230132 VO M5 Urban Sociology: Debates and Developments (2025W)

The course aims at offering an introduction into Urban Sociology and how it developed as a subfield of sociology addressing both classical thinkers and contemporary urban scholars contributions to the field. Students will be introduced to the analytical tools the discipline uses to critically understand urban phenomena. Are cities becoming more important? What are the consequences of the ongoing spatial changes? How does globalization influence urbanization dynamics in the global North and in the global South? Is gentrification the same everywhere? Where does Vienna fit into the broader picture? Students will be made aware about different theoretical and methodological approaches and their consequences in providing different views of cities and how they change across the globe. By doing so, the course will provide an overview of the complexity of cities and the need to disentangle this complexity in its multiple facets, from the political and economic to cultural and social points of views.

The course has a double objective:
1) first to provide a historical overview of how urban sociology developed;
2) second to provide the tools to understand cities and how they change. Students should be able to autonomously analyse urban contexts and how they change.