ABSTRACT
Culture has always been a significant part of what cities are and do. The visual culture expressed in architectural styles, monuments, and the designs of parks, as well as the less formal culture offered by street musicians and artists in neighborhood festivals and fairs, contribute to how cities feel and are experienced. Until recently, however, the study of culture and its importance to urban form and change was relatively circumscribed. Over the years, a number of sociocultural and symbolic interactionist sociologists campaigned to push the study of culture to the forefront of urban studies. This includes the work of Anselm Strauss (Images of the American City. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961) and Gerald Suttles (“The Cumulative Texture of Local Urban Culture,” American Journal of Sociology90, 2 [1984]: 283–304). But the discipline’s preoccupation with demographic and political-economic changes left very little room for “culture” as a primary focus of urban theory or research.
