Sharon Zukin

Her first urban book, Loft Living (1982, 1989), is considered groundbreaking. In their 2013 book Gentrification, Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly call Loft Living the most influential study of the development of “loft identity” and praise Zukin for developing the concept of the “artistic mode of production.” This refers to the way in which major real estate investors have tried to use artists and culture industries to attract capital and stabilize precarious real estate markets. According to Google Scholar, Loft Living has been cited 1,367 times (October 18, 2014).

Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award for Naked City, Urban Communication Foundation (2012)

In her most recent book, Naked City (2010), Zukin develops the concept of authenticity, the roots of which she traces back to ideas about an authentic self (meaning a self that is close to nature) found in Shakespeare and in the Romantic philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More recently, she says a craving for authenticity developed as a reaction to the modernist standardization and homogenization of cities that took place in the 1950s and '60s.

Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Career Achievement in Urban Sociology from the Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. (2007)

C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems for Landscapes of Power (1991)

Zukin's view, at least in 1980, was that “For most of their history, urban sociologists seemed to serve the interests of the state as much as industrial sociologists served the interests of capital.” She and other sociologists influenced by the new urban sociology intended to take a different course. In contrast to the prevailing Chicago School and its ethnographic focus on communities, immigrants and settlement patterns, practitioners of this new, more interdisciplinary approach were concerned with the role of the state and with analyzing how "urban space is produced deliberately and in response to the needs of capital."

Zukin's research interests and analytical framework place her in the broad category of Neo-Marxist social thinkers. She began teaching urban sociology just as the “new urban sociology” was emerging, partly in response to a series of urban riots (many of which involved African-Americans reacting to police brutality or other manifestations of systemic racism) that took place in U.S. cities in the late 1960s. Widespread urban unrest in the U.S. and Europe prompted worried governments and agencies to increase the funding for urban research. Sociologist Manuel Castells and geographer David Harvey were two of the theorists influential in developing the new urban sociology.

But Zukin differs from Jacobs in whom she considers the main antagonists when it comes to creating livable, equitable cities. Especially in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs blames planners and the planning profession for destroying healthy, functional neighborhoods through forced urban renewal programs and for generally inflicting a "Great Blight of Dullness." Zukin sees this focus on planners as largely misguided and unhelpful because for her, planners are “a relatively powerless group compared to developers who build, and banks and insurance companies who finance the building that rips out a city’s heart.” But “for one reason or another,” Zukin writes, Jacobs “chose not to criticize the interests of capitalist developers who profit from displacing others.” As to why Jacobs wasn't harder on developers and financial institutions, Zukin speculates that the fact that she was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, itself established and funded by corporate titan John D. Rockefeller and his heirs, might have played a role. In 1958, Jacobs received a grant from the foundation to develop her ideas about cities; the foundation published the result of that work as Death and Life in 1961. Zukin also points to Jacobs's connection to Time Inc., which published The Architectural Forum, where Jacobs held a staff position, and wonders whether Jacobs was influenced by a fear of red-baiting, given that McCarthyism had waned only a few years before she began work on Death and Life.

Sharon L. Zukin (born September 7, 1946) is an American professor of sociology who specializes in modern urban life. She teaches at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. As of 2014, she was also a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center and chair of the Consumers and Consumption Section of the American Sociological Association. Zukin was a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam in 2010–11.

Other early influences include Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century and anthropologist Sidney Mintz's 1986 book Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.

While Zukin understands the craving for the authentic and admits to acting on it herself, she says the problem is that instead of being attributed to people, authenticity is now understood as an attribute of things (such as beer and cheese) and even experiences, which can be consumed. This leads to authenticity being "used as a lever of cultural power for a group to claim space and take it away from others without direct confrontation, with the help of the state and elected officials and the persuasion of the media and consumer culture." Through these processes of displacement and gentrification, she argues, New York City "lost its soul" in the early 21st century. The solution she proposes is to redefine authenticity and connect it back to the idea of "origins," then use it to support "the right to inhabit a space, not just consume it as an experience." Nodding to Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey's "right to the city" concept, she argues that "authenticity can suggest a 'right to the city,' a human right, that is cultivated by longtime residence, use, and habit.”