Monday, August 13, 2012

Replay: The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)


Google has scanned 15 million books originally published from 1800 on. And they have also developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer. It's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in literature and other books (Google books database). One could irresponsibly use it as a proxy for the popularity of words in literature. And I did!














This chart above shows how often "Urban Sociology" has appeared in the literature (Google database - english literature only) since 1800. It looks to me that the Chicago School have had played an important role in the rising 'popularity' of Urban Sociology*. And it looks that Urban Sociology is not as 'popular' as it used to be....

*obviously, it would be necessary to scrutinize other keywords to conclude this (such as the major researchers in the first Chicago School)


And here are some queries of other keywords of interest:

And my favorites:

Traffic Jam:















Urban sprawl, compact city, smart city, smart growth, compact growth, New Urbanism.











Thanks Vinicius Netto for the tip!