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Award recognizes lifetime achievements
Mark Gottdiener’s peers call him one of the most important urban sociologists in the U.S. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
UB sociologist Mark Gottdiener has received many honors in his career, among them a number of international visiting scholar positions (three in 2007 alone), a special session of the Eastern Sociological Association devoted to his career’s work and a number of distinguished lectureships and fellowships, including two Fulbright awards.
Now, in recognition of his research and writings, he has received one of the most notable awards presented by the American Sociological Association: the 2010-2011 Robert and Helen Lynd Lifetime Achievement Award for distinguished career achievements in community and urban sociology.
Gottdiener, a professor of sociology, is a devoted urbanist who lives in Buffalo’s Riverside district and a founder of what is often called “the new urban sociology,” a field that considers the rise and fall of cities, their class-shaped patterns of capitalistic urban development, real estate manipulations and their symbolic dimensions.
Joseph Feagin, former president of the American Sociological Association and a distinguished scholar and Pulitzer Prize nominee in his own right, calls Gottdiener “one of two or three leading urban sociologists in the United States…a courageous and influential pioneer in critical social sciences approaches to and research on US and global cities.”
“He and his work are well known by urban analysts across the globe,” Feagin says.
Gottdiener conducts research at the intersection of urban sociology and cultural studies, and has earned international regard in particular for his work in socio-spatial analysis, an important contribution to urban sociological theory. He developed the new urban paradigm, which also focuses on cultural semiotics and popular culture, and how cultural issues are related to social problems. Much of this cutting-edge research is presented for undergraduates in his “The New Urban Sociology” (Perseus, 2010), originally published in 1986 and now in its fourth edition.
His leadership in the field is evidenced by the nearly 2,000 citations of his work by scholars across the disciplines of sociology, urban studies and economics. More than 95 percent of his books and articles are single authored, making his number of citations all the more impressive.
Like Gottdiener, Kevin Fox Gotham, professor of sociology and director of the Social Policy and Practice Program at Tulane University, conducts research that looks to tourism as a force of global standardization or heterogeneity. The author of several important books in the field, Gotham concurs with Feagin’s assessment of Gottdiener as a world-class scholar.
“His work is well known and respected everywhere,” Gotham says. “He has synthesized an impressive range of explorations on urban space and semiotics, notably in his famous book ‘The Social Production of Urban Space,’ which has been called ‘the best theoretically oriented book by a United States urban sociologist’ in more than 50 years.
“His research overall provides a theoretically sophisticated and politically incisive examination of the ways in which the restructuring of cities has become central to the new geographies of power,” Gotham says.
Another of his celebrated books looks at the commodification of everything: In the “Theming of America: Dreams, Visions and Commercial Spaces” (2001, Westview Press), about to be published in a third edition, Gottdiener investigated and offered reasons why the U.S. built environment increasingly consists of shopping malls, theme parks, fast food franchises and various hybrids of all three.
In 2006, he was awarded the Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was invited to give the annual Roth and Symonds Endowed Lectureship at the Yale University School of Architecture, and was recognized by his peers in the Eastern Sociological Society with a special session devoted to his work.
Gottdiener has presented 65 invited papers at sociological conferences since 1982 and has served as editor or editorial board member for eight sociological journals, including the prestigious American Journal of Sociology and the international journal Urban Studies, arguably the highest-rated journal in the field, where he served as managing editor for North America from 1996 to 2002.
He chaired the National Task Force on Urban Governance of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, and in 2005, when the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a major traveling exhibition titled “Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye” featuring the work of 70 important artists from 30 countries, it employed excerpts from Gottdiener’s writings in both the exhibition itself and in the exhibition catalog.
Gottdiener, who was recruited to UB in 1994 from the University of California-Riverside to chair the sociology department, says he is “most honored” to receive the Lynd Lifetime Achievement Award, but it hasn’t slowed him down much. He is under contract to produce another book—this one comparing urban development in Las Vegas with that of Dubai and Macau—and just recently completed editing a special issue of the journal Critical Sociology on the topic of urban sociology and critical theory.
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