Metropolitics

An American in Marseille

Olivier Gaudin & translated by Oliver Waine — 2023-03-17T06:00:00Z

In his latest work, Marseille, Port to Port, the New York-based ethnographer William Kornblum paints a rich and vibrant sociological portrait of France's second city.
Marseille through the kaleidoscope
William Kornblum, emeritus professor at the City University of New York, is a sociologist renowned for his work in the field of urban ethnography, devoted to subjects ranging from a group of Harlem teenagers (Kornblum and Williams 1994) to, more recently, the New York subway's 7 Train, which

- Reviews / Marseille, New York, urban sociology, sociology, ethnography, urban ecology

Thirty Years of Urban Sociology

Christian Topalov & translated by Oliver Waine — 2015-10-30T06:00:00Z

What is urban sociology in France? Christian Topalov, one of the key players in the history of this discipline, looks back on the two key periods during which the label “urban sociology” came into its own: the 1970s, and the era that heralded the “problem of the banlieues” from the early 1980s onwards – two periods in which academics' and public policymakers' visions of the city coincided.
Translated with the support of the Institut Français Series: Urban Studies in France “The city is what

- Essays / France, suburbs, public policy, urban knowledge, sociology, state, urban sociology

“Gentrification or ghetto”: making sense of an intellectual impasse

Anne Clerval & Mathieu Van Criekingen & translated by Oliver Waine — 2015-01-29T06:00:00Z

The debate on the causes, effects and extent of the “gentrification” of working-class neighbourhoods in the central areas of our cities has animated (and divided) the fields of geography and urban sociology for the last decade or so in France. This debate was reignited in September 2013 by the publication of a book by Anne Clerval titled Paris sans le peuple (“Paris Without the People”). In this article, Anne Clerval and Mathieu Van Criekingen reply with force to those fellow researchers and

- Debates / France, ghetto, gentrification, segregation, urban renewal, social diversity, suburbanization, periurban, metropolis, urban regeneration, metropolization, metropolitan areas, urban geography, urban sociology, depoliticization