The Urban Community

A World Perspective

Nels Andersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135686758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Part of the Sociology of the City series, originally published in 1959, this volume looks at the urban community bringing together rural and urban sociology. It advises that areas need to be looked at in terms the way of the life of the inhabitants and not by size and that urban sociology needs to assume a more global perspective, not just locally.

Chapter 1
Urbanism as a Way of Life*

OUR TASK IS TO STUDY and understand the modern community and its way of life. In this opening chapter our attention is directed to a brief examination of modern community life. It is centered in the great cities and it is oriented to industry. It is often referred to as Western, and as a way of life is called urbanism. It is found in its most characteristic form in the United States, but tends to be present wherever a good share of a people live by industry and commerce and, concomitantly, at a tempo which is peculiar to urbanism.

Urbanism as a way of life is not confined to cities and towns, although it emerges from the great metropolitan centers. It is a way of behaving, and that means one can be very urban in his thinking and conduct although he may live in a village. On the other hand, a very nonurbanized person may live in a most urbanized section of a city.

Characteristics of Urbanism

Urbanism as a way of life was once fairly restricted within the walls of the city and, within the city, it was limited to certain sections. The urbanized man remains oriented in the crowd. He is not disturbed by the coming and going of people, hence he is always making new acquaintances and forgetting the old ones; transiency is one of his characteristics. He cannot know all persons about him well and he may not wish to. Thus, again to use a term from Wirth, interpersonal relations are marked by superficiality. Since the urbanized man cannot know all people, and may not wish to, he acquires the ability to move in the crowd without caring who the people are about him, and he does not invite their approaches; anonymity is still a third characteristic.

Certain writers have questioned the transiency-superficiality-anonymity description of urbanism offered by Wirth. For example, Bascom studied the cities of the Yoruba in Africa. He found these cities were not well urbanized, and anonymity was less evident.¹ Sedky found that Alexandria, Egypt, also lacked these marks of urbanism. The people in Alexandria are still joined in extended family networks and they still live by the old tradition. She found little evidence of the emergence of individualism.² This writer does not know the cities of the Yoruba, but he does know Alexandria and other Middle East cities. Alexandria, much more isolated than Cairo, is much less urbanized. There is lacking in Alexandria the moving in and out of many strange people of varied races, religions, and nationalities. This may be said of all the cities of Iraq except Baghdad and it applies to all the cities in Iran except Teheran. But neither Baghdad nor Teheran is very industrial and neither could be described as being as urbanized as Cairo.

But urbanism is not merely a way of thinking and behaving. The urbanized man, wherever he may be, is ever adjusting to the new and changing. As he is congenial to initiative, he may also be intolerant of tradition if tradition stands in the way of getting things done. He is not only mobile himself, but he accepts the mobility of others. He may be loyal to his immediate family but he tends to lose contact with other relatives. As he tends to be more urbanized he is also more the individual than is possible in nonurban society.

A third characteristic of urbanism as a way of life concerns the standardizing influences which radiate from the cities. The farmer and the woodsman hear the same radio programs, view the same television programs, and visit the same movies as the most urbanized man. The American farmer, especially, uses machines made in the city and he has a city-made automobile. His children can receive the same education as do city children. He is connected with the world by his telephone and he is a newspaper reader. Not only does the newspaper come from the city, but his farm journals are edited and printed in cities. The farmer's wife buys the same packaged goods for her kitchen as the urban wife, and his children tell the same jokes and sing the same songs that happen to be in vogue among urban youth, A sort of network seems to exist by which all people tend to be mutually oriented.

This network is not merely one which extends urban influence outward. It has many other aspects. By it the thinking and creations of one country are transferred to other countries. Market news travels from one world city to another causing rapid responses in labor markets and industries.

Thus urbanism may be seen from a variety of viewpoints, three of which have been named above. It concerns the ability of people to behave in the urban setting, and it involves a sort of sophistication of the individual. It is also a kind of communication network by which people everywhere are knitted into a vast social system. Urbanism as a way of life is both complex and fluid, and tends to become more so.

Degrees of Urbanism

Urbanism as a way of life in the United States tends to find us extreme form in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In Europe they would be London, Paris, Rome, and formerly Berlin and Vienna. But what of smaller cities and towns, hundreds of which are suburban to the most urban centers? Sometimes the outlying suburban village may be occupied almost entirely by people who work in the city. It may be a very urban population with respect to sophistication, but these people may foster a type of neighborhood community life which may resemble in many respects the neighborhood relations in a remote farm village.

To what extent is the nonurban place oriented in its daily life to the great urban centers, in its buying and selling, in its play and its work, in its family relations? To what extent do nonurban people join secondary organizations which have branches in different cities, towns, and villages? If such tests were applied to American towns and villages it would be difficult to find any place that is not urbanized to some degree. The rural person, often depicted in the mass media as a comic stereotype, hardly exists today, but he did exist in many parts of the United States a few decades ago, although never as a comic character.

The same observation holds for some European countries. The United Kingdom is quite urban, the influence extending from the great cities to all of its shores. Efforts are being made to revive and restore some of its rural way of life. In Holland the peasant with his wooden shoes and wide pantaloons has disappeared, except in areas most visited by tourists and here the old garb is used as a trade uniform. At Arnhem, Holland, is a well-known outdoor museum in which the various farm houses and farm villages have been recreated, and even the modern Dutch farmer visits this place to see what farm life was like a generation or more ago. While the peasant is still found in France, he hardly exists any more in Germany or in tightly inhabited Belgium.

This does not mean that the farmer as a worker in agriculture is disappearing, although his numbers tend relatively to diminish in the industrial countries. It means only that ruralism as a way of life tends to disappear, and is replaced by urbanism as a way of life. As will be seen in other chapters, certain characteristics of that older way of life tend to linger and may be found even in urban communities.

The Process of Urbanization

More and more people in most countries are becoming city or town dwellers. This flow of population from land-bound occupations to other types of work is something new in human history. Such an urban trend could not have happened prior to the industrial revolution, and since the industrial revolution the trend has gone forward even though there have been efforts here and there to curb or guide it.

In a document on the causes and implications of urbanization prepared by the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), the term was defined in these words: "In its most simple and demographic sense, urbanization can be defined as the process whereby population tends to agglomerate in clusters of more than a designated size."³ This definition reflects the definition of the demographer Warren S. Thompson writing in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences who called urbanization the "movement of people from communities concerned chiefly or solely with agriculture to other communities, generally larger, whose activities are primarily centered in government, trade, manufacture or allied interests."⁴

This definition cannot be accepted without reservations. Assuming for the moment that urbanization is simply a one-way process, it need only be added that the rate of the process varies from time to time as well as from place to place. During the pioneering settlement period in the United States, for example, it was necessary for governments to encourage the location and building of towns. Before a half-century had passed, town-building was moving at a rapid rate and by 1900 many Americans feared their country was becoming too urban too fast. Yet with each decade since 1900 the United States has become increasingly urban. This trend has been frequently described in terms of the relative percentages of rural and urban population. Moreover, the rate of urbanization, as a one-way process, has been more rapid in all countries since the industrial revolution. It would, in fact, be difficult for some countries to survive were most of the people not living in urban agglomerations.

Such a definition of urbanization, however, tends to exclude too much. It is more than a shifting of people from country to city and from land-bound work to urban types of work. Merely moving a man to the city does not necessarily urbanize him (although it helps), while another rural man may be very much urbanized and never leave his rural work or habitat. Urbanization involves basic changes in the thinking and behavior of people and changes in their social values. It is not merely a matter of an individual or group changing from one kind of work to another, but involves changes in attitudes toward work, and it means entering a new and ever-changing division of labor. Thus Karl Mannheim used the term, "urbanization and its ramifications."⁵

Urbanization may assume the form of "idea migration' from the most urban to the less urban places. In the case of the American dairy industry we find an example of a rural occupation which has become quite urbanized. Most of the dairy farms are located in the most urban parts of the United States. The fact that this type of rural work is often called an industry is seen in the timing of the dairyman's work with the tempo of the city. Raper notes that as cities have grown, farm people have been "brought into closer and closer contact with urban centers." He then names some characteristic influences of urbanism on dairy farming and mentions as a second form of urbanization, the "continued growth of part-time farming and rural residences within commuting distance of urban or other non-farm employment."⁶

Thus it would be a mistake in our study of modern community life to think of urbanization as merely a one-way process; the urban way of life also moves into the nonurban and less urban areas. Urbanization also means a changeover from one way of life to another. It corresponds in the variety of its application to "detribalization," a term used by students of social change in Africa. Some Africans move from the tribal villages to industrial places and there enter the struggle of becoming adjusted to the urban way of life. But the ways of doing and thinking and the things characteristic of the urban way of life also invade the tribal villages, and there the struggle for adjustment may take another form. However the term is used, the end product of urbanization is urbanism as a way of life.

Ruralism

In most countries urban areas of habitation are distinguished from rural areas of habitation in terms of the number of people living there. In the United States if the number is under 2,500 the aggregate is designated as rural. Larger places are divided into classes: 2,500 to 5,000 population, 5,000 to 10,000 population, and so on to cities of 1,000,000 people or more. These are arbitrary distinctions which must be accepted in order to have comparable population statistics for comparison through time, and each country establishes its own arbitrary classifications.

The ambiguities inherent in this system of distinguishing rural from urban are too well known for discussion here. Nor do we need here to go into the various efforts of population statisticians to meet the problem. This much must be said: It is generally recognized that rural population and rural occupations are found in the United States in agglomerations far in excess of 2,500 population, while urban population and urban occupations are found in places of less than 2,500 inhabitants. Thus the size-of-population yardstick, however useful for many purposes, is not very helpful in measuring the presence or absence of a rural or an urban way of life.

Allan Nevins, in a preface to a book on great cities, having in mind the American situation, noted that "quite different faculties of mind and character, broadly speaking, appertain to the city and to the country. . . . The rural outlook is the more serene and conservative; the urban outlook the more volatile, alert and radical." In his discussion he mentioned differences in wit and humor, and the fact that in some important respects rural and urban characteristics tend to be mutually opposite. He implied, however, that the urban are dominant: "But we must make up our minds now to be a predominantly urban civilization, and try to nurture rural virtues in a citified environment."⁷

Without discounting in the least the statistics on population and occupations, we must also recognize that before referring to a person or an aggregate of people as urban or not urban we must take account of their thinking and behavior, which may be very urban, very rural, or some urban-rural mixture. The tendency in most countries is for rural places to assume a more urban way of life. This process of urbanization is easily to be seen, as Nelson has observed it in certain isolated Mormon villages:

Urbanization, or as some sociologists call it, secularization of life, is proceeding at a rapid pace. Communication and transportation devices which characterize contemporary life place the remotest corners in instantaneous contact with the world. The diffusion of urban traits to the countryside is everywhere apparent. Farmers are declining in numbers and farms increasing in size. Life becomes more impersonal, mutual aid declines, and contractual forms of association increase. Formal organizations multiply as new interests arise—economic, social, recreational, educational. New occupations come into being as specialization and division of labor grow more elaborate. Homogeneity of the population gives way to increasing heterogeneity. Attitudes change. The sense of community suffers as cleavages develop around special interests. These developments are clearly evident in the Mormon village today, as they are in the communities of the United States elsewhere.⁸

Nelson's closing observation applies to rural villages in most countries, but in particular in the Western countries. The global trend toward the urban way of life touches every community.

The trend of rural change is away from what we call ruralism. The term is not one of depreciation. Communities dominated by ruralism—and they are not numerous—are likely to be described as backward. Raper, quoted earlier, noted that the degree of urbanization (our term urbanism) differs from one regio...