ABSTRACT
Social science has not been kind to cities. What I mean by this is that cities as social entities-how they feature in social change-have been relatively neglected. This may be because studying cities does not fit easily into the ‘process-defined’ division of social science into disciplines, the core trinity of economics, sociology and political science that purport to match the three basic spheres of human activities. Thus the study of cities has been largely relegated to marginal areas of social science, notably human ecology/urban sociology and urban geography/ city planning. In recent years these areas have been brought together as ‘urban studies’; but notice that they remain a collection of ‘studies’ (implying theoretically challenged understanding) rather than a new focused ‘discipline’ (implying theoretical sophistication). But the neglect still remains curious not least because social science was invented to understand modern society and the concrete manifestation of this societal type has been large-scale urbanization. I suppose it could be argued that the urban has become ubiquitous and therefore cities are taken for granted in social science. But, again, this argument does not stand up, since states as social entities feature prominently in understanding social change while being typically taken for granted in social science. Clearly being taken for granted can be either a sign of immanent power or an indicator of irrelevance.
