This important work brings together a range of perspectives in contemporary urban analysis. The field of urban analysis is characterized by the multiplicity of approaches, philosophies, and methodologies employed in the examination of urban structure and urban problems. This fragmentation of perspectives is not simply a reflection of the multifaceted and complex nature of the city as subject matter. Nor is it a function of the variety of disciplines such as geography, planning, economics, history, and sociology. Cross-cutting all of these issues and allegiances has been the emergence in recent years of a debate on fundamental issues of philosophy, ideology, and basic assumptions underlying the analysis of urban form and structure. The notion of urban analysis Robert W. Lake discusses focuses on the spatial structure of the city, its causes, and its consequences. At issue is the city as a spatial fact: a built environment with explicit characteristics and spatial dimensions, a spatial distribution of population and land uses, a nexus of locational decisions, an interconnected system of locational advantages and disadvantages, amenities and dis-amenities. Beginning with landmark articles in neo-classical and ecological theory, the reader covers the latest departures and developments. Separate sections cover political approaches to locational conflict, institutional influences on urban form, and recent Marxist approaches to urban analysis. Among the topics included are community strategies in locational conflict, the political economy of place, the role of government and the courts, institutional influences in the housing market, and the relationship between urban form and capitalist development. This is a valuable introductory text for courses in urban planning, urban geography, and urban sociology.

Readings in Urban Sociology covers the specialized aspect of sociology, together with an introduction designed to relate the selected Readings to the state of sociological knowledge and research in the field in question. This book is organized into four parts encompassing 12 chapters, and begins with an overview of the study of urbanization and urban sociology. The opening part describes the nature of industrial urbanism in Great Britain. This part deals with the development of British urban sociology and the idea of neighborhood community. The next part examines the distinction between ways of life in the modern city and the modern suburb. This part also looks into the context of urbanization involving population dispersal and diffusion. The closing parts provide an analysis of the urban system in terms of a conflict model and demonstrate the development of Prague's ecological structure. These parts also discuss the notion of a rural-urban continuum and the process of adjustment to an urban system in Africa. This book will prove useful to sociologists and researchers.

This reader draws together seminal selections spanning the subfield from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Contributions from Simmel, Wirth, Park, Burgess, Zukin, Sassen, Smith and Castells are amongst the 40 selections.

Emphasising the social, critical and situated dimensions of the urban, this comprehensive Research Handbook presents a unique collection of theoretical and empirical perspectives on urban sociology. Bringing together expert contributors from across the world, it provides a rich overview and research agenda for contemporary urban sociological scholarship.

This book offers a coherant theoretical introduction to urban sociology. Based on the urban theory of Louis Wirth, it systematically examines Wirth's principal ideas in the contexts of pre-industrial cities, industrial cities and bureaucracies. Morris discusses conditions for the emergence of cities and for industrialization. He relates organisational and ecological accounts of the city and considers the contributions of each. Bureaucracy appears as a peculiarly urban form of organisation: its ecological and social characteristics are examined in an original manner and with considerable insight so as to illustrate and modify the propositions derived from Wirth's theory. The book concludes with a comprehensive evaluation of Wirth and his critics. This book was first published in 1968.

The fifth edition of this text presents a balanced review of the ecological arguments that the urban arena produces unique experiential and urban-based cultural effects while exploring the broader political and economic contexts that produce and modify the urban environment. In addition to examining the urban dimensions of such topics as community formation and continuity, minority and majority dynamics, ethnic experience, poverty, power, and crime, it provides an analysis of the spatial distribution of population and resources with regard to the metropolitanization of the urban form, and the interaction between urban concentration and development and underdevelopment. From a first chapter that begins with a discussion of some of the more micrological features of the urban experience, the text focuses on the significance of the more macrological cultural, social organizational, and political dimensions of urban change, in an historical span that includes the first cities and concludes with an exploration of the implications of cyberspace, transnationalism, and global terrorism for the future of urban sociology. While the work focuses primarily on the North American case, its analytical and integrated discussion makes it applicable to urban societies in general.

Fay Gow's way of life typifies the people who inhabit the forest of masts. Story shows him running his water taxi and follows him on an outing to Tiger Balm Garden.

This book focuses on the relationship between the state and economy in the development of cities. It reviews and reinterprets fundamental theoretical models that explain how the operation of markets in equilibrium shapes the scale and organization of the commercial city in a mixed market economy within a liberal state. These models link markets for the factors of production, markets for investment and fixed capital formation, markets for transportation, and markets for exports in equilibrium both within the urban economy and the rest of the world. In each case, the model explains the urban economy by revealing how assumptions about causes and structures lead to predictions about scale and organization outcomes. By simplifying and contrasting these models, this book proposes another interpretation: that governance and the urban economy are outcomes negotiated by political actors motivated by competing notions of commonwealth and the individual desire for wealth and power. The book grounds its analysis in economic history, explaining the rise of commercial cities and the emergence of the urban economy. It then turns to factors of production, export, and factor markets, introducing and parsing the Mills model, breaking it down into its component parts and creating a series of simpler models that can better explain the significance of each economic assumption. Simplified models are also presented for real estate and fixed capital investment markets, transportation, and land use planning. The book concludes with a discussion of linear programming and the Herbert- Stevens and the Ripper-Varaiya models. A fresh presentation of the theories behind urban economics, this book emphasizes the links between state and economy and challenges the reader to see its theories in a new light. As such, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of economics, public policy, public administration, urban policy, and city and urban planning. >

Urban Sociology in Canada, Second Edition introduces the fundamentals of the theoretical structure of Canadian urban studies. The book is comprised of 11 chapters that are organized into six parts. The text provides census data of various Canadian cities along with urban empirical studies to help illustrate the generalization and concepts. The book first covers the classical foundations of urban sociology, and then proceeds to discussing the growth of urban system. The third part talks about the process of entrance to the urban system, while the fourth part deals with the spatial shape of the urban system. The last two parts tackle urbanism and the regulation of urban system, respectively. The book will be of great use to social scientists who involve urban population as the main demographics of their research study.