ABSTRACT
For many years following the Second World War, urban sociology was unmistakably in decline as it became increasingly isolated from developments within the discipline as a whole. Following the demise of Chicago ecology and the lingering but finally inevitable collapse of the rural-urban continuum, urban sociology staggered on as an institutionally recognized sub-discipline within sociology departments, yet its evident lack of a theoretically specific area of study resulted in a diverse and broad sweep across a range of concerns that shared nothing in common save that they could all be studied in cities. Urban sociology became the study of everything that happened in ‘urban’ areaschanging patterns of kinship, political controversies over land use, educational deprivation among the working class, social isolation in council tower blocks-and it therefore became indistinct from the sociological analysis of advanced, industrial capitalist societies. The ‘urban’ was everwhere and nowhere, and the sociology of the urban thus studied everything and nothing. As Pahl observed, ‘It is as if sociologists cannot define urban without a rural contrast: when they lose the peasant they lose the city too’ (1975, p. 199).
