ABSTRACT
Intellectual perspectives on the nature of urban growth in the capitalist city have shifted considerably across the course of the last hundred years. The positivistic structural-functional perspective of the human ecology school prevailed in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Human ecologists described the tendency of competitive market forces in the city to stabilize into centralized structures of economic and political dominance and moral authority. Out of the Depression and wartime years, the Fordist industrial model and Keynesian commitments in government spending created the promise of an affluent society. The social conflicts of the 1960s and the oil crisis of the 1970s fueled growing conditions of economic uncertainty and social unrest in contemporary capitalist societies. These external shocks fed intellectual activism in urban sociology against the domination of the human ecology school, marking shifts to a “new urban sociology” that includes strands of Marxism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism.
