Experiencing Cities

Mark Hutter

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429561184
• Auflage: 4
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Sociology

The fourth edition of Mark Hutter's Experiencing Cities examines cities and larger metropolitan areas within a truly global framework, lending readers much to understand and appreciate about the variety of urban structures and processes and their effect on the everyday lives of people residing in cities.

Beginning with the emergence of the first urban centers and continuing to examine the present day and the future of smart cities, this book explores the changing cultural and domestic character of the metropolis and offers readers a complete historical and theoretical overview of municipal life. The new edition seamlessly integrates issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class in its examination of city and suburban life, and further extends the Chicago School of Sociology perspective by combining its traditions with a distinct social psychological orientation derived from symbolic interaction and macro-level examination of social organization, social change, and power in the urban context.

With this strong and sweeping interdisciplinary approach, the new edition of Experiencing Cities will continue to enrich students' understandings of urban life and offer new, forward-looking perspective to those working in the fields of urban sociology, history, politics, geography, and the arts.

Part I

Historical Developments

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Experiencing Cities

Aerial view of the New York City skyline showing the density and sprawl of this magnificent city. Source: Shutterstock © dade,72.

Chapter Outline

• The Urban World
  • Experiential Activity 1.1: Oral History
  • Urbanization, Urban Growth, Urban Transition, Urbanism
• Civilization and Cities
• Microlevel Sociology and Macrolevel Sociology and Experiencing Cities
  • Experiential Activity 1.2: Micro and Macro Issues
• Symbolic Interactionism and the Study of City Life
  • W. I. Thomas: The Definition of the Situation
  • Robert E. Park: The City as a State of Mind
  • Anselm L. Strauss: Images of the City
  • Experiential Activity 1.3: Photography
  • Lyn H. Lofland: The World of Strangers and the Public Realm
  • Experiential Activity 1.4: Strangers in the Crowd
  • Elijah Anderson: Race and Urban Street Life
  • Experiential Activity 1.5: Make Strangers “Invisible”
• Experiencing Cities Through Symbolic Interactionism
  • Experiential Activity 1.6: Draw a Map of Your Neighborhood
• Growing Up in the City: A Personal Odyssey
• Conclusion
• Study Questions

The contemporary world is becoming more urban. The twenty-first century marks the first time in history that more than half of the world's inhabitants live in cities. This is remarkable given that just 200 years ago the vast majority of people lived in rural areas. Today, all industrial nations have become overwhelmingly urbanized, and the processes of urbanization are accelerating rapidly the world over. I introduce the discussion of this new urban world with demographic data and note the concepts of urbanization, urban growth, urban transition, and urbanism. The chapter proceeds with how the word “city” is related to the word “civilization.”

A key point of emphasis is the comparison of “macrolevel” sociology with “microlevel sociology” I introduce the study of macrolevel sociology and its relationship to social organization, social change, stratification and power in the urban context. The social psychological perspective of symbolic interaction is a “microlevel” perspective that is informed by the Chicago School of Sociology. My orientation in the study of the city owes much to this perspective. I highlight five sociologists who have been influential in how I study the city. They are W. I. Thomas, Robert E. Park, Anselm L. Strauss, Lyn H. Lofland and Elijah Anderson. The chapter concludes with a brief biographical sketch of how growing up in Bensonhurst, a section of Brooklyn, New York City, has also influenced my way of thinking of how people experience cities.

THE URBAN WORLD

The world's urban population growth is accelerating today at a rate two and a half times faster than that of rural areas. According to social scientists at North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia working with United Nations (UN) data, on Wednesday, May 23, 2007, for the first time in history, the world had more urban dwellers than rural ones (Science Daily 2007). On that day, 3,303,992,253 urban dwellers exceeded the 3,303,866,404 people who live in rural areas.

By the year 2050, urban areas are expected to be home to 66 percent of people living on this planet (United Nations 2014). Further, the United Nations' 2014 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects predicts that by 2050, the world's population will increase by 2.5 billion. Virtually all of this population growth is expected to be absorbed in the urban areas of the world, with nearly 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa (United Nations 2014). This is astonishing given that just over 250 years ago, only one country—England—could describe itself as an urban society, in which the majority of its people lived in cities and not on farms or in villages (see Exhibit 1.1).

Exhibit 1.1 Urban and Rural Populations of the World, 1950–2030.

Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (Population Division). 2004. 2014. World Urbanization Prospects. New York: United Nations.

The demographer Kingsley Davis (1955) highlights the fact that cities are a recent phenomenon as compared to other aspects of human society and culture:

Compared to most other aspects of society—e.g., language, religion, stratification, or the family—cities appeared only yesterday, and urbanization, meaning that a sizable proportion of the population lives in cities, has developed only in the last few moments of man's existence. (Davis 1955:429)

The processes of urbanization are accelerating rapidly all over the world, with much of population growth and urbanization occurring in Asia and Africa. In 1800, only 3 percent of the world's population lived in cities (Hauser and Schnore 1965). In 1950, 29 percent of the world's population lived in cities; in 1975, that figure rose to 37 percent and was approaching 50 percent (47 percent) at the turn of the twenty-first century. As just noted, by 2050 66 percent of the world population is expected to be urban (United Nations 2014). Today, the most urbanized regions include Northern America (82 percent living in urban areas), Latin America and the Caribbean (80 percent), and Europe (73 percent). Asia (48 percent) and Africa (40 percent) are rapidly urbanizing and are projected to become 64 percent urban in Asia and 56 percent urban in Africa by mid-century (United Nations 2014). The urban population of Africa will nearly triple in size and in Asia it will increase by 61 percent. The UN predicts by the year 2050 the world's urban population will likely be the same size as the entire world's population was in 2004.

In 1950 there were just 75 cities in the world with over 1 million population. Today, more than 421 cities, most of which did not even exist 200 years ago and many of which have appeared within the last 75 years, have populations of 1 million or more (Brinkhoff 2004; Population Reference Bureau 2010). According to UN population estimates, by 2025 an additional 100 cities will top 1 million.

Most astonishing is the dramatic increase in megacities—cities with populations over 10 million people. Barbara Boyle Torrey (2004), writing for the Population Research Bureau, observes that this is the most striking example of the urbanization of the world. In 1950 only two (New York City and Tokyo) existed. The number doubled to four in 1975 with the addition of Shanghai and Mexico City. In 1990 there were ten megacities; in 2007 there were 19 megacities, and the United Nations estimates that today there are 28 (United Nations 2008; United Nations 2014). These 28 megacities contain about 453 million people or about 12 percent of the world's population. By 2030 the UN projection is 41 megacities with populations of 10 million or more (see Exhibit 1.2).

Exhibit 1.2 Urban Agglomerations with 10 million Inhabitants or More 1970, 2018, and 2020.

This rapid growth in the urbanization of the world is startling given the patterns of population growth and the rates of urbanization prior to the twentieth century. Only within the time span of the last 200 years, concurrent with the Industrial Revolution, has a sizable proportion of the human population lived in cities. Indeed, at the time when cities are believed to have first emerged, approximately 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, there were only about 5 million human beings on the face of this planet, about the same number as currently live in the Atlanta metropolitan area (World Population Review 2014). Advances in agriculture associated with the movement away from the nomadic hunting and gathering economy led to accelerated population growth.

From the period when cities emerged until AD 1, the worldwide population was relatively stable at about 250 million. It took about 1,650 years for the population to double to one-half billion, but in a mere 200 years (AD 1850) it doubled again. Then, in a time span of only 80 years—from 1850 to 1930—the population increased to 2 billion. By 1975, 45 years later, the population again doubled to approximately 4 billion people. By the end of the twentieth century the world's population reached 6 billion, and it only took until 2011 to pass the 7 billion mark (see Exhibit 1.3). Most of the population growth will occur in the poorest and least-developed countries located in Africa, southern Asia, and Latin America. Further, almost all of that growth is expected to reside in the urban areas of the less-developed regions of the world.

Exhibit 1.3 Line Graph of World Population, 1804–2030.

Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (Population Division). 2004. 2014. World Urbanization Prospects. New York: United Nations.

The last half of the twentieth century saw an urban population explosion never seen before in the history of the world. The first urban revolution began about 10,000 years ago, with the origin and development of cities. It was followed by the second urban revolution nearly 11,800 years later (AD 1800), which was brought about by the Industrial Revolution—led by Western capitalism first in England, Germany, and France, and later the United States and then through European colonization of almost the entire world. From our current perspective, the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we can see the globalization of urbanization patterns that began in earnest after World War II. Indeed, a third urban revolution is occurring, characterized by massive urban growth in non-Western cities and, in effect, the urbanization of the entire world.

In 1950, five years after World War II, the list of the 15 largest cities in the world was dominated by Western cities, with New York City being the largest metropolitan area in the world. According to United Nations data (United Nations 2004), by 2000 only two United States cities, New York City and Los Angeles, remained on that list and they ranked third and tenth, respectively. In 2025, New York City is projected to slip to ninth of the most populous cities (see Exhibit 1.4). In that same year Los Angeles would be in the seventeenth position and therefore is not on Exhibit 1.4 (United Nations 2008).

Exhibit 1.4 The 12 Largest Cities Ranked by Population Size 1950, 1990, 2015 and 2035.

Experiential Activity 1.1: Oral History

Ask your grandparents and other older adults about their memories of growing up in villages, towns, or cities. What changes have they observed in the decades since they were young? Do their observations agree with the trends cited in the text?

In 2019, among the top 20 cities with populations over 10 million, 13 are in Asia and two are in Latin America. Only two (New York and Los Angeles) are in the United States, two (Moscow and Istanbul) are in Europe and one is in Africa (see Exhibit 1.5).

Exhibit 1.5 World Map Showing 12 Cities with Populations over 20 million as of 2015 (population in millions).

The urbanization of the world is not only occurring in cities of over 10 million, or even 1 million. The United Nations (United Nations 2014) observes that almost half of the world's nearly 3.9 billion urban dwellers live in cities of fewer than 500,000 people. They remind us that only one in eight live in the megacities, and that most of the fastest-growing cities in the world are relatively small urban settlements. Yet, the overwhelming facts profoundly indicate that we are now living in an urban world that will only become more urban as time goes by.

Urbanization, Urban Growth, Urban Transition, Urbanism

What are the key factors for such urban population growth? Growth is associated with economic, political, social, and environmental global interconnections. Sociologists have begun using the term postindustrial city to describe cities anchored in a new economic reality based on global finance and the...