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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.