Structuralist Marxism, urban sociology and geography: reflections on Urban sociology: critical essays

Urban sociology: critical essays is largely a set of translations of articles on urban development, first published in French in 1968-72, and written by authors adopting a Marxist perspective. Chris Pickvance's collection was one of the first attempts to introduce to an English-language audience a new research tradition that profoundly influenced not just urban sociology but also urban, regional and, more generally, human geography. At the point in time when this volume was published, geography was a fairly clearly defined discipline: geography was a study of the characteristics of places, in which the ideographic preoccupations of the regional tradition (Figure 1) had temporarily declined in influence. The reasons why lay in the rediscovery and further development of a range of models/theories designed to represent/replicate certain aspects/characteristics of geographical landscapes and, more ambitiously, to identify generative mechanisms (the actions of actors and, depending on the approach, the impact of the circumstances in which they found themselves). This new tradition, which played a vital role in revitalising the discipline and which survives alongside other approaches, had nonetheless two major features that were matters of deep concern for a new generation of researchers and academics. The first was that the new discipline was uncritical of an established national and international social order whose economic, political and cultural legitimacy faced major challenges. The second was that established models were seen as inadequate/insufficient: in some cases models had virtually no explanatory content (gravity and associated principles of least effort were a case in point); in others models were seen as over-emphasising generic principles (indeterminate abstractions) at the expense of the specificity of different types of social order; and in yet others models were seen as essentially ideologies designed to justify a capitalist social order. The objections were in other words ideological and scientific, although these objections also embraced disagreements about the nature of science and the validity of predominantly empiricist theories of knowledge.