The Sociology of Urban Living

Harold E. Nottridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135668556
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The urban setting in which people live has an important influence upon the organization and planning of their social lives. H. E. Nottridge here presents a valuable introduction to the field of urban sociology, showing that it is a theoretical discipline which is worthy of consideration in its own right.

Throughout his account Mr Nottridge places strong emphasis on the need for comparative perspectives. He uses a wide range of source material from urban environments as far apart as shanty towns in developing countries and the great metropolitan complexity of London. He covers such topics as scope and methods in urban sociology, social differences in towns and , in the context of urban social structure, the family and network theories. He also analyses the work of the Chicago School of Weber, Tonnies, Park, Redfield and Wirth, assessing their value for mdoern urban sociology. The author concludes with an examination of housing, migration and urban poverty.

This book was first published in 1972.

1

What is urban sociology?

The word ‘urban’ was hardly used in the English language before the nineteenth century. It is briefly defined by the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as ‘pertaining to town or city life’. It is derived from the Latin ‘urbs’ a term applied by the Romans to a city—more especially the city of Rome.

The word ‘sociology’, which is so frequently applied to all kinds of situations, is also of recent origin; the vagueness of its usage in common language and the element of disagreement that occurs among sociologists about the meaning of the word, make it advisable for us at the outset to accept a definition which will be adhered to throughout the whole of this work. We shall consider sociology to be essentially the science of social structure and social relationships. Urban sociology is the sociology of urban living; of people in groups and social relationships in urban social circumstances and situations.

Although the study of people in towns and cities is an important aspect of urban sociology it would be unwise to confine the study solely to towns and cities. It has proved extremely difficult to create a complete sociological definition of the city. One reason for this difficulty lies in the immense variations which exist between towns and cities whether we are looking at existing ones or those known to us in the past. Towns vary in size, density of population, general appearance and the reasons for their development; in their relationship to other places and in a host of other ways. They are often closely linked with the society which has led to their creation. It is not yet possible to find a common urban pattern which will apply, for instance, to a remote Latin American mountain town of some 2,000 inhabitants and equally to the huge industrial complexes of the English Midland conurbation where one town merges into another.

Another question of definition is linked with the problem of boundaries. It is occasionally possible to find historical examples of towns whose walls acted as a limit between the townsfolk and the country people. The townsman in certain German mediaeval towns might say with pride, ‘Stadtluit macht frei’, meaning that the townsman was freer than the countryman because he possessed certain rights, but it is doubtful whether we can say that this represented a kind of social distinction which was universally applicable. In many highly urbanized countries today it is hard to demonstrate that there are definite sociological differences between town and country based solely on the location of the inhabitants. One American sociologist has found that in the middle of a large, densely populated industrial city, there were ‘villagers’ (Gans, 1962). They were immigrants who had brought with them a rural way of living and a different social structure from the urban dwellers round them. Though they earned their livelihood from a city they remained villagers. It will be useful for us to bear in mind the northcountryman’s advice about Yorkshire, ‘Don’t consider it as an area—it’s a state of mind.’

Some urban sociologists have tried to make a definition of the city based on the criterion of size of population, especially when studying the urbanization* process in regions such as parts of Asia or Latin America. In these areas some cities and towns are expanding with great speed and rapid urbanization is taking place. Breese (1969) has pointed out that it may be convenient to affix the term ‘urban’ to places with 20,000 inhabitants or more, so establishing an admittedly arbitrary demarcation between rural and urban by a counting of heads. However, this demarcation does suggest a number of important questions. Are those who live in settlements of less than 20,000 sociologically different from the others? Do we call them ‘rural’ and can we say that there will be social differences between those who live in large or small settlements? It is safer to assume that the criterion of 20,000 people may be a useful tool for studying the speed of urbanization in a particular area, but it must not be allowed to lead to a wider, unsupported theory applicable everywhere.

The fascination which the city held for some of the older urban sociologists seems to have bewitched them into uttering over-broad generalizations. Thus we find such terms as ‘the urban dweller’, ‘the city dweller’, ‘urban man’, ‘the urban pattern’, ‘the urban way of life’. Moser, in his comparative study of a large number of English towns, has warned us of the need to refrain from the use of such general terms unless we are at the same time prepared to accept and to show the variations that exist between towns (Moser and Scott, 1961).

The relevance of urban sociology

For a long period, until about the seventeenth century, the population increase of the world was comparatively slow and the levels of population reached were fairly stable; then a rapid surge of population commenced which continued at an ever-increasing tempo. The process has been graphically called ‘the population explosion’. Some calculations state that the present large world population will probably have doubled by the year AD 2000. Parallel with this general population expansion is an ‘urban explosion’—an enormous increase in that part of the world’s population which lives in cities. At present, some 370 million people live in large urban settlements of over one million inhabitants in size. It is estimated that, if this urban explosion continues, by the end of this century nearly 2,600 million people will be living in these settlements. These people would thus be a very much higher proportion of the world’s population. The expansion would produce great physical and material demands and changes since vast quantities of houses, buildings, roads, communications and services of many types would be required. Those now studying social life in existing large urban areas may wonder what the future might hold in the way of intensified urban social problems.

The social changes involved would be greater still. New forms of social living could be created when men dwell in such large masses. It must be remembered, as Elisabeth Pfeil (1950) has reminded us, that man has been on the earth a much longer time than his towns and cities, which are a comparatively recent phenomenon in the history of social living; it is by no means certain that towns and cities, important as they have been in man’s cultural development, are the last stage.

We are beginning to realize what urbanization implies by observing how it occasionally occurs in some relatively undeveloped parts of the world. The process of urbanization may happen with startling rapidity; the social adjustment to the new urban environment may demand great flexibility in the human beings who have to undergo this adjustment. We may wish to examine the effects of the sudden impact of urban living on a peasant who was tied to the soil and used to the social organization of a distant and isolated village, or the strains imposed on a wandering tribesman who exchanges the solitudes of the desert for the close life of crowded dwellings and the busy multitudes of the city streets (De Vries, 1961). These questions, both as they emerge today and as they will present themselves in the future, lie within the province of the urban sociologist.

Urban sociology can also be relevant in another way, According to Reissman (1965), urban studies are basic to the discipline of sociology. The process called urbanization can serve as an illustration of change in any society and the social structure and the social organization which are found in urban living can help us to understand the social structure and the social organization which are found in any society, even if not urban. Indeed Reissman affirms that some social features such as social class and bureaucracy can only really be studied in urban society. Cities and towns can be considered as a kind of social laboratory, in which a number of features of society can be studied more closely. For example, the sociological study of migration to urban areas affords useful material. People migrate to towns from less urban areas and from town to town. We may study the kind of people who move and ascertain what motives urged them to migrate—pressure from one cause or another such as the social attraction of the town. We may wish to know the social class of the migrant and whether it changes with migration or whether his residence in an urban situation leads to any significant change in social structure such as in types of family. An important aspect of our research could be the social relationship between the migrant, as a newcomer, and those who are already resident in the urban area.

One recent and valuable consequence of the growth of the discipline of urban sociology has been the recognition of the need to study urban social structure and organization more broadly and in many countries of the world. In the beginnings of urban sociology much pioneer work was carried out in Great Britain, the USA and western Europe. Some of the early theories of urban sociology were developed in those countries. This, however, had one serious defect which has become more obvious in recent years. There were special conditions in the United States and western Europe. The form of urbanization, the social history and the social structure were of a particular type often linked with a specific industrial development. It was, perhaps, almost inevitable that American, European and British sociology should show a certain outlook which has created difficulties when this sociology is applied to other parts of the world.

We know now that the conditions in these countries may not necessarily be found in other parts of the world. Speaking of Indian urbanization processes Sovani (1966) writes:

Is the urban social situation different from the rural social situation in India and, if so, are the differences between them similar to those found in the West? … Urbanization itself is a culture-bound phenomenon. It is unrealistic to expect the same kind of social developments in under-developed countries as in the polar types of Western cities.

It is clear that criteria which have been developed for use in the USA or Great Britain may be useless when applied to an Asian city or a Latin American town. To widen our view of social structure and social organization and to make our generalizations both more accurate and more universally applicable, we need a body of theory based on collated research made in many different countries. The discipline of comparative urban sociology, though still in its infancy, may supply us with new theoretical concepts which, in turn, can be applied to urban sociological theory in all countries.

Urban sociology and other urban studies

The investigation of cities, towns and adjacent or connected areas, requires a variety of different disciplines. The work of the urban geographer is to examine the morphology of a city; to look at its physical configuration and general appearance and to see what kinds of visual patterns are so revealed. He will want to know geographically how the urban settlement developed and in what ways it is affected, or modified by sea, lake, river, forest, hill or climate. He will delineate the land utilization and show which land is given over to houses, public services, industry, roads or leisure and what the relationship of all these factors is to the human inhabitants of the city. The urban demographer is primarily concerned with the population statistics of the area, its age and sex grouping, birth, marriage and death rates, and other vital statistics. He will compare and correlate these facts and study the distribution of the population. He may suffer from one limitation; in some parts of the world, accurate statistical material can be difficult to obtain. In other parts, such as some Swedish cities, he may find statistical material very readily obtainable. The economist will be informed about the trades and manufactures of the city and will probably have made studies that reach beyond the immediate confines of the urban area, e.g., overseas markets. The housing expert will know about the condition and types of domestic buildings and their distribution and costs. Other important figures, depending upon circumstances, are the architect, the traffic study expert and the town and country planner, whose onerous task is to study the redevelopment or replanning of an area. Occasionally, one finds the social development officer who is concerned with the welfare of urban people and perhaps, infrequently, the urban historian.

In this plethora of urban investigation we may conclude that it is difficult to outline precisely the function of urban sociology or to state exactly the relationship of urban sociology to these other disciplines. Some other disciplines may, indeed, impinge upon the borders of urban sociology. Certain of the earlier urban sociologists were willing to borrow materials from other disciplines or to employ their techniques and methods if they thought they were useful.

Zorbaugh provides us with an example of this frontier passage in his study The Gold Coast and the Slum. He collected demographic material (for Chicago) for suicides within a certain space of time. This data gave the addresses where the suicides had happened. He then took a large map of Chicago and marked on it, by means of black dots, the place where each suicide had occurred. When the marked map was complete, a heavy concentration of dots could be noticed in or near Clark Street. Zorbaugh had carefully surveyed this area, which lay between the wealthy Gold Coast district and ‘Little Italy’, an immigrant quarter, and he knew that it was a ‘rooming-house’ locality, where people either rented rooms or lived in lodgings; a place where unsettled people might live. Those who did not commit suicide were living in what Merton (1949) calls a state of ‘retreatism’ Zorbaugh sums up the situation concisely: ‘It is an area in which there can be no community tradition or common definition of situations, no public opinion, no informal social control.’

The criteria which we might apply to this passage from Zorbaugh’s classic would depend very much on what we considered was the true relationship between urban sociology and the discipline of geography. We might take the view that the theory of retreatism is independently free of relationships with other disciplines. We could also take the view that Zorbaugh was right to link geography and demography with sociology but that the cart could have been put in front of the horse. Did not the urban geographer and the demographer benefit from Zorbaugh rather than he from them?

Some urban sociologists have tried to solve this problem of relationship between disciplines by proposing a different kind of approach. They suggest that urban sociology is not clearly defined enough yet to stand out sharply as a discipline in its own right; its field of research is immensely broad and complex. Therefore, the right method of study, they say, is to take a little from many other disciplines and incorporate the total material in one unified form. This ‘umbrella’ approach presumably implies that urban sociology is rather the queen ruling over lesser princes than the scavenger who collects what is left from the other disciplines. It has, within it, the likelihood of two dangers. On the one hand we may be so tempted by a universal, wide approach that we may lose sight of the wood for the trees. On the other hand, the urban sociologist may be overwhelmed by the material, methods, or principles lavishly coming to him from other disciplines. He may lose sight of his primary quest, the search for basic principles in urban sociological theory. R. N. Morris (1968) has given us a useful warning about the hazards of being too much influenced by data coming from another discipline. He says that it may be interesting and easy statistically to show differences between towns of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000 people. These statistical differences may exhibit gradings between one town and another. It is, however, improbable that we can show a similar graded change in the social groupings or in the social behaviour of people as we move from one town to another.

Urban social reform

While some people consider that cities are the noblest works of men’s hands, there are other aspects to be considered. As far back as the seventeenth century, John Evelyn complained of the smoke and grime of London town. Largely as a result of social and technical changes and especially in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, industrial and manufacturing towns developed. These were often very unlike the old towns and in them certain evils were manifest, such as diseases caused by faulty hygiene intensified by town living. In the towns large masses of people were crowded together, frequently in bad conditions. Some of these people had come to the towns, from the country, because they needed work and the town was therefore an incentive.

Mumford has used two similar phrases to describe the worst town conditions, ‘palaeotechnic paradise’ and ‘palaeotechnic inferno’ (1961). The closely built houses, in monotonous streets, were crammed with enormous numbers of human beings who had to endure overcrowding, disease, poverty and a number of other social ills. For some observers the disease, overcrowding and poverty appeared to be less awful realities than their own startling conclusions that crime, immorality, moral degradation, anti-social behaviour and deviance were appearing, under urban conditions, in more pronounced ways and more unpleasant forms. Writers were to develop the theme of urban evils from a variety of angles. Zola’s portrait of the Paris slums can be compared with Upton Sinclair’s condemnation of the Chicago packing yards—the ‘Jungle’. Dickens wielded a powerful pen with the strength, if also the over-intensity of a great novelist. Other observers, who wrote non-fiction, varied from Thomas Chalmers, the Scottish minister turned social thinker, with wide interest in the poor districts of Glasgow and Edinburgh, to Henry Mayhew, the meticulously careful student of Londen life and the London poor (1861-1865). Another, no less vehement because of his moral polemics, was William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. His book In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) sketches the evils of urban living and suggests remedies.

Urban poverty, however much it was sensed by thinking people, could not be accepted as a proven urban social phenomenon until the first two great scientific social surveys were made in urban conditions. Charles Booth (1902) for the great city (London) and Rowntree (1901) for the smaller town (York), carried out laborious and careful researches. They reached a disquieti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General editors introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What is urban sociology?
• 2 Approach and method in urban sociology
• 3 Urban social structure
• 4 The complex web of urban living
• 5 Change and other urban phenomena
• Suggestions for further reading
• Bibliography