The World of Cities

The World of Cities is an intellectually strong and up-to-date synthesis, one that should prove useful to both students and sophisticated analysts alike. Harvey Molotch, University of California at Santa Barbara and New York University For the first time in recent US scholarship, Orum and Chen provide a deep and extended analysis of the importance of place in city development. Human beings value places as sacred sites with deep memories and legendary attachments, to be revisited even when catastrophes make this foolhardy. Dissatisfied with undemocratic development today, Orum and Chen provide a sage set of pro-active measures for creating much better urban places fostering human life and family. Joe Feagin, University of Florida

Anthony M. Orum is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of City-Building in America (1995) and Introduction to Political Sociology (fourth edition, 2000), co-editor of The Case for the Case Study (with Joe Feagin and Gideon Sjoberg, 1991) and co-author of Changing Societies (with John Johnstone and Stephanie Riger, 1999). Xiangming Chen is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Illinois at Chicago and Research Fellow with the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. He is interested in the comparative study of cities in the global context, with a primary focus on China and East Asia. He has published numerous articles on urban studies and is the author of the forthcoming As Borders Crumble (2004) and the principal editor of the forthcoming Global Aspirations, Local Actions (2004).

List of Illustrations. Preface. Acknowledgments. List of Figures. 1. Cities and Places. 2. Social Theory and the City. 3. Social Inequalities and the Creation of Metropolitan Space. 4. Place Change and Continuity: The City in Comparative and Global Contexts. 5. From A Critical to A Reconstructive Sociology of Cities. Glossary. Index.