Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel discuss how gentrification affects society in their book “The Fine Arts of Gentrification”, based on the phenomenon where low-cost housing undergoes renovation, which increases the property value. This leads to them being displaced by wealthier residents as the prior ones can no longer pay the rent (yu, 2007).

Georg Simmel describes different aspects of modern urban culture in “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, which he wrote in 1903. He talks about how cities are dominated by objectivism. This decreases human interaction, which becomes short and instrumental, lacking emotions and giving rise to personal involvement in small communities (Choi, 2006). Even though cities were very different when the book was written, it remains relevant to a great extent today. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess talk about the environment of a city in their book “The City”. Competition is the primary source of influencing the environment of a city. This social pressure gives rise to the division of “The City” or urban spaces where people with similar characteristics inhabit a region of the city or zone. Based on this theory, Park and Burgess gave rise to the model “Concentric ring theory” (Park and Burgess, 1925).

 In his book “Collective Memory”, Maurice Halwachs talks about the importance of individual memory and its significant role in people’s lives. He talks about two worlds, present society and society immersed in our thoughts. Each individual is in control of their memories and can manipulate their society immersed in thought (Kinney, 2017). This contradicts Foucault’s ideology where he believes we are already prisoners in our minds. In daily life, we run into people with different tastes. According to Pierre Bourdieu, in one way or another, people have a habitus that depends on the subconscious way humans perceive things due to the way they are raised, structuring their tastes and actions (Bourdieu and Richard, 1987).

 Foucault compared the monarchical Ancien Régime, and in his view a chaotic and violent age, with a rational and disciplinary modern age. However, Léonard (1977) criticised Foucault’s ignorance of the positive outcomes of punishment in his analysis of the Ancien Régime. Léonard means that Foucault only analysed the “prisoners” and not the “rest of society” and ignored social behaviour. From Léonard’s point of view, this is one of the most significant deficits of Foucault’s analysis. Hence, he is building a panopticon for himself. On the other hand, Foucault often refers to the “history of the present”. Throughout his writing, he used the restriction from using the word “history” and often saw it as a whole, using the term “genealogy”. He wonders if things have changed throughout time or have people now become prisoners in their minds instead.