Sociology: Urban Sociology

Urban Sociology provides you with the analytical tools to understand how conditions in urban environments affect the feelings, ideas, relations, and opportunities of their inhabitants.

For the first time in history, the majority of humanity lives in cities. The world has become urban. However, what does it mean in terms of individual and group opportunities, life-course development, inter-group contact and collaboration, and ecological impact? What new ideas, trends and movements contemporary cities give rise to? How does the urban 'explosion' change other arrangements we call 'nation-states' and 'world-regions'? Urban Sociology at UvA provides you with the research skills and analytical tools to answer these questions.
Urban Sociology begins with the premise that cities possess unique attributes –numbers, density, diversity, mobility. There are spaces of comforting anonymity, but also destabilizing strangeness. Their public spaces offer a fascinating 'people watching' and convivality, but they also are laden with conflict and turf wars. Urban Sociology at UvA has been at the forefront of understanding these contradictory, 'messy' dynamics of the urban public life.
Another strong focus of Urban Sociology is urban culture understood as both, life styles and cultural institutions. Meeting grounds of subcultures, migration flows from different countries and contine