Define and describe the concept of urban and highlight its nature and scope.

Urban geography is the study of urban places with reference to their geographical environment. Broadly speaking, the subject matter includes origin of towns, their growth and development, their functions in and around their surroundings.

The subject of urban geography has gradually taken a special place among the various branches of geography in the period after the Second World War in various foreign and Indian universities and colleges.

With the increase of population globally, towns and cities have become magnets of economic, social and political processes.

Nature:

In the first quarter of this, century, the theorizing and research of the sociologists established the main direction of much of the work in the following decades. Two major currents came to characterize urban sociology in the early period.

The first came from the sociologists at the University of Chicago, emphasizing the demographic and ecological structure of the city, the social disorganization and pathology of the urban normative order and the social psychology of urban existence.

The second current has come to be called ‘community studies.’ It consists of broad-gauged ethnographic studies of the social structure of individual communities and the ways of life of the inhabitants.  These two orientations are divided into the culturalists’ approach and the structuralists’ approach in the urban sociology.

The culturalists emphasize on how urban life feels, how people react to living in urban areas, and how the city life is organized. This approach tries to study and explore the culture, organizational and social psychological consequences of urban life. Louis Wirth’s works belong to this approach.

Scope:

The scope of urban sociology is very vast and multidimensional. Urban sociology relies on the related sciences and borrows from history, economics, social psychology, public administration and social work.

As stated already, the subject-matter of sociology is cities and their growth, and it deals with such problems like planning and development of cities, traffic regulations, public waterworks, social hygiene, sewerage works, housing, beggary, juvenile delinquency, crime and so on. Thus as urbanism is many-sided so is urban sociology.

The scope of urban sociology becomes wider as it not only tries to study the urban setup and facts but also tries to give suggestions to solve problems arising out of dynamic nature of the society. 

Under reformatory scope of urban sociology, the problems of urbanism are studied. This includes some of the important issues such as the impact of urbanization on urban society leading to urban disorganization, urban planning and development.

Thus, the scope of urban sociology is much wider as it covers the whole spectrum of urban life and its changing environments.

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