Introduction

Abstract

“What impact has city life on the individual–our behavior, personality, values, relationships?” George Simmel's 1905 publication of “The metropolis and mental life” remains a seminal essay on this central yet neglected question which we now term “urban psychology.” The centenary of Simmel's essay in 2005 is an apt time to take stock of the history and current status of urban psychology, with a special issue of this journal gathering data-based articles on diverse aspects of urban psychology. This four-part article (a) summarizes Simmel's 1905 essay, (b) comments on the dramatic population trends since 1905, (c) elaborates on 10 remarkable points about urban psychology, past and present, and (d) previews the five urban pychology reports in this special issue.     

Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society‐Nature Opposition

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society‐nature and city‐countryside—and their co‐identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society‐nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials‐flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolism's raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio‐natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlap's distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.     

'The look of hope or the look of sadness': Robert Frank's dialogical vision

Abstract

This article examines the work of Robert Frank with reference to his seminal photographic work, The Americans, and its relationships to his later post-1970s images. It argues that the 'outside eye' he brought to the US post-war consensus offered him a new comparative critical position and represented a fundamental, counter-cultural shift in the tradition of documentary photography. This vision formed around Frank's multiple 'dialogues', with the US social landscape, with earlier traditions of documentary and 'street' photography in Europe and the USA, and with the Beat generation's radical challenges to dominant post-war values. This 'moment' of overlapping and interconnected relations forms the basis for this discussion of Frank's importance as a 'political' commentator whose work has influenced generations of photographers and shares much with those writers who emerged as the Beats.     

The Social Psychology of Robert E. Park: Human Nature,Self, Personality and Social Structure

Robert E. Park is widely recognized today for his contributions to urban sociology, race relations and collective behavior but his social psychology has been largely neglected. Park's inclusive and loose framework covered his interest in: (1) human nature and the bio-physiological instincts which for him were raw materials of personality; (2) formulation of self concept as an organization of roles; and (3) micro-macro linkages between individual and social structure. Each one of Park's three themes is still important for symbolic interaction theory and offers insights into contemporary investigations of emotions, role acquisition and identity.     

Extension of Sartre's Philosophy for Today's World Situation

Sartre's philosophy was futurogenic. He was also a political activist. This article discusses how his philosophy applies to today's and tomorrow's political situations in the world. This article also extends his theory in the light of recent findings in social sciences and neuroscience. lf he were living today: (1) he would condemn collectivistic theories such as symbolic interactionism in sociology, and constructionism in psychology, which foster ingroup homogenization and self-stereotyping, and rationalize group-against-group hostility, violence and terrorism; (2) he would promote the understanding of HTICT (heterogeneity and trans-groupness of individual cognitive/cogitative/action types); and (3) he would reform inbreeding in organizational practice and replace it with outbreeding and polyocular vision.     

Time and mobility in the writing of Charles W. Chesnutt

Abstract

This article considers the elusiveness and ambivalence that characterize Chesnutt's writing in terms of the author's imaginative efforts to probe beyond the historical circumstances that condition and frame his authorship. Noting the focus on figures of absence and illegibility in recent criticism of Chesnutt, I examine the notion of a self in the process of uprooting itself that appears to preoccupy much of his fiction. In a close reading of Chesnutt's journals and his essay on 'Superstitions and Folklore of the South', I elaborate Chesnutt's conception of a literary voice as emerging from a context of commodification and contestation and oriented on a moment of posterior reception. I then discuss how this concept of a detachable voice informs Chesnutt's exploration of a transplantable self and an understanding of freedom in terms of a re-imagined social bond. This discussion focuses on the ways Chesnutt, in some of his short stories and in The House Behind the Cedars, evokes a passage from a condition of bondage to a capacity for multiple and variable attachments.     

A partnership forged: BSW students and service learning at a historically Black college and university (HBCU) serving urban communities

ABSTRACT

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have a long-standing history of engaging the African-American community. In most instances, these institutions are located in predominantly African-American communities. This article intends to offer a discussion of a pedagogical approach used at an HBCU, located in a large mid-Atlantic city. The purpose of this macro-assignment was an effort designed to prepare BSW students for macro-practice with communities through participation in service-learning projects that involved community engagement with urban communities. Outcomes reflect that students have a vested interest in working with underserved communities, which exemplifies the School of Social Work’s mission; said mission is to fully prepare urban social work leaders who are committed to the alleviation of human suffering, social justice, and the improvement of the quality of life for diverse urban populations.     

Understanding Georg Simmel

Abstract

This paper makes two basic claims. First, Simmel was aware of the Als-Ob (“As-If”) before Vaihinger published his Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (The Philosophy of As-If) (Vaihinger, 1911 [1935]), and he used the As-If in his epistemology of the social sciences. It is difficult to understand Simmel's sociology without recognizing the role of the As-If. However, this essential part of Simmel's epistemology of the social sciences almost has gone unreported in the standard literature. Second, Simmel formulated a concept of relativity. This concept, too, is an important part of his epistemology, yet it is not understood well. Only through an appreciation of his view of relativity can Simmel's concept Wechselwirkung (usually translated as “reciprocal interaction” but more exactly translated as “reciprocal effect”) be interpreted properly. Without an understanding of his concept of relativity Simmel's form-content relation does not convey the sense intended. This paper demonstrates that the form-content relation as used by Simmel is, in current terminology, the theory-model relation. Finally, use is made of my explication of Simmel's epistemology to clarify some relations between Simmel's ideas and Durkheim's position.     

Governing Women's Capabilities in China's Urban Expansion

By the middle of the twenty-first century, China's urban population is likely to have grown by about 500 million, to more than 1.1 billion people. This article applies Amartya Sen's concept of capabilities to explore how the government of urban expansion is affecting the generation of rural women whose villages currently are being enclosed by cities and towns. Drawing on interviews, press reports and government and Women's Federation documents from Zhejiang province, it illustrates how local governments' economic growth strategies hinge, in part, on reconstructing gendered relations in the spatial organization, civic management, production and social reproduction in new metropolitan sites. The article concludes, first, that unless China's leaders commit to involving rural women's representatives in urban planning and management, enforcing women's rights to property and enabling women to decide whether and when to work and retire, the capabilities of this generation of rural women will expand little; and, second, that Sen's concept overlooks organizational and material conditions that are necessary for women to enhance their capabilities.     

THE CONCEPT OF COMPETITION IN ROBERT PARK'S SOCIOLOGY*

This article examines Robert Park's concept of competition and the way in which it appears in his analysis of civilization and social change. Conventional interpretations of his writings have tended to emphasize that he radically separated presocial, ecological processes from interaction based on communication. Although Park does attempt such a separation, I argue that his thoughts on social change reflect an ambivalence about the relative degree of autonomy of social and cultural processes. Consequently, Park's evaluation of these processes reflects the judgment that contemporary forms of competition are instrumental for societal progress.     

Vygotsky's Stage Theory: The Psychology of Art and the Actor under the Direction of Perezhivanie

This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attention to the limits of his analysis, the mixed Marxist legacy that is evident in the book, the cultural blinders that affect his vision of the relative value of different artistic productions, the content of what he elsewhere refers to his “tedious investigations” into extant views, and the gist of what he considers to be the essence of art. Attention to his late work falls into two areas: Emotion in formal drama and emotion in everyday drama, each of which involves perezhivanie, roughly but incompletely characterized as emotional experience. The article concludes with an effort to situate Vygotsky's writing on art and emotion both within his broader effort to articulate a comprehensive developmental psychology of socially, culturally, and historically grounded individuals and social groups, and within scholarship that has extended and questioned his work as his influence has expanded beyond the clinics of Soviet Moscow.     

How manufacturing industries connect cities across the world: extending research on ‘multiple globalizations’

In this article, I concentrate on a macro‐level analysis of inter‐urban linkages in a ‘world city network’. Empirical research on the formation of a world city network has mostly concentrated on global service providers. Yet, globally operating manufacturing firms also choose distinct urban regions throughout the world as locational anchoring points. In this article, using social network analysis, I present the first global‐scale analysis of how manufacturing firms connected cities across the world (in 2010). To detect the differing ‘sectoral profiles’ and nodal centralities of cities functioning as geographical hubs of transnational production networks, it is necessary to analyse the network structure of distinct industrial subsectors within the global urban system. The data collected for analysis cover 120 top global firms from three manufacturing subsectors, of which two are analysed in more detail than the third. I then compare the nodal centralities of cities included in these subsectors' global networks with the GaWC research on the producer services sector that has been at the centre of previous analyses of the world city network. The comparison reveals the cities' differing positioning within ‘multiple globalizations’. The aim of the article is to extend research on world city networks.     

Is Vygotsky Relevant? Vygotsky's Marxist Psychology

This article explores the connections between Vygotsky's psychology and Marxism, arguing that his was a “Marxist psychology” in its “historical foundation”: a specific conception of history. This conception of history is evident in Vygotsky's analysis and diagnosis of the crisis in psychology. The creation of a Marxist, general psychology was the historical task that was defined by this crisis, and his developmental psychology was the historical project of such a psychology. In his practice of the methodology of this general psychology, Vygotsky recounted “child history”: the history of the genesis of mind. The conception of history evident in Crisis throws new light on Vygotsky's texts on child development: They tell a history of the objective tendencies of consciousness, of the dialectical processes of sublation, and of self-mastery. As Vygotsky interpreted the higher mental functions, they are manifestations of the child's ability to master himself or herself as a consequence of the “social moment” of consciousness. In fostering these functions, one shaped a human consciousness capable of free and deliberate choice.     

How Role Replaced Personality as a Major Category of Sociology

Try to imagine sociology being without the role concept. The thought experiment will strike us as impossible. And yet, through the early decades of the 20th century, remarkably few sociologists thought of social agents as incumbents of social roles and as performing roles in their day to day lives. This article addresses a set of related questions. How did sociologists manage without the concept social role? How did they describe the social agent and his agency? When and in what circumstances was the term social role initially formulated and when did it enter the vocabulary of social science? Ralph Linton’s The Study of Man (1936) is identified as the key text in this history of the concept social role, foreshadowed in writings of Robert Park, E. A. Burgess, and Kimball Young. Linton introduced his role idea in the midst of disciplinary change with boundaries between sociology and psychology (particularly social, and personal, psychology) being redrawn.     

推绿色教育促城市绿色发展

教育对绿色城市建设和城市的可持续发展具有重要促进作用,国际上一些国家和城市已较早地开始了以推行绿色教育来促进城市绿色发展的进程,取得了较好的效果。本文概述了绿色教育理念的形成和内涵,重点总结了国际上一些国家和城市在发展绿色教育中所积累的宝贵经验,并对中国城市绿色教育发展的概况和问题进行了简要分析,在此基础上提出了国际绿色教育经验对中国城市可持续发展的启示。     

国家中心城市的发展瓶颈及解决思路——以东京、伦敦等国际中心城市为例

国家中心城市是一个复杂的巨系统。本文在简要介绍国家中心城市的界定、特征和功能的基础上,着重分析了国家中心城市建设中的中心城市职能过度集中、中心城市交通拥堵、城市创新功能不足、城市公共服务和社会管理能力缺失等问题,并结合国际上先进城市在相关问题上的处理经验,探讨突破这些瓶颈的办法。     

Alternative approaches to researching social capital: A comment on van Deth's measuring social capital

This paper responds to van Deth's overview of empirical research on social capital and the difficulties of measuring the concept. We entirely agree with many of the problems that he identifies with the dominant mode of enquiry to date: namely survey and polling methods of attitudinal data. We are sure there are ways of improving on such quantitative methods although we are of the view that qualitative research is especially helpful for exploring the processes of social capital formation and the relationship between networks and norms so crucial to Putnam's use of the concept. Briefly, we discuss our own qualititive work involving intensive interviews with 120 activists drawn from a Citizens Audit of Britain. We address the importance of pre-existing trust and informal processes of mobilization, the significance of experiences of group involvement for generating norms of trust as well as distrust and the extent to which evaluations of such experiences influence wider views of participation and democracy in Britain. In sum, we totally endorse van Deth's call for the greater use of 'multi-methods and multi-level srategies' in empirical research by extending his plea to consider the valuable role of qualitative methods in the study of social capital.     

Love the Sin—Pedagogy,Pupils, and Psychology Commentary on Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pelligrini

This article examines the author's reactions to teaching Janet Jakobsen's and Ann Pellegini's Love the Sin in a course titled “Contemporary Issues in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies” at Dartmouth College. He examines not only the students' reactions and the points at which they can or cannot grasp the book's arguments, but also his own responses to their reactions. At the center of the essay is his realization that the students, having been brought up in a liberal mode of “tolerance,” have little access to Jakobsen and Pellegrini's social or political concept of “sexual freedom”; and, while they completely eschew state regulation of sexuality, they do not view it as an essential human right, but rather as a private matter.