Re‐thinking the urban social

Abstract

This paper has been prompted by a journal debate at the start of the new millennium on the future of urban sociology in light of the proliferation of urban studies in many disciplines at a time of increasingly blurred boundaries between cities and the world at large. It was a debate that, inter alia, asked urban sociology to engage seriously with globalization (and contemporary modernity in general) as well as to return to its original concerns with urban social inequality in a new division of inter‐disciplinary labour. This paper steers clear of defining a role for urban sociology, principally because it believes urban studies to have become a field of such intense inter‐disciplinarity that it makes little sense to demarcate the urban sociology from urban geography, urban planning and politics, and urban anthropology. Instead the debate is used to raise a more basic question of urban ontology relating, firstly, to how cities should be imagined as places, so that due recognition can be given to the radical exteriority that characterizes them and, secondly, to how the urban social should be imagined, so that trans‐local influences and non‐human associations can be counted as part of the urban social. It is argued that these two ontological inflections imply a different understanding of the geography and sociology of the city to that assumed in the original debate.