Ville et émergence du capitalisme

This short piece reviews several works from urban sociology that have examined the links between the city and the emergence of the capitalist economic system. At the turn of the twentieth century, Max Weber and Georg Simmel questioned the role of the city in the development of modern capitalism using two different approaches. Weber's socio-historical approach questions the role played by cities, from antiquity to the nineteenth century, in the emergence of the modern state, while Simmel focuses on the upheavals of his century such as the emergence of large urban metropolises. In the 1970s, marked by the economic crisis and urban struggles, sociological analysis concentrated on these issues, using a Marxist approach to study the city as the place of reproduction of the capitalist industry through the accumulation of urban capital.