Call for Abstracts. Special Issue "Social Urbanism: The Sociology of Urban Life and the Social Consequences of Urbanization"
The journal Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes announces a call for applications for a Special Issue "Social Urbanism: The Sociology of Urban Life and the Social Consequences of Urbanization".
Guest editors of the Issue: Dr. Sci. (Soc.) Inna A. Vershinina (Lomonosov Moscow State University), Cand. Sci. (Soc.) Aleksey N. Raskhodchikov (Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow Center for Urban Studies Gorod).
More than half of the world's population are already city dwellers, and their number continues to grow. Urbanization processes often occur spontaneously, manifesting the free choice of individuals and families. At the same time, they give rise to new problems, such as depopulation and degradation of vast territories, spontaneous expansion of megacities and overpopulation, and excessive concentration of population in cities. That is why the study of the phenomena of urbanization and deurbanization, the possibilities of managing these processes, as well as methods of managing settlement systems and creating an attractive environment for people in territories with varying degrees of urbanization are in the focus of interest of social urbanism.
At the beginning of the 20th century, urban sociology formed an independent branch of scientific knowledge, with its own theoretical foundations and various empirical studies. However, both the urban forms themselves and the challenges that modern cities face have changed significantly in recent decades. In this regard, there is a need to review and enrich many of the established sociological approaches to the analysis of urban space. The crisis of cities, which is increasingly being written about by modern urbanists, requires a search for new theoretical foundations for the formation of settlement systems and living conditions adequate to the challenges of post-industrial society.
Within the Special Issue of the Monitoring of Public Opinion Journal we invite researchers to discuss theoretical and conceptual problems and practical approaches related to the main trends in the change of modern cities and issues of urban environment management aimed at realizing the social needs of people and their potential.
The purpose of the Special Issue is to outline new prospects for analyzing the urban environment as a social space, including highlighting aspects that were previously absent or remained on the periphery of research attention, but today — in changing social contexts — are becoming increasingly relevant and significant.
The editors will consider applications on social urbanism. Priority is given to the following research areas:
- urbanization vs. deurbanization
- modern urbanism as a lifestyle
- digitalization of urban space and smart city technologies
- spatial inequality
- deindustrialization vs. reindustrialization of cities
- environmental problems of modern cities and strategies for overcoming them
- cultural consumption in the city and tourist attractiveness of territories
- urban environment for families and children
- development of an inclusive and accessible urban environment
We accept studies based on quantitative or qualitative methods of sociological analysis using official statistics, population surveys, big data, materials of in-depth interviews, focus groups, or other information sources. A mandatory requirement for articles is to justify the choice of the theoretical framework of the work, research methodology, and data sources.
Applications for the Special Issue are accepted by email (biryukova_s@wciom.com) until February 15, 2025. Please indicate the following subject when sending the letter: “Application for a Special Issue — Social Urbanism”. The application must include:
- Title of the article;
- Brief information about the authors (position and place of work, contact email);
- Abstract to the article of 300 to 600 words, containing the main purpose of the study and brief information about the theoretical framework of the work, research hypotheses, information about the methods used in the work and its empirical basis (data).
Applications are accepted in Russian or English.
The deadline for making decisions on applications is March 15, 2025.
The deadline for preparing full-text articles for selected applications is May 15, 2025. Full texts for selected applications are accepted through the Journal website (https://www.monitoringjournal.ru/) and must meet the requirements for manuscripts described in the Author Guidelines section: https://www.monitoringjournal.ru/index.php/monitoring/about/submissions.
The planned publication date of the Special Issue is September—November 2025.
