16 Recommended Books for Urban Sociology Graduate Students

CityReads 城读 2022-07-13

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16 Recommended Books for Urban Sociology Graduate Students

New semester starts in September. Here I compile a book list for graduate students in urban studies, especially urban sociology. These 16 books cover research methods, academic writing, urban theories and practices, the brain and learning, the brain and exercise, and how to work deep in a distracted world.

Research methods

1. Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. Fitzgerald, 2016. The Craft of Research, 4th Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing and Publishing)

This book is a classic in social science research methods.

2. Sönke Ahrens, 2017. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

How to Take Smart Notes builds on the "slip box" technique (Zettelkasten) used by a professor of sociology, Niklas Luhmann, in the late 20th century. It's well known to academics in Germany and in the sociology field, amongst others, but has made little impact beyond those borders. Sönke's book is a detailed explanation of the technique but also builds on the evidence in areas such as education, multi-tasking, ego depletion and willpower, and problems such as confirmation bias. We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains. It's a complete system that can allow anyone to build their own "second brain" in a Zettelkasten to think more deeply and be more productive. Smart notes are not just another way to collect stuff; their aim and goal is to foster and support creative and innovative output.

3. Chen Xiangming, 2006. Qualitative Research in Social Sciences, Education Science Publishing House (in Chinese).

Anthropologists are the best qualitative researchers. I want to express my appreciation to college and friend, Dr. Zhu Yujing, for recommending these two books on qualitative research methods: Qualitative Research in Social Sciences and Anthropological Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative.

4. H. Russell Bernard, 2011.Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 5th edition. Alta Mira Press.

Research Methods in Anthropology is the standard textbook for methods classes in anthropology. Written in conversational style, this guide has launched tens of thousands of students into the fieldwork enterprise with a combination of rigorous methodology, wry humor, and commonsense advice.

5. Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi. 2016. Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

The Internet is almost like air for most people. In this context, the relevant research has to shift to the online world, or combines online and offline issues. This book introduces the principles and practices of digital ethnography.

Academic writing

6. Eric Hayot, 2014. The elements of academic style: writing for humanities, New York: Columbia University Press.

The title indicates his tribute to the classic writing book, Elements of Style and the goal to become a classic in academic writing. Hayot's book treats writing as a process that encompasses "behavioral, emotional, & institutional parameters."

7. Umberto Eco, translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina, 2015. How to Write a Thesis, The MIT Press.

Umberto Eco was an Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is the author of The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery, all bestsellers in many languages, as well as a number of influential scholarly works.

By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis—from choosing a topic to organizing a work schedule to writing the final draft. Now in its twenty-third edition in Italy and translated into seventeen languages, How to Write a Thesis has become a classic. Remarkably, this is its first, long overdue publication in English.

How to Write a Thesis is unlike any other writing manual. It reads like a novel. It is opinionated. It is frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious. For example, Eco warned against the dishonesty, "What you should never do is quote from an indirect source pretending that you have read the original. This is not just a matter of professional ethics. Imagine if someone asked how you were able to read a certain manuscript directly, when it is common knowledge that it was destroyed in 1944!" More examples, "First, writing a thesis should be fun. Second, writing a thesis is like cooking a pig: nothing goes to waste". "Your thesis is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget. In the end, it will represent your first serious and rigorous academic work, and this is no small thing."

8. Paul J. Silvia,2007. How To Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

How to Write a Lot is about becoming a reflective, disciplined writer. I take a practical, behavior-oriented approach to writing. How to write a lot views writing as a set of concrete behaviors, such as (a) sitting on a chair, bench, stool, ottoman, toilet, or patch of grass and (b) slapping your flippers against the keyboard to generate paragraphs. You can foster these behaviors using simple strategies. Let everyone else procrastinate, daydream, and complain—spend your time sitting down and moving your mittens.

Writing productively is a skill, not a genetic gift, so you can learn how to do it. Writing productively is about actions that aren’t doing but could easily do: making a schedule, setting clear goals, keeping track of your work, rewarding yourself, and building good habits. Changing your behavior won’t necessarily make writing fun, but it will make writing easier and less oppressive.

Urban theories and practices

9. Lefebvre H 2003 [1970]. Translated by Robert Bononno, The urban revolution, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN.

This book initiates a Marxist turn in urban studies. The "planetary urbanization" predicted by Lefebvre, which has only recently become a reality worldwide, is more relevant today than when it was published 50 years ago, and is a timely guide to urban theory debate, empirical research, and urban practice.

10. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, 2019. Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice, SAGE Publications Ltd.

Based on a joint graduate seminar organized in 2016 by the geography departments of the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, three professors from, Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, co-edit and co-write a book, Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice, which provide a timely and comprehensive guide to urban studies especially the field of critical urban studies.

11. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. 2013. The Urban Sociology Reader, 2nd edition. NY: Routledge.

The Urban Sociology Reader is a selection of classic texts from different fields of urban sociology, which is divided into seven sections: urbanization and community, capitalist urban growth, race and social inequality, gender and sexuality, globalization and transnationality, culture and the city, and urban spatial governance and rights.

12. Richard Legates and Frederick Stout. 2016.The City Reader, 6th edition. New York, NY: Routledge.

This book selects classic and important research texts in urban studies and urban planning-related fields. The sixth edition of the English version is divided into eight parts: The Evolution of Cities, Urban Culture and Society, Urban Space, Urban Politics, Regulation and Economics, History and Vision of Urban Planning, Urban Planning Theory and Practice, Urban Design and Placemaking, and Cities in a Global Society. Note that the Chinese translation of this book is mainly based on the old edition (5th edition) and adds research papers by several well-known Chinese scholars in urban studies and urban planning, including Zhou Xing, Liang Sicheng, Wu Liangyong, Zhang Tingwei, Wu Zhiqiang, Sun Shiwen, and Wu Fulong, which are not available in the English version, and I recommend read both the Chinese and English versions together.

13. Saskia Sassen, 2019. Cities in a world economy, Sage.

In the late twentieth century, massive developments in telecommunications and the ascendance of information industries led analysts and politicians to proclaim the end of cities. Cities, they told us, would become obsolete as economic entities. The emergent globalization of economic activity seems to suggest that place—particularly the type of place represented by cities—no longer matters.

As Saskia Sassen argues in her book, Cities in a World Economy, the spatial dispersion of the economy is only half of the story of today's global and digital age. Alongside the well-documented spatial dispersal of economic activities and the increased digitizing of the sphere of consumption and entertainment are the growing spatial concentration of a wide range of highly specialized professional activities, top-level management, and control operations, as well as, perhaps most unexpectedly, a multiplication of low-wage jobs and low-profit economic sectors. More analytically, these trends point to the development of novel forms of territorial centralization amid rapidly expanding economic and social networks with global span.

Brain and learning, brain and exercise, and deep work

14. Barbara Oakley, 2014. A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra), Penguin.

This book is about learning how to learn through understanding the brain in learning. In this way, we can really master the way to learn, learn any subject you want to learn.

15. John Ratey, Eric Hagerman, 2008. Spark：the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain, Little, Brown and Company

Plato once said, "In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection." Many people value education, but neglect exercise.

In 2012, I visited Hong Kong for a year. When I was browsing the new books in the library, I encountered a book, Spark: the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain, in which Spark makes a strong argument that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain. This book completely changes my view on exercise. It was a turning point in my life. I spent first half of my life hating exercise because I failed all PE classes at schools. It turns out I am only hating my PE class but not exercise. In the second half of my life, I start running regularly. Now I have finished 7 full marathons and 1 half-marathon. I am a mediocre runner at best. But it does not prevent me from getting the benefits that exercise can produce.

16. Cal Newport, 2016. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Grand Central Publishing.

In the age of the Internet and mobile connectivity, everyone is glued to a screen all the time, but attention spans are fragmented, making it difficult to stay focused. Carl Newport, PhD in Computer Science at MIT and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, published a book, Deep Work: How to Stay Focused in a Distracted World, in which he introduces the increasingly scarce skill of "deep work" and offers suggestions for training and improving deep work skills.

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