• Burgess's (1925) concentric zone model of urban areas

Schools of Thought in Urban Studies

Both the Chicago School of Sociology and the L.A. School of Urbanism have contributed many ideas to understanding cities. But Detroit is neither a dense, industrial Chicago nor a sprawling, fast-growing, immigrant-rich Los Angeles. Yet Detroit is representative of a host of cities that have experienced sustained and substantial deindustrialization, depopulation, and disinvestment since World War II.

Is it time to establish a Detroit School of Urban Studies? If so, what defines it? How does thinking about Detroit-like cities change the questions we ask and the answers we pursue in the many disciplines that contribute to urban studies? What do we gain by rallying a community of scholars under the Detroit School banner? What do we lose?

The following manifesto reflects on these questions:

The following readings reflect on the Chicago School, the L.A. School, and the contested place of geographically-focused schools of thought within urban studies:

Beauregard, R. A. (2003). City of superlatives. City & Community, 2(3), 183–199.
Davis, M. (2006). City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso.
Dear, M. (2003). The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An intellectual history. Urban Geography, 24(6), 493–509.
Dear, M., Burridge, A., Marolt, P., Peters, J., & Seymour, M. (2008). Critical responses to the Los Angeles School of Urbanism. Urban Geography, 29(2), 101–112.
Dear, M., & Flusty, S. (1998). Postmodern urbanism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(1), 50–72.
Dear, M. J., & Dishman, J. D. (2002). From Chicago to L.A.: Making sense of urban theory. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications.
Gilmore, S. (1988). Schools of activity and innovation. Sociological Quarterly, 29(2), 203–219.
Halle, D. (Ed.). (2003). New York and Los Angeles: Politics, society, and culture - A comparative view. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Hoyt, H. (1933). One hundred years of land values in Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Judd, D. R., & Simpson, D. (Eds.). (2011). The city, revisited: Urban theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Park, R. E., Burgess, E. W., & McKenzie, R. D. (Eds.). (1925). The city: Suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Scott, A. J., & Soja, E. W. (Eds.). (1998). The city: Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century. University of California Press.
Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. New York: Verso.