Yugoslavian Urban Sociology and the Chicago Schools of Urban Sociology + Economics

This week's reading of Brigitte Le Normand's Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade was particularly interesting to me in thinking through questions I've had about the role of urban planning, urban sociology, and neoliberalism. Part of this thought process references my experiences as an undergraduate student when I took a class on urban sociology. One of my take away points from that class was the argument that spatial reconfigurations, especially un the constitution of cities and its maintenance/transformation via urban planning, can be closely linked to the logics of capitalism; moreover, some of the key theorists in urban sociology had in some ways created conceptual gaps that made neoliberal economic and political restructuring a logical next step.

As part of this undergraduate course, we read a number of articles that came from what we learned to be "the Chicago school of urban sociology". In reading works by UIC urban sociologists like Brian Berry, I felt as a student that the Chicago school of urban sociology was heralded as a key player in producing cutting edge research in the field especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Concurrently, I also learned of the key role that Milton Friedman et al played in the constitution of the Chicago school of economics through David Harvey's chapter "Freedom's Just a Word..." in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which would frame and shape the way that neoliberal economics and politics played out in the latter half of the 20th century. As a result of learning about these knowledge projects at the University of Chicago in both economics and urban sociology, I was particularly surprised when I came across a reference to the the Chicago school of urban sociology, in Le Normand's book. As she notes, urban sociology's first appearance within the introduction of the 1961 edition of Sociologija, the leading Yugoslav sociology review, focused on, among other academic work, the work of the Chicago school of urban sociology (191).

This interest in the Chicago school of urban sociology is key to me when thinking about the relationship between urban planning and neoliberalism. In that course, I was curious about how the co-existence of conservative political and economic scholarship coming from the school of economic might have affected the institutional culture in which urban sociological studies were conducted. Did the institutional history of say Milton Friedman's tenure at UIC since 1947 play a part in the shape and scope of urban sociology as it functioned in the 20th Century and how it was later practiced in processes of urban planning? When reading Le Normand's analysis, I began to also wonder: if indeed there was an institutional acculturation of Chicago school urban sociologists to neoclassical economic thought, did the focus on Chicago school urban sociology in Yugoslavia for its social scientists play a shaping and constitutive factor in the city planning projects they deemed valuable and invaluable? Could this perhaps play a part in how we think about the co-constitutive role of urban planning projects in a transnational perspective, even with the insistence that there is a different progression towards neoliberalization from socialist/market socialist states?

Unlike Le Normand, I am not asserting these claims from extensive research in the archives, in this case, of UIC's institutional history. Rather, it seems to just be a fleeting thought. Thinking about Le Normand's narrative, I began to wonder as well: if "planning was initially a subset both of central economic planing and of architecture", and "central economic planning was gradually completely abandoned...[which then brought] town planning back to its other origin as a subset of economic planning", albeit in a different manner than the original modern functionalist dream, then there must be inherent linkages between the knowledge projects, politics, economics, and city planning (247).

For my media object for this week, I think I just wanted to attach a link to David Harvey's book on neoliberalism. There's still much to think through and, in a sense, I hope that this quick write up with these preliminary thoughts about urban sociology, urban planning, neoliberalism, and its connections to the shifts economically and politically in Yugoslavia prompt some discussion in class tomorrow.

Some questions I'm left with are: how do planned, built, and in-construction infrastructures handle shifts in what is considered outdated/normative/novel city-planning? How does the reliance on the nation-state model, even in a socialist/market socialist context, occlude alternative conceptualizations of economics and land-use?