Chris Shilling
The publication of a Sociological Review Monograph on urban issues and processes is timely, both sociologically and politically. With the global recession of 2008 placing cities near the top of policy-making agendas, urban environments came to represent an ideal medium through which to explore the conjunction of ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’ that had exercised the discipline since its inception (Mills, 2000 [1959]).
There are several reasons for this. Economic crisis has prompted a growing concern about the capacity of cities to retain, attract and command new sources of capital. Just as important for sociologists, however, is that the organization and lived experience of urban life appears to be associated increasingly with renewed waves of social unrest and protest. Such conflict has been generated in significant part by systems of governmentality in which the proliferation of ‘gated communities’ and repressively policed ‘red zones’ of exclusion, characterizedbyanenforcementoflawrequiringasuspensionofdemocraticrightsfor some (Agamben, 2005), exist uneasily alongside the exacerbation of inequalities and rising levels of poverty.
This focus on the city is not, of course, entirely new: sociology has long recognized the importance of urban centres to those social, economic and culturalissuesthatlieattheheartofitsdisciplinarypurview.Contemporarystudies may be yielding new insights into the modern functioning of major cities as command and control hubs in the global economy (Sassen, 2001), the deleterious effects of city life on social capital (Putnam, 2000), racial separation and urban abandonment in the US (Wacquant, 2007), moral issues associated with cultivating sympathy for ‘those who are other’ in metropolitan contexts (Sennett, 1994: 18, 376), and a wide range of other issues. Nevertheless, these analyses continued to resonate with the significance placed on city life by the founding figures and early developers of the discipline.
Engels’s (2009 [1845]) explorations of urban industrial life in the 1840s, for example,providedanearlyandstillinfluentialstudyofthephysicallydamaging and spiritually dehumanizing conditions of life for working people living in urban enclaves characterized by overcrowding and lacking basic amenities. Weber (1966 [1921]) explored the differences between contrasting types of cities, and distinctive ways of city living, and located urban forms as integral to wider social, political and religious developments. Simmel (1971 [1903]) had earlier
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