The Chicago paradigm and the voice for „making common” in the paradigmatic discussion of social geography and urban sociology

Abstract

The text provides a voice in discussing the shared paradigmatic space of social geography and urban sociology about ‘place’. The study’s theses contrast two ways of understanding the relationship between disciplines: “making common” and “sharing”, pointing to the former’s importance concerning the sociological research tradition of the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s. The positions and empirical practices produced at that time were perfectly in line with the discussion that accompanied the independence of social geography, which was also one of the highly influential urban sociology trends. The text analytically explores three studies on the Chicago School that have appeared since the second half of the 1990s. A separate theme is understanding the empirical paradigm and the understanding of mixed methods as an example of “making common” research practices based on the concept of the empirical paradigm. The study’s conclusions aim to propose a mixed method convention for interdisciplinary studies of urban sociology and social geography, whose inspiration lies in the American tradition of Urban sociology.