Sharon Zukin

Who is Sharon Zukin?

Sharon Zukin is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, who specializes in modern urban life. She writes about culture and real estate in New York City, and has also examines consumer society and culture, the new economic order in the US and France, and socialism in the former Yugoslavia. Her books Loft Living, The Cultures of Cities and Naked City trace the recent reshaping of the city through deindustrialization, gentrification, and immigration, as well as the rise of the symbolic economy based on cultural production and consumption.

She is a critic of the work of Jane Jacobs whom she believes did not deal enough with gentrification and the process of urban homogenization that comes with it. She told the New York Times in 2010, "Much of what made [New York City's] neighborhoods unique lives on only in the buildings, not the people." She argues for more aggressive government regulation of rents and zoning to stop the economic stratification of the city.

She received the C.