SOCIOLOGIA URBANA

Learning Objectives

• SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN SOCIETY
  The course aims to ensure that students acquire the theoretical and methodological basic knowledge as a tool to frame the diverse thematic range of urban sociology and all the different schools of thought that characterize its development. Finally the course will focus on the fundamental concepts of the current sociological debate about the evolution of the urban phenomenon in the transition to post-industrial models.
• URBAN SOCIETY, CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT
  The course aims to provide students with the skills to apply the main paradigms of the discipline and to read of the most significant transformations of contemporary urban societies. The course will show the ability to properly analyze the interaction of social phenomena, economical and political at the local level, in their structural aspects and change. It also aims at stimulating the student to acquire the necessary sensitivity to design creative solutions to the problems of the city.

Detailed Course Content

• SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN SOCIETY

  The module aims to provide students with the analytical tools and useful method to the analysis of the most recent transformations of urban systems in their economic, political, physical and symbolic-cultural and environmental. By enucleation of the main theoretical approaches to the study of the urban phenomenon and the focus of the characters that assumes the evolution of the urban phenomenon in the history of development of human society, the module will point to stimulate reflection and critical skills of students on theories and especially the practices of urban transformations in progress, trying to encourage the necessary sensitivity to identify problems that characterize today's society and to assume useful projects to address them.

• URBAN SOCIETY, CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT

  The module will direct its attention to the new social morphology of the city highlighting the manner typical of the current phase of urbanization, among which particular importance have taken in the last decades of urban diffusion processes. It will highlight how these centrifugal tendencies, however, occur in conjunction with the deployment of opposite sign processes, which - as in some major cities - are producing the revival of the central cities of large metropolitan areas. It will also highlight, in this regard, as time has begun to return to the city of middle-upper classes, thanks to the start of the process of renewal of the central districts and reuse of areas previously occupied by industry, and how, hand in hand, they have intensified the new migratory flows from developing countries, with the subsequent escalation in the city of coexistence phenomena of socially and culturally heterogeneous groups and forms of mutual segregation and differentiation of living environments.

Textbook Information

• SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN SOCIETY

  A. MELA, Sociologia delle città, Carocci editore, Roma, 2006, pp. 15-144.

  C. COLLOCA, “ Urbanesimo”, in G. BETTIN LATTES e L. RAFFINI (a cura di), Manuale di sociologia, Cedam, Padova, Vol. II, 2011, pp. 867-905.

  S. SASSEN, Le città nell’economia globale, il Mulino, Bologna, 2003, pp.199-207.

  E. FINOCCHIARO, “I nuovi luoghi del consumo nella città contemporanea”, in C. CIRELLI (a cura di), Città e commercio, Pàtron, Bologna, 2008, pp. 61-80.

• URBAN SOCIETY, CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT

  A. MELA, Sociologia delle città, Carocci editore, Roma, 2006, pp. 145-249
  A. MELA, “Il tema dello sprawl e l’ottica della sostenibilità”, in G. NUVOLATI e F. PISELLI, La città: bisogni, desideri, diritti. La città diffusa: stili di vita e popolazioni metropolitane, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2009, pp. 37-50.
  G. NUVOLATI, “Conflitti fra popolazioni metropolitane: orizzonti di riflessione”, in G. NUVOLATI e F. PISELLI, La città: bisogni, desideri, diritti. La città diffusa: stili di vita e popolazioni metropolitane, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2009, pp. 209-226.
  E. FINOCCHIARO, Città in trasformazione. Le logiche di sviluppo della metropoli contemporanea, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2002, pp. 98-149.
  L. DAVICO, A. MELA, L. STARICCO, Città sostenibili. Una prospettiva sociologica, Carocci editore, Roma, 2009, pp. 87-119.