanization as a process
Dr. Amrita Sen
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
email:
[email protected] Urbanization as a process: an introduction to urban sociology
• Definitions and perspectives: What is distinctive about the city as a built environment?
• Positioning the city in the metropolitan region and in the global system
• Factors that "shape" urban settlements
• The meaningful character of the "built environment": inscribing identity and life-styles in "urban
space”
• Cities are relatively large forms of human settlement, within which a wide range of activities are
performed, which enable cities to become centres of power in relation to outlying areas and
smaller settlements.
An introduction to urban sociology
• Yet, despite all the rich opportunities that big cities have to offer, many people actually find them
lonely or unfriendly places.
• Why?
• One distinctive characteristic of modern urban life is the frequency of interactions between
strangers.
• Even within the same neighbourhood or block of flats, it is unlikely that people will know most of
their neighbours.
• If you live in a town or city, think about the number of times that you interact everyday with
people you do not know.
What is urban sociology and why do we need to study it?
• Relationships that happen in an urban society
• An investigation of urban culture
Distinctive factors of urban:
• Occupation
• Environment
• Size of group
• Thickness of populace
• Heterogeneity
• Social separation and stratification
Contemporary cities are characterized by ‘globalization and the rise of the new
information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and
the strengthening presence and voice of socio-cultural diversity. Each one of these trends
has its own specific conditionalities, contents and consequences for cities, and for theory
and research. Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in
distinct, often complex manners, in a way they do not in just about any other setting’
Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology
Columbia University
Scope of the subject ‘urban sociology’
• Awareness of theoretical perspectives
• Learning social impacts of developmental changes occurring in urban
environment.
• Distinctive features of third world urbanization
• Urbanization as a cultural form
• Impact of urbanization on class, occupational patterns, religion, polity,
kinship and so on.
• Making more aware on the diverse role of the ‘urban’ in our everyday
lives.
Sethi and Creutzig 2021
COVID-19 has magnified the deficiencies of how we manage our cities while giving us a unique chance to re-envision these, particularly in the global South. We argue that
pandemic-resilient cities require rental-housing stocks and highly accessible urban environments, financed by land value capture.
READINGS
• Sethi, M. and Creutzig, F. 2021. COVID 19 recovery and the global
urban poor. Urban Sustainability, 23, 1-5
• Sassen, Saskia. 2000. New frontiers facing urban sociology at the
millennium. British Journal of Sociology, 51 (1), 143-159.
