Environmentalizing Urban Sociology

Urban sociology, like sociology as a whole, has traditionally excluded the natural environment. The Chicago School notoriously treated external nature as a metaphor for human society in its “human ecology” paradigm, while naturalizing urban inequality, segregation, and power relations. Such canonical and “de-natured” understandings of urban environments still pervade much urban sociological research. However, increasingly interconnected ecological and urban crises, including the collision of climate change with growing precarity and inequality along the lines of race and class, are bringing urban-environmental questions to the fore in new ways. Such crises fall upon urban geographies transformed by informalization, housing crisis, and displacement across the global North and South. It is thus also high time for urban sociology—which recently has sought to globalize, historicize, and provincialize canonical paradigms and approaches—to rethink its approach to questions of nature and the environment. Yet, despite recurrent calls to develop a socioecological approach to the study of urban dynamics by a range of social scientists (Čapek 2010; Catton and Dunlap 1978; Gandy 2003; Williams 1975), the field’s rapprochement with the environment is not yet complete. In the context of today’s climate crisis, as cities cope with extreme weather and pursue far-reaching “resiliency” and “sustainability” plans, and as urban environmental justice struggles intensify under these conditions, there remains a need to bridge these divides, and “environmentalize” the field.

Why has the project of environmentalizating urban sociology been so difficult? We argue that this is due to longstanding epistemological and political assumptions that shaped the field’s classical foundations, persisted through its Chicago School formalization as a subfield, and continue to shape urban sociology in the present. Epistemologically, cities were defined in contrast to an environment “outside.” Politically, processes of urban development were understood to be natural rather than social. Vestiges of these assumptions remain visible in contemporary research foci, in urban sociology’s relationship to other areas of research (such as rural sociology), and in tepid responses to recurrent environmental efforts. “Environmentalizing” urban sociology has been a challenge because it involves not just “bringing nature back in” (i.e., “adding” the environment or nature as a topic for urban sociologists) but actually reckoning with these deep-rooted assumptions and reformulating some of urban sociology’s basic categories and approaches.

The introduction to this special issue contributes to this effort in two ways, one retrospective and one prospective. First, we tell the history of the excision of environmental questions from urban sociology and describe the consequences of their absence. Second, we outline a parallel history of incursions—points of intersection of urbanization and the environment that, for the most part, came from outside sociology but have influenced work in urban sociology and related disciplines. Third, we characterize urban-environmental sociology today, with an eye toward the future. The growth of urban-environmental research in other disciplines, and the increasing influence of that work in urban sociology, alongside renewed attention to such issues as a result of climate change, leaves us cautiously optimistic about the future of this project.

Excisions: External Nature, Nature as Metaphor

Efforts to “environmentalize” sociology in general and urban sociology in particular are not new. The environment has always been “there,” even if it has not been integrated systematically into the discipline or into urban sociology as a subfield. Concerted efforts began at least as early as the 1960s, as sociologists were influenced by environmental movements of that decade (Gross 2004). In the 1970s, Catton and Dunlap (1978) argued for a “New Environmental Paradigm” to replace sociology’s “Human Exemptionalist Paradigm.” In the 1980s, urban sociologists’ work addressed environmental dimensions of the transformation of landscape and the built environment, particularly emphasizing the ways environmental features and conditions (such as deep ports, waterways, or flat land) shaped or limited urbanization processes (Logan and Molotch 2007 [1987]). In the 1990s, some highlighted the material and symbolic consequences of representations of nature in urban space, as “actant” (Čapek 2010), and as spaces and symbols with affective and economic consequences (Brewster and Bell 2009). But, per Buttel (1987: 465), “while the early environmental sociologists sought nothing less than the reorientation of sociology and social theory, environmental sociology’s influence on the discipline has been modest.” Despite calls for a deep environmentalization of sociology and reconsideration of foundational assumptions of the relationship between the “social” and the “natural,” throughout the second half of the 20th century environmental sociology became a subfield: a specialized sociology of environmental issues rather than a truly environmental (or environmentalized) sociology.

Perhaps nowhere have these dynamics been more apparent, and problematic, than in urban sociology and in this subfield’s treatment of environmental issues. Urban sociology is a site where the epistemological and political consequences of the larger discipline’s relationship to understood-to-be external nature are sharply visible. This is evident in the segregation of “social” from “environmental” questions and larger bifurcation of city/nature and urban/rural issues. Sociology is a science of Western modernity, and the discipline’s analytic interests and epistemological blind spots reflect that history and its assumptions (Heller 1987). When classical thinkers took on such topics as industrialization and urbanization, the rationalization of daily life, and the rise of modern nation-states as objects of analysis, they deliberately isolated the social from the natural world. And, as critics have argued, their analyses frequently reflected an evolutionary understanding of economic and social development; maintained an interest in social life in metropoles without attention to the colonial violence upon which these ways of life were materially reliant; and naturalized forms of social difference that legitimated inequality, slavery, imperialism, and dispossession (Connell 1997; Go 2020; Magubane 2016). Although some foundational early thinkers, particularly historical materialists such as Marx and Du Bois (2013 [1935]), the radical regional planner and sociologist Patrick Geddes (1915), and the anti-colonial eco-sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1926), were keenly aware of the political and ecological dimensions of land and settlement both within and beyond cities (see Anderson 2020; Bhardwaj 2023; Silver Forthcoming; Studholme 2007), these insights remained marginal to the discipline, particularly in the United States, as well as to the later institutionalization of urban sociology as a subfield.

These epistemological and political assumptions were uniquely consequential in urban sociology, in that the city itself was taken to be the paragon and site of modern society, in contrast to the non-social nature and disappearing rural life understood to be found outside (Cronon 1996; Smith 2010; Wachsmuth 2012; Williams 1975). If sociology as a whole was a “science of the social” that excluded the natural environment, both ideas of external nature and a developmentalist approach to urban life were imported into early sociological work on and in cities (Angelo 2017). One familiar example of this is the use of analytic distinctions such as Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, rural/urban, and traditional/modern, with cities understood to be the site of the latter in each pair (Tönnies 2002 [1887]). But these ideas infuse early sociological work on cities beyond such crude forms. For instance, Simmel begins “The Metropolis and Mental Life” with a contrast between “primitive man,” who “must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence,” and the metropolitan individual’s struggle with society (2002 [1903]: 11). Later in the essay, he remarks that “In the life of a city, struggle with nature for the means of life is transformed into a conflict with human beings” (17). In other words, for Simmel, the “modern form of the conflict” between man and nature is man versus culture or individual versus social structure (11). In cities, the struggle with nature disappears because nature disappears: Because the environment has been controlled and instrumentalized and land-based livelihoods have been replaced by provisioning through wages and markets, analytic questions come to center on humans’ relationship to each other.

Thus, it is no great surprise that when sociologists of the Chicago School turned to the city as a laboratory in the early to mid-20th century, they extended these basic patterns—seeing the modern city as both “removed from organic nature” (Wirth 1938: 1) and as the paradigmatic form of society. However, the Chicago School’s human ecology model took matters a step further, using metaphorical forms of nature to understand and represent modern urban/social life. This was seen most famously in Park and Burgess’ concentric zone model of neighborhood change, which erased Lake Michigan, alongside the use of Darwinian evolutionary concepts like “neighborhood life cycles.” As we argue elsewhere (Greenberg and Angelo, Forthcoming), this use of urban ecology as a metaphor had far-reaching consequences on relationships between urban sociology and related professional fields and on the organization of urban space. University of Chicago sociologists used borrowed concepts from plant ecology (itself emerging at this time) to confer scientificity to their new fields, together with new professions of real estate and land economics at neighboring Northwestern University. They did so as historical processes of racial capitalism and uneven development were transforming U.S. cities—including the great migration of African Americans from the rural U.S. South to northern cities like Chicago, where new arrivals were confined to ghettos like the “Black Belt,” on the cusp of the Great Depression. Newly minted sociologists, alongside realtors, land economists, and soon urban planners, used ecological metaphors to naturalize and depoliticize processes of urban “growth and decline” and to explain the growing economic divide between African American neighborhoods, ethnic enclaves, and white commuter suburbs. By the late 1930s and 1940s, with the aid of land economists (like Homer Hoyt, who had studied at the University of Chicago) hired by the Federal Housing Authority, these ecologies justified “redlining” non-white neighborhoods, or what Raoul Liévanos, in this volume, calls the imposition of “racialized hazardous space.” In the urban crisis era of the 1960s and 1970s, such designations were medicalized to justify the “triage” of formerly redlined and segregated neighborhoods.

This story of the rise of urban sociology as a denatured, developmentalist field can also be told from the “outside”—from the perspective of the rural—where consequences for the organization of sociology as a broader discipline become apparent. As Suzanne Smith (2011) has argued in a fascinating but unpublished article presented at the Rural Sociological Society (an organization that exists separately from the American Sociological Association), these assumptions also had consequences for fields and research topics defined in opposition to the urban and the social. If “the social problem” was “a city problem” (Park 1929 qtd in Smith 2011: 17), then it was logical that urban sociology would focus on the human and social, while rural and community sociology became the home of putatively environmental issues. And the latter field was understood as marginal by mainstream sociologists in light of their evolutionary understanding of growing urban populations and “disappearing” rural lifeways (Friedland 1982). In Smith’s analysis (2011: 10), it was this intellectual division of labor between society/nature or urban/rural issues that later led to a parallel development of professional organizations and different forms of research, institutions, and state support, rather than the other way around. In other words, when self-consciously rural and environmental sociology eventually came into existence, both took shape very much in opposition to what urban sociologists took to be their core concerns. Mainstream and, especially, urban sociology made the mistake of “equating modernity with the city,” rather than seeing both urban and rural as modern categories (Smith 2011) or, as urban political ecologists would later argue, as fundamentally socioecological environments.

Incursions: Critical Urban-Environmental Traditions

This history suggests that “environmentalizing” urban sociology involves not simply “bringing nature back in” to urban analysis, but that it requires a deeper reappraisal of some of sociology’s (and urban sociology’s) founding categories and assumptions and a continued effort to “denature” processes taken to be natural rather than social and political.

Resources for this project can be found in critical traditions in social theory and geography, which drew on many of the same foundational insights from historical materialism, regional planning, and anti-colonial ecological thought that were present in the 19th and early 20th centuries but were marginal to the American disciplinary formations described earlier. In the postwar era, while mainstream urban sociology continued to exclude the environment from its purview, a critique of both the dualistic epistemology and developmentalist paradigm was coalescing in parallel. This scholarship showed the political, economic, and ecological consequences of depoliticized and denatured understandings of urban transformation and the built environment and shifted focus to the co-constitution of urban and rural spaces, domestically and internationally.

Such work included that of Raymond Williams, whose cultural Marxism examined the material underpinnings and cultural consequences of the ideology of separation between country and city. Critical human geographers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Neil Smith advanced concepts such as “the production of space,” “built environment,” and “uneven development” to foreground the political nature of the urban process under capitalism and to avoid reified city/nature or urban/rural categories and distinctions. While bio-physical nature, urban-ecological dynamics, and ideologies of nature were not, initially, the explicit focus, these concepts paved the way for such explorations (e.g., Smith 2010 [1984]; Harvey 1996). These approaches were brought into American urban sociology via the “new urban sociology” of Manuel Castells and Mark Gottdiener, whose focus on place-based urban social movements foregrounded early urban-environmental justice struggles that were taking place in the same decade. For instance, environmental justice movements politicized environmental issues more broadly, showing the classed and racialized exposure to environmental bads and access to environmental goods (see Di Chiro 1995). Meanwhile, non-urban sociologists were developing analytics for thinking broadly about interconnected political economic, spatial, and ecological transformation. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory (1974) and the work of later scholars such as Jason Moore (2015) highlighted the highly political and ecological nature of global uneven development, with the growth of metropoles reliant on ecological expropriation from colonies/peripheries (including human labor). William Cronon (1991) and other urban and environmental historians (e.g., Brechin 2006) did something of the same—their work showing cities’ reliance on the natural resources of their hinterlands and pointing out the “environmental” content of cities.

A more recent generation of urbanists concerned with environmental questions has continued to build on these foundations. Urban political ecologists married critical geographers’ work on the politics of urbanization with historians’ insights regarding cities’ environmental content to describe the “socionatural” environment of cities and their hinterlands. They have highlighted both the “environmental” content of apparently social phenomena, such as skyscrapers, and the “social” content of apparently “natural” features of the built environment, such as parks and water systems (Gandy 2003; Heynen et al. 2006; see Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015). More recent work on planetary urbanization, like world systems theory, has insisted on a relational, ecological, and political approach to the urban space, both in terms of understanding the impacts of urbanization on far-flung “natural” areas and relational geographies of extraction and disease vectors across the world (Arboleda 2020; Brenner and Ghosh 2022; Connolly, Keil, and Ali 2021). And at the same time, the “greening” of industrial cities in the global North—mostly in the form of quality-of-life interventions such as parks, bike lanes, farmers’ markets, and the transformation of industrial brownfields and waterfronts into commercial and recreational space—have brought attention to the political economy of the commodification of nature in cities, new “imbrications” of city and nature, and their intersections with race and class (Checker 2011; Gould and Lewis 2016; Greenberg 2018; Loughran 2016, 2021; Millington 2018).

And now, all this has come to a head in the context of climate change, in which new events and geographies make the excision of environmental issues from urban research particularly untenable. Climate crisis has reminded sociologists (and the world) that human separation from or domination over nature is a fantasy and an illusion and of the role of urban inequalities in exacerbating “natural” disasters as well as in producing highly uneven consequences in their aftermath. But beyond bringing renewed public attention to the environment, grasping contemporary urban-environmental problems literally requires new forms of analysis. Take the spatial politics of contemporary housing, which includes rural or wilderness gentrification as a result of remote work; unaffordability pushing people to suburbs and exurbs; migration and movement in response to flood, fire, and extreme heat; and the construction of new energy, water, and transportation systems to withstand shocks and sustain life (Greenberg 2021; Greenberg et al. Forthcoming). Not one of these can be understood from within the border of a city, or with a sole focus on social (i.e., human) conflict. Thus, perhaps it is not that surprising that we are now—perhaps really for the first time—seeing clear momentum behind work on the environmental dimensions of urban life. This includes the heat, flood, and fire risks of climate catastrophes (Elliott 2021; Klinenberg, Araos, and Koslov 2020; Rhodes and Besbris 2022); design, planning, and policy related to urban climate adaptation, decarbonization, and the pursuit of sustainability (Angelo 2021; DuPuis and Greenberg 2019; Goh 2021; Wachsmuth, Cohen, and Angelo 2016); urban climate politics and the politics of urban climate adaptation and post-disaster urbanization (Araos 2023; Cohen 2016; Gotham and Greenberg 2014); and the impacts of these events and efforts on rural communities and in wildland areas across the world (Paprocki 2021).

The New Urban-Environmental Sociology?

So where does this leave us? Is urban sociology—now, truly, finally—on the cusp of environmentalizing? Yes and no.

As the articles in this special issue reflect, urban sociologists are doing good work on a number of environmental fronts. We believe the greatest progress has been made in politicizing environmental questions in cities, which might signal a final, decisive shift away from the Chicago School’s naturalization of social processes. The valorization of environmental signifiers in contemporary urbanism and their articulations with race and racialization, redevelopment, and environmental politics are increasingly well-understood and well-documented. So too are the contradictions of market-oriented approaches to “urban sustainability,” “resilience,” and “green urbanism”—from environmental gentrification to the persistence of environmental inequality, hazards, and negative ecological impacts. New work is also emerging at the intersection of culture and political economy that addresses environmental signifiers and socioecological processes in urban environments, from watershed reclamation to housing decay and repair and to the pricing of environmental labor (Bartram 2023; Garrett 2023). Work on sociospatial difference increasingly incorporates environmental issues, including and perhaps especially in terms of the socio-environmental legacies of racial segregation and exclusion. Such research examines access to environmental assets (e.g., trees and parks) as well as exposure to environmental liabilities (e.g., pollution) and hazards (Foote and de Leon 2023; Liévanos 2023; see also Seamster and Purifoy 2021) and, importantly, the compounding of these dynamics over time (Tollefson et al., 2023).

But at the same time, much environmental work in urban sociology continues to reflect sociology’s old blind spots, particularly in terms of the entrenched epistemological assumptions described earlier. As a whole, spatially, the field continues to take cities to be the sites of society (and coterminous with urbanization per se), and the incorporation of environmental issues has focused first on the self-evidentially “natural”—that is, trees, parks, or pollution—rather than reflecting a broader understanding of what “counts” as environmental in the first place. We hope to see urban sociology push both these boundaries in the coming years. Particularly in the context of climate adaptation and the energy transition, we hope to see work that is more relational and spatially expansive, reaching to the extended geographies of urbanization upon which cities depend and broader politics of land, infrastructure, and development that are tied to suburban or ex-urban areas (e.g., Brenner and Katsikis 2020; Keil 2017). We hope to see work that moves beyond the “green” or superficially natural to examine “gray” aspects of urban-ecological life such as energy flows, waste, and the dynamics of housing and urban displacement (e.g., Braswell 2022; Greenberg 2021; Wachsmuth and Angelo 2018). We also hope to see more abolitionist, de-colonial, and international approaches to urban-environmental justice and inequality (Dillon and Sze 2016; Heynen 2016; Hosbey and Roane 2021; Ranganathan 2022). As was remarked in two other recent special issues in City & Community, on global urban sociology and on racial capitalism, American urban sociology remains inordinately focused on American cities. This subfield would also do well to “globalize” its approaches in the environmental realm, both in terms of considering the ecological relationships of different places to each other (such as the impacts of US cities’ car-dependent urban form on lithium mining in Chile and elsewhere) and in exploring environmental politics in cities beyond the United States (e.g., Ren 2020). Any or all of these directions will continue to build and strengthen a more deeply environmentalized urban sociology.

Of course, the injunction to expand urban sociology also raises the question of the other side of the coin: rural sociology, the field that has been, in many ways, shaped by the political and epistemological assumptions, and consequent exclusions and conclusions (disappearance and irrelevance of rural or agrarian life; excision of environmental questions) of urban sociology. We have described empirical and theoretical work that is bringing environmental questions into urban sociology and the wide-ranging theory and methods of urban sociology—from urban political economy to post- and de-colonial frameworks and to culturally and ethnographically informed methodological approaches—into the environmental realm. But how might a deeply environmentalized urban sociology then interface with rural and environmental sociology? Urbanists have much to learn from rural sociologists. Rural sociology’s pivot to agrarian political economy and ecology several decades ago made that field more expansive, international, and, arguably, relevant to contemporary questions of climate change, migration, adaptation, and international environmental politics than urban sociology has been. But much more work is needed at urban-rural interfaces and on the relationality of urban and rural issues, and more dialogue is needed between these two fields.

Generative explorations of material entanglements, political relations, and conceptual synergies across country and city are just beginning (Ghosh and Meer 2021; Paprocki 2020; Van Sant, Shelton, and Kay 2023), and we are eager to see where these lead, analytically and institutionally. In the last century, epistemological and political assumptions had institutional consequences. They shaped the formation of disciplines, departments, and funding structures. It is reasonable to imagine that present politics, geographies, and crises will have the same effects today. Thus, a compelling question for the present and near future is, “What reformations of these structures might take place in the 21st century, as old political and epistemological assumptions become untenable in lived experience and are overcome in scholarly research?”