Urban Futures: Urban sociology amid crisis

Session Submission Type: Invited Session (90 minute)

Description

We are living through a moment of compounding urban crisis. Cities and metropolitan regions across the world are simultaneously grappling with the accelerating effects of climate change, widening housing and food insecurity, public health emergencies, democratic backsliding, armed conflict and urbicide, and the unchecked spread of surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence. These are not separate crises unfolding in parallel — they are mutually reinforcing, driving deeper inequality and dispossession, destabilizing economic and ecological systems, and generating new concentrations of power whose effects on urban life remain poorly understood and hard to predict. This roundtable brings together scholars to ask what urban sociology is — and should be — doing in response. What would it mean to develop research that is both urgent and rigorous: attuned to fast-moving developments without sacrificing the historical depth, geographic range, and cultural specificity that make sociological knowledge matter? And how do we move beyond well-intentioned but insufficient frameworks — resilience, sustainability, equity — that too often leave the underlying structures of inequality intact? Spanning the Global North and South, and drawing on work that moves across sites, scales, and ways of knowing, this conversation takes seriously both the severity of the present moment and the possibility of something better — cities that are not merely more resilient, but more just.

Sub Unit

• Community and Urban Sociology Section / Urban Futures

Presider

• Brandi Thompson Summers, Columbia University

Panelists

• Patrick Sharkey, Princeton University

• Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• Xuefei Ren, Michigan State University

• Jacob William Faber, New York University

Session Organizer

• Brandi Thompson Summers, Columbia University