Urbanism: Finding Interlinkages between Heterogeneity, Mobility, Social Instability, and Insecurity
The industrial revolution and demographic transition in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the establishment of large cities. Classical sociologists believe that two principal conditions are responsible for the emergence of the cities which are agricultural surplus and an administrative system that exists over and above the family and kinship.
Urbanization is an uneven and complex historical process that is a product of shared experiences, cultural practices, urban rituals, and political processes regardless of demographic size, spatial characteristics, and socio-economic functions.
For sociologists, the city is more of a system of social relations rather than a demographic concept- firstly, a city is an administrative and political agency, secondly, a city is seen as a way of life and thirdly, a city represents the urban mentality and culture.
Robert Ezra Park defined the city as a natural environment of modern people, which follows specific laws of development.
The city gradually grew into a layered and complex network of communities coexisting which came to be associated with specific suburbs and neighborhoods over time.
A more concentrated and specific theory of the development of a city is the concentric zone theory of urban development in which a city’s growth is determined by a social struggle over land values, which ensures that the dominant group controls the most significant urban land.
A city acts as a social system in which the relations established between strangers act as a dominant factor for the growth of a city which gradually erodes traditional patterns of existence. There have been multiple debates and discussions around the positive and negative aspects of the development of cities.
On the one hand, the city acts as a catalyst for the evolution of urbanism and modern life while on the other hand, the city plays a role in depriving the working class physically as well as mentally. There have been various theories suggesting how urbanism leads to social mobility and dynamism on one hand while insecurity and personal disorganization on the other.
The three theories of Urbanism
In this context, three different theories argue about what urbanism is and its role in shaping people and their views.
Wirth’s Determinist Theory (also known as the Theory of Urban anomie) argues that in comparison to rural areas, urban areas have a higher rate of social and personality disorders.
He defines a city as a dense and large settlement that is composed of heterogeneous individuals who differ from each other in all senses- social, political as well as mental.
The activities in urban areas involve themselves in are much faster and more commercialized than those in rural areas. Here, socializing is more for maintaining and developing contacts to climb up the ladder rather than maintaining family ties and kinship or creating bonds, unlike in rural areas.
According to Wirth, the time and attention of individuals in urban areas are spread over multiple activities and places which makes their social structures weaker than that of rural areas where people’s activities are much more concentrated and focused on maintaining ties and building on kinship.
However, this is not the only way of looking at urbanism and urban life. The compositional theory challenges Wirth’s theory of urbanism of disrupting social order. For the compositionalists, the city is a mosaic of social worlds which are intimate circles essentially comprising family, kinship, similar personal attributes, cultures, etc.
This school of thought which forms a part of the Chicago School denies that the ecological factors of urbanism such as size, density, and heterogeneity directly and seriously affect the intimate social worlds. For example- cities might provide better-paying jobs or higher income opportunities and people who can get hold of those opportunities will be deeply affected but this change will be because of a transition in their economic status and not entirely because of the urban life.
Another example can be that a city might sometimes attract a significantly higher percentage of males than females which might cause the males to face difficulty in finding eligible wives for them which will affect them on a personal level but this effect essentially doesn’t highlight that it is urban life that has encouraged them to give up on social ties and family.
The two theories that we have talked about up until now are on the two opposite ends of the spectrum. A third theory that is more of a combination of both the theories is the subculture theory which argues that urbanism independently does affect social life and circles not by negatively affecting social life as determinism argued but by acting as a catalyst in creating and strengthening social circles by making it more diverse and inclusive.
Like compositional theory, the sub-cultural theory contends that there is an existence of intimate social circles within the mosaic of social worlds in a city. But it also supports the argument of ecological factors having serious consequences on the social order of urban life like determinism. The subcultural theory is an amalgamation of determinist and compositional theory that supports Park’s idea of urbanism being a mosaic of different worlds coming in contact with each other without interfering or penetrating each other’s worlds.
The heterogeneity in urban life
Large cities attract people from many places who come from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and when they interact with each in the urban areas, they do not destabilize the existing social order. Instead, they give rise to newer subcultures that are varied in nature. This implies that urbanism intensifies existing subcultures and at the same time gives rise to newer ones thereby maintaining its overall heterogeneous nature and at the same time giving space to diverse social worlds without invalidating the existing ones.
There are two processes in which urbanism intensifies subcultures. Firstly, when a subculture forms, it essentially has a population large enough to make its opinions heard and have its thought processes to sustain an active subculture that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible with a small group.
Having enough like-minded individuals help them to support institutions that they prefer- newspapers, clubs, etc. Secondly, subcultures intensify by coming in contact with other subcultures, which often leads to conflicts and varied opinions that might threaten each other’s existence. This in turn encourages every individual to embrace their respective subcultures more firmly thereby contributing to its further intensification and stabilization.
There are positive contacts as well between the groups such as mental influence and adapting some parts of each other’s cultures which again is a special feature of urbanism where people while holding on to their own beliefs grow tolerant of others’ opinions as well and respect each other’s subcultures and coexist without being rigid or clashing in the long run thereby creating a fairly diverse, accepting and stable space for people to live in.
This is absent in rural areas to a great extent where opposing views are met with disdain and intolerance. Any sort of thought not having the dominant support is thrown off the cliff to maintain the homogeneity and feeling of kinship and unity.
But this is not the case with urban areas to a great extent where it doesn’t matter to others what an individual is up to or what their views are thus giving the free space to live as and how they want to without forcing them to follow a homogenous way of living and maintaining families.
The personalities, cultural lineages, occupations, and other personal preferences of people in urban areas may be expected to range between more widely differentiated poles than those in rural areas. Such segregation is commonly believed to weaken interpersonal ties.
However, in cities, people build more acquaintances than they otherwise would and are more dependent on each other for their needs than in rural areas. Individuals living and working together to climb up the ladder of success might foster cutthroat competition and disruptions of each other’s lives but it also does make people adhere to certain routines and patterns to function and maintain themselves. However, with social order and formal controls in place, stability is maintained which is a key to the progress of urban cities.
It can very well be concluded that urbanism is characterized by heterogeneity which leads to mobility but not social insecurity or instability. In fact, in urban areas, people are much more secure where their thoughts are not discarded or they are not forced to follow the masses.
Coexistence is much more stable than pushing people to follow the crowd.
Be it on a social level or personal level, urbanism opens up to people various ways of exercising their ways of building families, maintaining contacts, and living which is heterogeneous but not unstable or insecure.
References
Lin, J., & Mele, C. (2013). The Urban Sociology Reader. Routledge.
Pickvance, C. (2007). Urban Sociology. Routledge.
Turner, B. S. (1999). Classical Sociology. SAGE.
