Toward a Global Urban Sociology: Keywords

Abstract

Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly American, cities on which much of urban sociology’s conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them in terms of a standard urban vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way of seeing. We need a vocabulary that is able to accommodate their different urban experience. This special issue contributes to the work of building that vocabulary. We select five keywords in urban sociology—eviction, segregation, suburbs, violence, and gentrification—and reconstruct them in light of the places we study (India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa). Our aim is to produce a set of keywords better equipped to travel South and, in the process, advance a truly global urban sociology.