O revizitare a oraşului interbelic: teme urbane la sociologii gustieni
Revisiting the Interwar City. Urban Themes in Gusti’s School of Sociology

Summary/Abstract: The sociology of Gusti School was largely depicted as a rural sociology, approaching topics related to the social life and cultural traditions of the villages. This characterization is, surely, derived from the “monographic survey of the Romanian villages” project and from the monographic method in itself, designed to be applied primarily in rural areas. In this paper I attempt to highlight some topics that targeted different areas of research, particularly, researches that sought to examine specific urban aspects (such as urban migration, urban services, urban poverty, urban ethnicity, urban institutions etc.), that focused their investigation in cities, mainly Bucharest. The thesis of my paper is not to ‘prove’ that Gusti School approached ‘urban themes’ as well (for that matter, an aspect largely known to those familiar with the history of the School), but to consider these research topics together with some social characteristics of cities in interwar Romania. I refer to a series of articles published in Sociologie Românească between 1937 and 1939, and I attempt to analyze how some Gustian sociologists addressed different urban topics covering the problems of the city and the process of urbanization. The paper intends to find out: (a) what kind of socio‑cultural realities and political‑economic concerns these topics referred to, (b) how were they presented in this sociology journal and other publications of the interwar period, and subsequently, (c) what did these themes mean for these authors, for the Gusti School project and, generally, for the social‑political discourses in that time.

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