Urbanization

Modern Urbanism and beyond

The industrial revolution made a marked difference in the development of modern cities. The revolution played an important role in drawing people to cities, where diverse nonagricultural occupations were available. Most importantly, however, the industrial revolution laid the infrastructural basis for the expansion of communication between distant areas and the transportation of people and resources from one place to another. Hence, preindustrial cities and modern cities were dissimilar from one another not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. Economically modern cities allowed elaborate specialization together with an open system in which achievement rather than ascription played an important role in social mobility. Politically, modern cities became social spaces wherein the notion of citizenship, replacing premodern subject-hood, found full-fledged expression. Culturally, modern cities not only served as centers of cultural intermixing but acted as places wherein diverse subcultures flourished. These processes allowed modern cities to grow exponentially. Some modern cities evolved into metropolises, central cities surrounded by towns and suburban areas with relatively integrated economies. Sometimes continued urbanization created a megalopolis, a continuous stretch of urban area forming a cluster of metropolises, such as from Boston to Washington, D.C.

Modern cities are also distinct from their premodern counterparts because of a unique form of social behavior that emerged within them. Urban sociologist Louis Wirth designated this emergent behavior as urbanism, a distinctive way of life eventuated by the social patterns of modernity. Because urbanites are [Page 981]exposed to an increasing social differentiation of the urban environment, they tend to be anonymous, superficial, and selectively sensitive to social matters while at the same time exhibiting strong ties with their primary groups. Before Wirth, Georg Simmel also remarked on the inimitable features of the urbanite. Unlike some modern social thinkers who lamented the disappearance of community life, Simmel underscored the positive dimensions of the urban experience without glossing over its problems. In place of excessive parochialism and surveillance characteristics of the traditional way of life a good deal of freedom is provided by urban centers to urban dwellers. Anticipating David Harvey's notion of “time-space compression,” Simmel was able to describe the intense feeling that urbanites experience. According to Simmel, to the extent that they develop a unique attitude that protects them from the overstimulations of urban life, urbanites experience an intense crash of people and events hitherto unimagined. In their blase attitude, an indifference to manifold but selective situations, urbanites might sound cold and calculating. Yet, the blase mind-set is nothing but a survival mechanism through which urbanites focus on what is indispensable to the process of coping with the encounters of city life.

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