Urban Social Change: A Socio-Historical Framework of Analysis

In this chapter the author looks at the problem of interpreting current urban social change starting from two theoretical and methodological assumptions. The first concerns the overall meaning of change viewed as a major transformation within a succession of long historical cycles. The second assumptions that although it is characterized by similar trends on a global scale, social change is giving rise to different forms of adaptation in diverse contexts, both at the local and national level. The two assumptions can be subsumed within the hypothesis that we are moving from social regimes that are differentiated but all grounded in the goals and directive of welfare capitalism and standardized organizations, to ones which are still differentiated but centred on more unstable, fragmented, flexible, and non-standardized rationales. Cities are windows to the transformation of social regimes. In fact, it is in cities that the trends of social change first take place, it is here that the tensions and difficulties of social integration and exclusion are predominantly localized and it is here that the complexity of the new organizational forms has its core, independently of the population’s residential distribution. The chapter focuses mainly on West European cities with some comparative reference to US cases and with a few observations on the urban transition in East European countries.