and Mathieu Zagrodzki , Doctorant, politique publique, CEVIPOF, Sciences Po
Comparing US and European cities is a classic exercise of urban sociology. Urban sociology has long privileged analytical models of the convergence of cities, either based on models of urban ecology inspired by writers from the University of Chicago, or in the context of the Marxist and neo-Marxist tradition that privileges the decisive influence of uneven development, and capitalism on social structures, modes of government, and urban policies. This tradition is well alive and constitutes an important body of research about global cities (Sassen, 1991), metropolis and flows (Castells, 1996). This implicit convergence is massively at play in the post modernist representation of fragmented incoherent urban space widespread all over the world (Allen and Soja, 1996). In theoretical terms, if the urban is growing everywhere, there are different types of urban models of cities which may differentiate, being different types of social, political, cultural, economic structures. That does not mean that all those models will not follow the same path to some extent. The comparison between European and American cities in this chapter is done in that spirit…