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1 1 CLASSIFICATION OF CITIES Unit Structure : 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Functional Classification of Towns and Cities 1.3 Classification of Cities on the basis of Age 1.4 Pre-industrial & Post-industrial Cities 1.5 Cities – Global, Capital, Primate, Dual & Metropolis 1.6 Summary 1.7 Questions 1.8 References and Further Readings 1.0. OBJECTIVES: • To familiarize students with different kinds of cities • To know more about cities’ historical developments 1.1 INTRODUCTION: Hamlets, villages, towns, cities and mega-cities form the cultural landscape of the world. Within these settlements be it new or old, resides the population of nearly 7.3 billion people. The question now emerges that how can one classify these settlements; the most obvious answer is rural and urban settlements based on their functions or economic activity. People in rural settlements mostly pursue agriculture or primary activity while in urban areas they are generally engaged in non-agricultural activities. This quantitative classification leaves some qualitative aspects untouched which scholars have tried to bridge through the concepts like rural-urban fringe, rural –urban continuum, ruurban, peri-urban, urban corridor to name a few. In fact, today it is more common to think in terms of a continuum rather than water tight compartments clearly cut or divided into two – rural or urban. But here, we are dealing mainly with the classification of urban places and to do so, we need to define an urban place. Numerous attempts have been made to define an urban place and the most basic definition of urban place was provided by OPCS Census, 1981 and Key Statistics for Urban Areas, 1984. According to them urban areas are made up of: 1. permanent structures and the land on which they are situated 2. transportation corridors (roads, railways and canals) which have built-up sites which are less than 50 meters apart munotes.in
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2 3. transportation features such as railway yards, motorway services areas and car parks (operational airfields and airports are also included) 4. mineral workings and quarries 5. any area completely surrounded by built-up sites This definition is not extensive so as to cover the variations in the nature of the urban place across the world. As we find that varied bases have been used to define urban population. Some examples taken from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook 1988 (United Nations, 1990) covering all the continents are sited here – 1. Asia – a) India – towns (places with municipal corporation, municipal area committee or cantonment board); also all places having 5000 or more inhabitants, a density of 400 persons per square kilometre and at least 75 per cent of its male working population engaged in non-agricultural activities. b) Japan – cities (Shi) having 50,000 or more inhabitants with 60 per or more of the houses located in the main built-up areas and 60 per cent or more of the population engaged in manufacturing, trade or other urban types of business. 2. Europe – a) France – Communes containing an agglomeration of more than 2000 inhabitants living in contiguous houses or with not more than 200 meters between houses. b) Netherlands – Municipalities with a population of 2000 or more inhabitants. 3. Africa – a) Botswana – Agglomerations of 5000 or more inhabitants where 75 per cent of the economic activity is of the non – agricultural type. b) Ethiopia – Localities of 2000 or more dwellings. 4. North America – a) USA – Places of 2500 or more inhabitants and urbanized areas b) Canada – Places of 1000 or more inhabitants having a population density of 400 or more per square kilometre. 5. South America – a) Argentina – Populated centres with 2000 or more inhabitants. b) Peru – Populated centres with 100 or more dwellings. munotes.in
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Classification of Cities 6. Australia – population clusters of 1000 or more inhabitants and some areas of lower population if they contain 250 or more dwellings of which at least 100 are occupied. A review of these representative definitions reveals seven bases which used either singly or in combination to identify the urban function of the population. i. Specifically named settlements ii. Settlements designated urban by administrative status iii. A minimum population iv. A minimum population density v. The proportion engaged in non-agricultural occupations vi. A contiguity either to include a sub-urban area or to exclude an area of loosely scattered settlement vii. Functional character The above discussion clearly brings forward the thought that function or functional character of a settlement is of prime importance in the process of taxonomy. And this has become one of the guiding parameters in the classification of urban places. 1.2 FUNCTIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF TOWNS AND CITIES: • Urban centres are classified by multitude of functions. They are the economic magnets where secondary, tertiary and related activities dominate. • The functional classification of towns gives the idea about the role of the town in the field of occupation, industrial type, economic, religion, social, political, etc. It is hard to define the functional role of a town because all the towns have more than one function. • Any city can be observed as composition of multiple functions as certain economic activities are found in all cities but certain economic activities are found in specific cities such as administration, education, trade and transport. • Thus, it is a complex academic work to classify them on functional basis. • On basis of predominant function and specialization classification is done. Degree of specialization can be determined by number of workers engaged in that activity out of total population. munotes.in
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4 • For ease of studying and appreciating the diversity, we need to classify the cities. • City classification has been attempted on the basis of various criteria such as: • Age of city • Stage of city • Population size • Functional classification • The initial scheme of classification does not focus on classification alone but on settlements in general, and classified them on the basis of types of development and economy. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. What is the functional classification of cities? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 1.3 CLASSIFICATION OF CITIES ON THE BASIS OF AGE: A. Taylor’s Classification: Griffith Taylor (1949) attempted to identify stages in the development of the cities. On the basis of these stages, he classified cities into six categories. 1. Sub-infantile- The initial cluster in a single ill-defined street town. 2. Infantile - Town in a second stage have no clear differentiation between industrial, commercial and residential area, through there is a tendency for the bigger houses to be located near the margins. There are no factories. 3. Juvenile - There is a fairly clear segregation of an extensive commercial quarter towards the centre of the town, through separation of function is in no way complete. The residential area also show no clear differentiation. 4. Adolescence – This stage shows clear differentiation of residential zone. munotes.in
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Classification of Cities 5. Early maturity – In this stage also there is a differentiation of residential zone, the different between the two lies only in degree. 6. Mature -A mature town is one in which there are separate commercial area as well as four zone of residential houses, ranging from mansions to shacks. The classification is interesting from an academic point of view, but is unpractical as no specific determinants have been stated. Moreover, it is applicable only to western cities under a particular economic system. B. Mumford’s Classification: Lewis Mumford (1938) an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic suggested six stages of development of cities. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish Theorist Sir Patrick Geddes. His six stages of development of cities are: 1. Eopolis: The beginning of urbanisation of course is rooted in the rural scene. Men used to be involved in hunting. As they slowly learned, they became producers and settled in village. They also indulged in fishing and mining. At this juncture of time depending upon their religion, they set up a temple, cathedral or mosque. Subsequently, a market also developed. 2. Polis: As more and more villages developed many found that they have certain things common with their neighbours. The settlements slowly developed into a brotherhood of traders and became richer because of accumulation of wealth from nearby villages. The religious establishments extend further and so does the market squares. There was a social stratification according to which people belonging to the higher hierarchy occupy central place while the others spread outwardly such that the people of lower level took peripheral places. 3. Metropolis: Small towns and villages in a region come together as a single entity. The entity is the city which has a compact site, good water and food supply, ample land etc. This becomes metropolis, the mother of city. As the city streamlines its production, a surplus occurs. The surplus at this stage is characterized by the specialization of trades. 4. Megalopolis: The stage is marked by more diversity of cultures. There is migration from all around. Indifference between the people increases. There is also a class struggle. Further developments are hence down wards. The city begins to decline. 5. Tyrannopolis: The economic and social scene slowly metamorphoses into more or less parasitic state. This stage of the development of city is marked by the indifference. People are involved in pomp and pleasure. This is what happened towards the end of Roman era. The environment of the city deteriorates and people munotes.in
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6 flee towards the countryside. The commercial activities are marked by booms and slumps. 6. Necropolis: The city decays further. The civilization follows a downward trend. War, famine and diseases erupt and lead the city towards destruction. The cultural institutions also erode greatly. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. Describe Taylor’s classification of cities. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 1.4 PRE-INDUSTRIAL & POST-INDUSTRIAL CITIES: Economists with their emphasis on economic rationality, typically stress the role of economies of scale in the creation of cities: “most urban areas arise because of the economic advantages of large-scale activities.” While true after the advent of the industrial revolution (see below), such a characterization was probably less correct prior to that; historians’ emphasis on military and administrative control may have been closer to the actuality. Certainly, prior to the Industrial Revolution, big cities were few and far between. The London of 1800 is thought to be the first modern Western city to attain a population of one million. Prior to that, Rome was considered to have been the biggest, achieving a population fluctuating between a half million and one million between A.D. 0 and 300. In a very real sense big cities were a creation of industrialization. Nevertheless, even before the industrial revolution, some cities developed markets, products and processes that subsequently were transplanted to the countryside as “cottage industries,” using so-called “putting out” systems. To the extent that cities developed trading activities, which many or almost all did, they also created potential gains from trade by exploiting comparative advantage. In particular, entrepot or depot cities, located at transport hubs or transshipment points, quite naturally developed related trading and marketing activities. Patterns of urban development changed with the Industrial Revolution, in degree and absolutely as well. Certainly, economies of scale came to the fore and the economic calculus for choosing an urban location became much more complex. Economies of scale alone, of course, would create or augment some urban sites. Such economies, however, were insufficient to explain the clustering of related and similar activities at particular points in space, thus creating truly large cities after industrialization. The early stages of industrialization emphasized, not too surprisingly, new and better ways of satisfying the most basic physical human needs: food, munotes.in
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Classification of Cities clothing, housing (construction), and transportation. Mechanical drills, fertilizers, and consolidation of many small farm units into large scale operations revolutionized the production of food, in the process releasing the manpower needed for other industrial activities. Factories replaced home production of textiles, using water and later steam and electric power to propel such inventions as the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the cotton gin. New iron and steel making processes made it economical to use iron or steel rather than wood in tools or implements for construction. As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, urban site location no longer depended so much on the productivity of the surrounding countryside but rather on how a particular site facilitated the production and distribution of a specific product using a specific technology. Urban development at a logistically advantaged site for industry generally augmented the value of surrounding countryside (by bidding up real estate values and by providing more trading opportunities and a generally larger market for nearby farmers and other suppliers). The pre-industrial urban sites that grew rapidly after industrialization, however, usually served the particular logistical needs of at least one new industry. Reducing the costs of shipping final product (by being near large populations) wasn’t necessarily enough, especially if processing greatly reduced the weight and mass of the product at various intermediate stages of production. Quite possibly, the most efficient location might be at the site of a major raw material input, if that input were very heavy, extensively used, difficult to transport, and processing wasn’t marked by substantial scale economies. A city exhibiting the characteristics of a post-industrial society include the following - service industries dominate with a strongly developed quaternary sector and footloose industries abound, often on pleasant open space at the edge of the city. Post-industrial cities are also characterized by large areas of office blocks and buildings for local government administration. These cities often exhibit marked inequality of income distribution because of the contrasts between those who are appropriately skilled—professionals, managers, administrators, and those in high-technology service industries—and the poorly paid service workers who look after their needs, together with the unemployed. The former can afford high house prices, and, in fact, contribute to them; the latter cannot. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. Explain pre-industrial cities. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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8 1.5 CITIES – GLOBAL, CAPITAL, PRIMATE, DUAL & METROPOLIS: Global city, an urban centre that enjoys significant competitive advantages and that serves as a hub within a globalized economic system. The term has its origins in research on cities carried out during the 1980s, which examined the common characteristics of the world’s most important cities. However, with increased attention being paid to processes of globalization during subsequent years, these world cities came to be known as global cities. Linked with globalization was the idea of spatial reorganization and the hypothesis that cities were becoming key loci within global networks of production, finance, and telecommunications. In some formulations of the global city thesis, then, such cities are seen as the building blocks of globalization. Simultaneously, these cities were becoming newly privileged sites of local politics within the context of a broader project to reconfigure state institutions. Early research on global cities concentrated on key urban centres such as London, New York City, and Tokyo. With time, however, research has been completed on emerging global cities outside of this triad, such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Houston, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, São Paulo, Sydney, and Zürich. Such cities are said to knit together to form a global city network serving the requirements of transnational capital across broad swathes of territory. The rise of global cities has been linked with two globalization-related trends: first, the expansion of the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in global production patterns and, second, the decline of mass production along Fordist lines and the concomitant rise of flexible production centred within urban areas. These two trends explain the emergence of networks of certain cities serving the financial and service requirements of TNCs while other cities suffer the consequences of deindustrialization and fail to become “global.” Global cities are those that therefore become effective command-and-coordination posts for TNCs within a globalizing world economy. Such cities have also assumed a governance role at the local scale and within wider configurations of what some commentators have termed the “glocalization” of state institutions. This refers to processes in which certain national state functions of organization and administration have been devolved to the local scale. Location is often key. Many countries choose a geographically central capital in order to emphasize the equity of their government; this way, the capital isn’t as likely to be, or seem to be, biased toward one region or another. Madrid, for instance, is located almost exactly in the middle of Spain (and, to take it one step further, the middle of the Iberian Peninsula). When Nigeria decided to build a brand-new capital city, it placed Abuja, which was formally named the capital in 1991, in the center—a place signifying unity in a country often considered divided by its geography. A capital can also be a sign of political compromise, as in the United States. Initially, members of Congress proposed that the national capital be in munotes.in
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Classification of Cities Pennsylvania—specifically, at either Lancaster or Germantown, then a borough outside Philadelphia. They believed that a Philadelphia-adjacent capital would honor the young country’s revolutionary roots. Sometimes a country’s choice of capital has been politically motivated without compromise. The name of Myanmar’s capital, Nay Pyi Taw, means “Abode of Kings” in Burmese, and the city’s origin mirrors its name. Its construction began in 2004 amid Myanmar’s chaotic transition from military rule to democracy, but, evidently, Nay Pyi Taw’s planners had never been especially worried about accessibility: it had initially been designed to house only government and military personnel. Finally, not all countries subscribe to the idea that there must be only one national capital. Bolivia, for instance, has La Paz as its administrative capital and Sucre as its constitutional capital. South Africa has three capitals: its administrative seat in Pretoria, its legislative seat in Cape Town, and its judicial seat in Bloemfontein. However, a country decides on its capital, that city becomes an important symbol of nationhood. While being a home to its inhabitants and a place for tourists to visit, it is also the city chosen to represent the entire country to the world. A primate city is the dominant city among a country's urban areas. Countries have urban hierarchies comprising large and small cities in terms of their population sizes, spatial extent, or territorial size and the importance of their economies. Primate cities are the largest cities in their respective countries, as they dominate the economy as well as being the top ranking in terms of territorial extent and population size. Geographer Mark Jefferson coined the term in the 1930s and defined a primate city as one that is twice as large as the next largest city in the urban hierarchy of a country and twice as significant economically. A primate city also dominates in terms of the centralization of the country's transport and communications, industrial and commercial. The term primate city may sound like something in a zoo but it actually has nothing to do with monkeys. It refers to a city that is greater than two times the next largest city in a nation (or contains over one-third of a nation's population). The primate city is usually very expressive of the national culture and often the capital city. The "law of the primate city" was first created by geographer Mark Jefferson in 1939. The use of the term Dual City as a synonym for a late capitalist metropolis is very frequent among city theorists who ideologically come within the neo-Marxist orbit. These thinkers produce social criticism that aims to unmask the capitalist superstructure and denounce urban injustices. This position is becoming more and more important after several decades of globalization, which has generated degrees of social polarization unknown since the end of the Second World War. Saskia Sassen thinks that it is a case of a phenomenon that is intrinsic to the new late capitalist order, where badly paid jobs are the key to economic growth. This makes social decline a complement to development, and not as previously an indication of decadence. munotes.in
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10 The Dual City has led to the crisis of the traditional social division inherited from the stage of the welfare state and characterized by the ruling of an immense middle class with slight variations upwards and downwards. At the moment the upper class has increased spectacularly with the appearance of the "nouveaux riches," people from all walks of life who have reached the top as a result of very diverse economic activities. Between the upper and the middle class yuppies have created a niche; in cities such as New York or Los Angeles they may represent as much as 30% of the population. They are followed by the middle class, which has been drastically reduced, and the lower class which is experiencing the opposite process. The last step of the flattened social pyramid of the Dual City is made up of the "new poor," former workmen expelled from the work market by the process of deindustrialization and shut away in urban ghettoes where they are trapped owing to their difficulties in achieving access to education and new technologies. The metropolis or megapolis and the small town represent two polar ends of the urban settlement spectrum in India and elsewhere in the developing world. For a very long time, urban thought in developing countries focused around the metros due to their predominance and the unprecedented scales of growth that were not experienced by the world so far. A concomitant of this preoccupation with metros was an overlooking of the small towns that represent a significant chunk of the urbanisation. Small towns, therefore, remain overall neglected in studies of urbanisation in developing countries and in India. They also remain neglected in public discourse, imagination and policy. There has been a recent upsurge of interest in small towns and in understanding their distinct features in terms of social structure, politics, economic drivers, built environment and development trajectories. This quest is linked to moving away from the understanding of urbanisation as a singular mode and understanding its heterodoxies. The metropolis is a term that signifies an agglomeration of several towns and adjunct areas that are roughly conjoined in a functional environment. In the geography of settlements, a metropolis is a class by itself bringing in a high volume of consumption and large flows of people, goods, services and information (Ramchandran 1995). A megacity, ie, city with more than 10 million population is a special form of such geographical conjointness. Megacities are a form of contemporary urbanisation. In 1980, there were just three megacities in the world. Currently, there are 24 and estimated to grow to about by 2025(UN 2006). According to the estimations of the United Nations (UN), a bulk of the megacity growth is expected to be in South Asia and Africa. Of the 24 existing megacities in the world, more than half are in Asia and Africa. Further, if one were to look at the fastest growing cities in the last 30 years, the top 20 would be in Asia and Africa. More than 10 are located in China and three in India (UN2006). munotes.in
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Classification of Cities CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. What are global cities? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 1.6 SUMMARY: Metros and small towns represent two ends of the urban settlement spectrum; however, research has been highly biased towards the metro, thereby making it the “dominant” discourse. An attention to small towns begins to suggest not only several new elements of settlement geography, but also the multiplicity of trajectories of urbanisation, and what it means for the residents of these geographies and how they shape their fortunes – a more granular, chaotic, globally connected process with several variants. It thus contests the unified inevitability of “urbanisation” that is being proposed as the final destination by proponents of urban age. 1.7 QUESTIONS: • Elaborate on post-industrial cities. • Write a brief note on ‘metropolis’ cities within a globalized world. • What are primate cities? • What is a mega city? 1.8 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS • Economic Activity: Pre-Industrial, Industrial & Post-Industrial. (2014, December 30). Retrieved from https://study.com/academy/lesson/economic-activity-pre-industrial-industrial-post-industrial.html. • David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 36. • post-industrial city. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 15 May. 2022, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100339535. • Charnock, G. (2013, May 30). global city. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/global-city. • Warf, B. (2010). Primate cities. In Encyclopedia of geography (Vol. 1, pp. 2291-2291). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412939591.n927 munotes.in
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12 2 TOWNS AND CITIES Unit Structure : 2.0 Objectives 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Meaning of Town 2.3 Towns strength according to Census 2.4 Census Towns 2.5 Importance of Town 2.6 Meaning of City 2.7 Nature of City 2.8 Global Cities Scenario 2.9 Out growths 2.10 Difference between City and Town 2.11 Summary 2.12 Questions 2.13 References 2.0 OBJECTIVES 1. To learn about the concept Town and Cities and its comparison 2. To understand the Towns and Cities within Indian context 2.1 INTRODUCTION In this chapter we will learn about the concept Town and City. Understanding these concepts from theoretical viewpoints is important to understand Urban Sociology in better way, as Urban Sociology itself emerged from the studies of Cities like Chicago. Even the Bombay School of Sociology began under the guidance of Patrick Geddes who was a Town Planner who was working on Urban issues. This chapter would act as a foundation with basic concepts for understandings of Urban Sociology. Let us look into its details. 2.2 MEANING OF TOWN A town is a type of human habitation. The uniqueness about towns is that it is usually bigger than villages but smaller than cities, however the criteria for distinguishing them vary greatly around the globe. munotes.in
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Towns and Cities The 2011 Census of India distinguishes between two categories of towns: statutory towns and census towns. All settlements with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board, or notified town area committee are considered statutory towns. Census towns are settlements that meet the following criteria: 1. There needs to be a minimum of 5,000 people residing in a given place. 2. Out of the five thousand at least 75% of the male labor force needs to be engaged in non-agricultural occupations. 3. The Population density needs to be at least of 400/km2. (1,000 per square mile). Thus, in contrast to rural regions, all statutory towns, census towns, and outgrowths are designated urban settlements. 2.3 TOWNS STRENGTH ACCORDING TO CENSUS In India, the rise of urban centers has not been unidirectional. The number of urban centers has decreased due to variations in the census definition of 'urban' regions. Only 1,430 of the 1,914 towns that existed in 1901 lasted until 1961. Because of the changing definition of town in the 1961 census, about 480 locations declared towns in 1901 lost their urban status. As a result, the number of municipalities decreased to 2700 in 1961, down from 3060 in 1951. In Rajasthan, for example, there were 227 towns in 1951, but this number had dropped to 201 by 1981. A similar drop has been observed in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra. In the 1991 census, 4,689 settlements were classified as towns, up from 4,029 in the 1981 census. In 1991, there were 2,996 statutory towns and 1,693 census or non-municipal towns among the 4,689 towns, compared to 2,758 and 1,271 in 1981. During the period 1981-1991, statutory notifications issued by the competent state/union territory administrations declassified 93 of the 4029 towns of the 1981 census, while 103 towns were totally merged with other towns. In 1991, 856 additional municipalities were added to the urban frame. The states of Punjab (21), Karnataka (19), and Village, Town, and City Andhra Pradesh (13) had the most towns declassified, while Madhya Pradesh had the most statutory towns added in the 1991 census (91). However, according to the 2011 census, the urban population and urbanization rate increased from 27.7 percent in 2001 to 31.1 percent in 2011, i.e., there is 3.3 percent percentage point gain. Several villages were recognized as towns during the 2011 census, in a way, there is an increase in the number of towns in Indiai. 2.4 CENSUS TOWN Census towns are regions that are not classified as towns by state governments but have urban features (at least 5,000 people, at least 75 percent of the town's male working population engaged in non-agricultural munotes.in
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14 activities, and a population density of at least 400 people per square kilometer.ii Since independence, India has seen a rapid increase in the number, size, and volume of statutory towns, but less attention has been paid to census towns, which have considerably contributed to the country's total urbanization. The Census Towns are located throughout the nation, from the far north to the far south, and from the far west to the far east, however Mizoram has no Census Towns in 2001 or 2011. Between 2001 and 2011, West Bengal and Kerala were states which showed increase in the number of Census Towns in India. West Bengal has one-fifth of the Census Towns in 2011, with the number of Census Towns increasing thrice from 252 in 2001 to 780 in 2011. Similarly, in Kerala, the number of Census Towns climbed from 99 to 461, accounting for 11.8 percent of the total census towns in the countryiii. 2.5 IMPORTANCE OF A TOWN When the city becomes overcrowded and highly populated it is the town which supports the city. People start slowly migrating to the nearby town of the metropolitan city. Specially those people who have higher standard of living like the professionals. As they can afford to have vehicles to commute, and even enough money to pay salary to drivers too. The towns are also filled with more parks, greenery and less crowded people hence people also prefer to move to the town. When ever there is migration, people often shift to the nearby towns. At times it is also done with the help of a relative or some networking. As that would help them to stay with a relative one or two days, and search a job. As leaving one’s village is a risk, specially among those families, villages, where communitarian beliefs are very strong. Studies point out that it is the male population who first migrates to the nearby towns or cities. Thereafter once settled brings the wife and children to the city/town. The population migrating to the nearby towns is not just workers but also large number of students. Students migrate for higher education like getting educated in a good college. Students preparing for Engineering Entrance Exam, Medical Entrance exam, these students need coaching and guidance hence they move to the nearby towns and stay there attend their classes and continue to study. Let us now try to understand about city. Check Your Progress 1. The Population density needs to be at least how much according to 2011 census. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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Towns and Cities 2. Discuss the Towns strength according to 2011 census. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Newly added Census Towns contributed 32.4% of the total urban localities in the 2011 census. In 2011 census there are a total of 2742 new census towns among which 2553 were recognised as Census Towns from villages, 141 towns are converted from either outgrowths or Statutory Towns, and the status of 48 towns is unknown. The newly formed census towns form a mammoth 70.4 per cent share of the total number of Census Towns of India. The state with the maximum number of new census towns is West Bengal (537), followed by Kerala (362), Tamil Nadu (271) and Uttar Pradesh (208) forming shares of 13.8 per cent, 9.3 per cent, 7 per cent and 5.3 per cent, respectively. The union territories and smaller states have contributed a little in the number of new Census Towns Newly added Census Towns contributed 32.4% of the total urban localities in the 2011 census. In 2011 census there are a total of 2742 new census towns among which 2553 were recognised as Census Towns from villages, 141 towns are converted from either outgrowths or Statutory Towns, and the status of 48 towns is unknown. The newly formed census towns form a mammoth 70.4 per cent share of the total number of Census Towns of India. The state with the maximum number of new census towns is West Bengal (537), followed by Kerala (362), Tamil Nadu (271) and Uttar Pradesh (208) forming shares of 13.8 per cent, 9.3 per cent, 7 per cent and 5.3 per cent, respectively. The union territories and smaller states have contributed a little in the number of new Census Towns 2.6 MEANING OF CITY Bergel described a city as a place where the bulk of the residents are engaged in occupations other than agriculture. He has stated that the market as a mechanism of trade is a fundamental aspect of non-agricultural activities, without which city residents would go hungry. According to Sorokin and Zimmerman, and others, a suitable description of the city contains a number of attributes or characteristics that are united. We will refer to a community as urban if its activities revolve around a market; a market is necessary for non-agricultural activities since the urban resident cannot subsist without the exchange of products. Two features of city are crucial, according to Prof R.N.Morris. Specifically, size and density. Let try to understand it further – munotes.in
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16 Size: The size of the city is an important factor to consider. The size of a city influences its growth and development. When a city is tiny, its works, structure, and social relationships differ from those of a bigger city. Relationships in larger cities, such as Mumbai, are impersonal and shallow. People do not know one other since they perform different roles their behavior is also calculative. The city inhabitants regard social ties as tools to be used to further his/her goals. This is described as "a reasonable intelligent approach" by Louis Wirth. The city dweller grows as more calculated, less outgoing, spontaneous, less participatory and more frustrated. The division of work in most modern cities is very much visible. Urbanization is defined by occupations. With numerous vocations where individuals are alienated and working for their own purposes, urbanization becomes increasingly selfish and artificial. People develop a goal-oriented mindset. As a result, Wirth claims that the company "has no soul." In comparison to rural and tribal communities, urbanization exhibits a distinct sort of social control. The police, the court, the government, and a variety of other institutions regulate people's behaviour and demeanor. Festivals and the amount of donation from people help to regulate people's religion and worship. The specialization of marketing and its goods is demonstrated by urbanization. Cities offer and meet a wide range of needs, including consumer items, clothing, medications, and educational institutions, as well as national and international requirements. Due to great specialization and reliance, the city is unbalanced and lacks stability and equilibrium. Because houses, markets, slums, roads, and transportation increase unnaturally, modern cities do not govern systematic urbanization. Governments have failed to regulate urban lifestyles. Population density A city is a specialty zone. There are large concentration of people in one location. There are several factors for the city's expansion. It might be anything from industrial growth to marketing to governmental administration. The quality of life and behaviour of people is diverse and continually changing, which is tied to population density. A city is called as City not just because it has more diversified residents, but also because it has various types of jobs opportunities available. A city is formed not just by the density of its inhabitants, but also by the organization of its population, into a meaningful structure. Sombart described city as "a location that has grown so enormous that people no longer know each other" munotes.in
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Towns and Cities 2.7 NATURE OF CITY Let us look into some of the nature, qualities of the residents of the city. This nature is often found in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai. Work in City In a city there are several kinds of work carried out. People are engaged into a variety of occupation. People are engaged into industrial work where heavy machines are used. Large number of people are also work in informal sector like construction sites, hawkers, auto drivers etc. There is a large set of marginal population who live on wages which they earn on day-to-day basis. Transience Mobility People are constantly moving towards and away from the metropolis, and even from one city to another. People are migrating in pursuit of greater possibilities in cities, which are hubs of money, power, and innovation. People's mobility or movement rises as cities become more industrial, and industry typically grows as a result of mobility. Another type of mobility is evident in cities when individuals shift employment. This is referred to as occupational mobility. Occupational mobility may also occur when a person moves from a lower to a higher level position. Transactional Social Interaction In a metropolis, most people's social interactions are impersonal. City living has an aspect of anonymity to it. There is, however, major group contact among family members, friends, and neighbors. The 'community' as a pattern of association is not eliminated, but new forms of association known as 'networks' replace previous neighborhood types. Large family networks may die out, but friendship networks carry on. 2.8 GLOBAL CITIES SCENARIO According to studies, there will be greater and larger cities in the future. In 1900, cities were home to 10% of the world's population. Today, the figure is above 50%, and by 2050, it will be at least 75%. (The Urban Age Project, London School of Economics). Scholars point out that over 200 million individuals resided outside their natal country in 2010, and cities are growing increasingly diverse as groups of all nationalities, faiths, and ethnicities flock to them.Young people are driving the urbanisation trend, since they see less opportunity to achieve their goals in rural regions. Cities are becoming a larger part of national economies and are also concentrating wealth. Instead of 200 countries, 600 cities are now considered the world's economic backbone (McKinsey & Co). Cities, like munotes.in
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18 countries, will fight for investment, funding, talent (skilled labourers and influence in the future. Cities must provide residents with a safe and secure environment in which people want to live and companies want to invest. As cities' prominence in national life grows, the repercussions of failing to adopt successful solutions will become more significant. In the past, states were primarily responsible for ensuring security, and this will continue to be the case in the future. Cities and municipal governments, on the other hand, are increasingly considering what role they may play as security suppliers rather than just recipients. Cities will play an important role in a variety of ways: Urban resilience—mitigating the effects of an inevitable shock and responding efficiently so that disturbance to the city and its residents is minimal and brief. Inclusion in the city—ensure that religious, sectarian, tribal, ideological, gender, and ethnic identities coexist without being fractured. Gain public confidence that resources and services are distributed fairly and equally. Urban violence—reduce residents' and tourists' fear of being victims of any sort of violence.iv 2.9 OUTGROWTHS There are not just cities, towns, and villages, but also outgrowths, as Ali (2020 points important to know. Out Growths (OG) are a viable entity, such as a village or hamlet, or an enumeration block made up of such a village or hamlet, that is clearly recognised in terms of its boundaries and location. Railway colonies, university campuses, port areas, military bases, and other developments that have sprung up near a statutory town outside of its statutory bounds but inside the revenue limitations of a village or villages next to the town are just a few examples. When determining a town's expansion, it has been ensured that it has urban features in terms of infrastructure and amenities such as pucca roads, electricity, taps, drainage system for waste water disposal, educational institutions, post offices, medical facilities, banks, and so on, as well as being physically contiguous with the UA's core town. Central Railway Colony (OG), Triveni Nagar (N.E.C.S.W.) (OG), and others are examples. Each of these towns, along with its outgrowths, is considered an integrated urban region and is referred to as 'urban agglomeration.' 1. In the 2011 Census, 475 localities were categorised as Urban Agglomerations, with 981 OGs, compared to 384 UAs with 962 OGs in the 2001 Census. Towns/UAs/OGs of a Certain Type Towns counted in the 2001 Census Census of 2011. munotes.in
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Towns and Cities Number of
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(OGs): Census of 2001 Census of 2011 Statutory Towns 3799 4041 Census Towns 1362 3894 Urban Agglomerations 384 475 Out Growths 962 981. 2. According to the 2011 Census, there are 7,935 towns in the United States. Since the previous Census, the number of towns has grown by 2,774. Many of these settlements are part of UAs, but the remainder are self-contained. The country's total number of Urban Agglomerations/Towns, which make up the urban frame, is 6166. Urban Agglomerations/Towns Population: 3. The Class I UAs/Towns are home to 264.9 million people, accounting for 70% of the total urban population. The share has risen significantly since the previous Census. Growth has been minimal in the remaining kinds of towns. 4. UAs/Towns with a Population of One Million or More: Of the 468 UAs/Towns in the Class I category, 53 have a population of one million or more. Each of the UAs/Towns has a population of one million or more people. Million Plus is a term used to describe a group of people who have These are the country's largest urban centres, or UAs/Cities i.e., 160.7 million people. These Million Plus UAs/Cities are home to 42.6 percent of the urban population. There are now 18 new UAs/Towns. Since the previous Census, more people have been added to this list. 42.6% of the urban population) live in these Million Plus UAs/Cities.18 new UAs/Towns have been added to this list since the last Census. 5. Mega Cities: There are three very big UAs/Cities with more than 10 million people in the country, known as Mega Cities, among the Million plus UAs/Cities. Greater Mumbai UA (18.4 million), Delhi UA (16.3 million), and Kolkata UA are the three (14.1 million). The Greater Mumbai UA is the country's largest UA, followed by Delhi UA. The UA in Kolkata is significantly lower. v held the second rank in Census 2001 has been replaced by Delhi UA. Similarly Delhi UA (from 52.24 to 26.6 in 2001-2011) and Kolkata UA (from 19.60% to 6.87% in 2001-2011) have also slowed munotes.in
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20 2.10 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CITY AND TOWN The population and topography of a place are the primary factors that distinguish cities and towns. Cities, in simple words, are bigger residential areas than towns. Cities are larger than towns, and as they grow, they may integrate or merge with the surrounding communities. Towns, on the other hand, do not often expand in the same manner that cities do. Cities have a higher population density than villages. As previously said, towns are smaller than cities but larger than villages. Unlike towns, most cities house the majority of a region's administrative duties, i.e., the majority of the region's main administrative offices. Cities are governed by corporate authorities, whereas towns are governed by municipal bodies. In most cases, a mayor leads a city corporation, whereas a chairman leads a municipality. Cities, rather than towns, are where authority is concentrated. Cities, unlike towns, are often well-planned, with enough sanitation, drinking water, roads, and other contemporary conveniences. The earliest settlements were ones where people were no longer farming and instead engaged in various trades and activities. The emergence of cities resulted from the expansion of towns. Though the population of a region determines whether it is classified as a town or city, different nations use different techniques to do so. In the United States, a 'city' is simply a legal word that refers to a self-governing metropolitan region. In other countries, the term may not have the same legal meaning as in the United States, and it is more commonly used to refer to a huge settlement. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of census towns increased from 1362 to 3894, resulting in an unforeseen growth in urbanisation. In the recent decade, the new census towns accounted for over 34% of urban expansion and roughly 69 percent of total Census Towns. Census Towns have gained attention as a result of an unexpected increase in the number of them in the 2011 census. Check Your Progress 1. Discuss Mega cities ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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Towns and Cities 2. Discuss the nature of Social Interaction in city. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 2.11 CONCLUSION In this chapter we learnt about the composition of a town and a city in this chapter. There needs to a minimum of 5,000 people residing in a given place. Out of the five thousand at least 75% of the male labor force needs to be engaged in non-agricultural occupations. We also looked into the importance of Towns and we also learnt about the growth of Census towns. The chapter also dealt with understanding about cities. Cities are home to the majority of essential administrative offices. Cities are ruled by corporations. This chapter also covered the concepts of outgrowths, Urban Agglomerations and also the difference between the towns and cities. 2.12 QUESTIONS 1. Discuss meaning of City and its Nature 2. Write a note on difference between town and city 3. Discuss the concept of Global cities 4. Discuss Outgrowths and Census Towns 2.13 REFERENCES i www.census.gov.in ii https://www.livemint.com/politics/policy/what-drives-india-s-urbanization-1566899353301.html iii Sahu, Manoj & Das, Kailash & Bhuyan, Bibhishana. (2019). Role of Census Towns in Rising Urbanization of India. iv https://www.sipri.org/events/2016/stockholm-security-conference-secure-cities/urbanization-trends 2016 Stockholm Security Conference on Secure Cities v Ali, Ershad. (2020). Urbanisation in India: Causes, Growth, Trends, Patterns, Consequences & Remedial Measures. 10.13140/RG.2.2.19007.05284. munotes.in
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22 3 URBAN, URBANISM, URBANIZATION RURAL-URBAN CONTINUUM Unit Structure : 3.1 Objectives 3.2 Introduction 3.3 Meaning, definitions of Urban Sociology. 3.4 Features of Urban Community 3.5 Scope of Urban Sociology 3.6 Development of Urban Sociology as a field of study in the West. 3.7 Value of Urban Sociology 3.8 Basic Concepts in Urban Sociology 3.8.1 Urban 3.8.2 Urbanism 3.8.3 Urbanization 3.8.4 Rural Urban Continuum 3.9 Summary 3.10 Questions 3.11 References 3.1 OBJECTIVES To introduce Urban Sociology as a specialized discipline of Sociology to students of Sociology. To study the meaning, definitions and scope of Urban Sociology. To know about features and way of urban life. To introduce basic concepts in Urban Sociology. To study urbanization as a process. To bring an awareness about urban facilities and problems. munotes.in
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Rural -Urban Continuum 3.2 INTRODUCTION Urban sociology studies the city. It is mainly confined to the study of urban society and community and urban life in all its aspects. Students of Sociology are interested in the study of Urban Sociology as an important subject. An urban study is important because large number of people in the world are living in cities and facing urban realities. City life has become fast, urgent and civilians are forced to adjust with the given geographical, social and economic conditions. All civilizations of the world began with the development of city-states. For example, Greek city-states, city-states of Italy, Rome, Babylonia etc. Some of the ancient and medieval cities were born on the banks of rivers, such as Patliputra, Banaras, and Ujjain. The world class one cities like London, New York, Colombo, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, Vishakapattanam, Mangalore, Cochin, Tiruvanatpuram were established on sea-shores. Some of the industrial cities like Surat, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Bangalore and Mysore were grown in the interior parts of the country. However, some cities like, London, Berlin, Mumbai and Kolkata were famous for higher education. The urban atmosphere is different from rural atmosphere in all respects. Manufacturing, marketing, banking, financial organizations, corporate sectors, service sector including, transport and communication, road making, real estate, hotel industry are growing rapidly and bringing economic progress. Social services like education, hospitals and health related institutions always striving for the betterment of urban community. Cities are economic backbones and national growth and development depends upon how far the cities have prosperous financial institutions and application of science, knowledge and technology. It is necessary to study problems of urban community, because city is a place of various social and economic problems. There is a public relation and disturbance, a common anomie where various governments are busy in solving problems of urban community. 3.3 MEANING AND DEFINITIONS OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY Sociologists, Anthropologists and students of Sociology, Economics, Politics and Geography are interested in the study of Urban Sociology. Economists, Political Scientists, Town Planners, Ministers and especially, Urban Ministry is keenly interested in the study of urban society, its meaning, features and changing urban life. Urban Sociology is a division of Sociology and all over the world it is studied systematically in colleges and universities. Urbanization is growing and progressing in its own peculiar and interesting way. It is an endless process. Urban community is a non-agricultural community where all people are engaged in non-agricultural occupations. Definition of urban munotes.in
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24 community is rather difficult one. We cannot establish a particular and accurate definition of urban studies, because urban places are different and life is different from rural and tribal communities. Urban Sociology is “a science of city life.” The dictionary meaning of ‘urban’ is ‘city’, which describes the city life. The following are some of the important definitions which clarify the meaning of urban life. According to Louis Mumford, urban society is “a melting pot of various cultures of the world due to railroad, industries and slums.” Louis Wirth, an American Sociologist says that urban society is “a place designed gracefully with different zones with definite purposes.” E.W.Burgess says that there is “industrialization, modernization, and establishment of bureaucracy, combined with business organizations, skyscrapers, theatres, hotels, abnormal growth of slums and surviving with numerous social problems.” According to Prof. Quinn, urban community is “a non-agricultural community.” E.Bergel defined “Urban Sociology deals with the impact of the city life on social actions, social relationships, social institutions and the type of civilization, derived from and based on urban mode of living.” Max Weber, the German sociologist in his book ‘The City’, defined Urban Sociology” as a whole system characterized by complex order of social actions, social relations and social institutions. It has following features – a market, a fortification, a complicated legal system, including a court and an elected body of administration.” Urban Sociology is a branch of sociology which studies the influence of urban environment on man, his actions, relationships, institutions and modes of thinking, acting, behaving with others. The urban social milieu, the physical environment, the conditions that follow the socio-cultural and physical surroundings, the circumstances that are incumbent and the consequences that occur are all Foci of attention of urban sociology. The social, economic and technological forces that operate through human social milieu play determinant part in individual, familial and social life of an urban person as his roles and statuses undergo tremendous transformations affecting in turn the of his entire life. The particular interest in urban life among sociologist may be thought of as a concomitant of the industrial urban revolutions which commenced during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and England. The contributions of Saint-Simon, Comte, Tonnies, Durkheim, Simmel and Max Weber were in direct response to societal transformations associated with industrial urban revolutions. munotes.in
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Rural -Urban Continuum Urban Sociology is a keen, interesting and practical subject which deals with city life, specialization of the study of complex human situations, deals with city organization and disorganization, cultural changes, overall development of civilization, economic development, political and social changes. It is a place exactly different and antithetical with rural community. The urban family life is different from village family life, celebration of marriage; casteism, etc are losing their importance. Divorces are found as men and women enjoy more social and economic independence. There are many job opportunities in urban community. Urban community attracts and pulls large number of rural people. Rural poverty pushes people and urban richness pulls them to settle down permanently in cities. So there is a conglomeration (assembly) of people in one particular place and space becomes costly, resulting into mushroom growth of slums. Modern cities are not away from slums, pipelines, and traffic jam, breakdown of machineries, strikes, hartal, alienation, loneliness, frustration and increasing number of social crimes and economic offences. The birth and growth of towns and cities in the modern world ultimately depends on the standard of living and application of science and technology to daily way of life, and missing traditions, morality, simplicity and humility in life. A village becomes a big village and big village into a town, a town into a taluka place, a district known as a big city, changed into metropolitan, mega-city, and cosmopolitan city. Within a period of ten-fifteen years, all modern world cities have grown abnormally. High population, land grabbing (snatching), infringement and encroachment, increasing number of crimes, lack of law and order, loose moral atmosphere, independence to men, women and children responsible to measure and understand the city of its size and development not only geographically, but also ethically, socially and aesthetically. Urban Sociology borrows a lot from history and other social sciences economics social psychology, political science, anthropology, government, public administration, business management, demography, social work, law etc. it deals with problems arising in context of public housing and accommodation, planning and zoning, building codes, slums, sanitation, sewers, garbage disposal, water supply, meter connections, traffic regulation, school administration, seaports, airports, city courts fire stations etc. the urban sociologists has to take data from jurisprudence criminology, medicine, hygiene and from architects, town planners, engineers, builder, auto dealers, ministers, educators, businessmen, commercial and other recreates. All these sorts of data are to be collected on specific scientific line keeping with the objectivity criteria in focus so as to arriving at certain inference could be feasible and interpretation and analysis of data brought under purview of scientific objectivity. munotes.in
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26 Check your progress – Q.1. Define urban sociology. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 3.4 FEATURES OF URBAN COMMUNITY Pitirim Sorokin and Zimmerman have suggested the following features which give us more meaning of urban community. 1) Heterogeneity : Urban community is a heterogeneous group, where people belong to different race, religion, language, caste and creed. For example, in a city like Mumbai, people from different states, of different cultural groups live and they are totally dissimilar. In London, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangla Deshis have their own colonies. 2. Secondary relations : The urban community is characterized by secondary relations People are indifferent towards one another. Face-to-face, friendly or intimate relations may not be observed among people. 3. Voluntary Associations : All people in city are doing non- agricultural jobs. They are necessarily members of many voluntary associations. According to standard of living, they form their own residential groups and needful institutions and associations. 4. Social Mobility : In urban society, social status is not traditional but based on the economic status, educational standard and talent. In other words, individual intelligence and talent brings progress and hereditary is not important. 5. Individual Freedom : In urban community, men and women have more independence. People are more individualistic in their attitudes. The city dweller is more selective in his choice and more individualistic in his preferences. He is guided by his own whims and fancies. 6. Occupations : All people are engaged in non-agricultural jobs, such as business, marketing, office, police, court, industry and factory, transport communication, hospitals and educational institutions, theatre, share market etc. So they are always far away from nature and simple life. munotes.in
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Rural -Urban Continuum 7. Secondary Control : In urban community individual behavior is not controlled by family, religion and neighborhood. It is controlled by secondary organizations, such as, government, police, court etc. 8. Lack of Community Feeling : There is a lack of community feeling, feeling of oneness, unity and integrity of the family, neighborhood in the city. In urban community, people are busy in their individual achievements, so naturally they neglect feeling of oneness and unity with the city. 9. Social Disorganization : Urban community has number of institutions and associations. They are working independently. So there is always struggle, conflict and competition. Thus social disorganization is seen and felt. 10. Unstable Family : Family is no longer the economic, educational, protective, recreational and effective unit. Family has lost much of its control over its individual members. Many of the traditional functions of the family are transferred to the external agencies. It is said that the urban family is not firmly organized. Check your progress Q.1. Explain the features of urban community. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 3.5 SCOPE OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY Urban studies as a distinct branch of sociology presents in – depth, study of the impact of city on man’s social actions, social relationships, social institutions and types of civilizations which are based on urban modes of living. It is a spatial study of the relationship between man and his environment wherein man becomes the conditioning factor over environment. Urban studies is the specialized study of city life and the problems, associated with the growth of urban areas. Urban studies deal with the whole complex situation that make up urban life. It studies all aspects of city life such as it’s land area, population structure composition, settlement pattern, clusters of population, social organization etc. Urban studies is a specialized discipline of sociology which deals with social anatomy of population and the problems associated with urban growth. Urban problems occupy the major attention of urban munotes.in
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28 sociologists today because of its complexity and its craving for an immediate solution. Urban studies explains interaction between the urban environment and the development of human personality. It also studies the structure of family, role of family and the permanent and changing elements of a family and also factors responsible for family disorganization. Urban studies examines class structure and class struggle in urban societies. It also studies such features of social disorganization as crimes, prostitution, beggary, unemployment, disease, pollution, slums, recreation centers, bars, clubs and the night life. In urban sociology, we also study the factors and causes of social and personal disorganization and the remedies thereof. It also undertakes study of disharmony between labour and management and the ways and means of bringing about the harmony and peaceful constructive relations. Urban studies presents not only the facts of urban life, but also evaluates the facts in order to understand their causes and means of improvement. Check your progress – Q.1. Discuss the Scope of Urban Sociology. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 3.6 DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY AS A FIELD OF STUDY IN THE WEST : The field of urban sociology was recognized within the formal discipline sociology in United States in the late 19th century. Until 1921, no effort to make it a discipline came down. A systematic discipline of urban sociology came into being in the 20th century only. Much intensive work has been done in the specialized field of urban sociology. Many books have appeared on the classification of towns and cities, development of towns, urban environment, social disorganization in cities, demographic trends, family, marriage, divorce etc. Urban sociology as we see it today began at the University of Chicago in 1928. The first department of sociology was established in 1892. leading sociologists like William. I Thomas, William Ogburn contributed to the study of city. Later sociologists like Ernest. W.Burgess and Louis Wirth also contributed to the Chicago school. The Chicago school treated the city as a natural phenomenon subject to a set of natural processes, for e.g. segregation is a natural process. munotes.in
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Rural -Urban Continuum Another American thinker W.E.B. Dubois was committed to make a scientific approach to special problems about the geographical distribution of blacks, their occupation, daily life, their homes and organizations and above all their relation with their fellow white citizens to understand their place in the city’s sociological structure. In 1907, a charitable institution provided support for research to collect information on social conditions in the modern metropolis. A survey was conducted by the institution in Pittsburgh to find out working and living conditions of workers in industries and factories. In 1929, Zorbaugh in the his ‘Gold Coast and the slum’ made a study of ethnographic literatures to describe the social life of one of Chicago’s natural areas. In the same year, 1929, Shaw published a book on juvenile delinquency and crime in urban society. Further, sociologists in Europe and USA developed several new thories which explained modern industrial society and its social relationships. Some of these modern European theoriststs included Tonnies, Durkheim, Simmel and Weber. Two emerging theories-Gemeinschaft and Gesselschaft and Folk-Urban continuum originated in the Chicago school. In folk-urban continuum, Robert Redfield, the Chicago school anthropologist explained a modern contrast between the ways of people in small and large communities. Special mention may also be made of intensive research into the mechanisms of social welfare, religion, cultural and educational institutions in cities, town planning and rehabilitation. Check your progress – Q.1 Discuss the development of urban sociology as a field of study in the West. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 3.7 VALUE OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY The metropolises of today in advanced countries are standard bearers of revolutionary changes in social, political economic and cultural movements. The process of urbanization has been greatly hastened in advanced countries due to industrialization and technological change. That urbanization has also given rise to a number of economic, social and cultural problems. As a result of urbanization, there is a change in personal tendencies and trends, the norms and standards of marriage and family have undergone sea-change and there has been considerable rise in corruption and munotes.in
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30 disorganization. It has also given rise to grave problems of health, psychological as well as physical. In order to understand and remedy this sorry state of affairs, we heed a systematic study. And as the problems are grave and crucial, governments are closely attentive to these. It is in this connection that the need of urban sociology is felt. An urban sociologist is a social doctor or engineer and like doctors and engineers, he is concerned with organization and disorganization of urban society. Therefore, without his services urban problems can not be effectively solved. That is the way services of urban sociologists are in high demand. In order to reconstruct town, the services of urban sociologists are indispensable. Check your progress Q.1. Explain the Value of urban sociology. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 3.8 BASIC CONCEPTS IN URBAN SOCIOLOGY. Let us now look at a few basic concepts related to urban sociology 3.8.1 Urban :- The word ‘Urban’ has been defined in the Oxford Dictionary as pertaining to city or town life. The term urban is derived from the latin word ‘urbs’ meanng a ‘city’. The concept of urban is almost universally understood to mean a large and densely settled population engaged primarily in non-agricultural economic pursuits. In actual practices, the designation of localities by various countries as urban or rural varies widely and it is often dependent upon administrative, political, cultural and historical, as well as upon demographic or economic considerations. The Indian Census definition of urban areas basically hinges on two different aspects- (a) Existence of a local self – government (b) Fulfilment of the criteria of size, density and occupational diversification. munotes.in
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Rural -Urban Continuum Census of India has adopted the following five criteria to define any place as a city. (1) Size of population – 5,000 or above (2) Density – 1,000/ sq. mile and above (3) Occupation – more than 75% of the inhabitants must be occupied in non- agricultural activities. (4) Political administration – The urban area to be so classified must be governed by municipality. (5) Pronounced urban characteristics – like market, water supply, road, electricity, transport and communication with standardized housing, banks, hospitals, courts and educational institutions. (6) Louis Wirth has given a sociological definition of city “as a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals.” This points to certain characteristics of city i.e. relatively larger and dense population which again gives rise to another feature i.e. heterogeneity among the dwellers. Sombart defined city “as a place which becomes so large that people do not know each other.” Bergel defined a city “ as a settlement where the majority of the occupants are engaged in other than agricultural activities”. He has pointed that market as a system of exchange is one of the basic feature of non-agricultural activity without which city dwellers would have nothing to eat. Sorokin and Zimmerman and others hold that a proper definition of the city includes a number of qualities or characteristics combined together. They further add that the characteristics of urban areas are different from the characteristics of rural areas. These difference are in the following spheres – (a) Occupation (b) Environment (c) Size of community (d) Density of population (e) Heterogeneity or homogeneity of population. (f) Social differentiation and stratification (g) Mobility (h) System of interaction (i.e. number and type of contacts). munotes.in
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32 We shall call a city any settlement where the occupants are engaged in other than agricultural activity. We shall call a community urban if the activities are centered around a market, for a market is essential for non-agricultural activities as without exchange of goods, the urban dweller will not be able to survive. According to Prof R.N.Morris, two aspects of city are important. 1) Size 2) Density of population 1) Size: Size of the city is an important aspect of city. City’s growth and development depends upon its size. If the city is small, its works, structure, social relations differ compared to a larger city. In the bigger city like Mumbai the relations are impersonal, superficial. Persons do not know each other as they play some roles. Family affinity is missing in their behaviour. The city dwellers treat social relations as instruments to serve his purposes. Louis Wirth calls it as ‘a rational sophisticated manner’. The city man becomes more calculative, less social and spontaneous, less participative and more frustrated. In most of the modern cities, division of labour is sharp edged. Occupations define urbanization. Urbanization becomes more selfish and artificial with various occupations where people are alienated and doing not for others but for their own ends. People become goal oriented. So Wirth says that the ‘corporation has no soul’. Urbanization is showing different type of social control compared to rural and tribal community. Police, court, government and many other originations control behavior and manners of people. Peoples’ religion, ethics worshipping are regularized with festivals and the amount of donation they pay. Urbanization shows us that there is a specialization of marketing and its products. Cities serve and fulfill various demands like consumer goods, clothes, medicines, and educational facilities, national and international requirements. City is imbalanced and does not get stability and equilibrium due to extreme specialization and interdependence. Modern cities do not regulate systematic urbanization because houses, markets, slums, roads and transport grow abnormally. Governments fail to regularize urban way of life. 2) Density of population: City is a place of specialization. There is a high concentration of population in a particular place. There are many reasons for the growth of city. It may be industrial development, marketing, public administration etc. Density of population is related to heterogeneity. The quality of life and behavior of people is diverse and always changing. munotes.in
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Rural -Urban Continuum Check your progress – Q.1. Explain the meaning of the concept ‘urban.’ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 3.8.2 Urbanism – This is the peculiar mental approach or mode of living in urban areas. Urbanization is at times synonymously used with urbanism. Louis Wirth used this term to denote distinct ways of living, typically associated with city residence. Urbanism is the consequence of living in urban areas. It is a peculiar mode of living, a condition or set of circumstances. Following Louis Wirth, urbanism is now regarded as “a way of life.” Wirth outlines a limited number of identifying characteristics of city. He pointed high heterogeneity, size and density as causative factors which bring change in the behaviour and kind of relationships among the city dwellers. For him, as the population increases, people become strangers to each other and develop secondary relationships. They also compete with one another for space and money. Number becomes most important for leadership and recognition in the city. ‘urbanism’ primarily as mode of living is characterized by the specific attitude of people, crowd and social considerations of urban society. People develop rationality and high sophistication in their day-to-day relationships with others. Louis Wirth also pointed ‘urbanism’ as peculiar approach of urban people. While adjusting to the urban crowd and environment, people become quick in response. Dr Radhakamal Mukherjee an eminent Indian sociologist describes various facets of urbanism. They are as follows. 1. Ecologically speaking, urbanism has a demographic, occupational and mechanical – technological base. People concentrate thickly on a particular place of specialization with various occupations, which are nurtured by non-agricultural organizations like industries, factories, banks, markets, where people have chances to earn money, daily or monthly. 2. Biologically speaking, men-women ratio is disturbed and imbalanced. Since men migrate from villages leaving behind their wife and children and ancestral house and land, women are less in munotes.in
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34 cities. So there are social and biological problems like prostitution, rape, sexual harassment etc. 3. Sociologically speaking, relations are impersonal, superficial and artificial. Most of the relations are contractual, formal and deliberate. People are more mobile and change their status very fast. 4. Psychologically speaking, money and external status symbols dominate attitudes and behavior of urban people. They are concerned with external status symbols and do not worry about internal aspects or qualities of persons. For example, a doctor, a lawyer, a judge, a professor, a manager, an officer etc. poster their status and economic well-being through educational qualification and earning. They are internally disturbed, facing problems like frustration, desertion, loneliness. In conclusion, modern cities like London, Tokyo, Kolkata, Mumbai, exhibit different way of life and they are the best places to study urbanism. Apart from these mega cities, small cities and towns are growing and influenced by fast changes in transport and communication, educational facilities, banking system and marketing federation. However, they are growing and urbanism is constantly changing. Check your progress – Q.1. Explain the meaning of the concept “Urbanism.” ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 3.8.3 Urbanization :- Urbanization refers to the level of population concentration in an urban area. Urbanization is the process of movement of population from non-urban to urban areas. Urbanization is a dynamic process which transform rural into urban areas. W.S. Thompson calls urbanization as “movement of people from communities concerned chiefly with agriculture to other communities, generally larger whose activities are primarily centered in government, trade, manufacture or allied interests.” Geruson and Mc Grath have defined the term “urbanizations as the concentration of population through movement and redistribution.” Urbanization also refers to a way of life peculiar to agglomerations of heterogeneous population. It also means a well developed munotes.in
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Urban, Urbanism,
Urbanization ,
Rural -Urban Continuum agglomeration with other occupations besides industry and it exhibits a well planned pattern of habitat. Urbanization, in demographic sense, is an increase in the population of urban areas (U) compared to the total population (T) over a period of time as Ashish Bose has mentioned. As long as U/T increases, there is urbanization. Urbanization is a culture bound phenomenon. It leads to change in all aspects of life. Politically, it means change over to democratic or bureaucratic set up from rural panchayat system. Sometimes a city is a capital, a centre of planning and development, an industrial centre or a place where most of the facilities are available. Urbanization affects the status of people. It leads to change in occupation from land bound work to technical industrial jobs. Urbanization also leads to movement from rural traditional ways of living to modern ways of behaviour. Economically, urbanization provides new economic opportunities for doing all modern jobs. This also leads to development of infrastructure facilities and people enjoy electricity, transport, higher education, communication, better health and food facilities. Urbanization can also be described as a process of change from prominence of primary relations in close compact dwellings to those of secondary relations in dispersed distant neighbourhood. Social norms and values also change simultaneously. People are exposed to modern ideas and ideals, they become more rational and feel free. Living in cities make them traffic conscious and time bound. Urbanization as a process shows the changing pattern of life of people. It is a movement of people and resources for the satisfaction of different needs of city dwellers. Noting is grown in the city, so all food grain, vegetables and fruits come from different rural communities. Urban place is a manufacturing place. So large number of people come from outside. A town grows into a city, a city into a metro and mega city, The following diagram help to know about urbanization 20000 and above Upto one lakh and above
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36 Psychologically, urbanization denotes a change in behaviour. People while adjusting to the urban environment change their habits and customs. They also lose faith in rituals and ceremonies Urbanization also indicates economic growth. As more people move to cities, more people are involved in industrial processes. Thus, if a country is more urbanized, it signifies better opportunities for people in cities in all respects. Urbanization is directly related to economic development. Industries, technological advance, mechanization take place in cities. Production or manufacturing develop in urban areas which give employment to many people. As cities grow, industrial development also takes place. Thus urbanization and industrialization occur together often hand in hand. But if a country is to progress in the economic sense – to raise the standard of living of its people and to have a surplus available for capital investment it must increase its agricultural and industrial production faster than it increases its population. Check your progress :– Q.1. Explain the meaning of the concept “Urbanization.” ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________
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Rural -Urban Continuum 3.8.4 Rural Urban Continuum A continuum is a continuous line. The phrase "continuity from the village to the city" refers to the continuity of the village in the city. The hamlet is at one end of this continuum, and the city is at the other. These two social structures are always interacting with one another. Because of this, villagers exhibit the profound effects of city living on them, and some aspects of rural culture are incorporated into urban culture. The continuum also demonstrates that urbanisation is taking place from rural areas. Towns and cities develop from villages over time. It was often believed in sociological research that there was a distinct disparity between urban and rural societies. Later, a large number of sociologists began to argue that a simple rural-urban dichotomy of population is insufficient. It has gradually become apparent that this dichotomy is inadequate and oversimplified. Urban and rural areas come in varying degrees. The idea of the folk, rural, and urban continuum was greatly advanced by Robert Redfield in 1930. He has created a continuum ranging from little rural settlements to enormous urban centres. Urbanization reflects a population that is more secular, individualistic, and labor-divided. A more straightforward interpretation of the idea of a rural-urban continuum is continuity in rural and urban social organisation. Rural life has been significantly impacted by the rapid urbanisation process and the emergence of new, technologically advanced industries in rural areas close to metropolitan centres. Modern industrial features have become far less prevalent, and the contrasts between the two are no longer discernible. Thus, it has been challenging to draw a line between rural and urban cultures due to unseen cultural borders. As a result, the peripheral areas exhibit an amalgamation and persistence of the cultural characteristics of both communities. The growth of transportation and road communication in India over the past three decades has quickly and efficiently connected rural villages, isolated tribal areas, and urban centres. The population of rural areas have been drawn to new professions and cutting-edge educational facilities. Migration from rural to urban has therefore occurred. As a result, there is less distance between cities, villages, and tribal communities. The tribal regions in the distance exhibit elements of urban, tribal, and rural culture. Cities may display combinations and amalgamations of these cultural elements as a result of migration from tribal-rural areas to urban areas. It is not appropriate to compare rural and urban societies in terms of their contrasts. They are not completely at odds with one another. They are components of one continuum. In India, a lot of literature about the transition between rural and urban society was published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With the release of "Urbanism as a way of life" by Lewis Wirth in 1938, the debate over the rural-urban continuum was ignited. munotes.in
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38 3.9 SUMMARY Urban sociology studies the city. It is mainly confined to the study of urban society and community and urban life in all its aspects. It is a shocking matter to know that, all world people are interested to live in cities. Rural society is vanishing. In U.S. and Europe all places are urbanized. In Asia and Africa large society remained rural, but in due course rapidly it is changing into urban. Urban place is charming, provide life necessities urgently, economic growth and political consciousness, media and educational provisions are immediately met with. Further in a nutshell, one can agree that cities have many social problems, like robbery, kidnapping, rape, murder, gambling, prostitution, and at the other side unemployment, beggary, housing problem, restlessness, loose morality, deprive of equality and fraternity. Urbanization is a process continuously adding new ideas, ideologies, and physical appearance of cities changing. Terrorism, smuggling at international level and many burning problems are disturbing the city life. However, city is an important place for all. 3.10 QUESTION PATTERN Answer the following questions: (Essay type Questions) Q.1 Define Urban Sociology and explain its scope. Q.2 Discuss the development of Urban Sociology in the West. Q.3 Explain the following Concepts :- (a) Urban. (b) Urbanism. (c) Urbanization. 3.11 REFERENCES 1) Urban Sociology – Prof Nandini Agarwal 2) Urban Sociology – Prof Quinn 3) Urban Sociology – Prof E.E. Bergel 4) Society – Prof Kingesly Davis 5) Urbanization and – Prof Ramachandran Urban Systems in India 6) A Reader in Urban – M.S.A. Rao, Bhat & Kadekar Sociology munotes.in
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39 4 TRADITIONAL THEORIES LOUIS WIRTH AND GEORGE SIMMEL Unit Structure : 4.0 Objective 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Traditional Theories 4.3 Louis Wirth 4.4 Georg Simmel 4.5 Summary 4.6 Question 4.7 Reference 4.0 OBJECTIVE To understand the contribution of Louis Wirth to Urban Sociology To understand Simmel’s work on the concept of Metropolis 4.1 INTRODUCTION Urban sociology is the study of how people live and work together in cities. It tries to learn about the structures, processes, changes, and problems of cities, as well as to help with planning and making policy. Around the beginning of the 20th century, urban sociology emerged as a separate branch of the sociology field. Even though cities have been around since the beginning of time, the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities caused social changes that led social scientists to study cities. After the Industrial Revolution, sociologists like Max Weber and George Simmel started to look at how fast cities were growing and how that made people feel socially isolated and anonymous. 4.2 TRADITIONAL THEORIES The work of sociologists like Durkheim, Karl Marx, George Simmel, Max Weber, and others has led to some of the most important theories in urban sociology. Simmel thought that the cities' money-based economies were bad for social life. Weber talked about how mass urbanisation made it impossible for people to take part in politics. Marx and Engels both said that capitalism's effects on cities were bad. They thought that putting a lot of workers in one place and making them miserable was a necessary step in making a revolutionary force. For them, poverty and loss of material goods munotes.in
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40 were one part of urbanisation, but the loss of the social centre of the traditional community and its replacement by the utilitarian world of the city was just as important. Communism needs urbanism for both its ideas and its actions. Concerning the origin and growth of cities, the following questions arise: 1) How do cities emerge? 2) How do they expand and grow? 3) What are the functions of the cities? 4) What causes the changes in the functions? To answer these questions and gain a deeper understanding of urban sociology, we must examine various theories of urban development. Louis Wirth and Georg Simmel were two of the most influential urban sociology researchers and contributors. 4.3 LOUIS WIRTH Urbanism Urbanism is the concept that encompasses all characteristics associated with urbanisation and the urban lifestyle. Louis Wirth conceived of the concept. Urbanism is a developing concept in the same way that the urban life pattern is a developing and ever-changing phenomenon. This term was coined by Louis Wirth to describe distinct ways of life typically associated with urban living. Urbanism is a result of residing in urban areas. It is a unique lifestyle, condition, or set of circumstances. As a result of Louis Wirth, urbanism is now considered a "way of life." Wirth lists a few distinguishing characteristics of the city. i) Size ii) Density iii) Heterogenity Population Size: Since Aristotle's time, it has been recognised that exceeding a certain number of inhabitants in a settlement has an effect on the relationship between people and habitat. It encourages competition for scarce resources and decreases the intimacy of relationships while increasing the number of contacts and acquaintances. Bonds of solidarity are replaced by competition and formal control mechanisms. Personal and intimate contact is limited. Social interactions in cities are impersonal and formal. The character of an impersonal market as a place of exchange and distribution of goods and services is typically urban. Density: An increase in population size over a limited area increases density. As density increases, differentiation and specialisation occur as a necessary condition for survival. While physical contacts are closer in densely populated areas, social contacts are further away. Increased population size and density are unavoidable by products of urbanisation. munotes.in
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George Simmel Density increases diversity. The place of work and the place of residence often become separated. Tensions and frustration are all too common. Deviance and disorganisation become commonplace. Heterogeneity: Another aspect of urbanisation is heterogeneity, as people from various cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds live in cities. Social interaction among different personality types weakens caste rigidity and complicates class structure. Contact and mixing of various cultural patterns in an urban agglomeration inevitably leads to assimilation and the formation of a sort of common mass culture. This explains the urban population's sophistication and cosmopolitanism. Louis Wirth believed that the larger, denser, and more diverse a population's lifestyle, the more urbanised it would be. In his opinion, the city's heterogeneity, large size, high density, and secular cosmopolitan atmosphere contributed to people's alienation rather than providing an opportunity for a richer life. Rapid social change, increased social differentiation, greater social mobility, higher levels of education and income, emphasis on material possessions and individualism, impersonality of relationships and a decline in intimate communication, and an increase in formal social controls On the basis of the three variables—number, density of settlement, and degree of heterogeneity of the urban population—it is possible to explain the characteristics of urban life and account for the differences between cities of various sizes and types. Urbanism as a way of life can be studied empirically from three interconnected angles: (1) as a physical structure composed of a population base, technology, and ecological order; (2) as a social organisation system characterised by a distinct social structure, a set of social institutions, and a distinct pattern of social relationships and interactions (3) as a set of attitudes and ideas, as well as a constellation of personalities engaging in typical forms of collective behaviour and subject to typical social control mechanisms. Louis Wirth listed the following four qualities of urbanism: Transiency : Urban residents tend to forget their old acquaintances and form relationships with new people, so their relationships with others only last for a short time. He doesn't feel particularly attached to his neighbours, so he is okay leaving them. Superficiality: An urban person interacts with a small number of people, and his relationships with them are formal and impersonal. People interact with each other in very distinct roles. For the fulfilment of their basic needs, they are more reliant on other people. munotes.in
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42 Annonymity: Urban residents don't get to know one another very well. There is a lack of the kind of personal mutual acquaintance that is typically present in a neighbourhood. Individualism: People place a greater emphasis on their personal interests. According to Wirth, urbanism's main characteristics are (1) The relatively weak bonds between co-residents are related to growth and diversity. Thus, formal social control techniques take the place of accepted custom. (2) As people become more purposeful, relationships start to resemble contracts. (3) Treating social relations as a means to an end is associated with a highly developed division of labour. People only become focused on their goals when The relationships, especially those that are contractual, are governed by written and clearly defined ethics and rules. (4) The complex division of labour grows as the market does. Extreme specialisation and interdependence are linked to an unstable equilibrium in the city because people are constantly shifting positions in order to advance their careers. (5) As the city expands, decision-making and the dissemination of information and opinions increasingly rely on indirect communication. (6) Greater differentiation and specialisation tend to be the results as population density rises. (7) As land prices rise, only those who can profit the most from it can afford to buy it. (8) The absence of strong emotional and sentimental bonds among coworkers and roommates promotes rivalry and mutual exploitation rather than cooperation. (9) Simple class distinctions are challenged by interactions between individuals with different roles and personalities. The class hierarchy is less distinct, and a person's place within it might be somewhat erratic. Criticism of Wirth's Urbanism Theory The following draw criticism from Wirth's theory: ● Although Wirth sought generalisations that applied to all cities, some of his deductions, if they apply at all, only apply to industrial cities. munotes.in
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George Simmel ● It is also disputed Wirth's assertion that interpersonal connections in rural societies are more often primary than in urban ones. ● Wirth has placed adequate emphasis on urban disarray and secularisation. Numerous studies, however, demonstrate that the breakdown of social and moral order is not always a side effect of urbanisation. 4.4 GEORG SIMMEL Simmel is not as influential in sociology as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, or even Parsons, but a number of early American sociologists studied with or were influenced by Simmel. This was especially true of those who developed the symbolic interaction approach, including writers from the Chicago school, a tradition that dominated early twentieth-century American sociology prior to Parsons. Georg Simmel (1858–1918, Germany) was born in Berlin and earned his doctorate degree there in 1881. He was marginalised in the German academic system due to his Jewish ancestry. Simmel did not obtain a regular academic position until 1914, and this position was far from Berlin in Strasbourg. Despite these difficulties, he wrote extensively about the nature of association, culture, social structure, the city, and the economy. His works were read by Durkheim and Weber, and he made significant contributions to sociology and the intellectual life of Europe at the turn of this century. The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) is one of his most well-known works, and The Philosophy of Money is his most well-known book (1907). Simmel's ideas greatly influenced the Marxist scholar Georg Lukacs (1885–1971), and Simmel's writings on the city and on money are currently employed by contemporary sociologists. Hegel and Kant influenced Simmel, who combines the ideas of all three major classical philosophers. When Simmel discusses social structures, the city, money, and contemporary society, his analysis resembles those of Durkheim (problem of the individual and society), Weber (effects of rationalisation), and Marx (alienation). Simmel believed that society was an association of free individuals and that it could not be studied in the same way as the physical world; therefore, sociology is more than the discovery of natural laws that govern human interaction. "According to Simmel, society is comprised of the interactions between and among individuals, and the sociologist should study the patterns and forms of these associations as opposed to searching for social laws." (Farganis, p. 133). This emphasis on social interaction at the level of the individual and small group, as well as the view that the study of these interactions is the primary task of sociology, distinguishes Simmel's approach from that of the classical writers, notably Marx and Durkheim. Simmel's writings are of contemporary interest due to his attempt to combine the analysis of individual action with the structural approach. munotes.in
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44 Simmel began his research by observing the smallest social interactions and attempting to determine how larger-scale institutions arose from them. As a result, he frequently observed phenomena that other theorists overlooked. For instance, Simmel observed that the number of parties involved in an interaction can influence its nature. The interaction between two people, a dyad, will be very different from that which is possible in a triad relationship. (Farganis, p. 133) The Metropolis and Mental Life Simmel gave consideration to the value of urban life and concentrated on urbanism rather than urbanisation. In his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," he discusses his opinions on city living with a stronger emphasis on social psychology. Simmel made an effort to comprehend how urban environments impacted how people thought and acted. According to him, the effects of size, differentiation, and rationality on social relationships are the most overtly apparent and felt. His essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," heavily emphasises these three factors. Size: According to Simmel, the metropolis' size is important. Larger social circles improve the range of personal freedom while degrading the quality of interpersonal connections. Differentiation: Due to the highest economic division of labour occurring in cities, the effects of differentiation are most noticeable there. This stark differentiation is a result of size. According to Simmel, only sizable human groups can create and sustain a wide range of services. Rationality: According to Simmel, "The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy." Metropolitan rationality and intellectualism are both fueled by and expressed through money. Cities are led not by affection and emotion but by logic and reason. Simmel contends that urban living permanently alters one's mental state. He doesn't say that these changes are bad, just that socialisation is subject to structural forces that are particularly potent in cities. George Simmel, who has a negative view of urban development, chose to concentrate on urbanism rather than urbanisation. The person adopts a blasé attitude that is detached from social interactions and responds more rationally than emotionally. It is a saturation-related inability to respond to novel sensations that is reinforced by the capitalist system. In his analysis of the Philosophy of Money, Simmel claims that the use of money encourages the kind of logical deliberation that characterises contemporary societies. Personal connections are replaced by impersonal, purpose-driven relationships when money is involved. In addition to serving economic purposes, it represents and personifies the impersonality, calculation, and rationalism of modern life. All values, regardless of their uniqueness, come to have money as their common denominator. Even though urban life fosters individual freedom, it also breeds more subjectivism and individualism. munotes.in
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George Simmel 4.5 SUMMARY Urban sociology is the study of how people live and work in cities. It tries to learn about the structures, processes, changes, and problems of cities. Louis Wirth and Georg Simmel were two of the most influential urban sociologists. They studied how fast cities were growing and how that made people feel socially isolated and anonymous. He identified three variables which determine the characteristics of urban life. Louis Wirth defined urbanism as a way of life in which people interact with each other in very different and impersonal ways. Georg Simmel (1858–1918, Germany) wrote extensively about the nature of association, culture, social structure, the city, and the economy. Wirth has placed adequate emphasis on urban disarray and secularisation. Numerous studies show that the breakdown of social and moral order is not always a side effect of urbanisation. Simmel's writings are of contemporary interest due to his attempt to combine the analysis of individual action with the structural approach. According to Simmel, the effects of size, differentiation, and rationality on social relationships are the most overtly apparent and felt. The Metropolis and Mental Life heavily emphasises these three factors. George Simmel argues that living in a metropolis permanently alters one's mental state. The person adopts a blasé attitude and responds more rationally than emotionally. Simmel claims that the use of money encourages the kind of logical deliberation that characterises contemporary societies. 4.6 QUESTION 1. Give a thorough explanation of Wirth's impact on urban sociology. 2. Write a brief essay on George Simmel's perspectives on urbanisation. 4.7 REFERENCE ● Ashley, David and D. M. Orenstein, Sociological Theory: Classical Statements (Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1990), second edition. ● Farganis, J., Readings in Social Theory: the Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1993) ● Frisby, David, Georg Simmel (Ellis Horwood, Chichester and Tavistock, London, 1984), Key Sociologists Series. HM 22 G3S482 1984. ● Frisby, David, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel's Social Theory (London, Routledge, 1992). HM 22 G3 S4828. munotes.in
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46 ● Frisby, David, Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel's Social Theory (London, Routledge, 1992). Second edition. HM 22 G3 S483. ● Knapp, P., One World -- Many Worlds: Contemporary Sociological Theory (Harper-Collins, New York, 1994). ● Ritzer, George, Sociological Theory (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1992), third edition. ● Simmel, Georg, The Philosophy of Money (Routledge, London, 1990), second edition. HG 221 S5913 1990. ● Wolff, Kurt, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1950). HM 57 S482 munotes.in
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47 5 ERNEST BURGESS AND HOMER HOYT Unit Structure : 5.0 Objectives 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Ernest Burgess 5.3 Concentric Circle Theory 5.3.1 Central Business District 5.3.2 The Zone in Transition 5.3.3 The Zone of independent workingmen’s homes 5.3.4 Residential Zone 5.3.5 The Commuter’s Zone 5.4 Homer Hoyt 5.5 Sectoral Model 5.5.1 Components of Hoyt Model 5.5.2 The Importance of Hoyt Model's 5.5.3 Limitations of the Sector Model 5.5.4 Burgess and Homer Hoyt Comparison 1.6 Summary 1.7 Questions 1.8 References 5.0 OBJECTIVES 1. To understand about Ernest Burgess Contribution and his theory 2. To learn about Homer Hoyt and his theory of Sector Model. 5.1 INTRODUCTION Early civilizations of the globe, such as the Indus (Mohenjodaro, Harrappa), Tigris - Eupharates (Lagas Ur, Uruk), Nile (Memphis, Thebes) and Hwang Ho, all arose along river valleys (Chen-Chan An Yang). Changes in technology and human needs influenced the early development of urban communities. Trade and commercial activity, as well as established agriculture, were important facilitators; in the formation of a city today. munotes.in
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48 Cities are thought to be places where marketplaces, governance, religious, and cultural centers are located. Cities have changed over time and vary greatly in terms of their different features and traits. Ancient culture had a distinct understanding of city than mediaeval and modern society. The modern cities are uneven in appearance and dynamic in naturei. The modern city is influenced by industrialization, urbanization, migration, population growth, urban growth etc. There are several scholars who are trying to understand and document this growth of cities. Two such authors are Ernest Burgess and Homer Hoyt. The unique aspect about these theories is that it can be applied to some extent in the present cities even today. For a better understanding, diagrammatic representations are made wherever necessary. Let us first understand the contribution of Ernest Burgess. 5.2 ERNEST BURGESS Ernest Watson Burgess was an American sociologist. He was born on May 16, 1886 in Tilbury, Ontario, Canada, and died on December 27, 1966 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Burgess earned his B.A. from Kingfisher College (Oklahoma) in 1908 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1910. (1913). Before commencing a lengthy career at the University of Chicago (1916–66), where he became professor emeritus in 1951, he taught at the Universities of Toledo (Ohio) and Kansas, as well as at Ohio State University. Burgess' scientific investigation into the structure of the family prompted him to look at marriage stability and the possibilities of forecasting whether a marriage would succeed or fail. He proposed that the quality of adjustment was determined by the husband and wife's progressive coalescence of attitudes and social features. Burgess devised his marriage success chart to forecast marital stability based on his results. Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage (1939; with Leonard Cottrell) and The Family: From Institution to Companionship (1939; with Leonard Cottrell) are two of his writings on the family (1945; with others; rev. ed. 1960). Burgess was particularly interested in the old, and he edited Aging in Western Societies (1960), a book that looked at the impacts of retirement and the effectiveness of government initiatives for the elderly. Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921; with Robert Park), a textbook that became a classic and charted new route in sociology, was one of Burgess' most important publications. Burgess and Park collaborated on a lot of research on urban land use and social elements of urban communitiesii. Later in the mid-1920s, Burgess developed the concentric zone model, a theoretical model of urban structure based on his studies of Chicago. Chicago was of particular importance to Burgess because of the way it grew following the great fire of 1871. The city developed as a socially segregated munotes.in
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and Homer Hoyt urban structure in the decades following that tragedy. Social patterning reflected a need for low-cost housing for blue-collar workers as economic growth in the city expanded. There were new industries initially located in the transition zone near the blue-collar housing zone. However, this pattern was not needed of housing being located within walking distance of the industries because of the new streetcar system, which provided workers with efficient and low-cost access to the workplace. Real estate speculation increased in the suburbs as wealth began to accumulate for business owners and managers. Observing these events, changes he built his theory. Burgess’s zones came to be known as “rings of rising affluence” within a dynamic model in which the inner zones encroached on the outeriii. Burgess claims that the city is separated into zones, which are made up of numerous circles. They work in a variety of ways. As the city expands, high-income citizens relocate farther from the major business areas to escape noise pollution and traffic congestion. Similarly, middle-class individuals relocate to more suited locales in order to live comfortably. People from the lower classes reside close to their workplaces. The city, according to this conception, is made up of Five Rings or Concentric Circles that radiate out from a central business district (CBD). Different sorts of land use and activity are represented in each circle. 5.3 CONCENTRIC CIRCLE THEORY According to R. Park and E. Burgess (1925), the battle for scarce urban resources, particularly land, resulted in rivalry for land and resources, resulting in the physical segmentation of urban area into zones. They projected that cities would be organised into five concentric rings, with regions of social and physical decay centred in the city centre and more wealthy neighbourhoods on the outskirts. Park and Burgess' paradigm was criticized, argued that it was simple. However, M. Davis (1992) described Los Angeles as a metropolis with an inner core of "urban degradation metastasizing in the heart of suburbia" using the concentric rings paradigmiv. The following are the details. 1) Central Business District. 2) The Zone in Transition. 3) The zone of independent workingmen’s homes. 4) Residential Zone. 5) The Commuters’ Zone. munotes.in
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50 5.3.1 Central Business District: This is the first and most significant zone within the city limits. The first ring zone or nucleus of the city is a business area, usually known as the Central Business District (CBD) in North America and western nations. This is the city's most significant location. Throughout the day, commercial, social, transportation, and civil life activities begin and finish here. Important shops, department stores, offices, clubs, banks, hotels, motels and boardings, theatres, museums, and administrative buildings may all be found here. This zone serves a variety of everyday duties and is an important place and commercial location in the city. Many individuals commute to this location for a variety of reasons. It is the city's core and center. Being the business center this zone is accessible from all directions and draws a diverse range of activities and visitors and large group of individuals. As a result, it is the most intense zone. Land usage and social interaction are also interconnected here. The high intensity of land usage also suggests land and rentals have a great value. Even though the local population increased with time, the total size of the land is smaller in size. 5.3.2 The Zone in Transition This zone is always shifting. This zone sees a lot of growth in terms of business and industry. As a result, this zone is referred to as residential degradation. This area is in transition because businesses and small enterprises. This zone is mostly occupied by light industries and slums, and may be found in many American cities. Several first-generation immigrants live in this area. There are large amount of people who belong to lower income groups and they continue to reside in this zone. Retrogressive (Poor, marginalized) neighborhoods, people who live in single rooms, homeless men live in these areas. As a result, there are also other issues like crime, gambling one-room dwellings, and homeless individuals are all part of the picture. and other social deviances thrive here. This leads to newer set of problems like poor housing, dysfunctional families, adolescent
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and Homer Hoyt misbehavior, instability, physical abuse and mental illness. Burgess examined the city of Chicago and discovered a second concentric zone, which will be transient in character and will include a residential area which is often congested and has even encroachment. This zone encompasses the CBD area and meets their demands, such as light industrial production and urban growth models 5.3.3 The zone of independent working men's homes This zone has a developed residential neighborhood which has centers of economic activity that frequently migrate and relocate to the outer rings. It is impacted by the transition zone since it is close to it. This zone represents the adverse effects of industrial pollution on the environment. There are also Slums in this zone and they have a cultural effect too. The outward ring circles are populated by moderate and upper-class homes. In terms of class character, these may be divided into several rings. There is a residential neighborhood with all of the latest conveniences too here. There are also people who are native-born Americans who live in these places. 5.3.4 Residential zone There are a lot of privately owned residences in this area. House prices are so high that most individuals cannot afford one. Professionals, wealthy small businesspeople, attorneys, physicians, managers, and other white-collar workers reside in general. In other words, there is a family movement. 5.3.5 The Commuters’ Zone This zone's residents live in the suburbs. They commute from home to workplaces and business locations on a daily basis. It may be a 50-kilometer journey; employ fast-moving modes of transportation such as trains, railroads, and shuttles. One of these people's most distinguishing characteristics is their daily shuttling. This zone's existence and continuation are due to an efficient and fast-moving mode of transportation. Otherwise, it was an impossible chore and an inconceivable feature of city life. Burgess goes on to say that in addition to the tracks and roads, there are businesses and motels that cater to the requirements of travelers travelling large distances. To go to work, public and private transportation may have to cross hills, rivers, bridges, tunnels, and flyover bridges. As a result, this zone may not be circular. It could develop in a straight line if the conditions are right. If the city's expansion goes unchecked, it will confront a slew of issues, including a shortage of infrastructure. It is now the job of the proper governments to ensure that everything is in order. Burgess did not assert that his theory was factually true as a physical description of any specific city, and he acknowledged that physical barriers like hills, rivers, lakes, and transit lines may cause deviations from his model. Rather, the concentric zone theory is an idealized notion intended to define in dynamic terms typical patterns of city expansion and differentiation in most modern industrial cities through time with minimal modification. munotes.in
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52 However, despite the fact that people often travel along major transit routes or lines of communication. In such instance, the next zones must be triangular in form rather than circular. Furthermore, the various types of housing are dispersed unevenly around the city, with the majority of them clustered at one end. By the 1930s, the Chicago school of urban sociology, led by R.E.Park and E.W.Burgess, had coined the term "human ecology" to describe its conceptual baggage. The use of analogies derived directly from the biological vocabulary to describe spatial correlations, such as 'succession' for the migration of different class groups across metropolitan regions, was argued to justify the term. Human ecology was immensely prominent for a brief period, but it eventually floundered on its own naive analogies, crude empiricism, and functionalist inductivism.v Check Your Progress 1. Write a note on the Residential Zone ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 2. Discuss the Commuter’s Zone ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 5.4 HOMER HOYT Dr. Homer Hoyt, was a economist and market analyst. He resided in Washington and he was a real estate expert, who had founded and led Homer Hoyt Associates, a consulting business based in Larchmont, New York, that relocated to Washington in 1953. He was involved in the market study and development of more than 200 metropolitan retail complexes from 1946 to 1974. He focused himself to investments and courses on land economics beginning in 1974. In 1934, Dr. Hoyt moved to Washington to work for the Federal Housing Administration as the senior land economist. He worked for the Chicago Plan Commission as director of research from 1941 to 1943, and the New York Regional Plan Association as director of economic studies from 1943 to 1946vi He also worked as a real estate dealer in Chicago from 1925 to 1934, and in 1933 he published "One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago," munotes.in
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and Homer Hoyt research that demonstrated the cyclical nature of Chicago land values. For the F.H.A., an economist. He also wrote a text called 100 years of Land Values in Chicago. He also practiced consulting work and provided his opinion, calculations on the demand of real estate which would be emerging in future. His immense contribution is towards the work of understanding land economics and that of real estate through which he even helped the Federal Housing Administration. There is also Homer Hoyt Institute built in his honor. In which research on real estate and land economics has been carried out. His theory was known as Hoyt Model or Sector Model (1939) of Urban Land Use by Homer Hoytvii. 5.5 Sector Model In 1939, Homer Hoyt proposed the sector model, sometimes known as the Hoyt model, to explain how cities grew. As the world's population grows, it's becoming increasingly important to understand how cities run. The public is very interested in studies on urban development trends, settlement geography, and land usage. Various theories and models have been developed to explain how urbanization occurred and how different groups and activities are organized in a city. The rank-size rule, primate city & primacy, central place theory, Multiple Nuclei Model, and Burgess Model are some of the several models for urban region expansion.
As pointed out earlier, Hoyt Model is comparable to Burgess Model and is frequently seen as an upgraded version of it. Cities, according to Hoyt, do not evolve in the shape of simple rings, but rather in "sectors." In 1939, Homer Hoyt proposed that few activities grow in the shape of sectors that extend out along major transportation routes. As cities have higher land utilisation throughout each sector would remain the same. The upper crust would remain upper crust since it would be the most desirable location to live in, and only the wealthy could afford to live there. Because the location benefits from a railway line or a waterway, the industrial sector would stay industrial. Housing, industrial activity, and so forth are examples of these sectors. These industries develop beside railway lines, roads, and waterways.
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54 5.5.1 Components of Hoyt Model The CBD (Central Business District) is located in the heart of the city. Land use/activities are organized into sectors and in partial rings. This neighborhood, often known as downtown, is densely populated with high-rise structures. • Industry – Industries are depicted as a sector extending outwards from the center. The availability of a transportation connectivity along which the activity grown, gave rise to this sector. The presence of a railway line, river, or road would draw comparable activity, resulting in the development of a continuous corridor or "sector." This region, in addition to the industries, also acts as a residential area for lower-class employees. Because of the close vicinity to industry, living conditions which is poor. • Low-Income Residential- This neighborhood is home to low-income people. This region has narrow roadways, dense population, and tiny buildings with limited ventilation. The roads are small and frequently linked to that of factories where the majority of the individuals employed in this industry work. Close proximity to industry minimizes travel costs, attracting industrial employees. • Middle-Class Residential- This location has a lot of middle-class people who can afford more expensive trips and seek better living circumstances. People who live in this neighborhood engage in a variety of activities; they do not just depend only on industrial jobs. In additional CBD connections has some industry connections too. This is where the majority of the people live. • High Class residential- This is the furthest and most remote part of the city. This is a wealthy and prosperous neighborhood. This neighborhood is nice, peaceful, and has spacious houses. 5.5.2 The Importance of Hoyt Model's • Hoyt model can be used to explain the Ecological variables + economic rent idea of land use pattern • Emphasis can be also seen on the importance of transportation networks which influences the city's spatial layout • The distance between the city center and the direction of expansion are both taken into account. munotes.in
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and Homer Hoyt • Corporates, industrial and environmental amenity factors are also determinants in the selection of a residential site. For example, high-class residential communities tend to move toward higher terrain, places which has better views, more open space, better space and existing outlying, smaller villages. • The presence of low-income individuals near industry helps the people to get jobs and for the industries labor at a cheaper cost. The Hoyt model recognized that the Burgess model was disrupted by transportation (in particular) and access to resources. Transportation connections have a big impact on what people do and where they do it. The cost of production is reduced by low transportation costs and closeness to roads/railways. Burgess did not consider the impact of main transportation routes on activity. 5.5.3 Limitations of the Sector Model • Only railway lines are taken into account for sector growth, leaving private automobiles out. Multiple business are not represented in this model since it is a monocentric depiction of cities. • The theory locates physical characteristics of city as limited and operating as in certain directions. However, this is not the case often. • There is no mention of out-of-town development in the Hoyt model. 5.5.4 Burgess and Homer Hoyt Comparison According to Pitzl (2004) Homer Hoyt, as an American economist, is the creator of one of three classic urban land-use models. His sector model, published in 1939, was based on a study of the organisation of more than 140 American cities and was developed in response to critiques of the concentric zone model produced by University of Chicago sociologists R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie two decades earlier. The Burgess concentric zone concept was essentially inaccurate, according to Hoyt's study of American cities. For example, Hoyt reported that in many cases, housing areas were extended from the CBD to the city borders and were not located in concentric zones. Both Hoyt and Burgess cited Chicago as an example of their models. Except for where it was broken in the east by Lake Michigan, Burgess claimed that Chicago's concentric zonation was constant. Hoyt, on the other hand, noted that the high-income housing sector ran north along Lake Michigan from the CBD, and that the industrial sector ran south along Lake Michigan from the train and highway lines to the steelmaking factories in Gary, Indiana. Hoyt's model was more complicated and was written nearly 20 years after Burgess's. American geographers Chauncey Harris and Edward Ullman produced an even more sophisticated model two decades after Hoyt's model was published. Their multiple-nuclei model of urban land use mirrored changes in post-World War II American city configurations and the CBD's declining prominence. (iii) munotes.in
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56 Check Your Progress 1. Who discussed the Sector Model theory? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 2. Discuss the limitation of Sector Model Theory ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 5.6 SUMMARY In these chapter two theories mainly developed by two Urban Sociology scholars was discussed. The first one is that of Ernest Burgess and his Concentric Circle Zones. He discusses about five concentric circles namely – Central Business District, Zone in Transition, Zone of Working men’s home, Residential Zone, Commuter’s Zone. We also learnt about the theory given by Homer Hoyt called Sector Model which explained the urban land use. It was developed as a critique to the Concentric Circle Theory. 5.7 QUESTIONS 1. Discuss the Concentric Circle Theory 2. Write a note on Homer Hoyt and his Sector Model theory 3. Discuss the comparison between Sector model and Concentric Circle. munotes.in
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and Homer Hoyt 5.8 REFERENCES i https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/27617/1/Unit-6.pdf ii Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopedia (2022, May 12). Ernest Watson Burgess. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Watson-Burgess iii GERALD R. PITZL (2004) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY GREENWOOD PRESS iv concentric zone theory. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 3 Jun. 2022, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095630414. v The Social Science Encyclopedia. Edited by Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper (1996). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. vi https://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/01/obituaries/homer-hoyt-early-planner-of-urban-shopping-centers.html vii http://hoytgroup.org/homer-hoyt-institute/who-is-homer-hoyt/ munotes.in
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58 6 ROBERT EZRA PARK Unit Structure : 6.0 Objectives 6.1 Introduction 6.2 ‘Human Ecology’ 6.3 “The City” 6.4 “Introduction to the Science of Sociology” 6.5 Important Publications 6.6 Summary 6.7 Questions 6.8 References and Further Readings 6.0. OBJECTIVES: • To familiarize students with works of Robert Ezra Park • To contextualize Robert Ezra Park’s contribution within urban sociology 6.1 INTRODUCTION: Robert Ezra Park (February 14, 1864 – February 7, 1944) was an American urban sociologist, one of the founders of the Chicago School of sociology, who introduced and developed the field of human ecology. Park began his career as a journalist, having the idea of presenting the news in an accurate and timely fashion, believing that this would best serve the public. He quickly became concerned with social issues, particularly those connected to race relations, and worked for a time with Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee. As a sociologist, Park believed that fieldwork was essential. His work, using the streets of Chicago to meet people and gather research material, led to the tradition of urban sociology and human ecology that became the hallmark of the Chicago School of sociology. Despite his emphasis on practical work, Park developed several significant theoretical concepts. His work on social groups led to conceptions of "social distance" and the immigrant position as "the marginal man." Park's work on social groups underscored the difference between human beings and the rest of nature in how they choose to work together for the common good. His work on social change also supports the hope that as people encounter diverse cultures and social groups, they will gradually overcome the barriers that divide them and learn to live in harmony. munotes.in
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Robert Ezra Park Park's career can be divided in two major parts, his early career when he was a journalist, and his later career that he spent as a sociologist. In his early career as a journalist, Park was rather idealistic. He learned that newspapers can be very powerful tools. They can change public opinion to one side, or can influence stock market values to rise or decline. Park believed that accurate and objective reporting was, thus, essential for the good of society. If the news was reported precisely and in a timely fashion, the public could respond to new information in an appropriate manner, without being faced with major shocks. The whole economy would thus function smoothly. Park planned a new kind of newspaper, called Thought News, that would present the news in a more accurate manner. His plan was never realized, but the whole experience had a long-lasting effect on Park, and influenced his career as sociologist. Park opposed the traditional, theoretical approach to sociology, in which sociologists created “big” theories from their armchairs. He rather believed in field study as crucial for his work. He claimed that only through field experience can scientists conclude something about a subject. Park said: “Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short go and get the seat of your pants dirty in real research (Robert Park, 1927)”. He saw sociology as: …a point of view and a method for investigating the processes by which individuals are inducted into and induced to cooperate in some sort of permanent corporate existence [called] society (Introduction to the Science of Sociology, 1921). During Park's time at the University of Chicago, the sociology department began to use the city that surrounded it as a sort of research laboratory. His work, together with that of his colleagues, Ernest Watson Burgess, Homer Hoyt, and Louis Wirth, developed into an approach to urban sociology that became known as the Chicago School. This Chicago School was famous for being involved more with people than with methodology, going on the streets and doing research. Through that, Park came in contact with city life, with its people, and their problems. He coined the term “human ecology” to specify this approach to sociological inquiry. Park was especially interested in immigrants, and conducted numerous studies on them. He was famous for the term “the marginal man,” to denote the specific position of immigrants in society. Based on his observation of immigrant groups in the United States, Park developed his theory of group behavior. He postulated that the loyalties that bind persons together in primitive societies are in direct proportion to the intensity of the fears and hatreds with which they view other societies. This concept was developed munotes.in
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60 as theories of ethnocentrism and in-group/out-group propensities. Group solidarity correlates to a great extent with animosity toward an out-group. Park proposed four universal types of interaction in intergroup relations: 1. Competition: Type of interaction where all individuals or groups pursue their own interests, without paying attention to other individuals or groups 2. Conflict: Type of interaction where individuals or groups consciously try to eliminate other individuals or groups 3. Accommodation: Adjustment toward reducing the conflict and achieving the interest of mutual security 4. Assimilation: Process whereby once separate groups acquire each other’s culture, or become part of a common culture. Although Park hoped that full assimilation would remove racial differences in the long run, he saw the situation of race relations in America in different terms. He regarded the concept of "social distance," referring to the degree of intimacy between groups or individuals, as more relevant. Park argued that racial prejudice and social distance should not be confused with racial conflict. Thus, for Park, racial conflict was the harbinger of change to come, and the cycle from accommodation to conflict to new accommodation was a special case in the general process of social change. According to Park, different ethnic groups coexisting in an urban area would ultimately merge into a single entity. This theory became famous as the “melting pot” theory of multiethnic integration. 6.2 ‘HUMAN ECOLOGY’: Robert Ezra Park’s major sociological contribution was human ecology, which related Darwin’s “web of life” in natural ecology to the human social system. Park found many transferable properties from plant and animal relationships to the relationship among individuals in a community. Park points out three essential characteristics of a community: a population that is organized by territories, rooted in the soil it occupies, and individual units foster a symbiotic interdependence. Competition of the community regulates number and preserves the balance between competitors. Numbers must be regulated as a community is placed under a great deal of stress when the numbers of community members exceed the amount of resources available. This disequilibrium is usually a product of a change such as famine, disease, or war, and can even destroy a community. Park demonstrates such disequilibrium, and the extent to which competition restores the communal equilibrium, in presenting the 1892 infestation of boll weevils across the Mexican border in Texas, which devastated cotton fields across the US. This beetle infestation presented enough disequilibrium between resources and people that, as Park states, it gave rise to “changes in the organization of the industry long overdue” and, through munotes.in
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Robert Ezra Park competition for farmers to survive, expedited the migration of African American farmers to northern cities. Competition also controls the balance within the community through two ecological principles: dominance and succession. The principle of dominance tends to construct communities spatially, through its relative location to industries and commercial institutions. Park states that the dominant areas in any community are usually the locations with highest land values, which are typically in the central shopping and banking districts. From these points, the land values decline, and through competition, these values begin to influence locations of neighborhoods, businesses and social institutions. This dominance of land use causes the community to move through stages of succession where stable equilibrium can be realized. This societal developmental process is cyclical and organized on two levels; biotic and cultural. The biotic, or symbiotic, level is established through competition, while cultural is established through communication and consensus. Park argues that the economic and territorial competition among individuals creates an economic interdependence among them, thus creating a symbiotic relationship. This competition is unrestricted and an important part of uniting individuals because of the interdependence created. The cultural level is achieved through mores, customs and traditions that create a sense of common purpose among individuals. This level is more restrictive and individuals are not as free to compete. Park acknowledges that society develops through more than just the ecological level. He recognizes an economic, political and moral order, arranged in a hierarchical pyramid structure where the ecological order serves as the foundation and the moral order at the top. He argues that the ties which hold a society together are “physical and vital rather than customary and moral”. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. What are the highlights of ‘human ecology’ as given by R. E. Park? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 6.3 “THE CITY”: The City by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, originally published in 1925, is a book that is frequently included in this list of urban studies classics. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Park and Burgess were leading figures in the highly influential Chicago school of sociology. Their ambition in publishing The City was to demonstrate how cities can munotes.in
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62 serve as a useful lens to study the human condition while simultaneously establishing urban sociology as a legitimate scientific discipline. In the foreword to this second reprinting, sociologist Robert J. Sampson argues that the book is particularly relevant in the contemporary era because cities (and by extension, the study of cities) are rapidly evolving. Indeed, the heady mix of austerity and inequality, climate change and disruption, digitalisation and social networks, and public health and contagion is having a profound influence on urban development and how urban scholars study these dynamics. Thus, it is an opportune moment to look back to The City for inspiration about the impetus for studying cities in all of their complexity and contradictions. The book largely comprises chapters by Park but also includes a handful by Burgess as well as Roderick D. McKenzie and Louis Wirth, all of them noted members of the Chicago school of urban sociology. The authors provide a wide range of comprehensive and engaging perspectives on the state of sociological thinking about cities in the 1920s. A common thread throughout the volume is an emphasis on ‘associated existence’ (99) and the various ways in which humans and the built environment come together in the growing metropolis. Such a relational perspective reflects a growing interest in the changing patterns of work, home life, recreation and travel due to the rise of capitalism and the subsequent recasting of connections between the individual, the family, the neighbourhood and government. The most valuable chapters in the book are those written by Park, with general insights on the drivers and characteristics of urban development as well as thematic chapters on community organisation, the influence of journalism on local politics and the importance of overlooked urban residents including homeless people, immigrants and juvenile delinquents. Park emphasises community as a unique achievement of the modern city when compared to pre-modern human settlements. Park’s introductory chapter is essential reading for all scholars of cities because it establishes a research agenda that continues to be an inspiration. Bringing the sociological imagination to cities was a brave and innovative endeavour in the early twentieth century and Park’s writings provide a vitality and urgency to fuel the creative impulses of contemporary urban scholarship. Of particular importance is how the volume served to solidify urban sociology as a legitimate scientific discipline. As Park argues, ‘sociology is ceasing to be a mere philosophy and is assuming more and more the character of an empirical, if not exact, science’. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. What was Park’s analysis of a ‘City’? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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Robert Ezra Park 6.4 “INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY”: Seven years after he joined the sociology department at the University of Chicago, Park, with Ernest W. Burgess, brought out a major work, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921). In brief, the book develops concepts for the analysis of group life. It presents a wide variety of historical, philosophical, scientific, and literary documents; relevant general and theoretical formulations; and suggestions for empirical study. The illuminating combination of field observations of all sorts with a theoretical scheme induced from them had also characterized Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, published shortly before. The Introduction begins with a discussion of human nature, in which personality is described as the development in the human organism of self-consciousness and a moral nature, a process possible only in group life. Next, Park and Burgess considered the dominant social process, interaction. It is social attitudes (tendencies to act) that, ultimately, interact and constitute the elemental social forces: “They present us human motives in the only form in which we can know them objectively, namely, as behavior. Human motives become social forces only so far as they are communicable, only when they are communicated. . . . The clearest way to think of attitudes is as behavior patterns or units of behavior” (1921, pp. 438-439). The first chapter of the Introduction contains what is perhaps still the best historical exposition of sociology and its relation to the other social sciences. For years the Introduction had few effective competitors in university classes all over the United States. It was a sophisticated work that drew liberally from European thought and held no hint of provincialism; although it must have been a difficult text for many students, its quality was appreciated. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. Explain Park’s sociological theory. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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64 6.5 IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS: • Robert, Park E. 1904. Masse und Publikum. Eine methodologische und soziologische Untersuchung. Berlin: Lack & Grunau. • Robert, Park E. 1928. Human Migration and the Marginal Man. American Journal of Sociology, 33, 881-893. • Robert, Park E. 1932. The University and the Community of Races. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. • Robert, Park E. 1939. An Outline of the Principles of Sociology. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc. • Robert, Park E. 1952. Human Communities: the City and Human Ecology. Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press. • Robert, Park E. 1955. Societies. Glencoe Ill: The Free Press. • Robert, Park E. 1961. (original 1937). Cultural Conflict and the Marginal Man. The Marginal Man. Russell & Russell Pub. ISBN 0846202816 • Robert, Park E. 1964. Race and Culture. Glencoe Ill: The Free Press. ISBN 0029237904 • Robert, Park E. 1967. On Social Control and Collective Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Robert, Park E. 1969. (original 1921). Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226646041 • Robert, Park E. 1972. The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226646092 • Robert, Park E. 1999. (original 1922). The Immigrant Press and Its Control. Reprint Services Corp. ISBN 0781205565 • Robert, Park E. & Ernest Burgess. 1984. (original 1925). The City: Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226646114 • Robert, Park E. & Herbert A. Miller. 1964. (original 1921). Old World Traits Transplanted: The Early Sociology of Culture. Ayer Co Publishers. ISBN 0405005369 • Robert, Park E. & Booker T. Washington. 1984. (original 1912). The Man Farthest Down: a Record of Observation and Study in Europe. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0878559337 munotes.in
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Robert Ezra Park 6.6 SUMMARY: Park saw human society as functioning on the same level as the natural world of plants and animals, the ecological order, but also participating in a social or moral order that had no counterpart in the non-human level. Thus, he regarded human societies as having dual aspects: on the one hand they consist of individuals competing for economic and territorial dominance, but at the same time they are involved in collective actions. Robert E. Park was a pioneer in originating and developing the field of human ecology. He changed sociology from being primarily a philosophical discipline toward incorporating field study into its methodology and becoming an inductive science of human behavior. He introduced the urban landscape as a valuable source of data for sociological study. His emphasis on immigrants and minorities was rather novel, revealing data that shed new light on our understanding of the race relations, in- and out-group dynamics, social pathology, and other forms of collective behavior. In addition, Park’s approach to the study of newspapers and public opinion inspired numerous scholars in the area of mass communication and education. 6.6 QUESTIONS: • What was Park’s major contribution towards urban sociology? • Elaborate on ‘human ecology’. • What was Park’s influence on Chicago school? 6.7 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS • Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2022, February 10). Robert E. Park. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-E-Park • Robert E. Park. "The Concept of Position in Sociology." Papers and Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, 20 (1926): 1-14. • Goist, P. D. (1971). City and “Community”: The Urban Theory of Robert Park. American Quarterly, 23(1), 46–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/2711586 • Park, Robert E. and Ernest W. Burgess. (1921) Introduction to the Science of Sociology. [Third edition, 1969] Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. • Park, Robert E., Ernest W. Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie. (1925) The City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. munotes.in
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66 • Park, Robert E. (1952). Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology.. [The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park, Volume II, Everett Hughes, ed.] Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. • Park, Robert E. (1967) Robert E. Park on Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers. [edited by Ralph H. Turner]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Small, Albion W. (1924). Origins of Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. munotes.in
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67 7 CONTEMPORARY THEORIES MANUEL CASTELLS Unit Structure : 7.0 Objectives 7.1 Introduction 7.2 “The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture” 7.3 Important Publications 7.4 Summary 7.5 Questions 7.6 References and Further Readings 7.0. OBJECTIVES: • To familiarize students with the contribution of Manuel Castells • To know more about the “Information Age” 7.1 INTRODUCTION: Manuel Castells is Professor of Sociology and Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed in 1979 in the Department of City and Regional Planning. In 1994-98 he served as Chair of UC Berkeley's Center for Western European Studies. Between 1967 and 1979 he taught sociology at the University of Paris, first at the Nanterre Campus, then, since 1970, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has also been professor and director of the Institute for Sociology of New Technologies, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Research Profesor at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Barcelona, and a visiting professor at 15 universities in Europe, the United States, Canada, Asia, and Latin America. He has lectured at about 300 academic and professional institutions in 40 countries. He was born in Spain in 1942. As a child he lived in Hellin, Albacete, Madrid, Cartagena, Valencia and Barcelona, where he completed his secondary education. He studied law and economics at the University of Barcelona in 1958-62. As a student activist against Franco's dictatorship he had to escape to Paris, where he benefitted from a political refugee fellowship, and graduated from the Sorbonne's Faculty of Law and Economics in 1964. He went on to obtain his PhD in Sociology from the University of Paris in 1967. He also holds a Doctorat d'Etat in Human Sciences from the Sorbonne, and a doctorate in sociology from the University of Madrid. His University of Paris PhD dissertation was based munotes.in
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68 on a statistical analysis of location strategies of industrial firms in the Paris region. Manuel Castells started his academic career in 1967 at the University of Paris, teaching methodology of social research, and researching on urban sociology. In 1972 he published his first book, La Question Urbaine, that was translated in 10 languages and became a classic around the world. He was one of the intellectual founders of what came to be known as the New Urban Sociology. His main publications in this field are The City and the Grassroots (University of California Press), a comparative study of urban social movements and community organizations based on his field work in France, Spain, Latin America, and California, that received the C. Wright Mills Award in 1983; and The Informational City (Blackwell, 1989) an analysis of the urban and regional changes brought about by information technology and economic restructuring in the United States. In 1998, Manuel Castells received the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his lifelong contribution in the field of community and urban sociology. In 1983 Castells undertook the study of economic and social transformations associated with the information technology revolution. His privileged point of observation in the San Francisco Bay Area helped his research on this topic. But he deliberately engaged in a cross-cultural approach to the subject by researching as well in Europe, Latin America and Asia for the next 15 years. The results of this work were published in his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society,and Culture (Blackwell): 1st volume, The Rise of the Network Society (1996, revised edition 2000); 2nd volume, The Power of Identity (1997); 3rd volume, End of Millennium (1998, revised edition 2000). The trilogy is translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and German. 7.2 THE INFORMATION AGE: ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE: A trilogy of books written between 1996 and 1998 and edited between 2000-2004. The books describe the shift from an industrial to an informational society, starting in the 1970s. The three volumes are translated in Spanish, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, German, Italian, Parsi, Catalan, Turkish, Croatian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Danish, Macedonian, Polish and Arabic. Full citation: The Information Age trilogy: 1. Castells, Manuel (1996). The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-22140-1. 2. Castells, Manuel (1997). The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. II. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-0713-6. munotes.in
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Manuel Castells 3. Castells, Manuel (1998). End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-22139-5. The network society is a global society because networks have no boundaries. Spatial transformation is a fundamental dimension of this new social structure. The global process of urbanisation that we are experiencing in the early 21st century is characterised by the formation of a new spatial architecture in our planet, made up of global networks connecting major metropolitan regions and their areas of influence. Since the networking form of territorial arrangements also extends to the intrametropolitan structure, our understanding of contemporary urbanisation should start with the study of these networking dynamics in both the territories that are included in the networks and in the localities excluded from the dominant logic of global spatial integration. Castells’ most well-known work is a trilogy of books, entitled, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Overall, it comprehends three sociological dimensions—production, power, and experience—stressing that the organization of the economy, of the state and its institutions, and the ways that people create meaning in their lives through collective action, are irreducible sources of social dynamics—that must be understood as both discrete and inter-related entities. The Information Age trilogy is his précis: "Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self"; the "Net" denotes the network organizations replacing vertically integrated hierarchies as the dominant form of social organization, the Self denotes the practices a person uses in reaffirming social identity and meaning in a continually changing cultural landscape. In other words, Castells’ theory of the Information Age explores the dissonance between “universal, digital language,” and individual, even local identities. Our physical selves exist in different places and experience different cultures, but the mind has essentially migrated into the world of the internet and the television. They exist in a “global space of instant information". Castells maintains that the Information Age can "unleash the power of the mind", which would dramatically increase the productivity of individuals and lead to greater leisure, allowing individuals to achieve "greater spiritual depth and more environmental consciousness". Such change would be positive, he argues, in that it would cause resource consumption to decrease. Castells' concepts of The Information Age, The Age of Consumption, and The Network Society are all perspectives attempting to describe modern life as it is known in the present and to depict the future of society. He asserts that from the 1970s to the present day, informational technology has allowed large businesses, organizations, and social structures in general to form global networks. The world is growing away from industrialism, which is focused on economic growth. Informationalism strives to develop knowledge and create massive networks. This theory is, of course, related to the growth of capitalism. As networks grow larger, the state gradually munotes.in
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70 plays a smaller role in the capitalist system. Common systems of information have begun to replace it. They act as a connector between networks that may very likely be on opposite sides of the globe. The concept of the network society is closely associated with interpretation of the social implications of globalisation and the role of electronic communications technologies in society. The definition of a network society given by the foremost theorist of the concept, Manuel Castells (2004 p. 3) is that it is 'a society whose social structure is made up of networks powered by micro-electronics-based information and communications technologies.' As Castells shows in his book, historically, there have always been social networks: the key factor that distinguishes the network society is that the use of ICTs helps to create and sustain far-flung networks in which new kinds of social relationships are created. According to Castells, three processes led to the emergence of this new social structure in the late 20th century: • the restructuring of industrial economies to accommodate an open market approach • the freedom-oriented cultural movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and the environmental movement • the revolution in information and communication technologies Castells' analysis of the significance of these three processes provides a broad historical context for the development paradigms we will discuss in the next section. The significance of economic restructuring is that it created the conditions for the emergence of the open market development paradigm, weakening the nation state and deepening processes of social inclusion and exclusion between and within countries. The cultural movements were significant because they created the conditions for emergence of an opposing 'human-capabilities centred' development paradigm that focuses on human rights. The values of individual autonomy and freedom espoused by this cultural change shaped the open network structure for communication. As Castells concludes, 'the culture of freedom was decisive in inducing network technologies which, in turn, were the essential infrastructure for business to operate its restructuring in terms of globalisation'. A key aspect of the network society concept is that specific societies (whether nation states or local communities) are deeply affected by inclusion in and exclusion from the global networks that structure production, consumption, communication and power. Castells' hypothesis is that exclusion is not just a phenomenon that will be gradually wiped out as technological change embraces everyone on the planet, as in the case that everyone has a mobile phone, for example. He argues that exclusion is a built-in, structural feature of the network society. munotes.in
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Manuel Castells In part this is because networks are based on inclusion and exclusion. Networks function on the basis of incorporating people and resources that are valuable to their task and excluding other people, territories and activities that have little or no value for the performance of those tasks (Castells 2004 p. 23). Different networks have different rationales and geographies of exclusion and exclusion - for example, Silicon Valley engineers occupy very different social and territorial spaces from criminal networks. The most fundamental divides in the network society according to Castells (2004 p. 29) are the division of labour and the poverty trap that we discussed earlier in the context of globalisation. He characterises these as the divide between 'those who are the source of innovation and value to the network society, those who merely carry out instructions, and those who are irrelevant whether as workers (not enough education, living in marginal areas with inadequate infrastructure for participation in global production) or as consumers (too poor to be part of the global market).' In a social structure characterised by exclusion from and inclusion in different kinds of social and communication networks, power is a crucial determinant of social change. Power can be defined as the capacity to impose one's will over another's will. In the concept of the network society, the chief form of power is control or influence over communication. This is because connectivity and access to networks are essential to the power of some social groups to impose their values and goals on society-at-large and of others to resist their domination. In the network society, one of the most important impacts of globalisation is the way it enables us to create economic, social and political relationships that are less and less bounded by where we are located at any given time - or in other words, by our spatial location. In traditional societies, different social relations, customs, and culture exist in separate spaces and individuals have to conform to most powerful expectations and rules - for example, in families, villages, towns, cities, and nation states. In the globalising society, these spaces lose their power to constrain individuals: people can communicate without personal contact via the global net of mass media, phone, fax and computers and are less and less linked by a common history and shared face-to-face relationships. At the same time, pre-existing traditions cannot avoid contact with, or being influenced by, distant values and forms of knowledge. Empowerment, according to Castells, is strengthened by social media including networking (such as Facebook) and social movements connected via the internet. He sees social media as evidence of trends within globalisation that promote cultural diversity, innovativeness and certain kinds of freedoms. munotes.in
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72 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: 1. What is a ‘Network Society’? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 7.3 IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS: Manuel Castells is one of the world's most often-cited social science and communications scholars. Castells is a sole author of 23 books and editor or co-editor of fifteen more, as well as over one hundred articles in academic journals. The trilogy, The Information Age, has been compared to the work of Karl Marx and Max Weber. It took him fifteen years to conduct research for the trilogy. Books The Urban Question. A Marxist Approach (Alan Sheridan, translator). London, Edward Arnold (1977) (Original publication in French, 1972) City, Class and Power. London; New York, MacMillan; St. Martins Press (1978) The Economic Crisis and American Society. Princeton, NJ, Princeton UP (1980) The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press (1983) The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell (1989) Technopoles of the World : The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes. London, New York: Routledge (1994) The Information Age trilogy: 1. Castells, Manuel (1996). The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-22140-1. 2. Castells, Manuel (1997). The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. II. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-0713-6. munotes.in
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Manuel Castells 3. Castells, Manuel (1998). End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-22139-5. The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society. Oxford, Oxford University Press (2001) The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model. Oxford UP, Oxford (2002) (co-author, Pekka Himanen ) The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar (2004), (editor and co-author), ISBN 978-1-84542-435-0. The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy. Washington, DC, Center for Transatlantic Relations (2006) (co-editor) Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press (2006) (co-author) Communication power. Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press (2009) ISBN 978-0-19-956704-1 Aftermath: the cultures of the economic crisis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (2012) ISBN 978-0-19-965841-1 Networks of Outrage and Hope. Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Polity Press (2012) ISBN 978-0-74-566284-8 Reconceptualizing Development in the Global Information Age. OXFORD University Press (2014) (co-author, Pekka Himanen ) ISBN 978-0-19-871608-2 Rupture: the crisis of liberal democracy. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press (2018) ISBN 978-1-5095-3199-8 Journal Articles Social Uses of Wireless Communications: The Mobile Information Society, co-author of the paper for the International Workshop on Wireless Communication Policies and Prospects: A Global Perspective, USC, 8–9 October 2004. Castells, M (2007) Communication, power and counter-power in the network society. International Journal of Communication 1(1): 238–66. Arsenault, A, and Castells, M. 2008. The structure and dynamics of global multimedia business networks. International Journal of Communication 2707–48. Arsenault, A & Castells, M. (2008) Switching power: Rupert Murdoch and the global business of media politics: A sociological analysis. International Sociology 23(4): 488. munotes.in
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74 7.4 SUMMARY: Manuel Castells is perhaps the most influential sociologist in the analysis and understanding of contemporary society as a networked society. His trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture is a milestone in terms of theorizing the concept of a social network, how this abstraction fits the contemporary world, and the economic and individual implications of this concept. His work takes into account social, cultural, and political perspectives of the communication revolution, using an international view to explain the interrelationships between power, people, and information technology. He serves on numerous boards of academic journals and co-edits the International Journal of Communication. Castells’s expertise in communications has earned him, among other distinguished awards, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the C. Wright Mills Award from the American Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his lifelong contribution to community and urban sociology. 7.5 QUESTIONS: • Elaborate on Castells’ ‘The Information Age’. • Who commands power in an information age? And how? • What has been Manuel Castells’ contribution in sociology? 7.6 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS • Markku Wilenius. (1998). A New Globe in the Making: Manuel Castells on the Information Age [Review of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, by M. Castells]. Acta Sociologica, 41(3), 269–276. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4201086 • Stevenson, Nick (2003). "Manuel Castells". In Elliott, Anthony; Ray, Larry (eds.). Key Contemporary Social Theorists. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. p. 91. • Castells, Manuel; Ince, Martin (2003). "Manuel Castells: Life and Work". Conversations with Manuel Castells. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 8–9. • Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (1996) p. 3 munotes.in
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75 8 DAVID HARVEY Unit Structure : 8.0 Objectives 8.1 David Harvey 8.2 Questions 8.3 References 8.0 OBJECTIVES To introduce the learner with the contemporary theory of David Harvey To understand the concept of the Right to City To apply the theory to the present urban situations 8.1 DAVID HARVEY: According to Harvey, urbanism is one part of the environment that has been developed as a result of the growth of industrial capitalism. Traditional societies distinguished clearly between the city and the countryside. Industry has eroded the distinction between the city and the countryside in the modern world. The distinction between the social structures of urban and rural people is lessened when agriculture gets mechanised and is managed solely on the basis of price and profit, much like industrial work. Harvey notes that in contemporary urbanism, space is constantly reorganised. The process is influenced by the locations that big businesses choose for their factories, Research centres, and other facilities, the restrictions that governments impose on industrial production and land usage, as well as the actions of private investors who buy and sell real estate. Businesses, for instance, are continually comparing the relative benefits of new locations to those of old ones. Offices and factories will be closed down in one location and opened up elsewhere as production costs decrease in one region relative to another or as the company switches from one product to another. As a result, there may at one point be a wave of office-block construction in the middle of major cities. Investors search for opportunities for additional speculative building elsewhere once the offices have been constructed and the central area has been "redeveloped." When the financial climate changes, what is advantageous during one period may not be profitable during another. How far and where business interests purchase land, as well as the loan and tax rates set by local and federal governments, have a significant impact on private homeowners. For instance, suburban development significantly increased in the United States' major cities after World War II. This was partly brought on by racial discrimination and White people's propensity to leave inner cities. Harvey contends that it was only made possible by munotes.in
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76 government policies to give tax breaks to home buyers and building companies as well as by the establishment of financial organisations. Harvey in writing Social Justice and the City, sought to bring into conversation those that professed a sociological imagination with those possessed by a spatial consciousness (or geographical imagination). This was also the first major work that systematically sought to use a Marxist geography to understand urban systems. In Social Justice and the City, Harvey, moves from a reformist appeal for territorial urban justice – to calling for a complete urban revolution. Using Marx, Harvey developed a theoretical understanding of how urban processes act as conduits of capitalist circulation. Ghettos and urban polarisation along with other forms of social exclusion are an inevitable result of capitalist urbanisation. In a more recent essay titled "Right to the City," Harvey quotes urban sociologist Robert Park to make the case that the type of city we create cannot be separated from the types of social ties we want to foster, the types of people we want to be, and the types of values we value. "Man's most effective attempt to reshape the world in which he lives more closely to his ideals. However, if the city is the world that man built, then he is now doomed to dwell there. In constructing the city, man has therefore indirectly changed himself while having no clear understanding of the nature of his mission (Park quoted in Harvey 2008: 23). It is crucial to uphold the concept of the right to the city as developed by Lefebvre and Harvey. It is not just a right to live in the city, but also a right to participate in shaping it. The right to the city is a right to shape our own selves as well as the world in which we live. Any urban transformation must be accomplished by a social effort since it is not an individual right. However, neither the State nor the capital make this a right that is equally or easily attainable. In the past, geographic and social concentrations of surplus riches have given rise to cities. Urbanization has therefore always been a class phenomena. The distribution of excess is controlled by a small number of people, whereas capitalism allows surplus to be plundered from many. In addition, the constant pursuit of profits fosters overabundance, and crises are brought on by labour shortages. Harvey contends that urbanisation, a process dependent on investment in housing, industry, and other sectors, serves as a location to absorb this surplus of labour and capital—a spatial fix. We can look at the situation in 1840s Paris as a historical example, when the unemployment and capital surplus crises were resolved by implementing a plan to reconstruct and construct Paris on a completely other scale, complete with wide boulevards and huge shopping arcades. A large portion of this rehabilitation was made possible by state-sponsored infrastructure development financed by debt, which employed formerly unemployed workers and fixed the excess into real estate. The socio-spatial relationships in the city of Paris were altered by this urban transformation. It annexed the "unruly" suburbs with extensive road and rail links, munotes.in
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David Harvey successfully displacing the urban poor — the "dangerous classes" — and their "insalubrious" dwellings from the city centre, and it catapulted the urban populace into an era of speed. The bourgeoisie was able to tighten its grip on the city thanks to the recently developed credit institutions, which also made it easier for capital to travel freely. Paris is frequently cited as the world's best example of capitalist-led urbanisation. Cities started to be considered as hubs of consumption, where the travel and tourism sector, fashion showrooms, cafes, etc. would help to shape a new urban persona. By increasing consumerism, the capitalist crisis was momentarily resolved. Following Paris, major centres around the world, including New York, underwent a similar transformation. With their debt-financed suburban homes, the middle class turned became ardent supporters of private property, while the working class was evicted, leaving vacant inner city districts. The world once more experienced financial problems in the 1960s because this geographical fix was only temporary. The urban revolution of 1968 included protests against racism, patriarchy, and war in addition to the unhappiness and alienation of contemporary suburbia living. Capitalism has produced a world in which the character of the urban process is now global due to its constant pursuit of profit, as well as frequent crises and spatial-fixes. Both the US housing market and the current urbanisation of China have played major roles in absorbing surpluses and promoting capitalism's worldwide expansion. The spatial features of today's cities, where unparalleled riches coexist with rising destitution, are inscribed with the uneven capital flows. Gated communities, watched streets, showy shopping malls, and privileged clubs are now commonplace in cities all over the world. The low working classes, the homeless, and the migrant labourers are pushed to the edges. Use value has been replaced with exchange value. Another result of capitalist urbanisation is the eviction and destruction of the homes and workplaces of the urban poor. Harvey refers to this process as "creative destruction," a Marxist concept. Older networks of social and geographical connections have been destroyed to create room for the new cities. In order to expand capital control and use the property for "higher" purposes, low-income individuals are almost invariably evicted from their neighbourhoods. The capitalist classes appropriate the disparity in land values, and this mechanism allows for "accumulation by dispossession." These kind of dispossessions are mainly what modern urbanisation under capitalism depends on. It goes without saying that there are disputes and contradictions in this process, and individuals who are displaced frequently protest and fight for their right to the city in the streets or in court. Marx, on the other hand, said that "between equal rights, force decides." munotes.in
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78 8.2 QUESTIONS 1. Explain the contemporary theory of David Harvey with regard to urbanization. 2. Explain the concept of the Right to City as put forth by David Harvey 8.3 REFERENCES Grossman, H (1929) Law of the accumulation and breakdown. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1929/breakdown/ Harvey, D (1985) Urbanization of Capital. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press Harvey, D (2003) New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. munotes.in
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75 9 THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF URBAN STUDIES VS THE LOS ANGELES SCHOOL OF URBAN STUDIES Unit Structure : 9.0 Objectives 9.1 Introduction 9.0 Chicago School 9.0 Los Angeles School 9.0 Summary 9.0 Questions 9.0 References 9.0 OBJECTIVES • To learn about Chicago School of Urban Studies • To learn about Los Angeles School of Urban Studies 9.1 INTRODUCTION In this chapter, there are two major schools of Urban Sociology which is being discussed in the Chicago School and Los Angeles school. Several important scholars in Urban Sociology emerged from these schools hence understanding these schools their nature of work and theories becomes very important. Before learning the details about the Los Angeles school and Chicago School, let us first learn about what is a school? The ordinary meaning of a school – is where children’s receive education, training etc. However, in this chapter, the school is being referred as a separate department, which is often located within the University. This is also started by some professors, who are conducting research work more than just teaching courses. These professors research is also published and becomes well known. Further, they receive periodic grants to run courses or even undertaken research important and larger researcher projects. The theories developed by these thinkers are applicable and relevant even today, hence it is important to study about Chicago and Los Angeles School. Studying about these schools would be also helpful to you if, in the future if you are planning to build careers related to Urban Studies, work with Urban issues. munotes.in
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76 9.2 CHICAGO SCHOOL Chicago school started with a group of sociologists who were working on the Urban issues. The researchers concentrated on Chicago, and viewed it as a social laboratory through which human behavior, social institutions, organizations were observed. The school provided numerous principles for comprehending the city. However, in this chapter, we will look into few fundamental concepts related to land use, development, structure, and urban lifestyles. Among the many notable one was Chicago School urbanists which studied diverse facets of the city, scholars like Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth were participants of these studies. One of the important work associated with the development of Chicago school was that of ‘The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment’. (Dear 2005: 54). The Chicago School chose to explore mechanisms of modern urban expansion in the city of Chicago, which was experiencing extraordinary growth at a given time. The Chicago school presented a modernist perspective of the city as a united entity, which was popular at the time. The school examined urban processes and situations through the eyes of urban residents. The writings of Chicago School urbanists are usually founded in the individual subjectivities of urbanites, their personal choices eventually explaining the broader urban state, including spatial organisation, crime, poverty, and racism," according to Michael Dear (2002). The Chicago school created several key theories that have become essential concepts in the formation of diverse urban social regions and urban lifestyles. For example- Robert E. Park developed the concept of Human Ecology, which tries to adapt biological processes/concepts to the social world and it also points out that cities and city life are the result of natural environment competition. The Chicago school also looked at the city's physical shape and how people adapted to the city's ecological constraints. The Chicago school was also influenced by Functional Theory and Social Darwinism, and saw the city as a social organism with internal processes that bind different parts/segments together. Cities, according to the Chicago School, are also similar to biotic/symbiotic ecosystems in which residents struggle for limited resources. Among Chicago School's many theories, like that of Ernest Burgess' Concentric Ring Theory remained influential for a long time in explaining the pattern of urban expansion. According to the Concentric Theory, the city expands outward in continuous residential rings around a central business district (CBD). Burgess determined that the city would tend to create a series of concentric zones "based on assumptions that included a homogeneous land surface, universal access to a single centered metropolis, open competition for space, and the premise that growth would take place outward from a central core." According to Burgess, the Central Business District is located in the heart of the city. A transitional zone around the Central District converts historic residences into workplaces and living spaces. Beyond the transitional zone, munotes.in
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Urban Studies a working population zone emerges, with housing units for working males and lower-class residents. A zone known as the Middle Class Zone continues to emerge where the middle class possesses dwellings that are relatively new. A commuter zone develops on the outskirts of the city, which is distinct from the city's continuous built-up region. The Chicago School created two new theories of urban morphology in response to Burgess' model. In his Sector Theory, Homer Hoyt observed that cities tend to expand in a star-shaped pattern rather than a circular pattern along roads radiating from a central point, with differing land uses in the gaps. Hoyt emphasizes the relevance of axial travel routes in spreading the built-up region outward. The concept that a city grows around a Central Business District is at the heart of both Concentric Zone and Sector Theory. Harris and Ullman, on the other hand, contend that there are multiple subsidiary centers outside of the CBD. "Cities have a cellular structure in which land-uses emerge around several growth-nuclei," they argued in their Multiple Nuclei hypothesis within the metropolis” (Dear 2002). These theories affected urban social theory during the majority of the twentieth century, and they also influenced city planning and expansion. It should be highlighted that urbanization focused mostly on population expansion, whereas Chicago thinkers concentrated on understanding urban ecological issues. "Although demographic and ecological factors are significant in any urban (or rural) study, they do not allow us to get complete detail of the social institutions, relationships, activities, values, and norms of city people by themselves." The Chicago School's 'Urbanism as a Way of Life' is another important concept developed in the Urban Sociology. It is based on the premise that cities have a particular way of life, as proposed by Louis Wirth. He emphasised the need for studying the social dimensions of urbanisation. The characteristics of urban life, according to Wirth, include population size, density, and varied social groupings. There were several theorist who had written about the socio-cultural elements of cities, but it was Louis Wirth's work which influenced urban studies with his concept of urbanism. There were other thinkers like Tonnies, Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber who were among the first to identify the patterns of social connections that emerge in cities. As "Louis Wirth brought nineteenth-century European thinkers' insights to an early twentieth-century American metropolis." Louis Wirth also paid more attention to the negative effects of modernity than Simmel, particularly the condition of Durkheimian anomie and... urban social issues and personality disorders." Wirth concentrated also focused "on the constellation of personalities that collectively constituted to social structure and control," unlike other School thinkers (Dear 2002). Wirth explores how cities are tied to the regional hinterland as well as the city as an isolated location. munotes.in
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78 • Criticism on Chicago School When researchers, commonly called as Neo-Marxists, employed the political economy approach to examine socioeconomic disparities maintained in the city in the 1970s, the Chicago school was then criticized on several grounds. Harvey Molotch (1976) highlights the gap in the explanation of city expansion by utilizing the metaphor of "city as growth machine." He claims that the Chicago theorists' dominating concepts complicated the actual realities of social structure that defined the city, as well as "decisions impacting land use, the public budget, and urban social life." Some scholars also pointed out that the capitalist economy created newer opportunities, resulting in uneven access by social group, economic developments which was ignored by Chicago school scholars. Like with the end of Fordism and the introduction of flexible production, the work force in the former factories and industries was severely impacted. Hence, the nature of cities with a Central Business District was turned into numerous sub centers in such circumstance. While studying the Los Angeles (LA) School of urban studies, Michael Dear (2002) also critiqued the human ecology. He criticized the theory by comparing the theories with Los Angeles growth. Dear said, that urban elite’s modernist hegemony gave way to a polycentric (having more than one center), polyglot (multiple languages), and polyculture (diverse culture) way of progress. According to Dear (2002), Los Angeles had grown itself as a model in terms of manufacturing system, land usage and value. Gated neighborhood’s, multiplexes, and retail malls had also replaced the former manufacturing. The right to utilize city spaces became an argumentative issue, and urban land and city spaces became the exclusive domain of the middle and upper classes. The Chicago School, in his opinion, included much more than urban sociology. Chicago was a wide critique of American society, as well as a social psychology, theory of institutions. The Chicago School was, in this sense, the elephant that so many blind men touched, felt and documented. It became many things for many individuals because it was large and amorphous.i Yet we cannot ignore the fact, that Chicago school laid the foundation of Urban Sociology and several concepts are very much relevant even today. Check Your Progress 1. Who were the first set of thinkers to identify social connections of cities? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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Urban Studies 2. Concentric Circle Theory was written by which thinker and he belonged to which school of thought? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 9.3 LOS ANGELES The Los Angeles School of Urbanism is an academic movement centered across Los Angeles, California, that began in the mid-1980s and has its headquarters at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the University of Southern California. The intellectual history of the Los Angeles School, explains the significance of its break with previous traditions (especially those of the Chicago School). The Los Angeles school advocates for a comparative urban analysis that uses Los Angeles as one of many example for understanding contemporary urban process, rather than projecting itself as a new urban "paradigm.ii" The uniqueness about Los Angeles School is that it shifts urban studies away from concentric zones and an ecological perspective, which were popular during the 1920s with the Chicago School. The Los Angeles school focusses upon social polarisation and fragmentation, cultural hybridity, and natural spread of population. The Los Angeles school was also inspired by that of the Post Modernism. According to the Chicago School, cities expand steadily outward from the urban core or central business area. A "zone in transition" with manufacturers and warehouses surrounds the commercial area. The working-class tenements and apartments follow, followed by middle-class areas with larger residences, and finally affluent commuter zones. The Los Angeles model, based on the theories of UCLA and USC urbanists, contends that growth does not occur in an orderly concentric pattern, but rather in a sprawling fashion, as a plethora of commercial, industrial, and residential areas spread outward without particular pattern, as evidenced by postwar L.A. Mike Davis, in his famous work ‘Urban history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, was the first to identify the Los Angeles (L.A.) School. According to Mike Davis, the school was fully formed in the mid-1980s when a diverse group of neo-Marxist intellectuals began publishing a series of essays and books focused only on Los Angeles. Davis tentatively estimated that the school had roughly twenty members distributed throughout Southern California and beyond, during the initial days, while some members even lived as far away as Frankfurt, Germany. During the 1980s and early 1990s, most of the work produced by members of the Los Angeles School attracted a lot of attention. While certain munotes.in
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80 members (such as Edward Soja and Mike Davis) were well-known in the field of urban theory, there was little awareness of the school as a whole, particularly outside of Los Angeles. This changed in 1998, when Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty published an article in which they explicitly argued for the existence of a distinct Los Angeles School of Urbanism, whose various theories, concepts, and empirical were combined together to form a radical new conception of "postmodern urbanism." Dear and Flusty's publication of a series of articles and books, included a full-length edited volume in which they compared the Los Angeles School to the Chicago School. The core assumption of the Los Angeles School's philosophy is that Los Angeles is the ideal American metropolis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as seen by both empirical and theoretical work. More than that, many members see the Los Angeles School as a challenge to the dominant Chicago School of Urbanism. Los Angeles has also evolved from an understudied metropolis to a widely new model for urban development throughout the world in the last two decades. The emergence of the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, also consists of a core group of "Marxist geographers" and postmodernist scholars, as well as a larger interdisciplinary community of academics working in research centres across Southern California, is one important factor accounting for Los Angeles school’s recent prominence. The Los Angeles School is also recognized for its urban peripheral concentration, varied theories about "social production of urban space," and pessimism about the future of urban livingiii. Los Angeles school focused later on post modernism way of looking at urbanism and urban issues. They also viewed things from global-local perspective which was different from the Chicago scholars who looked the problems within the local society itself or environment and local structureiv. While not all members of the L.A. School identify as postmodernists, and some (such as Mike Davis) are outright anti-postmodernism, many members of the L.A. School depend extensively on postmodernist thinkers such as Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, and Derrida. Scott and Storper's numerous writings on flexible specialisation, agglomeration, and the economic dynamics of the contemporary city reflect another line of study originating from the LA School. Scott and Storper's work varies from Dear and Soja's in that it approaches urban theory from a post fordist rather than a postmodernist standpoint. In the LA School, Scott and Storper reflect one unique trend, while Dear and Soja represent another. The Los Angeles School proposes a particularly specific Angeleno paradigm, based on the metaphor of the game of Keno, or, to put it another way, Keno Capitalism. The goal of this model is to explain a "decentralised and chaotic metropolitan region of random processes." This urban structure concept is strongly associated with "the post-industrial metropolis," where "spatial organisation is made up of random combinations." munotes.in
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Urban Studies
Image 1v: The Keno Capitalism model (Image 1) is a great method to theoretically present Los Angeles. The Keno grid portrays Los Angeles, as a modernist metropolis. Entities and districts that shape the postmodern city are shown between each quadrangle that comprises the grid. Urbanization happens in a seemingly random range of possibility. Each being is scattered throughout the grid at random. The relationship between one development and another's non-development is a split case with no link. There is evidence that the city core, which influenced the growth of the city or agglomeration in the past, no longer applies here. The traditional city shape, as exemplified by Chicago, is viewed as being in favor of a non-connecting collage of fragmented landscapes with traditional city centres. However, Los Angeles city is made up of a collection of disjointed areas. Several distinct entities may be found in this model. There are "Edge Cities," for example. Outside of major cities, these are cities that has concentrate stores, activities, and leisure at the intersection of two or more roads. There are also some "Edge Cities" and sprawling suburbs that stretch far and are bordered by towns or agricultural areas. Theme parks, such as Disneyland, may be found on the outskirts of Los Angeles in Anaheim. There is also the discussion of Ethnourbs by the Los Angeles School. "Ethnoburbs" are multi-ethnic communities in which a minority ethnic group has a significant presence but does not necessarily make up the majority. Ethnoburbs include places like Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Italy. These places are also had vast shopping complexes, entertainment venues, and so forth. Furthermore, the Keno model portrays "urban pockets that are socially separated." The main metropolitan motions, according to the Los Angeles School, result in the "formation of crowns, knots, and locations that are largely independent from the city core." As a result, the organisation of the area has changed. In certain ways, the city perimeter is no longer under the authority and influence of the city centre, and there is a decentralization of
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82 metropolitan operations. Furthermore, the Los Angeles School shows a "highly scattered distribution of the postmodern urban planning grid, reflecting a rise in socio-spatial isolation and the phenomena of individualizationvi." Postmodernity is symbolised thus by various people and places. Though most of the Los Angeles School's work stands still extensively read in urban studies, the school's membership has been steadily declining in recent years. Only Michael J. Dear discussed about the school's future existence at a retirement celebration for Soja in 2008, where several members were present. This situation highlights the Los Angeles School's fundamental conceptual conflicts, particularly between Dear and the other members. Check Your Progress 1. Discuss the Keno capital ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 2. The Los Angeles school of thought is influenced by which dominant theor? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 9.4 SUMMARY Thus, in this chapter there is discussion of two prominent schools of Urban Sociology the first is Chicago School and the second one is that of the Los Angeles school. The Chicago School was the foundation school which worked upon understanding urban issues, process of growth etc. There are several scholars who are associated with this school like that of Robert Park who developed the Human Ecology theory, Ernest Burgess who developed Concentric Circle theory, Louis Wirth – Theory of Urbanism etc. Later, the Los Angeles School began around Southern California. This school somewhat criticized the theories of that of Chicago School. They also used Los Angeles as a basic to explain their points. The Los Angeles school was also inspired by that of the Post Modernism. We also discussed about Keno Capitalism where we see random structures existing in cities. This school is associated with several scholars like that of Michael Dear, Soja etc. munotes.in
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Urban Studies 9.5 QUESTIONS 1. Discuss the Chicago School of Thought. 2. Write a note on Los Angeles School of Thought 9.6 REFERENCES i Abbott, A. (2002). Los Angeles and the Chicago School: A Comment on Michael Dear. City & Community, 1(1), 33–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6040.00003 ii Michael Dear (2003) The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History1, Urban Geography, 24:6, 493-509, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.24.6.493 iii Erie, S. P., & MacKenzie, S. A. (2011). From the Chicago to the L.A. School: Whither the Local State? In D. R. Judd & D. Simpson (Eds.), The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York (NED-New edition, pp. 104–134). University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttts735.8 iv Dear, M., & Flusty, S. (1998). Postmodern Urbanism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(1), 50–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2563976 v Keno Capitalism: a postmodern urban structure model. Dear M. J., Flusty S. (2002), « Los Angeles as Postmodern Urbanism », in M. Dear (éd.), From Chicago to L. A., Making Sense of Urban Theory, Thousands Oaks, Sage Publications, p. 61–84. vi Lorik Gajika (2020), https://medium.com/an-idea/from-the-chicago-school-to-the-los-angeles-school-urbanism-sociology-6e86ed0ef88f munotes.in
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79 9 THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF URBAN STUDIES VS THE LOS ANGELES SCHOOL OF URBAN STUDIES Unit Structure : 9.0 Objectives 9.1 Introduction 9.0 Chicago School 9.0 Los Angeles School 9.0 Summary 9.0 Questions 9.0 References 9.0 OBJECTIVES • To learn about Chicago School of Urban Studies • To learn about Los Angeles School of Urban Studies 9.1 INTRODUCTION In this chapter, there are two major schools of Urban Sociology which is being discussed in the Chicago School and Los Angeles school. Several important scholars in Urban Sociology emerged from these schools hence understanding these schools their nature of work and theories becomes very important. Before learning the details about the Los Angeles school and Chicago School, let us first learn about what is a school? The ordinary meaning of a school – is where children’s receive education, training etc. However, in this chapter, the school is being referred as a separate department, which is often located within the University. This is also started by some professors, who are conducting research work more than just teaching courses. These professors research is also published and becomes well known. Further, they receive periodic grants to run courses or even undertaken research important and larger researcher projects. The theories developed by these thinkers are applicable and relevant even today, hence it is important to study about Chicago and Los Angeles School. Studying about these schools would be also helpful to you if, in the future if you are planning to build careers related to Urban Studies, work with Urban issues. munotes.in
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80 9.2 CHICAGO SCHOOL Chicago school started with a group of sociologists who were working on the Urban issues. The researchers concentrated on Chicago, and viewed it as a social laboratory through which human behavior, social institutions, organizations were observed. The school provided numerous principles for comprehending the city. However, in this chapter, we will look into few fundamental concepts related to land use, development, structure, and urban lifestyles. Among the many notable one was Chicago School urbanists which studied diverse facets of the city, scholars like Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth were participants of these studies. One of the important work associated with the development of Chicago school was that of ‘The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment’. (Dear 2005: 54). The Chicago School chose to explore mechanisms of modern urban expansion in the city of Chicago, which was experiencing extraordinary growth at a given time. The Chicago school presented a modernist perspective of the city as a united entity, which was popular at the time. The school examined urban processes and situations through the eyes of urban residents. The writings of Chicago School urbanists are usually founded in the individual subjectivities of urbanites, their personal choices eventually explaining the broader urban state, including spatial organisation, crime, poverty, and racism," according to Michael Dear (2002). The Chicago school created several key theories that have become essential concepts in the formation of diverse urban social regions and urban lifestyles. For example- Robert E. Park developed the concept of Human Ecology, which tries to adapt biological processes/concepts to the social world and it also points out that cities and city life are the result of natural environment competition. The Chicago school also looked at the city's physical shape and how people adapted to the city's ecological constraints. The Chicago school was also influenced by Functional Theory and Social Darwinism, and saw the city as a social organism with internal processes that bind different parts/segments together. Cities, according to the Chicago School, are also similar to biotic/symbiotic ecosystems in which residents struggle for limited resources. Among Chicago School's many theories, like that of Ernest Burgess' Concentric Ring Theory remained influential for a long time in explaining the pattern of urban expansion. According to the Concentric Theory, the city expands outward in continuous residential rings around a central business district (CBD). Burgess determined that the city would tend to create a series of concentric zones "based on assumptions that included a homogeneous land surface, universal access to a single centered metropolis, open competition for space, and the premise that growth would take place outward from a central core." According to Burgess, the Central Business District is located in the heart of the city. A transitional zone around the Central District converts historic residences into workplaces and living spaces. Beyond the transitional zone, munotes.in
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Urban Studies a working population zone emerges, with housing units for working males and lower-class residents. A zone known as the Middle Class Zone continues to emerge where the middle class possesses dwellings that are relatively new. A commuter zone develops on the outskirts of the city, which is distinct from the city's continuous built-up region. The Chicago School created two new theories of urban morphology in response to Burgess' model. In his Sector Theory, Homer Hoyt observed that cities tend to expand in a star-shaped pattern rather than a circular pattern along roads radiating from a central point, with differing land uses in the gaps. Hoyt emphasizes the relevance of axial travel routes in spreading the built-up region outward. The concept that a city grows around a Central Business District is at the heart of both Concentric Zone and Sector Theory. Harris and Ullman, on the other hand, contend that there are multiple subsidiary centers outside of the CBD. "Cities have a cellular structure in which land-uses emerge around several growth-nuclei," they argued in their Multiple Nuclei hypothesis within the metropolis” (Dear 2002). These theories affected urban social theory during the majority of the twentieth century, and they also influenced city planning and expansion. It should be highlighted that urbanization focused mostly on population expansion, whereas Chicago thinkers concentrated on understanding urban ecological issues. "Although demographic and ecological factors are significant in any urban (or rural) study, they do not allow us to get complete detail of the social institutions, relationships, activities, values, and norms of city people by themselves." The Chicago School's 'Urbanism as a Way of Life' is another important concept developed in the Urban Sociology. It is based on the premise that cities have a particular way of life, as proposed by Louis Wirth. He emphasised the need for studying the social dimensions of urbanisation. The characteristics of urban life, according to Wirth, include population size, density, and varied social groupings. There were several theorist who had written about the socio-cultural elements of cities, but it was Louis Wirth's work which influenced urban studies with his concept of urbanism. There were other thinkers like Tonnies, Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber who were among the first to identify the patterns of social connections that emerge in cities. As "Louis Wirth brought nineteenth-century European thinkers' insights to an early twentieth-century American metropolis." Louis Wirth also paid more attention to the negative effects of modernity than Simmel, particularly the condition of Durkheimian anomie and... urban social issues and personality disorders." Wirth concentrated also focused "on the constellation of personalities that collectively constituted to social structure and control," unlike other School thinkers (Dear 2002). Wirth explores how cities are tied to the regional hinterland as well as the city as an isolated location. munotes.in
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82 • Criticism on Chicago School When researchers, commonly called as Neo-Marxists, employed the political economy approach to examine socioeconomic disparities maintained in the city in the 1970s, the Chicago school was then criticized on several grounds. Harvey Molotch (1976) highlights the gap in the explanation of city expansion by utilizing the metaphor of "city as growth machine." He claims that the Chicago theorists' dominating concepts complicated the actual realities of social structure that defined the city, as well as "decisions impacting land use, the public budget, and urban social life." Some scholars also pointed out that the capitalist economy created newer opportunities, resulting in uneven access by social group, economic developments which was ignored by Chicago school scholars. Like with the end of Fordism and the introduction of flexible production, the work force in the former factories and industries was severely impacted. Hence, the nature of cities with a Central Business District was turned into numerous sub centers in such circumstance. While studying the Los Angeles (LA) School of urban studies, Michael Dear (2002) also critiqued the human ecology. He criticized the theory by comparing the theories with Los Angeles growth. Dear said, that urban elite’s modernist hegemony gave way to a polycentric (having more than one center), polyglot (multiple languages), and polyculture (diverse culture) way of progress. According to Dear (2002), Los Angeles had grown itself as a model in terms of manufacturing system, land usage and value. Gated neighborhood’s, multiplexes, and retail malls had also replaced the former manufacturing. The right to utilize city spaces became an argumentative issue, and urban land and city spaces became the exclusive domain of the middle and upper classes. The Chicago School, in his opinion, included much more than urban sociology. Chicago was a wide critique of American society, as well as a social psychology, theory of institutions. The Chicago School was, in this sense, the elephant that so many blind men touched, felt and documented. It became many things for many individuals because it was large and amorphous.i Yet we cannot ignore the fact, that Chicago school laid the foundation of Urban Sociology and several concepts are very much relevant even today. Check Your Progress 1. Who were the first set of thinkers to identify social connections of cities? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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Urban Studies 2. Concentric Circle Theory was written by which thinker and he belonged to which school of thought? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 9.3 LOS ANGELES The Los Angeles School of Urbanism is an academic movement centered across Los Angeles, California, that began in the mid-1980s and has its headquarters at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the University of Southern California. The intellectual history of the Los Angeles School, explains the significance of its break with previous traditions (especially those of the Chicago School). The Los Angeles school advocates for a comparative urban analysis that uses Los Angeles as one of many example for understanding contemporary urban process, rather than projecting itself as a new urban "paradigm.ii" The uniqueness about Los Angeles School is that it shifts urban studies away from concentric zones and an ecological perspective, which were popular during the 1920s with the Chicago School. The Los Angeles school focusses upon social polarisation and fragmentation, cultural hybridity, and natural spread of population. The Los Angeles school was also inspired by that of the Post Modernism. According to the Chicago School, cities expand steadily outward from the urban core or central business area. A "zone in transition" with manufacturers and warehouses surrounds the commercial area. The working-class tenements and apartments follow, followed by middle-class areas with larger residences, and finally affluent commuter zones. The Los Angeles model, based on the theories of UCLA and USC urbanists, contends that growth does not occur in an orderly concentric pattern, but rather in a sprawling fashion, as a plethora of commercial, industrial, and residential areas spread outward without particular pattern, as evidenced by postwar L.A. Mike Davis, in his famous work ‘Urban history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, was the first to identify the Los Angeles (L.A.) School. According to Mike Davis, the school was fully formed in the mid-1980s when a diverse group of neo-Marxist intellectuals began publishing a series of essays and books focused only on Los Angeles. Davis tentatively estimated that the school had roughly twenty members distributed throughout Southern California and beyond, during the initial days, while some members even lived as far away as Frankfurt, Germany. During the 1980s and early 1990s, most of the work produced by members of the Los Angeles School attracted a lot of attention. While certain munotes.in
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84 members (such as Edward Soja and Mike Davis) were well-known in the field of urban theory, there was little awareness of the school as a whole, particularly outside of Los Angeles. This changed in 1998, when Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty published an article in which they explicitly argued for the existence of a distinct Los Angeles School of Urbanism, whose various theories, concepts, and empirical were combined together to form a radical new conception of "postmodern urbanism." Dear and Flusty's publication of a series of articles and books, included a full-length edited volume in which they compared the Los Angeles School to the Chicago School. The core assumption of the Los Angeles School's philosophy is that Los Angeles is the ideal American metropolis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as seen by both empirical and theoretical work. More than that, many members see the Los Angeles School as a challenge to the dominant Chicago School of Urbanism. Los Angeles has also evolved from an understudied metropolis to a widely new model for urban development throughout the world in the last two decades. The emergence of the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, also consists of a core group of "Marxist geographers" and postmodernist scholars, as well as a larger interdisciplinary community of academics working in research centres across Southern California, is one important factor accounting for Los Angeles school’s recent prominence. The Los Angeles School is also recognized for its urban peripheral concentration, varied theories about "social production of urban space," and pessimism about the future of urban livingiii. Los Angeles school focused later on post modernism way of looking at urbanism and urban issues. They also viewed things from global-local perspective which was different from the Chicago scholars who looked the problems within the local society itself or environment and local structureiv. While not all members of the L.A. School identify as postmodernists, and some (such as Mike Davis) are outright anti-postmodernism, many members of the L.A. School depend extensively on postmodernist thinkers such as Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, and Derrida. Scott and Storper's numerous writings on flexible specialisation, agglomeration, and the economic dynamics of the contemporary city reflect another line of study originating from the LA School. Scott and Storper's work varies from Dear and Soja's in that it approaches urban theory from a post fordist rather than a postmodernist standpoint. In the LA School, Scott and Storper reflect one unique trend, while Dear and Soja represent another. The Los Angeles School proposes a particularly specific Angeleno paradigm, based on the metaphor of the game of Keno, or, to put it another way, Keno Capitalism. The goal of this model is to explain a "decentralised and chaotic metropolitan region of random processes." This urban structure concept is strongly associated with "the post-industrial metropolis," where "spatial organisation is made up of random combinations." munotes.in
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The Los Angeles School of
Urban Studies
Image 1v: The Keno Capitalism model (Image 1) is a great method to theoretically present Los Angeles. The Keno grid portrays Los Angeles, as a modernist metropolis. Entities and districts that shape the postmodern city are shown between each quadrangle that comprises the grid. Urbanization happens in a seemingly random range of possibility. Each being is scattered throughout the grid at random. The relationship between one development and another's non-development is a split case with no link. There is evidence that the city core, which influenced the growth of the city or agglomeration in the past, no longer applies here. The traditional city shape, as exemplified by Chicago, is viewed as being in favor of a non-connecting collage of fragmented landscapes with traditional city centres. However, Los Angeles city is made up of a collection of disjointed areas. Several distinct entities may be found in this model. There are "Edge Cities," for example. Outside of major cities, these are cities that has concentrate stores, activities, and leisure at the intersection of two or more roads. There are also some "Edge Cities" and sprawling suburbs that stretch far and are bordered by towns or agricultural areas. Theme parks, such as Disneyland, may be found on the outskirts of Los Angeles in Anaheim. There is also the discussion of Ethnourbs by the Los Angeles School. "Ethnoburbs" are multi-ethnic communities in which a minority ethnic group has a significant presence but does not necessarily make up the majority. Ethnoburbs include places like Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Italy. These places are also had vast shopping complexes, entertainment venues, and so forth. Furthermore, the Keno model portrays "urban pockets that are socially separated." The main metropolitan motions, according to the Los Angeles School, result in the "formation of crowns, knots, and locations that are largely independent from the city core." As a result, the organisation of the area has changed. In certain ways, the city perimeter is no longer under the authority and influence of the city centre, and there is a decentralization of
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86 metropolitan operations. Furthermore, the Los Angeles School shows a "highly scattered distribution of the postmodern urban planning grid, reflecting a rise in socio-spatial isolation and the phenomena of individualizationvi." Postmodernity is symbolised thus by various people and places. Though most of the Los Angeles School's work stands still extensively read in urban studies, the school's membership has been steadily declining in recent years. Only Michael J. Dear discussed about the school's future existence at a retirement celebration for Soja in 2008, where several members were present. This situation highlights the Los Angeles School's fundamental conceptual conflicts, particularly between Dear and the other members. Check Your Progress 1. Discuss the Keno capital ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 2. The Los Angeles school of thought is influenced by which dominant theor? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 9.4 SUMMARY Thus, in this chapter there is discussion of two prominent schools of Urban Sociology the first is Chicago School and the second one is that of the Los Angeles school. The Chicago School was the foundation school which worked upon understanding urban issues, process of growth etc. There are several scholars who are associated with this school like that of Robert Park who developed the Human Ecology theory, Ernest Burgess who developed Concentric Circle theory, Louis Wirth – Theory of Urbanism etc. Later, the Los Angeles School began around Southern California. This school somewhat criticized the theories of that of Chicago School. They also used Los Angeles as a basic to explain their points. The Los Angeles school was also inspired by that of the Post Modernism. We also discussed about Keno Capitalism where we see random structures existing in cities. This school is associated with several scholars like that of Michael Dear, Soja etc. munotes.in
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The Chicago School
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The Los Angeles School of
Urban Studies 9.5 QUESTIONS 1. Discuss the Chicago School of Thought. 2. Write a note on Los Angeles School of Thought 9.6 REFERENCES i Abbott, A. (2002). Los Angeles and the Chicago School: A Comment on Michael Dear. City & Community, 1(1), 33–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6040.00003 ii Michael Dear (2003) The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History1, Urban Geography, 24:6, 493-509, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.24.6.493 iii Erie, S. P., & MacKenzie, S. A. (2011). From the Chicago to the L.A. School: Whither the Local State? In D. R. Judd & D. Simpson (Eds.), The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York (NED-New edition, pp. 104–134). University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttts735.8 iv Dear, M., & Flusty, S. (1998). Postmodern Urbanism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(1), 50–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2563976 v Keno Capitalism: a postmodern urban structure model. Dear M. J., Flusty S. (2002), « Los Angeles as Postmodern Urbanism », in M. Dear (éd.), From Chicago to L. A., Making Sense of Urban Theory, Thousands Oaks, Sage Publications, p. 61–84. vi Lorik Gajika (2020), https://medium.com/an-idea/from-the-chicago-school-to-the-los-angeles-school-urbanism-sociology-6e86ed0ef88f munotes.in
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88 10 HISTORY OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY IN INDIA : COLONIAL PERIOD, POST – INDEPENDENCE PERIOD Unit Structure : 10.1 Objectives 10.2 Introduction 10.3 Development of urban life in Ancient India 10.4 Urbanization in Medieval India 10.5 Urbanization in the British ( Colonial ) period 10.6 Urbanization in the Post-Independence period 10.7 Summary 10.8 Questions 10.9 References and further Readings 10.1 OBJECTIVES 1) To acquaint the students with the history of urbanization in Ancient, Medieval and Modern India. 2) To understand the various stages of city development. 3) Religious and political influence on cities in Medieval India. 4) To know about Europeanization of cities during British administration. 5) To bring awareness about present urban scenario and problems of modern Indian cities. 10.2 INTRODUCTION :- The topic History of Urbanization in Indian begins with the development of cities in ancient society. It explains us about the genesis of urban life in India. In ancient Indian urban life began when people started to settle down in a particular place and preserve their belongings. In medieval India urban life began systematically and permanently. Medieval urban development was started by the kings, mughal rulers and administrators. Eventually, the study of urban life as ‘urbanization’ began with the arrival of British in India. As a history of urbanization, we are trying to understand the city development subjectively and objectively. Beginners classified and studied rural and urban life comparatively. munotes.in
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Sociology in India :
Colonial Period,
Post – Independence
Period After independence different scholars in sociology, anthropology and geography studied different cities in India and enriched research on urban studies. 10.3 DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN LIFE IN ANCIENT INDIA :- Probably the development of urban life in Ancient period began from New Stone Age. There was a gradual transition from food gathering stage to food production stage. Invention of fire, agriculture and wheel, domestication of animals and growth of variety of crops brought great changes in the life of ancient people. Surplus food products, permanent settlements, use of improved tools and techniques, specialization of occupations laid foundation for the emergence of model cities in ancient India. Invention of wheel, construction of houses, temples, making of ornaments, and guild system introduced urban life in dense localities. Metallurgy, crafty works, religious activities, military warfare and other special works brought changes in city life. Such ancient cities were Harappa and Mohenjo Daro (now they are in Pakistan), Magadha and Patliputra. Neolithic Revolution and Urban Development Neolithic revolution changed specialization of works in due course. All ancient cities began on the banks of the rivers due to water facility and navigation. This is clear from the diagrams :-
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90 The first city emerged with military and warfare activities. Other cities were famous for residence of soldiers and preservation of arms and armaments. Farmers were forced to supply surplus food commodities to soldiers in exchange of protection from outsiders. Invention of iron, copper and other important metals helped men to develop cities.
The First City The widespread use of two and four wheeled carts, advancement in boat building and introduction of sails permitted more rapid transportation and urbanization in the ancient world. It is the fact that beginning of human civilization is related with city life. World’s first cities were born on the banks of the rivers, such as the Nile Tigris, Euphrates and Indus. Sumerian cities were developed along with the waterways of the Southern Mesopotamian plains. The river valleys produced good climate, fertile land and water resources. Waterways were used for irrigation purpose and navigation. The people of ancient cities have special common granaries to store food products. Writing helped them to keep various records, collecting taxes became common practice, Development of architecture, science, mathematics, astronomy and astrology took place and enhanced for the development of cities. Harappa and Mohenjo Daro are the best examples of their various ideas of town plans with roads, walls, drainage, sewage and public bath systems known as Hamam Bath. Ancient cities were rich with jewellry ornaments, animals used in wars were horses, elephants and camels. In the kingdom of Chandra Gupta Maurya there were 1600 elephants and 6000 horses reserved. However, ancient time cites were characterized by the following features. • Small in size: Cities were small in size compared to medieval and modern cities. • Near to rivers: Most of the ancient cities were originated near the rivers. • Construction: All cities were built with special stones and bricks • All cities were political and military beehives.
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History of Urban
Sociology in India :
Colonial Period,
Post – Independence
Period Check your Progress :- (1) Explain the emergence of urban life in ancient India. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 10.4 URBANIZATION IN MEDIEVAL INDIA :- Medieval cities were walled meant for military force and such places were most urbanized. The central area of the city was with large space, enclosed with an inner wall housed within its temple of the city gods, and the palace of the ruler surrounded by the residences of administrators. The surrounding areas had houses, gardens and roads. Finally, the city accompanied with market guilds. In other words, medieval cities provided people with material security, prosperity and efficient government. Most of the medieval cities were popular in pre-colonized and post colonized period. India was ruled by Nandas, Mauryas, Cholas, Rajputs, Palas, Kadambas, Rashtrakootas and Chalukyas in ancient and by the beginning of medieval period all kingdoms vanquished and declined. They were experts in art, architecture, building palaces, mosques and temples. Their most of the buildings and temples are towers. The medieval cites were zoomed with art, fine art, dance, drama and development of sculpture, temple building, construction of palaces and forts. Military houses, spy houses were there in all capital and military cities. Rulers and ruled were well mannered, refined in their way of life and outlook. Dress making, ornament making, weaponry was the most refined and important works carried out in cities. Mughals have great contribution in the development of various monuments and forts. They have constructed cities like Delhi, Agra, Daulatabad, Aurangabad, Allahabad and Ahmadabad. The cities imbibed Greek and Persian culture. The medieval period urbanization is dominated by :- a) Religion and Pilgrimage b) Historical and political cities 10.4 (A) RELIGION AND PILGRIMAGE India was a multi-religious and multi–ethnic Country in the world. All religions flourished in India. They were Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Jainism. The Hindu religious cities were Kasi, Mathura, Hardwar, Prayag, Ayodhya and Madurai. They were concentrated with religious activities, inviting pilgrims for religious purpose such as munotes.in
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92 worshipping and divine fulfillment. Kashi Vishwanath temple was famous in ancient and medieval period. Indian pilgrims from South and North, and even foreign pilgrims were visiting to Kasi, Hardwar, Nasik, Madurai Kancheepuram were famous religious centres surrounded by various temples, shops, lodgings and dharamshaalas. Year around many days special religious functions, fairs, bazaars were inviting devotees from the entire country. Muslim pilgrims like Ajmer Chisti, Macca and Madina were famous. Religious heads were used to be consulted by politicians in various complicated matters. Astrological education, scholarship in Sanskrit, astrological consultancy were common affairs for kings, rulers and administrators. There were many Dharma Gurus guiding in the family, political, philosophical and religious subjects. Religious education was given to children in temples. Education was given to Brahmin boys by Brahmin Gurus. Guru-Shishya Parampara was maintained. Madarasas were established to educate Muslims and propagate Islam. Buddhist Stupas, Vigrahas and Jain temples and Mosques were found in all cities. Along with religion, architecture was the most important factor for urbanization in medieval period. Ajanta, Ellora, Agra Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar, Charminar, Hampi were singularly significant in north, central and south India. These artistic places were constructed by kings and nawabs. 10.4(B) HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CITIES Prayag, Allhabad, Patilputra, Ayodhya, Dwarka, Agra, Delhi, Fatehpur Sikri, Kanauj, Lahore, Dacca, Bidar, Vijaynagar, Bijapur, Kancheepuram, Mysore were great capital and political cities. They were politically important since Kings, Nawabs and administrators were living there. These all cities were dominated by politics. Domination and subordination of rulers, frequent wars, celebration of victories were common. These cities were famous for rituals and festivals. Every citizen had an important role in day-to-day politics. People were happy. Though agriculture was the main occupation, artisans, handicrafts workers, merchants were busy in city works. However, British defeated all princely states and united India for their selfish end such as trading and imperial, political administration and colonization. Nalanda, Takshashila, Vikramshila, Ujjain, Benaras were great university cities in India famous for higher education. Scholars from all over Hindustan and even from China, Rome and Egypt were taking education in cities. Travellers from Rome, China and Italy like Marco Polo, Hueins Tsang, Meghanstenes left their written documents about rich life in different phases of their visits. A number of major cities in the Deccan were Golconda( now in ruins) near Hyderabad, Bijapur known as the Gol Gumbhaj city, Ahmednagar, Gulbarga, Badami, Kolhapur, Pune, Nagpur, Hampi (now in ruined) previously known as Vijaynagar are famous for their age-old history munotes.in
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Period and culture, art and architecture. Hyderabad known as the Charminar city was famous for its colourful market, selling colourful indigenous goods and musical instruments. The Nizam of Hyderabad who constructed the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad on the banks of the river today uphold the native culture of Telangana and Nizamshashi on the dam sight of Hussein Sagar. Urbanization was well developed in the medieval period with monumental and palace cities like Agra, Delhi (old), Jaipur and Udaipur were occupied by rulers and artists of great merit. Qutub Minar, Taj Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri, Lal Killa which were constructed by the Mughals are ever famous and popular not only in India but in the world. The Buddhist Viharas, Stupas and jain temples were famous in Magadha, Prayag and Ujjain. In south India the famous cities were Bangalore, constructed by Kempe Gowda, Mysore the palace city of Mysore Wadeyars, Shrirangapattnam and Chennarayanpattam political capitals of Tipu Sultan were combined with Hindu and Muslim culture, where people were more secular. Cholas, Kadambas, Rashtrakootas, Chalukyas were famous in using marbles of high quality in construction of temples with Gopurams and palaces. Construction of tomb type rounds and rounds, smaller ones at the top with an arrangement of flying colourful flags representing political affinities, religious and cultural heritage of those rulers and their societies. There were many opportunities for musicians, singers and painters and artists during the medieval period. Navaratnas in Akbar’s palace were Tansen, Birbal, Abul Fazal were legendary examples who furnished well organized urban life with civilized mannerisms with all citizens. Check your Progerss :- (1) Elaborate the urban development in Medieval India. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 10.5 URBANIZATION IN THE BRITISH ( COLONIAL ) Period (1880-1947) When the Mughal rule was at its zenith, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish fort cities in India. Portuguese established Panaji (Goa) in 1510 and Bombay in 1534. Dutch established Machchalipattanam in 1605 and Nagapattinam in 1658. The French founded Pondicherry in 1673 and Chandranagar in 1690. The British established Madras in 1639 and Calcutta in 1690. But it is only in 1900 munotes.in
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94 regular westernized urbanization started in full swing all over the country. In 18th century, Varanasi was the largest city in India, followed by Calcutta, Surat, Patna, Madras, Bombay and Delhi (some names changed). Varanasi had a population of more than 150000. Among these cities, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were new, built in European style. The most important cities in medieval period, especially famous in Mughal rule were Agra, old Delhi, Lucknow, Patna, Gaya, Sikri, Shahazanabad, Ahmedabad, Srinagar, Gaya and Indore. By the beginning of 19th century, cotton textile mills in Bombay, jute mills in Calcutta, interlocution of railways, construction of national highways, waterways began in western style rapidly. British started trading from all corners of India and political expansion of their rule ended medieval urban history and British started modern system of urbanization. The history of urban sociology took a turning point from 20th century. From the beginning of the 20th century the metropolitan cities such as Bombay, Calcutta and Madras have become the leading administrative, commercial and industrial cities in India. These cities have become more urbanized under British provincial administration. Various buildings and roads were constructed in and around these cities. Harbours were developed. European style buildings with Goethic art have come up. Various banks, administrative buildings, police head quarters, railway zonal offices, P.W.D. and revenue offices have existed. Reserved Police, Military, Navy offices, cantonment and military and navy head quarters and restricted areas were developed. Surroundings to such areas markets were allowed. Numerous shops and establishment have set up in due course. Press and journalism became an important weapon for politicians, writers, social reformers and to the governments. These offices and printing press have developed in major cities. Cloth shops, medical stores, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and dispensaries have come up. In all major cities extension area is known as suburban city which is linked with the main city with transport and communication. People’s movement became a common feature. Selling and buying became a routine affair for people. Bombay, Calcutta and Madras (now names changed) have also attracted many political movements. Indian National Congress leaders from 1885 onwards had their many functions, movements and organizations in these cities. Civil Disobedience Movement, Non-Cooperation Movement, Quit India were either taken birth in Mumbai or they have influenced mass. Such movements also influenced people in all cities in India. By 1911 massive buildings were constructed and in Delhi, British started their imperial administration considering it as their official political- capital city. The construction of New Delhi was completed in 1935 with spacious buildings, roads, gardens, parliament house and annexed munotes.in
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Period administrative blocks. By 1911, British started railways all over India and set up railway zones. Churches, church towers, church-convent schools have set up in all important cities in the country. Check your Progress :- (1) Write briefly on urbanization in India in the Colonial ( British ) Period. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 10.6 URBANIZATION IN THE POST-INDEPENDENCE PERIOD (1947 ONWARDS) After independence in first two five years plans, under the PrimeMinistership of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, new economic infrastructure development began. It was an adventurous step of Indian Government to go for agricultural and industrial development. The planning commission of India under the guidance of Prof B. Mahalonbis went for fast development in the field of basic and heavy industries. But the planners did not heed about the way of city development projects in India. So cities developed abnormally and unsystematically. Thus industrialization, migration, encroachment of government land, growth of slums became common phenomenon in million plus cities like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Pune, Bangalore and Nagpur. After India’s Independence, urbanization has entered a different phase. During this period, there was a rapid urbanization, especially in the one lakh and million plus cities. There has been a three-fold increase in India’s urban population. The major changes in the urban life in the post-independence period are as follows: (1) Industrialization and migration of rural unemployed and landless labourers to major industrial cities like Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Delhi, Pune, Nagpur and Bangalore. (2) New industrial cities were constructed to absorb Industrial workers. (3) Constructions of new capital and administrative cities have taken place. (4) Rapid growth of million plus population cities. (5) Massive increase in slums and pavement houses. munotes.in
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96 (6) Introduction of city planning and urban development ministry. It has introduced flexible and rigid rules and regulations on the urban development. (7) Water and electricity supply was made. (8) Drainage, sewage and gutters were constructed. (9) Health and sanitation administration worked on to control diseases. (10) Municipal administration was separated from state and central governments. After partition of India and Pakistan, refugees came from West Pakistan (present Pakistan) and East Pakistan (present Bangladesh). So Indian government accommodated millions of refugees in U.P., Gujarat, Punjab and Maharashtra. Chandigarh the well planned city was built under the guidance of urban development ministry. The other capital cities newly built Gandhi Nagar, Bhubaneswar and Dispur. All capital cities have got a chance to urbanize under various projects provided by road and transport ministry, railway ministry and ministry of energy. After independence, Indian Government supported all state governments to go for industrial developments. Especially, in the second five years plan, more funds was allocated and spent on industrialization, which has boosted for the rapid urbanization. Almost all industrial activities were concentrated in the major cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Nagpur and Bangalore. The outskirts of these cities were crowded with shanty houses as slums, tin houses and sheds for human residence, then mushroom growth of required shops and establishments were born in a short time. The municipal and local administration allowed growing number of slums. Slum dwellers were provided with ration card, electricity and tap water connection. Goodaism and hooliganism prevailed in such places to capture government empty land for residential use, sell and resell it to others encouraged growth of slums. The industrial development started rapidly in second five years plan. The new industrial cities founded were Rourkela, Durgapur, Bhilai, Bokaro, Salem, Bhadravati and Industrial Development Corporations in all districts and corporations cities. Iron and Steel Industry, Cotton Textile, Paper, Glass and Cement Industries have given jobs to millions of rural people. Urbanization has become the important source of living for millions of people permanently. Industrial cities have become pulling places whereas, rural community pushed large number of labour and semi-skilled workers to cities. They settled near industry walls, pipelines, near construction sites. Later they settled there permanently in such places. The best example is Kamathipura in Central Mumbai, where British had brought Kamathis (construction workers) from Hyderbad to construct Bombay city. As such the rural people had munotes.in
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Period brought along with them their native culture in the cities. Such noted cities are Mumbai, Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore and have become more and more cosmopolitan and metropolitan in course of time. Market networks, real estate business, hotel industry, tourism, private and public transport, bureaucracy and all service sectors have played an important role in development and growth of cities. After independence states had capital cities. Today all 28 states and union territories have capital cities. Various administration wings, courts, police head quarters, municipal councils and corporations and their various departments have changed the entire city atmosphere. Various bureaucratic organizations have appointed lakhs of servants to serve in corporations, state and central administration. Indian Railways made slow but stable process. By 1970s, the Indian railway started to reorganize, renovate and replace meter guage to broad gauge. The cost was sum million of rupees. Electric trains were introduced between two to three cities covering a distance of 250 to 500 kms on need base. Indian Railways played a significant role in abnormal growth of cities. Movement of people from one state to another state became easy. The road transport, air ways and water ways served millions passengers and cargos. National Highways, state highways, district roads, invited development of heavy transport like movement of truckloads from Bombay to Bangalore, Madras and Delhi to Calcutta and Ahmedabad. Along with transport and communication, hotel industry grew in all urban places in the country. All types of hotels including star hotels started to cater the need of travellers from domestic and foreign countries. Consumerism has systematically developed along with urbanization. A class of people set up a different standard of living in the cities with their different tastes, styles and fashions. In other words, there was a cultural change taken place in all cities. Buying and selling, wholesaling and retailing became a common economic phenomenon in urban places. The Quantum of difference between rural and urban communities well mapped. Cinema and entertainment industry grew abnormally in major cities like Bombay, Madras and Bangalore. Cinema making industry, number of studios, publicity offices became common. Some states and cities have become famous for agricultural products such as Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Cities like Ludhiana, Pataila, Surat, Navsari, Nagpur, Bheed, Latur, Sangli, Satara, Tumkur, Belgaum, Davangere have become famous for particular crops, food grains and fruits. To modify and prepare ready-made food products, agri-based industries, milk products began in urban places. In other words, agricultural development also strongly supported urbanization. munotes.in
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98 Check your progress :- (1) Write briefly on urbanization in India in Post-independence period. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 10.7 SUMMARY :- The story of urbanization in India in historical times is a story of spatial and temporal discontinuities. Spatial discontinuities in urbanization continue to be an important aspect even in modern India. The causative factors behind urbanization varied from time to to time leading to not one but several urbanization processes at different points in time. On the basis of the temporal discontinuities in Indian urbanization we have, for the sake of convenience, divided the urban history of India into ancient, medieval, colonial ( British) and post- independence period 10.8 QUESTIONS :- 1) Discuss the emergence of urban life in Ancient India. 2) Elaborate the urban development in Medieval India. 3) Write an essay on urbanization in India in British ( Colonial ) Period. 4) Write an essay on urbanization in India in Post-Independence period. 5) Write short notes: a) Religious cities in Medieval India. b) Industrial cities in Post Independence India. c) Ancient cities. d) Urbanization in India in British ( Colonial ) Period. munotes.in
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Period 10.9 REFERENCES AND FORTHER READINGS 1) A Reader in urban Sociology by M S A Rao, C Bhat and Kadekar. 2) Urbanization and Urban System in India by Ramachandran. 3) Urbanization in India by Mrs. Nandini Agarwal 4) Urbanization by Ashish Bose munotes.in
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96 11 RECENT TRENDS OF URBANIZATION IN INDIA Unit Structure : 11.0 Objectives 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Contextualizing Urbanization Globally 11.2.2 Population redistribution 11.2.3 Population decline in cities 11.3 Overview of Urbanization Trend in India 11.3.1 Urbanization Trend in India (1901-2011) 11.3.2 Rural Urban Population Differences 11.3.4 Cities and Urbanization Trend 11.3.5 Reasons for growth of Cities 11. 3.6 State Level Urbanization Trends 11.4 Climate Change and Urbanization 11.5 Summary 11.6 Questions 11.7 References 11.0 OBJECTIVES 1. To learn about Urbanization Trends in recent times 2. To understand it in the context of Global world. 11.1 INTRODUCTION In the chapter you will learn about Urbanization trends in India. This chapter would be very much useful if you are pursuing career in Urban studies, Urban Sociology, population studies, demography etc. Being the second largest populated country in the world studying Urbanization trends becomes very important. This topic is also relevant as Urbanization is a continuous process. We will not just look into the trends but also look into the Global scenario to understand Indias Urbanization case better and even that of the influence of Colonialization movement. munotes.in
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Urbanization in India 11.2 CONTEXTUALIZING URBANIZATION GLOBALLY To understand Urbanization process in India, we need to look from an Global perspective. As Global conditions does influence Indian economic situations through funding, investment directly as well as indirectly. Let us first look into the meaning of Urbanization 11.2.1 Meaning of Urbanization The term "urbanisation" has two distinct meanings that are intertwined. First, demographers view Urbanization as a concept referring to the migration process of people between rural and urban regions, Secondly, urbanisation is viewed as the changing morphological form of urban agglomerations and its evolution in a variety of different social disciplines, most notably economics, geography, and sociology. Indeed, one of the primary study topics in the social sciences is the distinction between the causes and effects of urbanisation as a demographic process and the emerging morphology of huge urban complexes different parts of the world. 11.2.2 Population redistribution The study of urbanization has focused on the global migration of people between rural and urban regions, as well as the differences in the level, pace, and pattern of the redistribution of population between industrialised and developing nations. Only 28% of the world's population is estimated to have lived in urban areas during the 1950s. Over half of the people in the more developed nations lived in cities, whereas only around 15% of the population in the less developed regions did during the 1950s. According to studies from 1980, urbanisation in the developed regions had reached 70%, while it had exceeded 30% in the less developed countries. These redistributions are the result of uneven rates of population growth in rural and urban areas in highly industrialized and developing countries. For example, in developed districts, the urban population expanded by around 85% between the year 1950 and 1980, whereas the rural population actually declined by more than 10%. The urban population in under developed region expanded by more than 25 percent, while the rural population increased by more than 60 percent. While the rate of urbanization may be directly connected to the rates of urban and rural growth, identifying the differences in the components of urban and rural population change is substantially more challenging. This is primarily owing to the fact, growth of cities and net migration, altering borders (or area reclassification of places i.e., urban and rural regions have an impact on population growth in both cities and rural areas. The historical trend in population redistribution has been toward highly populated metropolitan regions. However, there has been also a shift away from urban centers towards the suburban fringe inside metropolitan districts. Although the definitions of urban, suburban, and rural vary greatly from country to country, there are strong indications that decentralization munotes.in
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98 of population is occurring in many Western countries, and that it is increasing movement of large agglomeration (metropolitan) boundaries in the non-metropolitan sector (suburban)i. 11.2.3 Population decline in cities Although cities have be expanding globally, but studies in the recent times point out that there is going population decline in the near future. This is due to decline in the number of elderly people in various industrialized nations, developed countries which will have an indirect influence on urban infrastructure and accessibility. Globally, it can also be observed that the urban population has been steadily increasing between 1950 and 2025. After that, it is projected that in the years 2025-2050, there might be a shift in the character of the population, particularly in metropolitan areas. Urban migration would also been moving from the North to the Southern regions, according to studies. Scholars also point out that cities in Asia and Africa are growing faster than cities in other areas at the moment, and in the future estimates show that Asia, African cities would rule the world in terms of growth rate from 2015 to 2050. The continents with the most megacities and large cities are Asia and Africa. According to estimates, this trend is projected to continue. Over time, these two regions would also become increasingly densely populated with large number of small and medium-sized cities. Two Asian countries, China and India, will be home to some of the world's biggest cities in the twenty-first century. Asia and Africa is said to be having the majority of the world's urban population in the future. On the other hand, some cities in Northern America and Europe will be diminishing in size.ii Understanding these global trends is also important as it helps us to understand our own country’s location and measures which needs to be undertaken in terms of policiesiii.. Thus, we can see that the Asian countries like India have bright future if you channelize the youth and even the urban growth policies strategically and effectively Check Your Progress 1. Explain how the developed countries population would be effected by 2050. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 2. Discuss meaning of Urbanization ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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Urbanization in India 11.3 OVERVIEW OF URBANIZATION TREND IN INDIA The urban landscape in the post-independence era is characterized by dualism. The economically developed states attracted people towards the urban areas as a result of industrialization and infrastructural investment, however, this was primarily in and around big cities and developing industrial centers. A notable tendency emerged in the post-independence period with time like even in underdeveloped regions, urban growth was rapid, particularly in small and medium towns. Government investments in district and taluka headquarters, urban industry dispersion programs, and a needs-based or "gap-filling" approach of sending funding from states to urban local governments all contributed to towards this growth. Another reason for rural–urban migration towards the smaller towns in backward states may be described in terms of push factors, such as a lack of diversification in the agrarian sector. Though one of the important point to note is that the districts which were backward and smaller towns have remained stagnant even now as urbanization has been concentrated on developed regions and major cities. This phenomenon is also seen in the developed nations where large municipal institutions, have a strong economic base, as evidenced by their fast economic and demographic growth. Smaller towns in developing nations, on the other hand, have suffered economically and seen slow or negative demographic development, with many failing to reach the criteria for classification as urban centers. Rapid income growth has occurred in both industrialized and emerging regions, as well as in and around Class I cities. Poverty has become concentrated in remote locations and problem areas as a result of these socioeconomic features. While industrialized nations have built a resistance to in-migration over time, emerging countries appear to lack the ability to send skilled labour to the destination. Given this macro environment, the most logical conclusion appears to be a slowdown of urbanization and a concentration of urban growth in relatively developed states and around a few global capitals. Due to the Covid epidemic, the Indian government chose not to undertake the census in 2021. Home Minister has now stated that the next Census will be an e-survey that will be completed by 2024, making it India's first "digital Censusiv. Hence, the data presented in this chapter is viewed with reference to the year 2011. 11.3.1 Urbanization Trend in India (1901 – 2011) Since mid-nineteenth century, historians, social reformers, and politicians have been interested in urbanization, development which resulted mainly due to industrial and scientific revolutions of the previous two centuries. Let us look into the details of it. Consequences of Unbalanced Urbanization can be also leading to problems like Shortage of Houses, basic facilities like sanitation, health facilities, water etc. This could also lead to growth of slumsv. munotes.in
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100 Years on
which Census
were carried No. of Urban
Agglomerations /
Towns Percentage of
Urban
Population Urban
Population
Annual
exponential
Growth rate
1901 1827 10.84 1911 1825 10.29 0.03 1921 1949 11.18 0.79 1931 2072 11.99 1.75 1941 2250 13.86 2.77 1951 2843 17.29 3.47 1961 2363 17.97 2.34 1971 2590 19.91 3.23 1981 3378 23.34 3.79 1991 3368 25.72 3.09 2001 5161 27.86 2.75 2011 7935 31.16 2.76 Table – 1 Note – As the 1981 Census was not conducted in Assam and 1991 Census was not conducted in Jammu and Kashmir, the population of India includes their projected figures. (Source: Census of Indiavi) India has the most distinct characteristics of urbanization among developing countries. According to the 2011 Census, India's urbanization has accelerated faster than projected. This is a reversal of the downward trend in urbanization that was witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s. Another significant feature is that, for the first time since independence, the urban population increased faster than the rural population. This is due to a significant increase in the number of municipalities as well as the concentration of population in urban regions. This has far-reaching consequences for urban infrastructure and other civic amenities. The number of urban agglomerations/towns has climbed from 1827 in 1901 to 7935 in 2011, while the total population of urban areas has risen from 2.58 crores in 1901 to 37.71 crores in 2011. Thus, data clearly demonstrates that India's urbanization tendency is gradually increasing. munotes.in
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Urbanization in India In comparison to many emerging countries, India's urbanization has been slow. The percentage of yearly exponential growth rate of the urban population in India shows that it grew at a quicker rate from 1921 to 1951. Following that, it fell suddenly between 1951 and 1961. The growth rate also improved significantly between 1961 and 1971 and 1971 and 1981. (Table 1). However, from 1981 to 1991, there was a downward trend that persisted through 1991-2001; from 2001 to 2011, there was a very slight increase, signaling a turnaround from the previous two decades to the current rate. The declassification of a large number of municipalities during that decade was the cause of the reduction in the urban rate between 1951 and 1961. When looking at the number of towns, the data shows that the number of urban agglomerations/towns has increased from 1827 in 1901 to 7935 in 2011. Table 1 depicts the Indian urbanisation process. It shows that India's urbanisation trend is expanding, indicating that the country is moving forward, as the proportion of the people living in cities has increased to 31.16 percent, despite the trend suggesting a reduction in growth. In 1961, India's urban population accounted for around 18% of the overall population, as seen in Table 1. Between 1951 and 1961, the average rate of urban population increase was 2.32 percent, which accelerated to 3.79 percent between 1971 and 1981, the greatest rate of urban population growth since independence. After 1981, the urban growth rate slowed to 3.09 percent between 1981 and 1991, and then to 2.75 percent between 1991 and 2001. During the period 2001-2011, however, the dropping growth rate was partly reversed. Between 2001 and 2011, the overall increase in urban population was 91 million, the largest ever, and for the first time, urban population growth outpaced rural growth (Bhagat, 2017) 11.3.2 Rural-Urban Population Differences It is vital to note that urban population increase alone will not accelerate urbanization; instead, if urban growth is to occur, the pace of urban population growth must be higher than the rate of rural population growth. As a result, the urban-rural population growth difference is crucial to the urbanization process. Annual exponential growth rate in percentage Years Rural Urban Urban -Rural
growth 1971 -81 1.76 3.79 2.03 1981 -91 1.80 3.09 1.29 1991 -2001 1.69 2.75 1.06 2001 -2011 1.16 2.76 1.60 Source – Census (cited from Bhagat, 2017) munotes.in
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102 The above table shows that the urban-rural growth differentials rose from roughly 1% per year between 1991 and 2001 and 1.60 percent per year between 2001 and 2011. Table 2 also shows that the rural population growth slowed down significantly between 2001 and 2011, compared to preceding decades. The difference in natural rise between rural and urban regions (births-deaths), net rural urban categorization, and net rural to urban migration are all factors in the urban-rural population growth disparity. During the period 1991-2000 to 2001-2011, there is the natural rise differentials between urban and rural areas. As a result, it was the net rural-urban categorization and net rural-to-urban migration that caused the urban-rural growth disparity widened the urbanization to accelerate between 2001 and 2011. (Bhagat, 2017) 11.3.4 Cities and Urbanization Trend An in-depth examination of the distribution of urban population reveals that India’s urbanization has been top-heavy or skewed towards larger cities. The unique aspect of the population living in the metropolitan cities is also that nearly 5 million or more than that are living in cities which at times equal to a size of population of one country. This has also risen rapidly in the last three decades (Kundu, 2009). Over the last few decades there is also an increasing concentration of Urban Population which has been residing in the Class I cities specially those with population above 100,000 has been observed. Even the percentage of urban population in Class I cities has increased from 26.0 percent from 1901 to 68.7 percent in 2011 and about 70 percent increase in the year 2011. One of the important reasons for this is the faster growth of the Class I cities in India. There were just 24 Class I cities in 1901, but in the year 2011 it became 964. The concentration of urban population is significantly higher even in metropolitan (or metro) cities, which have populations of one million or more. In 1901, there was just one city with a population of over a million people, accounting for only 6% of the entire urban population. Although their percentage share of the urban population has increased from 10.6 to 12.0 in 1941 from the year 1901. 11.3.5 Reasons for growth of Cities The British built their economy throughout the colonial period around massive commodities and population flows that were only channelled through port cities or administrative hubs. As a result, the Middle Ages' inter-settlement ties and bi-directional flow of products and services between the core and periphery were diminished. Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Karachi were the four largest urban agglomerations (UAs) munotes.in
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Urbanization in India that became economic centers. Pre-existing rural–urban ties were gradually being replaced by export–import commodities movements. The only condition for the survival of growing urban centers was the mobility of people and goods (and the plantation fields). As a result, unlike their counterparts in more prosperous countries, Indian agglomerations were not the outcome of economic development. Later as our country underwent both political and economic structural changes after gaining independence in 1947, massive public-sector investment was made in the early plans, especially the Second and Third Five-Year Plans, which limited the urban hierarchy. Despite the government's important role in assisting the development of backward areas through proper expenditures, regional disparities persisted. This was owing to the inability to create a sustainable urban settlement system that preserved their surroundings. The transition of large cities from colonial to national capitals led in a concentration of low-productivity manufacturing and service sectors, which were able to establish themselves more quickly owing to the changing political economy. Urbanization was significant in the first three decades after independence, but this resulted in the informalization of the urban economy and worsened poverty in terms of basic utilities. Data reveals that the trend of urbanization was higher until 1981, after which it began to decline, only to increase fractionally in 2011. However, natural growth rate has been dropping during this time. This suggests that the greater percentages of urbanization is not due to the rise of towns, but rather due to other factors such as rural to urban conversion and rural-urban migration. 11.3.6 State Level Urbanization Trends The pattern of urbanization varies from one state to another, the economically advanced states also have a higher level of urbanization. There is relatively low levels of urbanization in most sections of central, eastern, and north-eastern India. This area of India is likewise economically underdeveloped. All southern states, as well as northern and western Indian states like Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, have greater levels of urbanisation than the national average, yet tiny states like Goa continue to lead the list with 62 percent urban, followed by Mizoram (51.5 percent). With a rate of urbanisation of 48.4%, Tamil Nadu continues to be the most urbanised of the main states. In 2011, 48.4 percent of the population voted. Himachal Pradesh is at the bottom of the list, with a degree of urbanisation of 10%, followed by Bihar (11.3), Assam (14%), and Orissa (14%). Other states with lesser urbanisation than the national average include Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, munotes.in
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104 MP, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand. All of these figures are used from the 2011 census. (Bhagat, 2017) 11.4 CLIMATE CHANGE AND URBANIZATION According to the Sustainable Urbanization Policy Brief, urban areas account for less than 5% of the global terrain. Nonetheless, they are responsible for around 70% of world energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. When it comes to urban infrastructure and technology, innovation is critical. For example, by 2030, greenhouse gas emissions in the world's 724 biggest cities might be decreased by up to 1.5 billion CO2e annually, owing mostly to radical changes in transportation networksvii. To cope with the limited resources for large uses. There are newer ways of producing resources are been made like that of introduction of electric vehicles. This is planned through growth and consumption of Electric vehicles – like buses, scooters, cars as these vehicles emit massive amount of Co2 in the air. With changes brought about in Countries like India – which stands as second largest populated country in the world it would influence other countries too. Our government is taking enough measures, encouraging and providing subsidies to companies who are working on electric vehicles, solar panels-based industries any other forms innovation-based industries which are working on climate change related issues. Check Your Progress 1. Explain one reason rise of Urbanization in Metropolitan cities. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 2. What is the Urban Population Annual Exponential Growth rate of the year 2011 ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ munotes.in
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Urbanization in India 11.5 SUMMARY Urbanization is concerned with the study of cities and city systems; at the same time, it is also a concept used across several disciplines. In simple terms, urbanisation can be defined as a transformation process that occurs when various conditions and relationships within society alter. Since mid-nineteenth century, historians, social reformers, and politicians have been interested in urbanization, development which resulted mainly due to industrial and scientific revolutions of the previous two centuries. The percentage of the population living in urban regions is used to determine the level of urbanization in the field of demography. In this chapter we saw about the Urbanization trends which grew rapidly with the passage of time. The trend also shows certain metropolitan cities grew more this was due to the colonial movement where the port cities developed as market centers. The post-independence period also there was not much changes. The smaller cities though developed but it could grow like the metropolitan cities. This trend is also seen globally across other developed countries. We also discussed in the chapter about studies where it is projected that there would population decline in the developed countries because of aging of the population around 2050 yet in Asia and Africa there would be still growth in the population. The Urbanization trends also would be impacted heavily by the Climate change, Global Warming and several other natural disasters or uncertainty. 11.6 QUESTIONS 1. Discuss the impact of Urbanization trend on Climate change. 2. Discuss Rural Urban Population differences 3. Explain state level Urbanization trends 4. Write in brief Cities and Urbanization trends. 11.7 REFERENCES i David F.Sly The Social Science Encyclopaedia. Edited by Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper (1996). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ii Kundu, D., Pandey, A.K. (2020). World Urbanisation: Trends and Patterns. In: Kundu, D., Sietchiping, R., Kinyanjui, M. (eds) Developing National Urban Policies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3738-7_2 munotes.in
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106 iii https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/rise-urban-consumer-class-economy-india iv https://theprint.in/opinion/decade-without-data-why-india-is-delaying-census-when-us-uk-china-went-ahead-during-covid/954383/ v Kumar, D., & Rai, A. K. (2014). Urbanization process, trend, pattern and its consequences in India. Neo Geographia, 3. vi www.censusindia.gov.in vii The New Climate Economy Report. 2014. Ram B. Bhagat, (2017), Urbanization in India: Trend, Pattern and Policy Issues Paper presented at 28th International Population Conference to be held at Cape Town, 29th October to 4th November, 2017. munotes.in