Occasionally, a colleague will ask, “Say, what’s so ‘new’ about The New Urban Sociology after all these years?” It sounded frivolous at first, but we have come to realize that this is meant as a serious question.
So, what is still “new” about The New Urban Sociology? Our original formulation of the new paradigm dismantled the previous dominant approach of urban ecology grounded in neo-Classical economics with the market of many buyers and sellers as supreme along with its neo-Liberal political and planning prescriptions that weighted market solutions heavily despite government subsidies. The new urban sociology replaced this view with the more realistic one of an economy and political system hegemonically controlled by large, powerful interests that dominate our “mixed” economy, where government intervention usually favored those powerful interests. It is not a level playing field. To suggest that our view, along with the theory of Henri Lefebvre, and the political economy based on our perspective, are somehow not relevant to better planning, better control over our urban environments, and better management of job creation and profit making cannot be the case. The new urban sociology remains the best explanatory paradigm for the urban crisis, both current and past.
Despite the overwhelming reality of how everyday life is organized today in the United States—and increasingly in developed countries elsewhere—as a regional, expanding space that we call the mutlicentered metropolitan region, many urbanists persist in placing the term the city exclusively at the center of their analysis. They speak of world cities, edge cities, megacities. The immense regional spread of socioeconomic activity with multiple centers of economic activity and diverse forms of residential settlement have taken over many of the functions of the classical, historical central city itself. The City of London is still the financial center of the United Kingdom, but the City of London is but a small part of the city of London, which itself is part of a vast multicentered metropolitan region encompassing myriad residential, business, recreational, and government minicenters. New York City must be considered globally central, but when it is compared to London and Tokyo in the “world cities” literature, the reference is almost exclusively talking about Manhattan, and even more specifically, a small area of Manhattan—Wall Street and its attendant services and spin-off businesses. Looming as an immense regional agglomeration outside Manhattan is a vast expanse of urbanized, multicentered space encompassing parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as dozens of New York State areas around the five boroughs of the city. In short, what remains still “new” is the basic need to grasp the size and internal dynamics of this new form of urban space that we call the multicentered metropolitan region.
Given the alternative approaches advertised by other urban sociology textbooks, we must ask how we can best help our students understand the current economic meltdown and its enduring impact on everyday life—something that can be explained directly, easily, and quite usefully by reading The New Urban Sociology’s approach to the role of real estate speculation and investment.
It is a great pleasure to produce a fifth edition of this text that began as an idea of Mark Gottdiener’s in 1991 and was first published three years later. Alarmed that the original publisher planned to offer the third edition at the cost of $100 or more, we arranged for that edition to be put out by Westview in a paperback format. In this fifth edition, we have once again updated the material in previous editions to cover the persisting importance of understanding the “new” approach in order to explain the failures of the market and influence-controlled government intervention, the persistent and growing pattern of uneven development within metropolitan regions, and the critical need for increased social justice in dealing with persisting social, political, and economic problems of everyday urban life in the massive, multicentered metropolitan region. New cultural forms, new political struggles, new changes in the global positions of countries like India, Brazil, and China, new patterns of global labor sourcing and transnational corporate dynamics, new issues of social justice and environmental concerns, and the like in our urban society continue to make this edition of the New Urban Sociology as relevant today as it was when the first edition came out more than twenty years ago. We hope that it will be as useful in the classroom as have previous versions of this new paradigm.
The development of The New Urban Sociology through five editions has been an extended project. It could not have been accomplished without the crucial help provided by a number of people. We wish to thank friends in academia and beyond for their support: Andrew Austin, Bob Antonio, Karen Dalke, David Diaz, Joe Feagin, Kevin Gotham, Harvey Kay, Bruce Haynes, Chigon Kim, Nestor Rodriguez, Eric Monkkonen, Peter Muller, Sean Ryan, Mario Small, Leonard Wallock, and Talmadge Wright in the United States; Phil Gunn, Lena Lavinas, Sandra Lincioni, Circe Monteiro and Sueli Schiffer in Brazil; Jens Tonboe in Denmark; Lorenzo Tripodi in Germany; Alexandros Lagopoulos and Nikos Komninos in Greece; Mark Clapson and Chris Pickvance in England; Gabrielle Manella and Simone Giometti in Italy; Dorel Abraham in Romania; Lynn Smith in Scotland; Milan Prodanovic and Sonya Prodanovic in Serbia; and Richard Wolff in Switzerland.
We thank the editing/design/production team of Catherine Craddock, Trish Wilkinson, Carolyn Sobczak, Chrisona Schmidt, and Kay Mariea at Westview.
Once again we would like to thank our colleagues who served as reviewers for earlier editions: Brian Aldrich, Winona State University; Brian Barry, Rochester Institute of Technology; Craig Calhoun, then at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and now at New York University; Robert L. Carroll, University of Cincinnati; Scott Ford, Florida State University; Anthony Filipovitch, Minnesota State University at Mankato; Karl Flaming, University of Colorado–Denver; Judith Friedman, Rutgers University; Kevin Fox Gotham, Tulane University; Geoffrey Grant, South Dakota State University; George Kephart, Pennsylvania State University; Jerry Lembcke, College of Holy Cross; Anthony Mendonca, Community College of Allegheny County; Charles Price Reavis, CUNY–John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Nestor Rodriguez, University of Houston; Thomas Shannon, Radford University; Steven L. Vassar, Mankato State University; and J. Talmadge Wright, Loyola University; Gordana Rabrenovic, Northeastern University; Richard E. Ocejo, City University of New York; Gabriel Santos, Lynchburg College; Amy Donley, University of Central Florida, Antwan Jones, The George Washington University.