世纪之交的城市社会学新前沿

New Frontiers Facing Urban Sociology at the Millennium

本文总结了世纪末城市社会学面临的一些主要挑战。这些挑战来自于主要的宏观社会发展趋势与它们特有的空间模式的交织。城市和大都市区是这些宏观社会趋势物质化的战略性场所,因此成为研究的对象。这些趋势包括全球化和新的信息技术的涌现,跨国和跨地区动态的增强,以及社会文化多样性的逐渐加强。对于城市及其理论和研究来说,每一种趋势都有着特定的发展条件、内容和结果。城市是这些趋势以独特而复杂的方式相互作用的场所,而这种相互作用几乎是不可能在其他环境中发生的。因而,正如当初城市在社会学的起源中所发挥的作用一样,城市再次成为研究宏观社会趋势演变的重要窗口。城市社会学能否应对这些挑战,能否再次为理解这些宏观转型提供一些有力的分析工具?

The article examines some of the major challenges facing urban sociology at century＇s end given its traditions and lineages.These challenges arise out of the intersection of major macrosocial trends and their particular spatial patterns.The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where these macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study.Among these trends are globalization and the rise of the new information technologies,the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics,and the strengthening presence and voice of specic types of socio-cultural diversity.Each one of these trends has its own specific conditionalities,contents and consequences for cities,and for theory and research.Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in distinct,often complex manners,in a way they do not in just about any other setting.The city emerges once again as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations as it was in the origins of sociology.Can urban sociology address these challenges and in so doing once again produce some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader transformation？