Mark Gottdiener

Mark Gottdiener (born 1943) is an Urban Sociologist/ Cultural Studies academic considered one of the best urbanists in the United States.^[1] With hundreds of citations to his work, including a significant amount from other fields, such as Economics and Semiotics, he has published 16 books, several in multiple editions, and over one hundred scientific papers. In 2010 Gottdiener was honored with the Robert and Helen Lynd Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association. His principle faculty posts were at the University of California, the City University of New York, and the State University of New York. In addition, he held visiting professorships at universities in Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, and in the US.

Personal Life and Early Career

Gottdiener was born in the South Bronx, NYC, and lived in a tenement with his parents, Moritz (Moshe Ovadiah HaCohen) and Aranka (Rachel HaLevy) Vogel, who were Orthodox Jewish refugees from Hungary that arrived in the U.S. in the late 1930s. Both parents were of mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazic heritage who spoke Hungarian and German in the home. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and the City College of New York majoring in Mathematics. Gottdiener attended graduate school in the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota in an accelerated PhD program for mathematically gifted students. He studied with Leonid Hurvicz, Hugo Sonnenschein and John Chipman. However, he dropped out with a Master's degree due to the a- social nature of his studies and because of involvement in the counter- culture activities during the 1960s. In 1970 he entered the Sociology program at SUNY Stony Brook where he studied with David Street, Gerald Suttles and Kurt Lang receiving is PhD in 1973. Gottdiener married his girlfriend from Minneapolis, Jennifer Paulson Garwick, a craft artist with an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1969. They have two sons, Felix and Zev.

Contributions

Mark Gottdiener is best known for two contributions to social science and cultural studies: the socio- spatial approach to urbanism, known as the New Urban Sociology, following the work of Henri Lefebvre, and the application of Peircian and Eco's semiotics to the study of material culture. "Challenging human ecology, the new urban sociology , defined a paradigm of urban analysis that has dominated the field since the 1990s (1988; 1995 [1985]). Emphasizing academic dialogue and work ranging across disciplinary boundaries, he has developed ideas of European critical and social theory to serve urban analysis. Notably , he was the first person to systematically introduce, in the Anglophone world, Henri Lefebvre's theory of the social production of space"^[2] (1995; Forthcoming, 2018). The second innovative contribution is the concept of theming, as it is studied in social science, which he initially developed in 1986, 1995 and expanded further in 2001.

References

[1] "UB's Gottdiener Called One of the Most Important Urban Sociologists in the U. S.-- University at Buffalo". www.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2016-03-03

[2} Lehtovuoari,P. (2009), in R. Huthcison, ed., Encyclopedia of Urban Studies. Sherman Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Pp 319-322.