ABSTRACT
In sociological research today, the city often acts as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations. Whereas, to date, some studies have focused on the influence of early urban sociology on contemporary conceptions of the city, the conditions of possibility for the emergence of urban statistics as an observer and (co-)producer of ‘social problems’ in early modern nation-states have remained largely overlooked. This chapter aims to fill this important gap in the scholarly literature by examining urban populations and urban problems in the Belgian Queteletian population statistics of the mid-nineteenth century. Specific attention is devoted to the emergence of the city as an observation unit, the agency of the city as a data collector and the definition of social problems through the lens of (urban) statistics. The central question addressed in this chapter is in how far, in the population statistics of this period, urban social problems can be identified as distinct from social problems at the level of the country as a whole. It is argued that research into the formation of social urban indicators provides an interesting breeding ground for the study of nation-building processes.
