Urban People and Places

The Sociology of Cities, Suburbs, and Towns

Daniel J. (Joseph) Monti, Michael Ian Borer, Lyn C. Macgregor

• Editore: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781483315331
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Urban Sociology

Providing a thorough and comprehensive survey of the contemporary urban world that is accessible to students, Urban People and Places: The Sociology of Cities, Suburbs, and Towns will give balanced treatment to both the process by which cities are built (i.e., urbanization) and the ways of life practiced by people that live and work in more urban places (i.e., urbanism) unlike most core texts in this area. Whereas most texts focus on the socio-economic causes of urbanization, this text analyses the cultural component: how the physical construction of places is, in part, a product of cultural beliefs, ideas, and practices and also how the culture of those who live, work, and play in various places is shaped, structured, and controlled by the built environment. Inasmuch as the primary focus will be on the United States, global discussion is composed with an eye toward showing how U.S. cities, suburbs, and towns are different and alike from their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America

1

URBANIZATION IN WESTERN SOCIETIES

There are two basic ways to tell the story of urban places and people. The first is to compare the several historical stages through which cities in Western (and more developed) societies appear to have moved. This is generally referred to as an evolutionary approach. People who talk about the evolution of cities try to identify some key features about these places or the people who live there and trace the way they changed over a long period of time. It is the perspective we will be using in the present chapter. The second way is to compare cities in more economically developed societies to cities in societies with less developed economies, something we do in the next chapter. This is called, unsurprisingly, a comparative approach. The idea in comparative studies is to explore the differences between cities and urban cultures in two or more parts of the world.

The portrayal of urban places as preindustrial, proto-industrial, industrial, or postindustrial is predicated on the idea that what people at the time did to make a living is the most crucial piece of information you need to make sense of the place and its people. These names, as it happens, also are used to characterize the level of development of the whole society in which the cities are found. The key determinant in this scheme is how much heavy manufacturing and actual producing of goods the people living there did, either in the city itself or in the society generally. Cities with lots of industry and manufacturing usually, but not always, have more people living in close proximity to each other. By the time cities enter their late-industrial period or postindustrial period, they have begun to spread out along with their manufacturing sites. Cities that didn’t have as much manufacturing going on inside their borders during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution didn’t grow as much or become as wealthy as cities that had lots of goods being produced within their boundaries.

It isn’t necessarily the case that every city will go through the same four stages. The “cities” created by the aboriginal peoples of the United States, for instance, were part of a preindustrial society. They didn’t last long enough to become proto-industrial cities much less industrial or postindustrial cities. The places that would someday become cities along the eastern coast of the United States began as proto-industrial sites or were founded by people who lived in proto-industrial societies. Some of the places they made became major industrial or postindustrial cities. Others did not. Not all cities “evolve” or do so in the same way at the same time.

The correspondence between city building and industrialization isn’t perfect either. When you compare cities in the West with those found in less economically developed parts of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America, for instance, the cities on these other continents tend to be much larger. There are fewer of them, but they are bigger, much bigger than places like New York or London. We’ll see why in the next chapter. Even in the West, however, the “more industry and bigger city” equation doesn’t always work out. Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix have grown to be quite large “cities” in the United States without ever having an industrialized core like Cleveland, Chicago, or St. Louis once had. They became big cities by annexing ever greater pieces of territory around their central core as these areas expanded and often contained manufacturing or processing centers. These cities today are much more spread out than older cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Many parts of their “central city” look very much like the suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh: single-story ranch houses, strip malls, and “big box” shopping malls.

What has remained true about the connection between urbanization and industrialization is that the equation works very well at the national level. Societies with more manufacturing tend to have more cities and a greater percentage of their people living in urban areas. Societies with less manufacturing have fewer cities, but those cities tend to be extraordinarily large. These societies also have a smaller percentage of their people living in urban areas. The division between big cities and a rural hinterland in those societies tends to be much starker.

The connection between city building and manufacturing was especially crucial at the start of the Industrial Revolution. City building prior to the 19th century had been something of a hit-and-miss proposition. The fortunes of a city rose and fell with those of the empire that built it. A city thrived when its empire had successful military campaigns, conquered new lands, and populated these faraway places with its own people. Cities that lost their political and economic clout had their population shrink, and were sometimes sacked when their empire waged unsuccessful military adventures or couldn’t hold onto the lands it once ruled.

The up-and-down character of city building in Europe may have persisted well into the 19th century and perhaps even past it had its colonization of Africa and Asia not been accompanied by industrialization at home. After industrialization became more firmly established in these societies, colonial powers didn’t just leave their armies and governors in new lands to strip them of their natural resources and homemade goods. Empires now had something to sell back to colonized people and new ways to prolong the dependence of these peoples and lands on their colonial overseers. Trading brand-new manufactured goods back to colonies helped cities in more successful European countries grow dramatically. It also enabled the leaders of those cities to wield unprecedented influence over other settlements, not just in their own country and in neighboring countries. That is why virtually every person who writes about the evolution of cities treats industrialization as a pivotal moment in the history of city building.

We will continue this custom by offering a brief survey of how city building proceeded before and after industrialization took hold in Europe. The before-and-after parts of the story can be told by referring to four distinct periods of history. The first period covers the development of preindustrial cities and ends in the last decades of the 14th century. The second period covers the emergence of proto-industrial cities from sometime around the middle of the 14th century to the middle of the 18th century. The third period is comprised of a relatively short time between the middle of the 18th century to the early-20th century when industrial cities grew so dramatically. The most recent part of the story deals with postindustrial cities and covers the period between the early-20th century and today.

When and how a particular society industrializes still tells us a great deal about the kind of cities it has. Whether we’re talking about urbanization in the West or in newly developing countries, however, the basic criteria that must be met for places to be considered “urban” are the same. They must be permanent settlements of some size where most of the inhabitants don’t grow food for a living. With the exception of their recent and comparatively brief flirtation with industrialization, cities rarely produced much in the way of tangible goods or made much profit on their own. Such wealth as they acquired came first and foremost from having successfully appropriated and reinvested the wealth and resources of people who lived outside cities or in faraway lands. For the better part of their recorded history, cities have been surplus gobblers rather than surplus producers.

Whatever surpluses were available to early cities would have been difficult to ship far except by sea because short-distance transportation on land was inefficient and hinterlands were not especially well protected. Occasional fairs made it possible for goods and ideas from faraway places to be brought to the castle gate. Otherwise, there was no good trading or much social and economic intercourse with the surrounding lands except by sea.

Until the onset of industrialization, urban people could make a comparatively good living by appropriating what people in other places had in the way of natural resources or produced goods. The great urban centers of Europe never stopped extracting wealth from the foreign lands they’d colonized. They simply added to the booty they had always taken from these outposts all the wealth they could now acquire by selling people in these same faraway places the wondrous things European “manufactories” were producing for their own people. Though large-scale manufacturing wasn’t centered in cities for a long time, we will see that the impact of its comparatively brief presence there was dramatic.

PRE-URBAN AND EARLY URBAN SETTLEMENTS (CITY BUILDING UP TO THE MID-14TH CENTURY)

Archaeologists until recently had put the location of pre-urban settlements in Mesopotamia and the time of their emergence at around 3500 BCE. The location and timing have changed with the discovery of a large and sophisticated temple complex in southern Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. Built some 11,600 years ago, the religious site predates both Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. More importantly, it was used by people when they were still nomadic hunters and gatherers (Mann, 2011).

Prior to the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, archaeologists had supposed that pre-urban settlements emerged only with agricultural surpluses and animal domestication. Such sites in Mesopotamia were estimated to have held between 2,000 and 25,000 people and contain somewhere between 4% and 5% of an area’s population. Though some of the people residing in these places may have done a little gardening, they did not earn their keep as shepherds and farmers. They were released from that kind of labor. Most of the jobs they held were new and revolved around the acquisition, storage, and sale of produce and beasts. Their markets weren’t just local. Some were located a distance from the village where they lived.

Now it looks like nomadic people traveled great distances first to construct and then worship at a monumental piece of architecture thousands of years before they lived in relatively permanent settlements. The first settlement may have had more to do with a great cultural innovation—institutionalized religion—than with economics.

Be that as it may, the small number of residents in early Mesopotamian villages also founded more “leisurely” pursuits, with religion foremost among them. The new customs, art forms, and institutions they created that had little to do with food and shelter. Many of the novel ideas, practices, and artifacts these people produced were offered as cultural goods to people who didn’t live in the town.

New ideas, ways of behaving, and cultural artifacts were important exports for early town inhabitants. In fact, as members of a small class of “retainers,” they laid the foundation for producing everything from new ways to govern and impressive public works projects to massing and paying for armies that would conquer and pillage in the name of the people who’d raised the money to send them off. The riches they acquired would eventually end up in the treasuries of the ruling elites in early cities like Rome.

The earliest urban settlements were more than places where surpluses could be gathered and used by the small number of people who lived there. They also were political or ceremonial centers. Such commerce and manufacturing that was accomplished in these towns was sufficient to sustain only the elites and their handlers. It was not so large that any one urban settlement could export its surpluses much farther than the next urban settlement, which was more likely reached by water than land. There certainly wasn’t enough surplus to sustain ongoing trading among a network of urban places. Instead, residents of these earliest cities consumed most of the surpluses produced elsewhere (either as goods or in the form of tax payments) in the name of their local leader and later for their emperor or empire.

Urban populations remained small because agricultural surpluses were small and unpredictable. The main way that early urban leaders dealt with the problem of having too many people to feed and house was by shipping a part of the excess population off as armies and colonizers. These persons were supposed to seize the wealth and natural resources of other peoples. The towns these expatriates built were garrisons supported by hinterland taxes and trade with farther-off places that were guaranteed a measure of peace and prosperity in exchange for their surplus.

This left early urban-based empires a “mosaic of city territories” with bigger cities acting as administrative centers. Local elites had to pay for the services they received and subsidized the provision of such “public” services that would have been made available to people in the city generally. As a result, they either expropriated what they could from other local residents or, in a pattern oddly familiar to anyone who’s visited a modern up-scale suburb or gated community, they took off for their rural villas and left the city to stagnate and corrode.

As we’ve already noted, there was no consistent growth in the number and size of cities in this period and nothing yet like the development of urban regions. The rise and decline of cities correlated with the fate of the empire of which they were part. Intermittent outbreaks of diseases also reduced the size of urban populations. This was especially apparent in the impact that the Black Plague had on Europe’s urban populations in the late-14th century.

Cities were compact and poorly laid out. There was little segregation in terms of people living some distance from where they worked or in terms of where different activities took place. Each city had a religious and political gathering spot. Markets usually were located on plazas in front of the local church. They remain that way today in some smaller urban settlements in Europe.

Preindustrial cities exhibited a great deal of inequality. Society was highly stratified into categories of persons distinguished by their relative wealth, power, and social prestige (see Weber, 1947). The differences between wealthy people and everyone else were especially apparent in the way that persons lived in towns or early cities and the way people lived in more rural areas. It is the glaring distinction between urban wealth and grinding rural poverty that provokes some of the earliest statements against the excesses of urban life. But stark differences in the life chances of people also were apparent in the way urban elites lived as compared to the lives that were led by the common people and slaves who also dwelled in urban settlements. Cities have always been places where distinctions based on wealth, power, and prestige are highly visible and important in marking who had to be deferential to whom. It wouldn’t b...