Middle Class in Cities

Middle classes are commonly associated with cities, the emergence of new economic opportunities and forms of segregation, consumer practices, higher education, and voluntary associations. Historically, the bourgeoisie emerged in towns and cities in Europe, first through artisan trades (in guilds) and later through commercial activity, capitalist investments, and new professions that emerged with industrial capitalism. Capitalism produced factory jobs in major industrial centers such as Manchester, England, and Detroit, Michigan, and new managerial jobs, service work, clerical and office positions, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and commercial traders. People in these latter positions have been called the bourgeoisie or the middle classes.

Both terms, bourgeoisie and middle class, refer to those occupying a “middling” position between working classes and the aristocracy or gentry, even though the terms are not entirely commensurate. Thus, they refer to relative social positioning, economic status, and educational level, as noted by Raymond Williams in 1983. Those identified as being “in the middle” are variously defined by income, occupation, values, status, security, education, manners, housing/real estate, consumption patterns, and lifestyle. In contemporary usage, middle class refers to families engaged in professional or white-collar work.

Due to their middling position, much has been written about the middle classes' political beliefs and class interests, in Europe historically and Asia more recently (e.g., South Korea and China). Would middle-class people support existing power structures, or would they be inclined to support social or democratic movements? In Europe, the bourgeoisie supported ending the feudal system of landed and inherited power and serfdom and establishing a liberal society that protected civil and political rights. Towns surrounded by city walls were some of the first locations that replaced serf-lord relationships with the freedom to find one's own work, fostering new notions of equality and citizenship in cities (bourgeois philosophies). In Marxist analyses, however, the bourgeoisie was identified as part of the ruling class because its members were economically, culturally, and politically dominant. According to this view, in cities, ruling class ideology emerges in local politics, urban planning decisions, and the educational system.

In the United States, early entrepreneurial activities that led to the accumulation of private wealth and real estate purchases—commonly used markers of middle-class status—first occurred in farming activities rather than urban employment sectors. The middle class in the United States, in other words, was originally a rural phenomenon, as noted by C. Wright Mills in White Collar. Nevertheless, the growth of the middle class is now strongly associated with the growth of metropolitan centers, increased residential segregation (by area and housing type), and the emergence of new social and business associations that demarcate status in the city. A particularly salient social distinction is [Page 471]between blue-collar or manual workers and whitecollar or professional workers; it has been reproduced spatially in various ways in cities (e.g., through neighborhood and district segregation, suburbanization, and gentrification).

An important aspect of the growth of the urban middle class has to do with the separation between work and family spaces brought about by industrial capitalism. Commercial activities and wage labor—activities primarily done by men at that time—moved out of the living space. This newly private domestic sphere became feminized and was counterposed to the public male world. This public/private distinction was a class-specific phenomenon based on “family wages” for men and supplemental wage status for women who worked outside of the home. Moreover, women who forayed into the public sphere transgressed moral boundaries, compromising their own reputation and, in many cultures, that of their extended families as well. Numerous novels have been written as moral tales about the fate of “respectable” middle-class women on city streets.

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