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The City Reader - Complete summary
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Complete summary of the City Reader 5th Edition, all articles, introduction, totalling 50 pages. Complete substitution for reading the book
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Part 2 Introduction:The people within the city are in a continuous interplay between society,
community and culture, and how these factors are place within a urban context.
The subject of sociology is broad and inclusive, it includes concept of economy,
history and psychology. The field includes social interactions between individuals
and groups, patterns of social stratification (social class), social deviance (crime)
and issues of race, ethnicity and gender.
Through the application of education policies, social action, and urban planning,
sociology matters can be solved.’
Mumford is focusing on the connections between urban life and the human
personality, also Wirth is focusing on defining the urban life(style). Defining it as
the opposite of rural, distant communications, individualization of humans in the
city.
Jane Jacobs is working on a urban design plan to promote urban street life in
order to reduce urban crime rates.
DuBois is focusing on racial segregation and social exclusion experienced by
immigrant over the world, mostly (Afro-American) Negro’s. Wilson is also involved
in social minorities saying that the negro’s do not have the right opportunities to
get out of trouble. Anderson is defining street and decent families, street defined
as violent/offensive behaviour and decent as middle class/ respectable etc.
Porter argues that programs that do not address the real competitive advantages
of inner cities are counterproductive. Putnam is arguing that the high culture like
fine arts, opera etc. aren’t the urban arts they’re just are the arts/culture of the
elite not of the majority (poor/ middle-class people).
Richard Florida beliefs that there is a creative class, that must be stimulated by
make the city compatible to these creative minds.
In the last part they’re focusing on the clash between different civilizations
meaning cultures, race, religions that may clash within the city and Stout is
arguing that popular journalism, photography and cinema are among the
characteristics of urban cultural genres a real artefact of the urban society.
Lewis Mumford – What is a city?
The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic
organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic
symbol of collective unity.
Their unified plans and buildings become a symbol of their social relatedness;
and when the physical environment itself becomes disordered and incoherent,
the social functions that it harbors become more difficult to express.
Social facts are primary, and the physical organization of a city, its industries and
its markets, its lines of communication and traffic, must be subservient to its
social needs.
The process grow of a city might be indefinitely, but if the city is a theater of
social activity, definite limitations on size follow.
, It is more important to express size always as a function of the social
relationships to be served.
Limitations on size, density, and area are absolutely necessary to effective social
intercourse; and they are therefore the most important instruments of rational
economic and civic planning.
These limitations are necessary to break up the functionless, hypertrophied urban
masses of the past.
Urban facilities will decentralize and dissociate farther; the whole region becomes
open for settlement.
The principles of the polynucleated city have been well established. Instead of
trusting to the mere massing of population to produce the necessary social
concentration and social drama, we must now seek these results through
deliberate local nucleation and a finer regional articulation. To embody these new
possibilities in city life, which come to us not merely through better technical
organization but through acuter sociological understanding, and to dramatize the
activities themselves in appropriate individual and urban structures, forms the
task of the coming generation.
Louis Wirth – Urbanism as a Way of Life
It’s important to call attention to the danger of confusing urbanism with
industrialism and modern capitalism, because the rise of cities is not dependent
of technology, mass production and capitalistic enterprise. For sociological
purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent
settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals.
Wirth gives a number of sociological statements concerning:
- Numbers of population: the multiplication of persons in a state of
interaction under conditions which make their contact as full personalities
impossible produces that segmentalization of human relationships. The
contacts of the city may indeed be face-to-face, but they are nevertheless
impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental. The city is characterized
by secondary rather than primary contacts. Urbanites are in a state of
anomie and social void (leegte).
- Density: the juxtaposition (naast-elkaarplaatsing) of divergent personalities
and modes of life tends to produce a relativistic perspective and a sense of
toleration of differences which may be regarded as prerequisites
(voorwaarden) for rationality and which lead toward the secularization of
life. Our physical contacts are close but our social contacts are distant.
Frequent close physical contact, coupled with great social distance,
accentuates the reserve of unattached individuals toward one another and
gives rise to loneliness.
- Heterogeneity: social interaction among a variety of personality types
tends to break down the class structure, and city dwellers know physical
foot looseness and social mobility. People can turnover in group
membership rapidly. But although the city knows a highly differentiated
population, it also exercises a leveling influence (individuals are being
replaced by categories).
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