City Fragments

Today, cities and urban life are far from being an area that can be studied by invoking some fundamental criteria that define the city, as most of our social scientists working on the subject did until a quarter of a century ago. The first and easily understandable reason for this situation is related to the new appearances that contemporary cities have taken, in other words, the process of urban evolution. New urban forms, along with structural elements such as technological developments and global transformations, the changing course of urban daily life relations, and new agent-oriented structures in work and home life are transforming both today's cities and urban life at an incredible pace. Most of the city's initial appearances or functions have taken different forms today. The second reason is more related to the changes occurring in the social sciences, which claim to understand and explain realities related to social life. In this process, not only the city, or more broadly "the facets of the social," have changed, but also the ways in which the social sciences, which take it as an object, objectify the social world have undergone transformation. Therefore, to understand the city and to analyze it, it no longer seems sufficient, for example, to rely solely on Durkheim's functionalist theory of the division of labor or Weber's conceptualization of "the city," or, at a more advanced level, to analyze the city through specific variables such as population, secondary relations, industrialization, or opposition to tradition.

City Fragments focuses on the analysis of current and complex problems specific to cities and urban life by organically relating numerous fragments defining today's cities, such as daily life, spatiality, fear of crime, poverty, surveillance, and civil society. The theoretical analyses and evaluations of researchers and academics from different disciplines, offering a broad perspective, strengthen the book's claim to be both contemporary and to look at the subject from different windows.