ABSTRACT
The field of urban studies has acquired significant and increasing attention over the last few decades. The dramatic growth of cities and urban areas has spread new questions among scholars across many disciplines, including sociology, geography, economics, politics, and anthropology. The systematic study of the urban environment can be traced back to the first half of the 20th century, when the Chicago School of Urban Sociology attempted a comprehensive theoretical investigation and used the city of Chicago as the main focus of their empirical work. However, it was only from the 1970s, a period in which the world was dramatically urbanizing, that the investigation of the urban environment acquired “critical” tools with which to frame the “urban question” in relation to the global capitalist system.
