Description
First published in 1986. For this new edition of Social Theory and the Urban Question Peter Saunders has updated the text to take account of major theoretical developments in the 1980s and has also considerably developed his own approach. Three chapters have been completely rewritten and others have been appropriately revised. The revisions ensure that Social Theory and the Urban Question will retain its position as a major textbook in urban sociology and an important contribution to the development of urban social theory. The book begins with a review of the ways in which Weber, Durkheim, Marx and Engels approached the analysis of the city. It goes on to consider the four major theoretical approaches which have been developed in twentieth-century urban sociology - those of human ecology, cultural theories, neo-Weberianism and neo-Marxism. Recent innovations and new directions arising out of the work of contemporary writers such as Castells, Pahl, Harvey and Giddens are discussed and evaluated, and the book concludes by identifying a new 'sociology of consumption' which may now be emerging in the urban studies literature.
Table of Contents
Introduction to the second edition, 1. Social theory, capitalism and the urban question, 2. The urban as an ecological community, 3 The urban as a cultural form, 4. The urban as a socio-spatial system, 5. The urban as ideology, 6. The urban as a spatial unit of collective consumption, 7. A non-spatial urban sociology?, 8. From urban social theory to a sociology of consumption, Appendix: A note on the empirical testing of theories, Further reading, References, Index
