Urban Kinships. Everyday Kinship and the Making of the City

Abstract

The social sciences were long dominated by the notion that cities are places where kinship ties are weakened. Since the seminal works of Emile Durkheim (1892) and Frederic Le Play (1884), followed by the theories of Talcott Parsons (Parsons and Bales 1955), a connection has been made between urbanization, the emergence of the nuclear family and the modernization of society. Sociologists of the Chicago School thus described the contemporary city as a place of individual emancipation and electi...