Urban sociology

Scientific interest in the city is very old but the science of urban sociology is quite recent. What probably is the first book about the city was written by the Italian Giovanni Botero, whose Delle Cause della grandezza della città appeared as early as 1598. This book, of course, is now hardly more than a scientific curiosity and it cannot be said that it created a new science. From the seventeenth century on, the city increasingly became the object of scientific research. The founders of political arithmetic and their successors the statisticians, the students of population problems, the economists, and the historians became interested and were joined by administrators, architects, planners, and social reformers. They have produced a literature so extensive that a complete bibliography, if it could be compiled, would dwarf the size of any monograph on the subject. Urban sociology is indebted to these scholars; some of the basic problems have been first investigated by such pioneers as Graunt, Ravenstein, Mayr, Supan, Buecher, Adna Weber, Will cox, and Hurd, but none of their works is truly an urban sociology. Even after sociology had established itself as a new science, its students took rare notice of urban phenomena.