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Urban studies is the transdisciplinary study of Urban area and urban development—comprising the theory portion of the field of urban planning. Topics range from Urban geography, Urban sociology, anthropology, Urban history, urban design and architecture, to public policy and Civics, and their interrelations with community development. Urban studies is a major field of study used by practitioners of urban planning, it helps with the understanding of human values, development, and the interactions they have with their physical environment. (2015). 9780813349718, Westview Press. ISBN 9780813349718 (2025). 9780813345031, Westview Press. ISBN 9780813345031
Urban history plays an important role in this field of study because it reveals how cities have developed previously. History plays a large role in determining how cities will change in the future. Such areas change continuously as part of larger processes and create new histories that researchers study on both large-scale and individual levels.
Overall, three different themes have influenced how researchers have and will continue to study urban areas:
Scholars have also researched how cities outside of the United Kingdom and the United States have developed, but only to a limited degree. Urban history previously focused mostly on how European and American cities developed over time, instead of focusing on how non-European cities developed. Additional geographic areas researched in this field include South Africa, Australia, Latin America, and India. This is changing as more research is performed in developing economies, leading to more contextual urban and infrastructural development in various parts of the world.
The racial segregation of urban residents in the United States has played an important role in developing this field. One program founded to research African-American urban residents, the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, was founded in 1959 to study residential segregation and to support affected communities. More recently, studies related to race and urban life started to focus on Ethnography to study how individuals lived in relation to the city and their respective systems as a whole.
Israel Zangwill wrote one of the first books on the Ghettos of Europe and how they impacted the Jewish children that were descendants of the original residents, Children of the Ghetto (1892), he also wrote two other books about the European Ghettos. Louis Wirth was the next scholar to write about the Ghettos, he wrote about them from a sociological perspective. Louis Wirth and Roberts Ezra Park also became the first sociologists to publish about the immigrant neighbourhoods in America with suggestions on their future design. Roberts Ezra Park was a student of George Zimmel in Chicago. Other famous scholars that studied segregation, American Ghettos, and impoverished neighbourhoods include Du Bois (1903), Haynes (1913), Johnson (1943), Horace Cayton (1944), Kenneth Clark (1965), William Julius Wilson (1987).
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