I first met Ray in the early 1970s when I worked at the Centre for Environmental Studies in London. CES, funded by the Ford Foundation and the British government, had a young and dynamic multidisciplinary staff many of whom went on to become leaders in the field of urban and regional research. And Ray was already an intellectual leader in what came to be known as ‘the new urban sociology’.

His own work had broken decisively with what had become an increasingly sterile tradition of, on the one hand, ‘community studies’ and, on the other hand, methodologically sophisticated but theoretically banal urban ecology, both deriving from the pioneering work of the Chicago School but without its intellectual excitement or relevance to contemporary urban policies and events; a tradition he explored and began to transcend in his Introduction to a path breaking collection which he edited Readings in Urban Sociology (1968). Ray’s subsequent work, deeply influenced by Weberian perspectives on power and bureaucracy, focused initially on the role of the ‘urban managers’ as the ‘gatekeepers’ of access to urban resources and had an immediate resonance with those of us just entering our professional life as sociologists, politically and socially committed to social justice in the city and seeking a means of both understanding and changing our cities and societies.