ABSTRACT
From a relatively dense and geographically specific cluster of research centres in the 1920s and 1930s (New York, Chicago, Cambridge/Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia), the academic study of the city in the US rapidly broadened both geographically and intellectually in the period after the Second World War. While European urbanists engaged with Marxism, and especially its structural variant, as the key expository model for explaining social and spatial differentiation in the city; in the US the Chicago heritage continued to attract new practitioners, notably Gans (whose work we discuss below) Greer (1962) and Suttles (1968). However, the dominant trend in American urban studies was away from the ecological and interactionist approaches favoured by Chicago sociology towards ‘a critical political economy that gave greater emphasis to the structure of political power than to the mode of production’. While the scholars in this tradition were generally inclined towards radical liberal social objectives they were more influenced
In Britain, meanwhile, the Booth and Webb legacy of urban social investigation was continued after the Second World War at the Centre for Urban Studies, established at University College London in 1958 under the directorship of Ruth Glass (herself an LSE graduate and wife of the LSE sociology professor, D.V. Glass) with the declared aim of
However, lacking the strong methodological traditions of French and German sociology, British urban researchers often fell back on the investigative ‘mise-en-scène’ style of the Victorian moralists, so that community studies risked being regarded in Ruth Glass’s words as ‘[the] poor sociologist’s substitute for the novel’ (Glass, 1966: 148 in Bell and Newby, 1971: 13). Glass went further in ‘castigating
A theory limited to ‘the city’ is too narrow in scope to explain the changing landscape of the city itself.
