A wake for urban theory

Abstract

AbstractIn a critical essay on new books by Matthew Desmond and Mitchell Duneier, I interrogate the demise of social theory in urban sociology following what I call the consolidation of a post‐Wilsonian consensus: a turn from properly urban sociology to a field of descriptive poverty studies. This is what Duneier's intellectual history of the idea of the ghetto illustrates most unambiguously, viz. that sociologists today rarely study cities as such, but instead treat urban poverty that happens to occur in cities. Divorced from the theories of racialization, urban political economy, and space that once defined the subfield, writers have shifted toward a localist descriptivism, embodying what Castells once called phenomena in the city, but not of the city. This reluctance to theorize characterizes Desmond's book on evictions, his prior pleas for a relational ethnography notwithstanding. Far from laying out the field of evictions, I argue, he instead treats immediate landlord‐tenant relations, never exploring how the state, investors, and other key actors are involved in the process. As Duneier unwittingly demonstrates in Ghetto, urban theory withers away in the subfield at precisely the moment when it is needed to make sense of new processes of dispossession and dislocation that have characterized urban change in the United States since the implosion of the ghetto in the 1970s. Hopefully Evicted will serve as a clarion call to reverse this tendency with its rich descriptions of such processes. But this sort of reversal would require us to engage in a project of theoretical reconstruction, piecing together the insightful theoretical fragments scattered throughout Desmond's book, as he remains hesitant to promulgate an actually relational sociology.