Urbanism

Classic Statements

European countries experienced rapid industrialization in the first half of the nineteenth century. The city of Manchester, England, would come to symbolize the early industrial city, due in part to Friedrich Engels's description of life and labor in the city in The Condition of the English Working Class. An engraving of the town of Manchester from 1809 shows a rural landscape with village church spires rising through the trees; an oil painting by William Wyld of the industrial city from the same perspective in 1830 shows dozens of smokestacks and clouds of industrial pollution; the church spires can barely be made out. Early social theorists lived through these changes and confronted questions of what life in the industrial city would be like.

Ferdinand Tönnies, the German social philosopher, described the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from the small-scale rural society that tightly encircled the individual and family within the local community to the large-scale urban society where the city dweller confronts a “strange community” lacking traditional bonds, [Page 885]where “there exists a condition of tension against all others.” Georg Simmel, viewing urban life in Berlin in the last half of the nineteenth century, wrote more directly about the experience of urban life. First was the overwhelming intensity of nervous stimuli in the city—the crush of people, the noise of the streetcars, the smell of the street. To take all of this in would overwhelm the sensory foundations of psychic life, and so the city dweller develops a blasé attitude to surrounding persons and events. Second was the pervasive influence of the market on urban relations: Social life becomes conditioned by rational calculation as individuals encounter one another in partial roles, as consumers or store clerks, employees or managers, no longer as persons sharing common interests and activities within a localized community. Not only people's work lives but the very basis of everyday social interaction becomes subject to the same sorts of rational calculation that people might employ when making decisions of what to purchase at the corner market.

The classic statement on urban life is that of Louis Wirth, an American sociologist who studied under Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the University of Chicago and who would later become an important member of the faculty. Wirth's Urbanism as a Way of Life, published in 1938, is considered a summary of the perspectives of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology. Wirth set out to establish a theory of urbanism and began by suggesting that urban life is characterized by three variables: size, density, and heterogeneity. Compared to nonurban communities, the city had a larger and more heterogeneous population concentrated within urban space, and these variables interacted with one another to produce a distinctive urban way of life found only in the city. Increased population size resulted in a division of labor and specialization, while increased density would speed social interaction and competition among urban populations. Larger population size was in part the result of immigration, and cities would bring together persons of different cultures (just as the division of labor would mean the concentration of persons would increase urban heterogeneity by bring together persons with different skills and backgrounds within urban space). Urbanism would create greater opportunities for the individual for self-fulfillment with others who shared common interests, but the overall effect was negative: Urban life was characterized by social disorganization, as personal interactions within the primary group were replaced by voluntary associations among secondary groups. The impersonal nature of social relations in the city would result in anomie (a sense of isolation) despite the number of persons one encountered in daily life. The social disorganization of urban life was a pervasive trope in the early Chicago School studies, with studies of homeless men, street gangs, and slums.

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