Urban Life

Modern Life and the Industrial City

The first systematic social scientific analysis of the contrast between urban and rural life was Ferdinand Tönnies's Community and Society, published in 1887. Seeking to understand the social and economic transformations then sweeping through his native Germany, Tönnies argued that industrialization was fundamentally transforming the nature of social bonds between people. Where previously social relations were defined by their Gemeinschaftlich (or, loosely translated, communal) character—relations were organized through custom, obligation, and paternalism—in modern, industrial societies social relationships were primarily Gesellschaftlich in orientation. Under the term Gesellschaftlich Tönnies described a society (not a community) defined by contractual market relations, rationality, and individual autonomy. Crucially Tönnies also argued that Gesellschaftlich relationships were defined by their urban nature. The rise of modern, commercial society was also simultaneously the rise of an urbanized society. For Tönnies, as for many subsequent thinkers, modern society equated with urban society, modern life with urban life.

This idea—that to understand modern society it was necessary to understand urban society and that to understand urban life was to understand what was to be modern—dominated urban thought through much of the twentieth century. Georg Simmel in his 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” for example, argued not only that urban life was fundamentally different from rural life but also that city life demanded a higher level of intellectual faculty than did rural life. The offshoot of this was the urban dweller's famous blasé attitude, which was not so much a sign of indifference as of an elevated degree of mental capacity. In a similar manner, Robert Park, the founder of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, saw the city as “the natural habitat of civilized man”; although simultaneously Park also stressed that in its dependence on secondary relationships, the city with its “intensity of stimulations, tends … to confuse and demoralise the person.” Louis Wirth, in his essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” which in many ways marked the apogee of this line of thinking, argued that “the beginning of what is distinctly modern in our civilisation is best signalized by the growth of great cities…. The distinctive feature of mode of man living in the modern age is his concentration into gigantic aggregations.” Equally the writings of the great modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with those of Garden City advocates such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, and [Page 892]the Regional Planning Association of America, were infused with the idea that in reorganizing urban life, in building cities that were rational and ordered—“machines for living,” according to Le Corbusier—the whole of society itself could be transformed.

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