Private Pleasure, Public Plight

Urban Development, Suburban Sprawl, and the Decline of Community

Hans Kummer, David Popenoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138530775
• eBook ISBN: 9781351308069
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a social and cultural analysis of community life in metropolitan areas of three nations--the United States, Sweden, and England. The author focuses on how environment and culture interact to shape human behavior. Despite their many similarities, the three societies offer remarkably contrasting urban forms, and thus provide a unique opportunity for comparative research. The findings suggest goals for urban community development in America that can help regain a sense of human scale and establish more meaningful face-to-face contact among urban dwellers.

David Popenoe is professor of sociology at Rutgers University. He has had visiting appointments in the Centre for Environment Studies (London), the University of Stockholm, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Among his other books are: Distributing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies; The Suburban Environment: Sweden and the United States; Neighborhood, City and Metropolis; The Urban Industrial Frontier and a basic text on sociology that will soon appear in its seventh edition.

Part I
History

1
The Rural to Urban Transition

For the first few hundred thousand years of their existence on earth, human beings lived in small groups that seldom exceeded a hundred people. First as roving, hunting bands, then as settled agricultural villages, these groups encapsulated every dimension of life from the material to the spiritual, the personal to the societal.¹ The majority of persons on the globe still live today in small rural groupings, except that their lives are increasingly enmeshed in the larger units of tribe and nation-state. Even in urban societies, the cultural roots in these small, self-contained communities are not far below the surface, embedded, to use Lewis Mumford’s phrase, “in birth and place, blood and soil.”²

People were not able to leave these land-tied groupings until increases in agricultural productivity yielded a surplus sufficient for some to live off the food production of others.³ The first nonagricultural town dwellers did not emerge until some seven or eight thousand years ago, an event often regarded as synonymous with the rise of civilization. But it was not until less than two hundred years ago, and then only in a handful of nations, that further agricultural advances together with the industrial revolution permitted more than a tiny minority of people to savor the privileges as well as the drawbacks of urban-industrial life.

The mass movement of people from village to town and then to city and metropolitan area, and from farm to factory and later to nonindustrial work organization, is one of the greatest social changes in human history. While still under way in most parts of the world, it is a change that has nearly run its course in the affluent societies of the West, where almost three-quarters of the population live in urban localities and less than 5 percent of the work force are engaged in agriculture. Yet the effects of the great change—in every aspect of society from sex roles to political structure—are still being played out. Explaining the causes of this great social change was the dominant motif of classical sociology ; carefully scrutinizing its effects has been perhaps the principal activity of the following generations of sociologists, including the current one.⁴

The main dimensions of urban-industrial change are almost too well known to bear repeating. Because several of them are the main substance of this study, however, and many are not beyond controversy, it is important to outline them as a foundation for further discussion. As in later chapters, I shall view these changes principally from those perspectives most relevant to people’s everyday lives.

Industrialization can be defined as “the transfer of inanimate energy sources to the production of goods through the agency of factory organization.”⁵ It consists of two main components: technological developments, such as the steam engine and electric power, replacing human effort; and the organization of production through routinized organization—the factory. In the early industrial revolution industrialism took a capitalist form: production was oriented to the making of private profit, and was organized in terms of a market for commodities. Later in history, industrialization has taken place in many parts of the world under state socialist forms, with state-owned factories and a government-managed economy.

The industrial revolution began in England in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. Prior to this time nonagricultural production had made its way into many villages and many homes; home weavers had become quite common, for example. But work and home remained united, few people worked for wages, and village culture and social unity remained tied to the land and to feudal traditions.

Industrialization radically changed the nature of work. But it just as radically changed the nature of communities and community life. While many cities and towns had been in existence before the industrial revolution, devoted to such functions as trade, government, and religion, not until after the industrial revolution did people leave farms in large numbers and urban communities become the principal form of settlement. Thus industrialization and urbanization are very closely interlinked, at least in the experience of the West, and it is accurate to discuss the great transformations that took place in societies under the heading of the rural to urban transition.

The Preindustrial English Village

England represents the first and still the classic case of urban-industrial development in the West, the case to which all later forms of development beg to be compared. Accordingly, it will serve our purposes well to develop in some detail the English experience, and in the next chapter to comment on the main variations to that experience posed by Sweden and the United States.⁶ For thousands of years, until industrialization began in earnest in the last part of the eighteenth century, England was a nation of small villages. Rooted in the land, and perhaps several hundred people in size,⁷ these villages were relatively self-contained minisocieties, organized for hundreds of years prior to the industrial revolution along feudal lines. Originally all village land was owned by the feudal lord of the manor and most villagers were serfs, granted enough land for self-sufficient farming in return for regularly giving to the head of the manor agricultural produce and assisting him in times of war. Over time further social gradations came into being as some serfs became freemen, owning or renting their land for cash; later domestic or cottage industry entered the villages, and the lives of families became divided between farm and workshop. But the society remained tightly bonded by its hierarchial class structure, by the dominance of religion and the church, and by the rhythm of the seasons and the agricultural year.

At heart, each small village was a cluster of households centered on the cultivation of adjacent land. The average household size is estimated by Peter Laslett to have had between four and five persons, but this average masks great variation around the mean.⁸ Unlike the situation in most modern societies, household size increased with social status, so wealthy families averaged nine persons per household while very poor families were often only two in number.⁹ The larger households of the wealthy are accounted for not only by a larger number of children living at home but also a more extended family network under one roof and a contingent of servants. Servants were common even in the homes of middle-class tradesmen and yeoman farmers.

The villagers lived in cottages and worked within walking distance of their homes. Life was lived always in the company of others, with personal privacy at an absolute minimum. The “others” often as not consisted of substantially the same people throughout life, varying mainly through births and deaths. The village was an almost self-contained unit, a society in miniature, that encapsulated the lives of its residents. It contained a society of rich and poor, young and old, all in daily contact and living within visual distance of one another. Although there was contact with neighboring villages and towns, and some social mobility among them, the great majority of people probably lived out their lives in the villages in which they were born. For better and for worse, each village consisted of a small number of sequestered people forced to share a common life together within a limited space. “To the facts of geography, being together in one place,” as Laslett notes in The World We Have Lost, “were added all the bonds which are forged between human beings when they permanently are alongside each other; bonds of intermarriage and of kinship, of common ancestry and common experience and of friendship and cooperation in matters of common concern.”¹⁰

While this basic social structure in which the majority of English people lived for millennia is quite clear, our knowledge of the “feel” of these communities is much more cloudy and subject to speculation. Moreover, comparisons with modern communities are made extremely difficult due to the vast transformations that have taken place in every other social and cultural sphere. Materially, it is probably a reasonable generalization that life was “nasty, brutish and short.” Certainly this must have been the case for most English villages prior to the Elizabethan renaissance in the 1500s. As WG. Hoskins notes, “In 1550 most English people were still living in the rather dark, squalid and cramped dwellings of their medieval forefathers. These were generally two roomed houses—a hall and bower—built of a timber frame with walls of reinforced mud, the whole raised upon a rubble foundation. There were no glazed windows.”¹¹ None of these dwellings survives to this day.

Life expectancy at birth in preindustrial England was no more than thirty to forty years, lower than that in the poorest Third World nations today.¹² There was no great fear in England of foreign invasions, but life was constantly threatened by illness, pestilence, and economic downturn, and there was a continuing personal as well as collective fight for survival.

In social feel, however, life in the preindustrial English village was as different from the modern scene as in material level. Family relationships were extraordinarily cohesive, and often must have provided a powerful emotional anchorage in a turbulent world. Again in the words of Peter Laslett, “Time was when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size.”¹³

This is not to suggest that medieval family life was any more “loving” than such life in the present day. Intensity of human relationships can breed enmity as well as love. Moreover, the evidence is fairly clear that medieval childhood was, in the language of Lloyd de Mause, “a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.”¹⁴ It is all too easy to romanticize about medieval life, to fall into the pattern of thinking that Henry Adams did in Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, for example, and for which he has been so roundly criticized.¹⁵ Indeed, recent “firsthand” accounts of medieval life that have been uncovered, such as Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, cast serious doubt on the idea that these times were marked by any special nobility or virtue.¹⁶ But one can say with some certainty that life took place for the most part in a very close-knit family—a small circle of intensely loyal members who felt a deep sense of sharing a common fate in the struggle for survival.

In addition, the collected families in a single settlement were enmeshed together through the necessity for communal effort with what was probably a deep sense of communal loyality.¹⁷ The necessities of rural life, for example ploughing, harvesting, and barn raising, required recurrent cooperative activity among families that has no parallel today. Like the members of a single family, community residents were also imbued with a strong sense of sharing a common fate. This intense “sense of community” rested on the community’s being a single economic enterprise, a phenomenon quite foreign to the urban scene. Moreover, as often as not the individual household was the scene of economic labor, a very far cry from the strict separation of residence and work that is universal in urban-industrial settings.

Again, one must be careful not to exaggerate the positive social character of medieval village life. The English villages were the scene of profound exploitation of the poor by the rich, of younger by elder siblings, and of a pervading patriarchy that placed women in a form of servitude that today would be judged intolerable. For what it is worth, however, many of these may not have been strongly felt injustices, in the sense that we think of them today: people tended to accept their lot in life. Medieval life was, after all, relatively immutable and there was little expectation of reform.

The Coming of Industry

The earliest forms of industrialization did little to upset the primitive symmetry of the English rural village. Water mills for grinding corn, for example, had been a part of the English landscape since the eighth century. In medieval Lincolnshire, it is estimated, one village in three contained such a mill.¹⁸ Other highly decentralized industrial developments blended into the English rural scene, both in function and in appearance, in ways that were not appreciably upsetting to the rural way of life. Such developments include small-scale mines, quarries, and coal pits, salt works, and glass works. Even the early “factories”—typically cottage industries making textiles—were extensions of the household, which had always been the scene of substantial economic activity.

The massive shift in community life came only after the development of larger-scale factories that required the assemblage of a sizable labor force at sites far beyond the confines of agricultural jurisdictions. Because they were based on water power, as in the case of Alexander Darby’s iron mill at Coalbrookdale (1760), Josiah Wedgewood’s pottery plant at Etruria (1769), and Arkwright’s textile mill at Cromford (1771), even these factories were at first located in rural settings, “close to the land,” often in remote river valleys. These early factories produced at best small hamlets or villages not too different in scale from their rural counterparts. That these new environments were not too inhuman and distorted is attested to by the fact that the factory owners, as in the case of Darby and Wedgewood, lived right next door to their workplaces, their homes providing a vantage point from which they could continuously oversee and view their creation with pride.

All of this changed with the introduction of an extremely consequential new form of energy, steam power—the steam engine fed by coal. Although it has been estimated that more than three hundred steam engines were built between 1775 and 1800,¹⁹ it was not until the early part of the nineteenth century that use of the steam engine burgeoned, and a major development occurred that led to the industrial city. Freed from the necessity of being beside a fast-flowing river, factories organized around the steam engine sought flat land in open country, often in the vicinity of major coalfields. In the rush for competitive profits, workers’ housing was thrown up quickly, cheaply, and haphazardly, and it was not long before Charles Dickens’s “Coketowns” came to dominate the English landscape. As Lewis Mumford has pointedly stated, early industrialism “produced the most degraded urban envir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the 2000 Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I History
• Part II Form
• Part III Life
• Part IV Change
• Index