THEORETICAL - METHODOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE CITY

Abstract

The paper presents the basic theoretical and methodological assumptions for the sociological study of the city. The great acceleration of all social flows, new forms of social life, the emergence of entire value systems that were not developed until yesterday, the increasing regional differentiation, on the one hand, globalization, on the other hand, have made it very difficult to talk about patterns that could be universal. As the number of inhabitants in cities continues to grow in all areas, there is no doubt that these are precisely the areas where the greatest number of changes occurring in society are "recorded". If the phrase that "the city is a direct imprint of society in space" once represented the best definition and simultaneously described the city itself, today it can be said that the city has become synonymous with society itself. The occupations of urban sociology researchers can be divided into three large groups of urban problems. First, on the one hand, there is a large (western) city in which the social changes of the world, with more and more attributes of postmodernity, are daily faced with: high population density, the inability to solve communal and organizational problems of dynamic everyday life, crime and other forms of insecurity on the city's asphalt , threatening ecological cataclysms, alienation, consumerist lifestyle, etc. 2. On the other side are cities in underdeveloped parts of the world, where some of the problems of Western cities are multiplied or have different, often more pronounced manifestations. It is possible to record a kind of urban and social chaos, with little new, but intensified forms of old manifestations, such as: class and / or racial segregation, spatial differentiation, diseases, lack of basic communal infrastructure in many parts of the city, illegal settlements inhabited by the poor population, with a substandard quality of life, crime, etc. 3. On the third side, there are cities and societies in "transition" in which the collapse of the social systems within which they shaped their reality in recent decades suddenly occurred. Although we are mostly talking about the countries of yesterday's political east of Europe, we must not lose sight of the fact that a large part of the underdeveloped world at the global level is in immediate social transition. Be that as it may, the feature or group of problems that occupy these urban environments pervades the first two groups of problems (that is, Western cities and cities in underdeveloped parts of the world), along with some specific features characteristic of cities in countries in transition, namely: disruption of social relations, as a side effect of the collapse of the value system built for many years. Accelerated and dramatic social stratification, where the closeness of people, especially in urban areas, is sociologically "read" as a new phenomenon. The author's intention is to introduce the reader to modern theoretical and methodological bases for the study of the problems of urban sociology. The text consists of several parts. In the first part, marked as Introduction, the author will present the basic ideas that he considers further in the paper. In the second part, we will present a brief overview of the most important sociological definitions of the city, moving chronologically, from the origin of this scientific discipline to its contemporary understandings. The third part presents the most important theoretical and methodological assumptions in the sociological study of the city. The fourth part will be a sublimation of everything mentioned above and will represent a certain type of concluding considerations. In the fifth part of the paper, we will present a detailed list of the literature used.