Ferdinand Tonnies was an early German social philosopher who came up with the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesllschaft. These mean community and society, respectively. He said that European societies started to transform in the late 1700s from communities to societies. A community was where individual families had long historical individual interaction with one another on a personal level. A society was where an individual interacted with others whom they don’t know and worked with simply social ties. Therefore, whereas in Gemeinschaft where there was a sense of belonging and mutual dependence posed by affirmation and working together, Gesselschaft required trade, commercialism, industrialism which focused on more social connections than deep interpersonal connections.
Emile Durkheim elaborated on these terms and called them mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity was the predetermined mechanical bonds of kinship and social interdependence which could not be altered. Organic solidarity consisted of organic bonds in industrial cities which flowed from differentiation as a result of division of labor. I agree that the cities have some form of organic solidarity. However, I can’t agree that the cities have only organic solidarity. Indeed, there is always some form of kinship still present because there are still personal connections within a city in the modern day.
Friedrich Engels and Georg Simmel continued to study the city in Europe. The work of Georg Simmel, which focused on cultural terms and how life transformed individual consciousness, came back to the University of Chicago. At the university, they were more concerned with social behavior and interaction in the urban environment like Simmel. Urbanization is studied by looking at the rise and fall of the larger cities.
Urbanization is referred to the origins of the cities and the process of city building. This concept looks at how the social activities are oriented in the city and how they interact with each other. Urbanism is referring to the ways of life that are found in the urban environment. This deals with culture and patterns of daily life. Simmel was concerned with urbanism because he wanted to know how activities and the ways of thinking were a road to transition from a traditional society to a more modern society. He is the one who came up with the idea of defensive attitude or Blasé attitude being prevalent in cities as the quality of life changed for many city workers.
Then, Louis Writh stressed the way the city was a spatial environment and how this environment influenced individual behavior. He looked at how people in the city behaved to create a urban culture, without focusing on origins outside the city. He focused on 3 factors to describe urbanism. He said that urbanism was a product of population size, density, and heterogeneity. He stressed social disorganization in urbanism. First, he said that the greater the population size, the greater the specialization and diversity of the social roles we can find in the city. This means that competition would replace kinship as a way to organize the society. Next, increased density of the population would increase the effects of large population and increases competition among people, which would create need for specialization. Because groups don’t share common identities now, there is greater stress as groups live closer to each other. Lastly, people in the city have greater contact with people that differ from them. This increased heterogeneity will lead to greater tolerance among groups as ethnic and class barriers are broken down.
Robert Park wanted to study the different groups of people who came into the city. The Chicago School had created a concept of human ecology that avoided the study of capitalism and preferred a biological way to conceptualize urban life. Park said that the social organization of the city was a result from the struggle with survival that made division of labor. Urban life in general, he said, was organized into two levels: biotic and cultural. The biotic level is created by competition from scarce environmental resources. The cultural level is the symbolic and psychological adjustment processes and to the organization of urban life according to shared sentiments.
Furthermore, the ecological approach was highlighted by Roderick McKenzie which said that the quality of the struggle for existence was location of the individual/group. This location was determined by economic competition and the struggle for survival. In other words, the more successful people got better positions. More importantly, he viewed the changes in cities as a result of transportation and communication developments. His ideas were the precursor to the multi-centered metropolitan region that was stressed by the sociospatial approach. He did something that no many urban sociologists did. He looked at the regions from an economic geography perspective.
Ernest Burgess used Darwin’s ideas and Park/McKenzie’s ideas to develop his theory of city growth. He said that the city grew due to population pressure which stimulated a process of commercial decentralization. The city grew outward into the peripheral areas. The central area of the city ended up being the business focal point. The surrounding 4 distinct ring areas had other homes and local businesses. Also, Burgess said that the change of location was due to centralization and decentralization. The characteristics of the city were also separated. However, Homer Hoyt questioned this concentric zone model that Burgess created to say that the sectors were not all evenly divided. He said that all activities manufacturing and retailing expanded out. Thus, the city grew in blobs rather than in neat circles. Hoyt’s theory was called the sector theory.
As the cities started modernizing more, the studies transformed from human ecology to urban ecology. Walter Firey went against the traditional concentric zone model and talked about how the large areas of land in downtown were reserved for noneconomic uses and that sentiment and symbolism influenced the spatial patterns of development. While I believe the urban ecology is a method that is transformative, I don’t think that it has a very broad perspective of the city. It does not focus on the current processes and production. Rather, it focuses on how aspects of the past can only influence the development of the city, instead of the scarcity of the resources. Moreover, in all, as technologies developed, urban sociologists were able to now look at the entirety of cities now, instead of sections of cities. They could also look at levels in the city such as education, employment, etc. This new method of study was under the factorial ecology umbrella.
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