Urban spaces are developing at an ever faster pace, and the need to understand, discuss and bring out the essence of social life in an urban area is essential. Hence thought of starting a blog on Urban sociology.
Urban Sociology as you know is the sociological study of life and human interaction in urban spaces.
It is a discipline of sociology which seek to study
the structures, processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing
so provide inputs for planning and policy making. In other words it is the
sociological study of cities and their role in the development of society.
Early men were nomads the earliest signs of a
process leading to sedentary culture can be seen as early as 12,000 BC as they
settled near the river bank thus became sedentary; it evolved into an evolved into agricultural society, settlement
of life and the real growth of towns and
cities.
The earliest recorded studies of a contrast from
Rural agrarian society was done by Ferdinanad Toennis a German social
philosopher who lived from 1855 to 1936. He compared and contrasted the
community life that existed prior to great period of industrialization and post
industrial revolution. The late 1700s signified a change from community to
association. He highlight the differences between village life of the
preindustrial period and urban life of the industrial period, and between small-town
life and that of the large city.
Next prominent writing were of Emile Durkheim, on
Solidarity in Society, in his book ‘the division of labour in society’, he too
wrote about the changes brought about by industrialization. In the
preindustrial village, individuals were held together by the mechanical bonds
of kinship and social interdependence-mechanical because they were
predetermined and could not be changed as long as the individual remained
within the local village. Hence called Mechanical Solidarity. While under the
industrial setup, individuals were no longer bound by the mechanical bonds of
kinship: instead they could work at new types of jobs and have greater
opportunities for interaction with a wider range of people.
George Simmel contribution of ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ was
concerned with modernity, or the transition from a traditional society to industrial society situated within cities, Simmel compared the psychology of
the individual in rural life with the psychology of the city dweller. His
investigation determines that the human psychology is altered by the
metropolis. As such, the city dweller’s attitude and psychology is
fundamentally different to an individual that inhabits rural life. The
psychology of the city dweller, therefore, exhibits what Simmel describes it as a
blaze attitude. Simmel described blase attitude as an attitude of absolute
boredom and lack of concern for others.
The real
growth of the present urban studies came with the establishment of Chicago School in the 1930’s. which marked the beginning
of a series of studies and researches conducted to study the people, life, the
processes, the human interaction, the architecture,environment and pathologies
of urban life. Robert Park is the most
interesting figure in the development of the Chicago School Of Urban Sociology.
He and his associates went a lot further from a bipolar spectrum of analysing
the society to adopting a conceptual position that we call human ecology- the study of the process of human group
adjustment to the environment. Urban life for Robert Park was organized on two separate levels: the
“biotic” and the “culture”. The biotic level refers to
the forms of organization produced by human competition over scarce
environmental resources. The cultural level refers to the symbolic and the
psychological adjustment processes and to the organization of urban life
according to shared sentiments.
Ernest Burgess’s yet
another contributor to uraban studies, put forward the Concentric Zone theory. According
to Burgess the city constantly grew because of population pressures. This in
turn triggered a dual process of central agglomeration and commercial
decentralization; that is spatial competition attracted new activities to the centre
of the city but also repelled other activities to the fringe area. First he
explained the pattern of homes, neighborhoods, and industrial and commercial
location in terms of the ecological theory of competition over “position” or
location. In short competition produced a certain space and a certain social
organization in space. Those who could afford it leaved near the center; those
who could not arranged themselves in concentric zones around the city center.
Such a model required among other things that the center have the most jobs and
social activities and hence that it be the most desirable location. This view was
challenged various other models that were prior to it.
With the invention and use of computer extensively, brought sweeping changes to the field
of human ecology. Urban sociologists no longer had to limit their research to
field studies of urban communities; now they could assemble data for the entire
cities.
Plez find the attachment and sent it back .
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