Urban Studies and Sociology (BA)

Urban studies is an established and interdisciplinary area of inquiry—focusing on cities and their regions, urban social life, cultures, the built and natural environment, economics, politics, and policy—that is strengthened when students are strongly grounded in a traditional academic discipline. Sociology is organized around a series of problems and broad social, political, and economic forces that profoundly affect urbanization and shape the lives of urbanites, including racial and ethnic structures, labor and social class, power and inequality, demography and population mobility, neighborhoods and families, and organizations and institutions. Social theory and sociological methods—especially quantitative analysis and social statistics; demography; and ethnography—provide valuable tools for urban inquiry (many of which were forged by sociologists’ engagement with urban life and society). The joint major in Urban Studies and Sociology introduces students to different approaches to the study of cities and metropolitan areas and provides an overview of the diversity of social scientific and humanistic theories that inform much urban research.