The city: Its return as a lens for social theory

The article examines in what ways the sociological study of cities can produce scholarship and analytic tools that help us understand the broader social transformations under way today. Urban sociology had this capacity early in the 20th century, when industrialization generated massive changes in cities. The thesis is that today globalization is similarly generating major changes that become visible in cities, most notably global cities. One critical issue here is whether these larger transformations evince sufficiently complex and multivalent urban instances as to allow us to construct such instances as objects of study that take us beyond the urban moment of a process or condition. The urban moment of a major process can help the empirical study of that process in ways that other phases of such a process might not. At the same time, this urbanization of major processes repositions the city as an object of study. And this is the second question organizing this article: what is it we are actually naming today when we use the construct city?