Sociology of Cities, Housing Sociology
The theoretical study of the links between urban sociology and the sociology of housing does not only refer to different levels of scientific investigation. In urban sociology, how housing is taken into account in the study of the change too often reduced it to a part of the urban economy or dissolved it in the observation territories. Thus, the two more traditional explanatory models of urban change oppose on the one hand a paradigm of structural causality and the other a model of territorial analysis based on descriptive material of the local social groups practices. After showing the importance and limitations of both models, this article shows how the study of gentrification of a Parisian neighborhood, the Goutte d’Or, the history of settlement of the housing stock is an indispensable parameter to better understand the social changes of the city and its consequences.