University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: February 23, 2006

By JESSICA KELTZ
Reporter Contributor

It's not something that happens to most academics during their careers.

But UB sociologist Mark Gottdiener, a leader in the field of urban sociology and urban studies, will be recognized by his peers during a special session devoted to his work being held as part of the Eastern Sociological Society's annual meeting in Boston. The meeting begins today and runs through Tuesday.

Mark Gottdiener is being honored by colleagues at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting being held in Boston.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

During the special session, which was organized by ESS president Nancy Denton, associate professor of sociology, University at Albany, Gottdiener will answer questions posed by another leading urban sociologist, Gregory Squires, chair and professor of sociology at George Washington University, and by colleagues attending the session.

Recognition of this type is awarded to only a few scholars who have amassed a body of significant work that has greatly influenced a discipline.

"I'm unbelievably honored and flattered that something like this would take place," Gottdiener said last week during an interview with the Reporter. "This type of thing is rarely done while the person is still alive. It happens to maybe 1 percent of academics."

Squires describes Gottdiener, who has published 16 books, as "a very productive sociologist" whose work in sociospatial analysis "has been an important contribution to the theory of urban sociology."

"An important dimension of his work is that he's widely read internationally," he said. "His work has reached international audiences and has had an influence on urban sociology around the world."

Squires, who studies race, segregation, insurance redlining, predatory lending and related topics, said he cites Gottdiener's work from time to time in classes and in his own work.

Gottdiener joined the UB faculty in 1994 as chair of the Department of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences. He previously served on the faculty at Brooklyn College, the University of California-Riverside and Hunter College, and has held several visiting appointments, among them a post at Helsinki University of Technology in Finland.

His work focuses on analyzing the changing dynamics of urban space.

Urban sociologists, he says, typically focus on the central city, but he sees that perspective as incomplete. Instead, Gottdiener thinks of his approach as "an overall primary focus on space, as opposed to location, and the analysis of how vertical, as well as horizontal, political and economic forces impact the environment and, in turn, are affected by local sociospatial group activities."

He said a big difference between his work and that of other urban sociologists is that he considers his work to be more analytical than descriptive.

"My approach considers space as multidimensional, whereas most urban analysis focuses on location, which is one-dimensional," he explained.

"The approach I developed is one that most urbanists still haven't adopted, but it has increasingly acquired followers around the world."

Gottdiener is well-known for his book "Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City," published in 1999. He called the region an "excellent example of the kind of urban space that has replaced the large central city."

The dominant area of Las Vegas, he said, is the strip, which is located away from the downtown area. Housing, services, manufacturing and other industries are scattered across the region, rather than concentrated in a central city ringed by suburbs.

But, he said, "it's not a simplistic regional array because Las Vegas is vertically connected to the global economy." It's these vertical (the term Gottdiener uses to describe all forces emanating from both higher forms of government and the global economy), as well as horizontal (forces that are physically near one another) links that define modern urbanity, Gottdiener said. One indicator of Las Vegas's global nature is that 20 million travelers per year go through its airport, even though the region has a population only slightly larger than that of the Buffalo-Niagara region, he said.

The importance of airplanes and airports in the global culture comes up again in Gottdiener's 2001 book, "Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel." There, he uses air travel as a means of analyzing globalization from a sociospatial perspective; in other words, a perspective that looks at both locations and at global forces. He defines air space as a new modern place populated at any given time by thousands of people traveling in planes.

His two most successful works, he said, are "The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions and Commercial Spaces" and a textbook, "The New Urban Sociology," now in its third edition.

In "The Theming of America," Gottdiener examines the signs and signals that locations employ when they compete with one another for business. He describes it as synthesizing semiotics—the study of signs and how their meaning is understood—with urban analysis. In the United States, this "theming" means a heavy reliance on global franchising and on sameness.

"In Europe, they call that 'non-places,'" he said. "It's an eradication of location."

Despite his differences with the more typical location-based approach in his field, Gottdiener sees the biggest issue facing modern urban sociology is its disconnect from the political and civic dialogue on urban America. He feels that since most people feel qualified to comment on the urban areas in which they live, the perspective of academic experts often is overlooked.

"There is this gap between the academic expertise of urbanists and public decisions," he said. Urbanists' contributions to the discussion, he said, are "all about academics and scholarship."

"I'm not offering political opinions," he added.