蜜桃传媒

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Even in retirement, Mark Gottdiener, PhD, professor emeritus of sociology in the 蜜桃传媒 College of Arts and Sciences, is recognized as one of the nation’s leading urban sociologists.

His work at the intersection of cultural issues and social problems was the foundation for the book “The New Urban Sociology,” a groundbreaking text that has evolved through six editions, last updated in 2019. In recent years, publishers presented the opportunity to revise the book once again, but Gottdiener recognized how the social problems he had spent decades researching had grown extreme, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.

He wanted to write a new book, one centered on a different approach, to analyze and stimulate solutions to what has become what he calls “a collection of humanitarian crises” plaguing the U.S. as well as many other countries.

Disheartened by what he saw yet encouraged by the possibilities of sharing a new perspective, Gottdiener started down a path to shift the ideological focus of urbanism away from its historically singular focus on large cites.

His new book, “Urbanism in the Digital Age” (Wiley Blackwell, 2025), turns urban sociology on its head.

“Ever since my work as a graduate student I’ve been interested in taking a regional approach to urbanism, rather than one that looks specifically at cities,” says Gottdiener, the 2010 recipient of the Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Sociological Association, one of the organization’s most prestigious honors.

“Over the years, the importance of this broader perspective has become more evident, to the point where today it’s impossible to deny that the regional urbanized areas containing our cities are a more important subject than studies looking only at the cities themselves,” he adds.

Gottdiener takes his concept of the Multi-Centered Metro Region (MCMR), introduced in his earlier research, and combines that with the continually emerging effects of the digital age to develop a vocabulary that redefines existing conceptions of urbanism.

Since the 1970s, most Americans have chosen to live outside of central cities, in what were once considered suburbs. But as the population shifted, so, too, did many of the jobs.

The suburbs are now a form of urban living.

“We’re still talking about cities, but we’re including the areas around them,” says Gottdiener. “That perspective makes a huge difference. 

“It allows urbanists working in sociology, geography, political science, architecture, urban planning and policy to look at the needs and requirements of the future in ways that find solutions to problems like affordable housing, transportation and health care.”

He says the market solutions of the past, which have repeatedly failed, must now be abandoned. It’s a lie to suggest that a private market solution exists for everything that doesn’t involve the government, according to Gottdiener.

“It has been established that the market can provide for certain specifics,” he says. “Competition and supply chains that are for profit work well for products, like shoes, but economists know that public goods and services, like clean air, roads, health care, public education, and a constellation of other things, can’t be supplied by the market.”

But Gottdiener says the perception of public goods and the role of governmental funding is flawed.

“It’s a problem people don’t talk about, and we ignore the fact that the private market requires government help,” he says. “During the financial crisis of 2008 private market entrepreneurs who denigrate government spending wind up with tears in their eyes running to the government for help. And we bail them out, to the tune of a trillion dollars of our tax money.”

Change begins by focusing on the MCMR.

“Digital technologies already have us living in a way that enables us to look at our regions as a whole and finding better ways of delivering the necessary goods and services to larger numbers of people without increasing the cost to taxpayers.

“I call it a new form of urbanism.”