SOC280J - METROPOLIS UNBOUND

URBAN SOCIOLOGY IN QUESTION

Loc Wacquant
Fall 2008 - Thursday 4-6pm 203 Wheeler
Deparment of Sociology, 478 Barrows Hall
Office hours: Wednesday 12-2pm/2-4pm and by appointment at <loic@ berkeley.edu>

This course scans theoretical approaches to the city and explores salient features of social
structure, experience, and transformation in the American metropolis at centurys turn in an
effort to determine whether there exist or should exist an urban sociology and what this
designation covers in the twofold sense of comprise and hide.
We first map out the space of theories of the structure, functioning and culture of cities
and then examine in seriatim the impact of economic globalization and informational
technologies on the material basis of urban life; the sifting and sorting of new waves of
immigration and ethnic competition; the specificity of the ghetto as mechanism of sociospatial
seclusion and the comparative politics of urban polarization from below; the myth and reality of
suburbia and their conjoint dissolution under the press of exurbanization and gentrification; the
tangled nexus of poverty, crime and violence in the inner city; the rise and ramifying
implications of gated communities; and the role of the metropolis as cultural site and symbolic
engine.
Each theme is anchored by a major book and assorted shorter pieces which are dissected
and discussed with a view towards identifying the strengths and weaknesses of contending
theories of the city (ecological, sub-cultural, political-economic, neo-Marxist, feminist, and
so-called postmodernist) as social constellation, concentrate, prism, and laboratory. As we
proceed, we probe the parameters, weigh the concepts, and scope the concerns of contemporary
urban sociology, asking what is distinctive about it as a form of inquiry and consciousness, and
what it contributes to our understanding of the social condition and present historical
predicament.
The course format mixes lectures, individual presentations, group discussion and written
exercises. The readings are copious and dense; they must imperatively be covered and digested
prior to the weekly meeting so that participants can fully contribute to, as well as benefit, from it.
Each week a pair of students will present that weeks readings and lead discussion; one student
will outline and defend the particular theory or research assigned while the other offers a
methodical critique of it. Both students will prepare a one-page synopsis of the major points to
be debated.
The course requirements are fourfold: (1) a class presentation and synopsis geared to
leading discussion; (2) a short conceptual-cum-bibliographic memo (5 single-spaced pages,
excluding references) on a major theory, issue, or phenomenon covered in the course, on a topic
to be approved by the instructor, due on week 8; each student will also read, comment, and edit
the memo of another seminar member; (3) weekly electronic reading notes addressing the core
issues and concepts of that week, due on the previous Tuesday at 12 noon (covering 10 sessions
of your choice); (4) a well-written and tightly argued term paper (20 pages max.) engaging a
research topic or several of the works sampled in the course, due week 15. Deadlines are

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imperative and shall not be extended. You are encouraged to pursue your own research work and
training as part of the requirements for this course.
The required texts are available from the usual bookstore(s). All readings are also on
reserve at Moffitt. The remaining articles and dispersed pieces is available on line through
bspace (at SOC280J): https://bspace.berkeley.edu/dav/3b4d5508-fb8a-4f5b-b37b-bc9cb0c59a7f.
Note that we skip two weeks (weeks 3 and 13) and have four extended sessions (4-7pm,
indicated by *) to cover more weighty materials. Please plan your schedules accordingly.
Required books
Anderson, Elijah. 2000. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner
City. New York: W.W. Norton.
Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Edited by Ida Susser.
Cambridge: Blackwell.
Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. 1945, 1970. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a
Northern City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Fischman, Robert. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic
Books.
Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place.
Berkeley: University of Chicago Press.
Low, Setha, M. 2004. Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress
America. New York: Routledge.
Portes, Alejandro and Alex Stepick. 1993. City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami.
Berkeley: University of California Press. Entire.
Sassen, Saskia. 1991, 2nd ed. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York:
Routledge.
Wacquant, Loc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
1. MAPPING URBAN SOCIOLOGY I: OF THE CITY OR IN THE CITY?
(27 August)
Hannerz, Exploring the City, chapters 2, 3, 7.
Weber, Max. [1921] The Nature of the City (from The City, 1958). Reprinted in Richard
Sennett (ed.), Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1969, pp. 23-046.
Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Urban Ideology (1972) and Urban Sociology in the Twenty-First
Century. Pp. 34-69 and 390-405 in The Castells Reader.
Low, Setha. 1996. The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City. Annual
Reviews in Anthropology 25: 383-409.

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Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, Prologue, pp. 1-11.
Supplementary
White, Morton and Lucia White. 1962. The Intellectual Versus the City. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Boyer, Paul. 1978. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1975. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. MAPPING URBAN SOCIOLOGY II: RAMPARTS
(3 September)
Simmel, Georg. [1905] 1950. The Metropolis and Mental Life. Pp. 409-424 in The Sociology
of Georg Simmel. Edited by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press.
Park, Robert and Ernest Burgess. 1925. The City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
chapters 1-3, pp. 1-79: The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior
in the Urban Environment (Park); The Growth of the City (Burgess); The Ecological
Approach to the Study of the Human Community (McKenzie).
Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 4: 1-24
(reprinted in Louis Wirth, On Cities and Social Life, Chicago, The University of Chicago
Press, 1964, pp. 60-83).
Fischer, Claude. 1995. The Subcultural Theory of Urbanism: A Twentieth-Year Assessment.
American Journal of Sociology 101-3 (November): 543-577.
Supplementary
Gans, Herbert. 1962. Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life: A Reevaluation of
Definitions. Pp. 625-648 in Human Behavior and Social Processes. Edited by A.M.
Rose. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Wirth, Louis. 1964. On Cities and Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hawley, Amos. 1984. Human Ecological and Marxian Theories. American Journal of
Sociology 89: 904-917.
Wilson, Franklin. 1984. Urban Ecology: Urbanization and Systems of Cities. Annual Review
of Sociology 10 283-307.
Smith, David A. 1995. Rereading Some Classical Human Ecology: The New Urban Sociology
Meets the Old. Urban Affairs Review 30, 3: 432-457.
3. SKIP WEEK
(10 September)
4. MAPPING URBAN SOCIOLOGY III: BARBARIANS
(17 September)
Walton, John. 1993. Urban Sociology: The Contribution and Limits of Political Economy.
Annual Review of Sociology 19: 301-320.
Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, entire, with emphasis on
chapters 1-5.

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Massey, Doreen. 1992. Politics and Space/Time. New Left Review 196 (NovemberDecember), reprinted as chapter 11 in Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, University
of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 249-272.
Recommended
Castells, Manuel. [1975] 1977. The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. London: Edward
Arnold.
Saunders, Peter. 1981. Social Theory and the Urban Question. New York: Holmes & Meyer.
Gottdiener, Mark. 1985. The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Milicevic, Aleksandra Sasha. 2001. Radical Intellectuals: What Happened to the New Urban
Sociology? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25-4 (December):
759783.
*5. NEW CAPITALISM COMES TO TOWN: INFORMATIONAL CITY, GLOBAL
CITY, DUAL CITY
(24 September)
Castells, Information Technology, the Restructuring of Capital-Labor Relations, and the Rise of
the Dual City, in The Castells Reader, pp. 285-313 and The Space of Flows, 314-366.
Friedmann, John and Goetz Wolff. 1982. World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and
Action. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6: 309-344.
Sassen, The Global City, entire, with emphasis on chapters 1-2, 4-6, 9-10.
Supplementary
Fainstein, Susan S., Ian Gordon and Michael Harloe (ed.). 1992. Divided Cities: New York and
London in the Contemporary World. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.
Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1999. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Americas Global Cities.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, esp. Conclusions and a Look to the
Future, pp. 398-426.
Marcuse, Peter and Ronald Van Kempen (eds.). 1999. Globalizing Cities : An International and
Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.
Brenner, Neil and Roger Keil (eds.). 2006. The Global Cities Reader. New York: Routledge.
6. ETHNI/CITY: ETHNIC LADDERS, INVASION, AND SUCCESSION REVISITED
(1 October)
Waldinger, Roger. 1989. Immigration and Urban Change. Annual Review of Sociology 15:
211-232.
Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge, entire, with focus on chapters 2-3, 5-8.
Supplementary
Waldinger, Roger. 2001. Strangers at the Gate: New Immigrants in Urban America. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Smith, Robert. 2005. Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

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Gregory, James N. 2005. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White
Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Kazepov, Yuri (ed.). 2005. Cities of Europe: Changing Contexts, Local Arrangement and the
Challenge to Urban Cohesion. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell.
7. RACE IN THE METROPOLIS 1: GHETTO AND ETHNIC CLUSTER
(8 October)
Sennett, Richard. 1994. Fear of Touching. Chapter 7, pp. 212-251 in Flesh and Stone: The
Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton.
Wacquant, Loc. 2004. Ghetto. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. London: Pergamon Press.
Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, part I.
Recommended
Stow, Kenneth R. 1992. Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Europe. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Osofsky, Gilbert. 1971. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto--Negro New York, 1890-1930. New
York: Harper, 2nd ed.
Clark, Kenneth B. 1965. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. New York: Harper.
Nelli, Humbert S. 1970. Italians in Chicago: A Study in Ethnic Mobility. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Zhou, Min. 1992. Chinatown: The Socioeonomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
*8. RACE IN THE METROPOLIS 2: THE PARALLEL CITY
(15 October)
>>Conceptual memo due. Brief presentations by seminar participants.
Wacquant, Loc. 1998. A Black City Within the White: Revisiting Americas Dark Ghetto.
Black Renaissance - Renaissance Noire 2-1(Fall-Winter): 141-151.
Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, part II.
Recommended
Sides, Josh. 2003. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression
to the Present. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and
Public Policy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton. 1992. American Apartheid. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Moore, Joan and Raquel Pinderhughes (eds.). 1993. In the Barrios: Latinos and the Underclass
Debate. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Western, John. 1996. Outcast Cape Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.
9. HYPERGHETTO, ANTIGHETTO, PRECARIAT
(22 October)

Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, entire.

Supplementary
Perlman, Janice. 1976. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ladnyi, Jnos Szelnyi, Ivn. 2006. Patterns of Exclusion: Constructing Gypsy Ethnicity and
the Making of an Underclass in Transitional Societies of Europe. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks
Within China's Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
*10. THE CITY OF DREAD: CRIME, VIOLENCE, AND THE STREET
(29 October)
Pick and read one of these two books:
Bourgois, In Search of Respect, entire, with emphasis on chapters 1, 3-6.
Anderson, Code of the Street, entire, with emphasis on 1-3, 5-7.
Wacquant, Loc. 2002. Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban
Ethnography. American Journal of Sociology 107-6 (May): 1468-1532.
Supplementary
Snchez-Jankowski, Martn. 1991. Islands in the Street: Gangs in Urban American Society.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi. 2006. Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Marquez, Patricia. 2002. The Street Is My Home: Youth and Violence in Caracas. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
11. SUBURBIA AS HISTORICAL MYTH AND MYTHICAL REALITY
(5 November)
Fischman, Bourgeois Utopias, entire.
Baumgartner, M.P. 1988. The Moral Order of a Suburb. New York: Oxford University Press,
chapters 1, 4, 6, pp. 3-13, 72-100, 127-135.
Supplementary
Jackson, Kenneth. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Fogelson, Robert M. 2007. Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Kirp, David L., John P. Dwyer, and Larry A. Rosenthal. 1997. Our Town: Race, Housing, and
the Soul of Suburbia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Self, Robert O. 2003. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton:
Princeton University Press

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12. PROFITS AND POLITICS IN GENTRIFICATION
(12 November)
Smith, New Urban Frontier, entire.
Slater, Tom. 2006. The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, 4 (December): 737-757.
Wacquant, Loc. 2008. Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in
Recent Urban Research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32-1
(March): 198-205.
Supplementary
Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. 2007. Gentrification. London: Routedge.
Abu Lughod, Janet et al. 1994. From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New Yorks
Lower East Side. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Atkinson, Rowland and Gary Bridge (eds.) 2005. Gentrification in a Global Context. London:
Routledge.
Peck, Jamie. 2005. Struggling with the Creative Class. International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 29-4 (December): 440-470.
Documentary: Flag Wars, see at: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2003/flagwars/
12. GOING GATED (OR THE NEIGHBORHOOD AS SHIELD AND TRAP)
(19 November)
Low, Behind the Gates, entire.
Caldeira, Teresa P.R. 1996. Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation. Public Culture 82.
OR
Small, Mario. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. Assessing
Neighborhood Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research. Annual
Review of Sociology 28: 443-478.
Supplementary
Blakely, Edward J. and Mary Gail Snyder. 1999. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the
United States. Brookings Institution Press.
Atkinson, Bland and Sarah Blandy (ed.). 2006. Gated Communities: International Perspectives.
New York: Routledge.
Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2001. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in So Paulo.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Documentary: Rodrigo Pla, La Zona (2008).
13. SKIP WEEK, Happy Thanksgiving
(26 November)

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14. TBA
(3 December)
*15. CODA AND EXCURSUS: METROPOPOLIS UNBOUND OR EXPLODED?
(10 December)
>>Term papers due with class folder
Harvey, David. 2003. The Right to the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 27, 4 (December): 939-941.
Simone, The City Yet to Come, entire.
Additional readings to be selected by the seminar participants.
Supplementary
Hall, Peter. 1988. Cities of Tomorrow. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.
Hayden, Dolores. 1995. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Gottdiener, Mark and Ray Hutchison. 2006. The New Urban Sociology. Boulder: Westview.
Low, Setha, M. (ed.). 1999. Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Fyfe, Nicholas (ed.). 2005. The Urban Geography Reader. New York: Routledge

[8/24/2008 version]