Unit 19 Communities and cities

1. What is community?

Community is defined as a relatively large group of people who have common values and interests, relatively enduring ties, frequent face-to-face interaction, and a sense of being close to one another. The small Montana town of " Mineville" in the 1930s accurately displays social life in a community: everybody knows everybody, residents participate in many community activities, neighbours watch each other's every move, and people share a routine rhythm of everyday life.

Most Americans today do not live in places like Mineville. Many more of us live in places like the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. The contrasts to Mineville are striking: on the Upper West Side people do not orient their lives to community activities, they remain aloof from neighbours and cultivate anonymity, they worry about crime but leave social control to the police, and they all like to shop in trendy boutiques and eat in restaurants serving the latest ethnic fad food. The differences between Mineville and the Upper West Side are those of place: social life in a small town differs dramatically from life in an urban neighbourhood.

Urbanisation is the process whereby large numbers of people leave the countryside and small towns in order to settle in cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. It is urbanisation that leaves fewer people in places like Mineville, while many more people flock to the metropolitan areas of New York and Los Angeles. In 1900, 13.6 percent of the American population lived in cities; today 62.5 percent live in cities. Urbanisation has unquestionably contributed many positive things to modern life: cities facilitate artistic and scientific innovations, they provide a place where people from diverse backgrounds can mingle, and they allow for highly specialised jobs and avocations. City life, however, is also marked by pollution, high rates of crime, and a stressful pace.

2. What are the effects of urbanisation on community?

Sociologists disagree on the effects of urbanisation on community. One perspective suggests that community disintegrates as people come to live in large, densely populated urban centres. This view has roots in Tonnies's distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The word Gemeinschaft can be translated as " community, " and is used to describe a setting where everyone knows everyone eke; people remain at their place of birth; residents share common ancestry, values, aspirations, and traditions; and people create strong emotional bonds through frequent face-to-face interac­tion. Gesellschaft can be translated as " society." This word describes a completely different setting where people live in a large, densely settled population; they are strangers to one another and interact in impersonal ways; they have diverse values, roles, ancestries, and traditions; and there is much more social and geographical mobility. Although Tonnies coined these concepts in 1887, he would have described Mineville as Gemeinschaft and the Upper West Side of Manhattan as Gesell­schaft.

Tonnies believed that social life in the Western world has shifted from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, much to his regret. He felt, as did Simmel and Wirth, that urbanisation destroyed the.possibility of the kind of community life that was found in small towns and rural villages. In Sim­mers view, residents of cities are overstimulated by constantly changing and extraordinarily varied

stimuli. The response is often a high degree of stress; many urban residents " tune out" (that is, they become indifferent to what goes on around them in public places) in order to avoid being over­whelmed by the bombardment of social and sensory stimuli.

Wirth noted that urban populations have three characteristics-large size, high density (crowding), and great heterogeneity (different kinds of people) - and that each of these traits prevents the kind of personal interactions and relationships that characterise community. It is impossible to know more than a tiny fraction of the population in a large city; crowded living conditions encourage friction and irritations among residents; heterogeneity or differentiation precludes relationships

based on shared values and norms. The impersonal nature of urban life, says Wirth, leads to in­creased rates of mental illness and crime among city dwellers. More recent research shows that urban population density itself does not always cause these negative consequences; instead, increas­ing rates of mental illness and crime occur in cities with particular characteristics (for example, high

unemployment and widespread poverty).

A second perspective suggests that urbanisation does not destroy community; rather, community can persist within large cities. Empirical support for the " persistence of community" idea conies; from ethnographic studies by Gans in Boston and Suttles in Chicago. In Boston's largely Italian I West End, Gans found close and enduring ties and reliance upon networks of mutual support. e Community life was extremely important for residents of the West End: a resident would feel lost if separated from his or her peer group. Suttles's study of Chicago's multi-ethnic Near West Side neighbourhood revealed the same patterns: residents gathered at a corner grocery store or restaurant to gossip and to catch up on news in the same way as those living in a small village congregated at the general store on Main Street. The close ties and mutual cooperation persist despite urbanisation.

A third perspective suggests that urbanisation transforms community: cities neither destroy community nor allow it to persist but give rise to entirely new and different kinds of community.

For example, because of the diversity of interests and tastes in large cities, residents who do not necessarily live in the same neighbourhood and who are not from the same ethnic group might form community-like relations (called an urban subculture) on the basis of some common activity. Violin playing, organic foods, or feminist theory might generate close personal relations among a group of people scattered widely in an urban region: residential propinquity (living near someone else) and common ethnicity are no longer seen as essential for the development of community. Fischer found that urbanism did not destroy community but simply changed the composition of people's! networks of friends. Moreover, Fischer found that the uncaring appearance assumed by city dwellers, in public (perhaps as a way of protecting themselves from potentially dangerous interactions with strangers) contrasts sharply with the close and caring relationships in their private lives.

3. What conditions led to the emergence of the first cities?

A city is a relatively large, densely populated, permanent settlement of people who are socially diverse and who do not produce their own food directly. This definition highlights two features of all cities: their dependence upon agricultural products from outlying areas and their social heteroge­neity (wide differences in occupations, social class, values, and lifestyles).

Several factors were important in the invention of the first true cities: domestication of plants and animals, along with improved technologies for irrigation and fertilisation, increased the availabil­ity of food. No longer did human groups need to be nomadic, moving about the countryside in search of new fruits and vegetables to harvest or game to hunt. Reliable quantities of food pro­duced by continuously maintained fields and pastures enabled people to live in semipermanent villages.

Increased agricultural yields meant that fewer people needed to work directly in food produc­tion, and a more diversified division of labour emerged. As workers became more specialised (pro­portionately fewer were self-sufficient farmers), they needed to live near those who performed other jobs, on which they depended. Centralised power structures provided order for these increas­ingly diverse social and economic activities, and cities became centres of kingdoms and empires. Cities also became home to growing numbers of lawmakers and judges, who settled disputes among those who were drawn to cities from diverse backgrounds and who had competing interests.