Citation

Sassen S. Br. J. Sociol. 2000; 51(1): 143-159.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, London School of Economics and Political Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1468-4446.2000.00143.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article examines some of the major challenges facing urban sociology at century's end given its traditions and lineages. These challenges arise out of the intersection of major macrosocial trends and their particular spatial patterns. The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where these macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these trends are globalization and the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of specific types 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. The city emerges once again as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations as it was in the origins of sociology. Can urban sociology address these challenges and in so doing once again produce some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader transformation?

Keywords

centrality; Globalization; inscription; telecommunication; transnationalism