Urban Sociology

Abstract

Urban sociology seeks to describe and interpret the causal connections between the constitutive elements of a city and the factors that give rise to them. This approach furnishes understanding of the complex as well as profound meaning of every urban reality, notably the territorial stabilization of social life, the rise of a space symbol system and culture, and the origin and evolution of human settlements. The city came to reproduce, in historically different ways, the structural elements of the first human settlements: ancient cities, cities in the Middle Ages, modern cities, those of the industrial revolutions, and those of the world as a city system. The features of the ‘global city’ seem to be the following: an indifference to the spatial allocation of the production process, supremacy over increasingly broader territories, a market on the world scale, and the production of symbols and mechanisms that legitimate the cities' planetary power which the legal and political orders of states are unable to counteract.