“URBAN BRAINS, URBAN LIVES AND THE EMBODIMENT OF URBANICITY: How does the experience of urban living get under the skin? How do different forms of urban life shape body and soul, mental life, mental health, mental distress? This question has a long history in social thought from George Simmel and Walter Benjamin to the ‘Chicago School’. It was crucial to early sociological attempts to chart the distribution of mental disorder across urban space. But from the 1960s onwards, accounts of the distribution, causes and consequences of social suffering proceed without much attention to how these got ‘under the skin’ and the stance of sociology to psychiatry transformed from alliance to critique. Professor Rose argues that the time is right to revive this relationship between the human sciences and the life sciences.
A new biology is taking shape in neuroscience and in genomics in which vitality and milieu are understood in constant and dynamic transaction, nowhere more so than in relation to the brain. And some in the social sciences and humanities are beginning to recognize that their subject too is a vital organism. Following an exploration of some historical transactions between the social and the vital in urban existence, Professor Rose considers some recent work in the neurosciences and its potential, and its problems, for a revitalized sociology of urban experience. At a time when more than half the world’s population lives in cities, from the shantytowns and slums of Sao Paolo and Mumbai to les banlieues of Europe’s capitals, Professor Rose suggests that such a revitalized sociology might once more help grasp some of the most pressing questions of our present.”