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Reading Resources/References
Sociology, Urban
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William
A. Darity, Jr.. Vol. 8. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference
USA, 2008. p15-17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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Sociology, Urban
· BIBLIOGRAPHY
As the cutting edge of change, cities are important for
interpreting societies. Momentous changes in nineteenth-century
cities led theorists to explore their components. The French
word for place (bourg), and its residents (bourgeois), became
central concepts for Karl Marx (1818–1883). Markets and
commerce emerged in cities where “free air” ostensibly fostered
innovation. Industrial capitalists thus raised capital and built
factories near cities, hiring workers “free” from the feudal legal
hierarchy. For Marx, workers were proletarians and a separate
economic class, whose interests conflicted with the bourgeoisie.
Class conflicts drove history. Max Weber’s (1864–1920) The
City (1921) built on this legacy but added legitimacy,
bureaucracy, the Protestant ethic, and political parties in
transforming cities. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) similarly
reasoned historically, contrasting traditional villages with
modern cities in his Division of Labor (1893), where multiple
professional groups integrated their members by enforcing
norms on them.

British and American work was more empirical. British and
American churches and charitable groups that were concerned
with the urban poor sponsored many early studies. When
sociology entered universities around 1900, urban studies still
focused on inequality and the poor. Robert Park (1864–1944)
and many students at the University of Chicago thus published
monographs on such topics as The Gold Coast and the
Slum (1929), a sociological study of Chicago’s near north side
by Harvey Warren Zorbaugh (1896–1965).
The 1940s and 1950s saw many efforts to join these European
theories with the British and American empirical work. Floyd
Hunter published Community Power Structure (1953), an
Atlanta-based monograph that stressed the business dominance
of cities, broadly following Marx. Robert Dahl’s Who
Governs? (1961) was more Weberian, stressing multiple issue
areas of power and influence (like mayoral elections versus
schools), the indirect role of citizens via elections, and multiple
types of resources (money, votes, media, coalitions) that shifted
how basic economic categories influenced politics. These
became the main ideas in power analyses across the social
sciences.
Page 16 | Top of Article
Parisian theorists like Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Pierre
Bourdieu (1930–2002), and Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991)
suggested that the language and symbols of upper-status persons
dominated lower-status persons. Others, such as Jean
Baudrillard, pushed even further to suggest that each person
was so distinct that theories should be similarly individualized.
He and others labeled their perspective postmodernism to
contrast with mainstream science, which they suggested
reasoned in a linear, external, overly rational manner. Urban
geographers like David Harvey joined postmodernist themes
with concepts of space to suggest a sea change in architecture,
planning, and aesthetics, as well as in theorizing, although
Harvey’s main analytical driver is global capitalism.
Saskia Sassen starts from global capitalism but stresses local

differences in such “world cities” as New York, London, and
Tokyo. Why these? Because the headquarters of global firms are
there, with “producer services” that advise major firms, and
market centers where sophisticated legal and financial
transactions are spawned. Individual preferences enter, via
global professionals and executives who like big-city living, but
hire nannies and chauffeurs, attracting global migrants, which
increases (short-term, within city) inequality. Some affluent
persons create gated housing, especially in areas with
high crime and kidnapping, like Latin America.
These past theories stress work and production. A new
conceptualization adds consumption. Walter Benjamin (1892–
1940) theorized that the flaneur drove the modern capitalist
economy, by shopping. Typified by the top-hatted gentleman in
impressionist paintings, the flaneur pursued his aesthetic
sensitivities, refusing standardized products. Mall rats continue
his quest.
Theories have grown more bottom-up than top-down, as have
many cities, although this is controversial, as some capital and
corporations are increasingly global. The father of bottom-up
theory is Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), whose Democracy
in America (1835–1840) stressed community associations like
churches. Linked to small and autonomous local governments,
these associations gave (ideally) citizens the ability to
participate meaningfully in decisions affecting them. Such
experiences built networks of social relations and taught values
of participation, democracy, and trust.
In the late twentieth century, Tocqueville and civic groups
became widely debated as nations declined and cities competed
for investors, residents, and tourists. With the cold war over,
globalization encourages more cross-national travel,
communication, investment, and trade. Local autonomy rose.
But nations declined in their delivery of egalitarian welfare
benefits, since ideal standards are increasingly international.
“Human rights” is a new standard. Yet the world is too large to
implement the most costly specifics, even if they remain

political goals.
Over the twentieth century, many organizations shifted from the
hierarchical and centralized to the smaller and more
participatory. The community power literature from Hunter
(1953) to Dahl (1961) and beyond suggests a decline in the
“monolithic” city governance pattern that Hunter described in
Atlanta. Dahl documented a more participatory, “pluralistic”
decision-making process, where multiple participants combine
and “pyramid” their “resources” to shift decisions in separate
“issue areas.”
New social movements (NSMs) emerged in the 1970s, extending
past individualism and egalitarianism and joining consumption
and lifestyle to the classic production issues of unions and
parties. These new civic groups pressed new agendas—ecology,
feminism, peace, gay rights—that older political parties
ignored. In Europe, the national state and parties were the
hierarchical “establishment” opposed by NSMs. In the United
States, local business and political elites were more often
targeted. Other aesthetic and amenity concerns have also
arisen— like suburban sprawl, sports stadiums, and parks; these
divide people less into rich versus poor than did class and party
politics.
Comparative studies emerged after the 1980s of thousands of
cities around the world. They have documented the patterns
discussed above, and generally show that citizens and leaders
globally are more decentralized, egalitarian, and
participatory. The New Political Culture (1998), edited by Terry
Nichols Clark and Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot, charts these new
forms of public decisions and active citizen-leader contacts via
NSMs, consumption issues, focused groups, block clubs,
cabletelevision coverage of local associations, and Internet
groups. Global competition among cities and weaker nations
makes it harder to preserve national welfare-state benefits. This
encourages more income inequalities, individualism, and
frustrated egalitarianism, which is registered in higher crime
rates, divorce, and low trust. As strong national governments

withdraw, regional and ethnic violence rises (e.g., in the former
Soviet Union or diverse cities like Miami). Voter turnout for
elections organized by the classical national parties (which still
control local candidate selection in most of the world) thus
declined, while new issue-specific community associations
mushroomed in the late twentieth century. Urbanism has
become global, carried by civic groups, diffused by the Internet,
and operating in more subtle ways than past theories proposed.
SEE ALSOAnthropology, Urban ; Assimilation ; Bourdieu,
Pierre ; Chicago School ; Cities ; Class Conflict ; Community
Power Studies ; Dahl, Robert Alan ; Elite Theory ; Foucault,
Michel; Page 17 | Top of ArticleGeography ; Hunter,
Floyd ; Marx, Karl ; Metropolis ; Pluralism ; Social
Movements ; Street Culture ; Tocqueville, Alexis de ; Urban
Renewal ; Urban Riots ; Urban Sprawl ; Urbanization ; Weber,
Max
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clark, Terry Nichols, and Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot, eds.
1998. The New Political Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Dahl, Robert A. [1961] 2005. Who Governs? Democracy and
Power in an American City. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Hunter, Floyd. 1953. Community Power Structure: A Study of
Decision Makers. Durham: University of North Carolina Press.
Terry Nichols Clark
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sociology, Urban." International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 8,
Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 15-17. Gale Virtual
Reference
Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3045302542/GV
RL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=dfc27136. Accessed 26 June
2019.
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· Decentralization,
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· urban sociology,
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· Social movements,
· urban sociology,
· 8: 16
· Sociology, urban,
· 8: 15-17
· Tocqueville, Alexis de,
· urban sociology,
· 8: 16
· Urban sociology,
· 8: 15-17
· Urban studies,
· urban sociology,
· 8: 15-16
Urban Sociology
LEE J. HAGGERTY
Encyclopedia of Sociology. Vol. 5. 2nd ed. New York,
NY: Macmillan Reference USA, 2001. p3191-3198.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Macmillan Reference USA,
COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage
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Page 3191
URBAN SOCIOLOGY
Urban sociology studies human groups in a territorial frame of
reference. In this field, social organization is the major focus of
inquiry, with an emphasis on the interplay between social and
spatial organization and the ways in which changes in spatial
organization affect social and psychological well being. A wide
variety of interests are tied together by a common curiosity
about the changing dynamics, determinants, and consequences

of urban society's most characteristic form of settlement: the
city.
Scholars recognized early that urbanization is accompanied by
dramatic structural, cognitive, and behavioral changes. Classic
sociologists (Durkheim, Weber, Toinnes, Marx) delineated the
differences in institutional forms that seemed to accompany the
dual processes of urbanization and industrialization as rural-
agrarian societies were transformed into urban-industrial
societies (see Table 1).
Several key questions that guide contemporary research are
derived from this tradition: How are human communities
organized? What forces produce revolutionary transformations
in human settlement patterns? What organizational forms
accompany these transformations? What differences do urban
living make, and why do those differences exist? What
consequences does the increasing size of human concentrations
have for human beings, their social worlds, and their
environment?
Students of the urban scene have long been interested in the
emergence of cities (Childe 1950), how cities grow and change
(Weber 1899), and unique ways of life associated with city
living (Wirth 1938). These classic treatments have historical
value for understanding the nature of pre-twentieth-century
cities, their determinants, and their human consequences, but
comparative analysis of contemporary urbanization processes
leads Berry (1981, p. xv) to conclude that "what is apparent is
an accelerating change in the nature of change itself, speedily
rendering not-yet-conventional wisdom inappropriate at best."
Urban sociologists use several different approaches to the
notion of community to capture changes in how individual
urbanites are tied together into meaningful social groups and
how those groups are tied to other social groups in the broader
territory they occupy. An interactional community is indicated
by networks of routine, face-to-face primary interaction among
the members of a group. This is most evident among close
friends and in families, tribes, and closely knit locality groups.

An ecological community is delimited by routine patterns of
activity that its members engage in to meet the basic
requirements of daily life. It corresponds with the territory over
which the group ranges in performing necessary activities such
as work, sleep, shopping, education,Page 3192 | Top of Article
Table 1
Table 1
Classic Contrasts Between Urban and Rural Societies
Institution
Urban-Industrial
Rural-Agrarian
Agreements
Contractual
Personal
Authority
Bureaucratic
Paternalistic
Communication
Secondary
Primary
Integrative mechanism
Specialization
Common experience
Normative standards
Universalistic
Particularistic
Normative structure
Anomic
Integrated
Problem solution
Rational
Traditional
Production
Manufacturing
Agriculture
Social control

Restitutive
Repressive
Social relations
Segmentalized
All encompassing
Socialization
Formal
Informal
Stratification
Achieved status
Ascribed status
Values
Money and power
Family
World views
Secular
Sacred
and recreation. Compositional communities are clusters of
people who share common social characteristics. People of
similar race, social status, or family characteristics, for
example, form a compositional community. A symbolic
community is defined by a commonality of beliefs and attitudes
among its members. Its members view themselves as belonging
to the group and are committed to it.
Research on the general issue of how these forms of
organization change as cities grow has spawned a voluminous
literature. An ecological perspective and a sociocultural
perspective guide two major research traditions. Ecological
studies focus on the role of economic competition in shaping
the urban environment. Ecological and compositional
communities are analyzed in an attempt to describe and
generalize about urban forms and the processes of urban growth
(Hawley 1981).
Sociocultural studies emphasize the importance of cultural,
psychological, and other social dimensions of urban life. These

studies focus on the interactional and symbolic communities
that characterize the urban setting (Wellman and Leighton 1979;
Suttles 1972).
Early theoretical work suggested that the most evident
consequence of the increasing size, density, and heterogeneity
of human settlements was a breakdown of social ties, a decline
in the family, alienation, an erosion of moral codes, and social
disorganization (Wirth 1938). Later empirical research has
clearly shown that in general, urbanites are integrated into
meaningful social groups (Fischer 1984).
The sociocultural tradition suggests that cultural values derive
from socialization into a variety of subcultures and are
relatively undisturbed by changes in ecological processes.
Different subcultures select, are forced into, or unwittingly drift
into different areas that come to exhibit the characteristics of a
particular subculture (Gans 1962). Fischer (1975) combines the
ecological and subcultural perspectives by suggesting that size,
density, and heterogeneity are important but that they produce
integrated subcultures rather than fostering alienation and
community disorganization. Size provides the critical masses
necessary for viable unconventional subcultures to form. With
increased variability in the subcultural mix in urban areas,
subcultures become more intensified as they defend their ways
of life against the broad array of others in the environment. The
more subcultures, the more diffusion of cultural elements, and
the greater the likelihood of new subcultures emerging, creating
the ever-changing mosaic of unconventional subcultures that
most distinguishes large places from small ones.
Empirical approaches to urban organization vary according to
the unit of analysis and what is being observed. Patterns of
activity (e.g., commuting, retail sales, crime) and characteristics
of people (e.g., age, race, income, household composition) most
commonly are derived from government reports for units of
analysis as small as city blocks and as large as metropolitan
areas. These types ofPage 3193 | Top of Articledata are used to
develop general principles of organization and change in urban

systems. General questions range from how certain activities
and characteristics come to be organized in particular ways in
space to why certain locales exhibit particular characteristics
and activities. Territorial frameworks for the analysis of urban
systems include neighborhoods, community areas, cities, urban
areas, metropolitan regions, nations, and the world.
Observations of networks of interaction (e.g., visiting patterns,
helping networks) and symbolic meanings of people (e.g.,
alienation, values, worldviews) are less systematically available
because social surveys are more appropriate for obtaining this
kind of information. Consequently, less is known about these
dimensions of community than is desirable.
It is clear that territoriality has waned as an integrative force
and that new forms of extralocal community have emerged.
High mobility, an expanded scale of organization, and an
increased range and volume of communication flow coalesce to
alter the forms of social groups and their organization in space
(Greer 1962). With modern communication and transportation
technology, as exists in the United States today, space becomes
less of an organizing principle and new forms of territorial
organization emerge that reflect the power of large-scale
corporate organization and the federal government in shaping
urban social and spatial organization (Gottdiener 1985).
Hawley's (1950, 1981) ecological approach to the study of
urban communities serves as the major paradigm in
contemporary research. This approach views social organization
as developing in response to basic problems of existence that all
populations face in adapting to their environments. The urban
community is conceptualized as the complex system of
interdependence that develops as a population collectively
adapts to an environment, using whatever technology is
available. Population, environment, technology, and social
organization interact to produce various forms of human
communities at different times and in different places (Table 2).
Population is conceptualized as an organized group of humans
that function routinely as a unit; the environment is defined as

everything that is external to the population, including other
organized social groups. Technological advances allow people
to expand and redefine the nature of the relevant environment
and therefore influence the forms of community organization
that populations develop (Duncan 1973).
In the last half of the twentieth century, there were
revolutionary transformations in the size and nature of human
settlements and the nature of the interrelationships among them
(Table 3). The global population "explosion" created by an
unprecedented rapid decline in human mortality in less
developed regions of the world after 1950 provided the
additional people necessary for this population "implosion:" the
rapid increase in the size and number of human agglomerations
of unprecedented size. Urban sociology attempts to understand
the determinants and consequences of this transformation.
The urbanization process involves an expansion in the entire
system of interrelationships by which a population maintains
itself in its habitat (Hawley 1981, p. 12). The most evident
consequences of the process and the most common measures of
it are an increase in the number of people at points of
population concentration, an increase in the number of points at
which population is concentrated, or both (Eldridge 1956).
Theories of urbanization attempt to understand how human
settlement patterns change as technology expands the scale of
social systems.
Because technological regimes, population growth mechanisms,
and environmental contingencies change over time and vary in
different regions of the world, variations in the pattern of
distribution of human settlements generally can be understood
by attending to these related processes. In the literature on
urbanization, an interest in the organizational forms of systems
of cities is complemented by an interest in how growth is
accommodated in cities through changes in density gradients,
the location of socially meaningful population subgroups, and
patterns of urban activities. Although the expansion of cities
has been the historical focus in describing the urbanization

process, revolutionary developments in transportation,
communication, and information technology in the last fifty
years expanded the scale of urban systems and directed
attention toward the broader system of the form of organization
in which cities emerge and grow.
Table 2 SOURCE: Abstracted from Berry 1981.
Table 2
Comparative Urban Features of Major World Regions
Basic Feature
Nineteenth Century North America
Twentieth Century North America
Third World
Postwar Europe
SOURCE: Abstracted from Berry 1981.
Summary
Concentrated
Spread out
Constrained
Planned
Size
1–2 million
14 million
19 million
8 million
Density
High
Low
Medium
High
Timing
250 years long period
Emergent no pressure
Very rapid since 1950s
Very slow stationary

Scale
Regional and local
Inter-metro and global
Global and local
National and local
City system
Rank size regional
Daily urban national
Primate national
Rank size national
Occupations
Secondary manufacture
Tertiary services
Family and corporate
Diverse mixture
Spatial mix
Zone-sector core focus
Mutlinodal mosaic
Reverse zonal
Overlayed mixed use
Rural–urban differences
Great in all areas
Narrow and declining
Medium and growing
Narrow except work
Status mix
Diverse hierarchical
High overall poor pockets
Bifurcated high % poor
Medium compacted
Migration
Heavy rural-urban and foreign
Inter-metro and foreign
Heavy rural-urban circulation
Foreign skilled
Planning

Laissez-faire capitalism
Decentral, ineffective
Centralized, ineffective
Decentral, effective
Much research on the urbanization process is descriptive in
nature, with an emphasis on identifying and measuring patterns
of change in demographic and social organization in a territorial
frame of reference. Territorially circumscribed environments
employed as units of analysis include administrative units
(villages, cities, counties, states, nations), population
concentrations (places, agglomerations, urbanized areas), and
networks of interdependency (neighborhoods, metropolitan
areas, daily urban systems, city systems, the earth).
The American urban system is suburbanizing and
deconcentrating. One measure of suburbanization is the ratio of
the rate of growth in the ring to that in the central city over a
decade (Schnore 1959). While some Metropolitan Statistical
Areas (MSAs) began suburbanizing in the late 1800s, the
greatest rates for the majority of places occurred in the 1950s
and 1960s. Widespread use of the automobile, inexpensive
energy, the efficient production of materials for residential
infrastructure, and federal housing policy allowed metropolitan
growth to be absorbed by sprawl instead of by increased
congestion at the center.
As the scale of territorial organization increased, so did the
physical distances between black and white, rich and poor,
young and old, and other meaningful population subgroups. The
Index of Dissimilarity measures the degree of segregation
between two groups by computing the percentage of one group
that would have to reside on a different city block for it to have
the same proportional distribution across urban space as the
group to which it is being compared (Taeuber and Taeuber
1965). Although there has been some decline in indices of
dissimilarity between black and white Americans since the
1960s, partly as a result of increasing black suburbanization,

the index for the fifteen most segregated MSAs in 1990
remained at or above 80, meaning that 80 percent or more of the
blacks would have had to live on different city blocks to have
the same distribution in space as whites; thus, a very
highPage 3195 | Top of Article
Table 3 SOURCE: Adapted from Dogan and Kasarda (1988b)
Table 1.2.
Table 3
Population of World's Largest Metropolises (in millions), 1950–
2000 and Percent Change, 1950–2000
Metropolis
1950
2000
% Change
SOURCE: Adapted from Dogan and Kasarda (1988b) Table 1.2.
Mexico City, Mexico
3.1
26.3
748
Sao Paulo, Brazil
2.8
24.0
757
Tokyo/Yokohama, Japan
6.7
17.1
155
Calcutta, India
4.4
16.6
277
Greater Bombay, India
2.9
16.0
452
New York/northeastern N.J., USA

12.4
15.5
25
Seoul, Republic of Korea
1.1
13.5
113
Shanghai, China
10.3
13.5
31
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
3.5
13.3
280
Delhi, India
1.4
13.2
843
Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina
5.3
13.2
149
Cairo/Giza/Imbaba, Egypt
2.5
13.2
428
Jakarta, Indonesia
1.8
12.8
611
Baghdad, Iraq
0.6
12.8
2033
Teheran, Iran

0.9
12.7
1311
Karachi, Pakistan
1.0
12.1
1110
Istanbul, Turkey
1.0
11.9
1090
Los Angeles/Long Beach, Cailf., USA
4.1
11.2
173
Dacca, Bangladesh
0.4
11.2
2700
Manila, Philippines
1.6
11.1
594
Beijing (Peking), China
6.7
10.8
61
Moscow, USSR
4.8
10.1
110
Total world population
2,500
6,300
152

degree of residential segregation remains. Although there is
great social status diversity in central cities and increasing
diversity in suburban rings, disadvantaged and minority
populations are overrepresented in central cities, while the
better educated and more affluent are overrepresented in
suburban rings.
A related process—deconcentration—involves a shedding of
urban activities at the center and is indicated by greater growth
in employment and office space in the ring than in the central
city. This process was under way by the mid-1970s and
continued unabated through the 1980s. A surprising turn of
events in the late 1970s was signaled by mounting evidence that
nonmetropolitan counties were, for the first time since the
Depression of the 1930s, growing more rapidly than were
metropolitan counties (Lichter and Fuguitt 1982). This process
has been referred to as "deurbanization" and "the
nonmetropolitan turnaround." It is unclear whether this trend
represents an enlargement of the scale of metropolitan
organization to encompass more remote counties or whether
new growth nodes are developing in nonmetropolitan areas.
The American urban system is undergoing major changes as a
result of shifts from a manufacturing economy to a service
economy, the aging of the population, and an expansion of
organizational scale from regional and national to global
decision making. Older industrial cities in the Northeast and
Midwest lost population as the locus of economic activity
shifted from heavy manufacturing to information and
residentiary services. Cities in Florida, Arizona, California, and
the Northwest have received growing numbers of retirees
seeking environmental, recreational, and medical amenities that
are not tied to economic production. Investment decisions
regarding the location of office complexes, the factories of the
future, are made more on the basis of the availability of an
educated labor pool, favorable tax treatment, and the
availability of amenities than on the basis of the access to raw
materials that underpinned the urbanization process through the

middle of the twentieth century.
The same shifts are reflected in the internal reorganization of
American cities. The scale of local communities has expanded
from the central business district–oriented city to the multinodal
metropolis. Daily commuting patterns are shifting from radial
trips between bedroom suburbs and workplaces in the central
city to lateral trips among highly differentiated subareas
throughout urban regions. Urban villages with affluent
residences, high-end retail minimalls, and office complexes are
emerging in nonmetropolitan counties beyond the reach of
metropolitan political constraints, creating even greater
segregation between the most and least affluent Americans
Deteriorating residential and warehousing districts adjacent to
new downtown office complexes are being rehabilitated for
residential use by childless professionals, or "gentry." The
process of gentrification, or the invasion of lower-status
deteriorating neighborhoods of absentee-owned rental housing
by middle- to upper-status home or condominium owners, is
driven by a desire for accessibility to nearby white-collar jobs
and cultural amenities as well as by the relatively high costs of
suburban housing, which have been pushed up by competing
demand in these rapidly growing metropolitan areas. Although
the number of people involved in gentrification is too small to
have reversed the overall decline of central cities, the return of
affluent middle-class residents has reduced segregation to some
extent. Gentrification reclaims deteriorated neighborhoods, but
it also results in the displacement of the poor, who have no
place else to live at rents they can afford (Feagin and Parker
1990).
The extent to which dispersed population is involved in urban
systems is quite variable. An estimated 90 percent of the
American population now lives in a daily urban system (DUS).
These units are constructed from counties that are allocated to
economic centers on the basis of commuting patterns and
economic interdependence. The residents of a DUS are closely

tied together by efficient transportation and communication
technology. Each DUS has a minimum population of 200,000 in
its labor shed and constitutes "a multinode, multiconnective
system [which] has replaced the core dominated metropolis as
the basic urban unit" (Berry and Kasarda 1977, p. 304). Less
than 4 percent of the American labor force is engaged in
agricultural occupations. Even the residents of remote rural
areas are mostly "urban" in their activities and outlook.
In contrast, many residents of uncontrolled developments on the
fringes of emerging megacities in less developed countries are
practically isolated from the urban center and live much as they
have for generations. Over a third of the people in the largest
cities in India were born elsewhere, and the maintenance of
rural ways of life in those cities is common because of a lack of
urban employment, the persistence of village kinship ties, and
seasonal circulatory migration to rural areas. Although India has
three of the ten largest cities in the world, it remains decidedly
rural, with 75 percent of the population residing in
agriculturally oriented villages (Nagpaul 1988).
The pace and direction of the urbanization process are closely
tied to technological advances. As industrialization proceeded
in western Europe and the United States over a 300-year period,
an urban system emerged that reflected the interplay between
the development of city-centered heavy industry and
requirements for energy and raw materials from regional
hinterlands. The form of city systems that emerged has been
described as rank-size. Cities in that type of system form a
hierarchy of places from large to small in which the number of
places of a given size decreases proportionally to the size of the
place. Larger places are fewer in number, are more widely
spaced, and offer more specialized goods and services than do
smaller places (Christaller 1933).
City systems that emerged in less industrialized nations are
primate in character. In a primate system, the largest cities
absorb far more than their share of societal population growth.
Sharp breaks exist in the size hierarchy of places, with one or

two very large, several medium-sized, and many very small
places. Rapid declines in mortality beginning in the 1950s,
coupled with traditionally high fertility, created unprecedented
rates of population growth. Primate city systems developed with
an orientation toward the exportation of raw materials to the
industrialized world rather than manufacturing and the
development of local markets. As economic development
proceeds, it occurs primarily in the large primate cities, with
very low rates of economic growth in rural areas. Consequently,
nearly all the excess of births over deathsPage 3197 | Top of
Articlein the nation is absorbed by the large cities, which are
more integrated into the emerging global urban system (Dogan
and Kasarda 1988a).
Megacities of over 10 million population are a very recent
phenomenon, and their number is increasing rapidly. Their
emergence can be understood only in the context of a globally
interdependent system of relationships. The territorial bounds of
the relevant environment to which population collectively
adapts have expanded from the immediate hinterland to the
entire world in only half a century.
Convergence theory suggests that cities throughout the would
will come to exhibit organizational forms increasingly similar
to one another, converging on the North American pattern, as
technology becomes more accessible globally (Young and
Young 1962). Divergence theory suggests that increasingly
divergent forms of urban organization are likely to emerge as a
result of differences in the timing and pace of the urbanization
process, differences in the positions of cities in the global
system, and the increasing effectiveness of deliberate planning
of the urbanization process by centralized governments holding
differing values and therefore pursuing a variety of goals for the
future (Berry 1981).
The importance of understanding this process is suggested by
Hawley (1981, p. 13): "Urbanization is a transformation of
society, the effects of which penetrate every sphere of personal
and collective life. It affects the status of the individual and

opportunities for advancement, it alters the types of social units
in which people group themselves, and it sorts people into new
and shifting patterns of stratification. The distribution of power
is altered, normal social processes are reconstituted, and the
rules and norms by which behavior is guided are redesigned."
REFERENCES
Berry, Brian J. L. 1981. Comparative Urbanization: Divergent
Paths in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martins.
——, and John D. Kasarda 1977 Contemporary Urban Ecology.
New York: Macmillan.
Childe, V. Gordon 1950 "The Urban Revolution." Town
Planning Review 21:4–7.
Christaller, W. 1933 Central Places in Southern Germany,
transl. C. W. Baskin. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Dogan, Mattei, and John D. Kasarda 1988a The Metropolis Era:
A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.
—— 1988b. "Introduction: How Giant Cities Will Multiply and
Grow." In Mattei Dogan and John D. Kasarda, eds., The
Metropolis Era: A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park,
Calif.: Sage.
Duncan, Otis Dudley 1973 "From Social System to Ecosystem."
In Michael Micklin, ed., Population, Environment, and Social
Organization: Current Issues in Human Ecology Hinsdale, Ill.:
Dryden.
Eldridge, Hope Tisdale 1956 "The Process of Urbanization." In
J. J. Spengler and O. D. Duncan, eds., Demographic Analysis.
Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Feagin, Joe R., and Robert Parker 1990 Building American
Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Fischer, Claude S. 1975 "Toward a Subcultural Theory of
Urbanism." American Journal of Sociology80:1319–1341.
—— 1984 The Urban Experience. San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Gans, Herbert J. 1962 "Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of

life: A Reevaluation of Definitions." In A. M. Rose, ed., Human
Behavior and Social Processes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Gottdiener, Mark 1985 The Social Production of Urban Space.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Greer, Scott 1962 The Emerging City. New York: Free Press.
Hawley, Amos H. 1950 Human Ecology: A Theory of
Community Structure. New York: Ronald.
—— 1981 Urban Society: An Ecological Approach. New York:
Wiley.
Kleniewski, Nancy 1997 Cities, Change, and Conflict: A
Political Economy of Urban Life. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.
Lichter, Daniel T., and Glenn V. Fuguitt 1982 "The Transition
to Nonmetropolitan Population
Deconcentration." Demography 19:211–221.
Nagpaul, Hans 1988 "India's Giant Cities." In Mattei Dogan and
John D. Kasarda, eds., The Metropolis Era: A World of Giant
Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.
Palen, J. John 1997 The Urban World. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schnore, Leo F. 1959 "The Timing of Metropolitan
Decentralization." Journal of the American Institute of
Planners 25:200–206.
Suttles, Gerald 1972 The Social Construction of Communities.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taeuber, Karl E., and Alma F. Taeuber 1965 Negroes in Cities:
Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change. Chicago:
Aldine.
Weber, Adna F. 1899 The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth
Century. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wellman, B., and B. Leighton 1979 "Networks, Neighborhoods
and Communities: Approaches to the Study of the Community
Question." Urban Affairs Quarterly 15:369–393.
Wirth, Louis 1938 "Urbanism as a Way of Life." American
Journal of Sociology 44:1–24.
Young, Frank, and Ruth Young 1962 "The Sequence and
Direction of Community Growth: A Cross-Cultural

Generalization." Rural Sociology 27:374–386.
LEE J. HAGGERTY
HAGGERTY, LEE J. "Urban Sociology." Encyclopedia of
Sociology, 2nd ed., vol. 5, Macmillan Reference USA, 2001, pp.
3191-3198. Gale Virtual Reference
RL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=1fc6cbac. Accessed 26 June
2019.
Urbanization
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William
A. Darity, Jr.. Vol. 8. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference
USA, 2008. p545-548.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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Page 545
Urbanization
· THE CONTEMPORARY SPREAD OF URBANIZATION
· DENSITY, DIVERSITY, AND URBANIZATION
· URBANISM AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
· BIBLIOGRAPHY
Urbanization—the transformation of social life from rural to
urban settings—is the seminal process in defining the course of
civilization. Urban life evolved approximately ten thousand
years ago as a result of sophisticated agricultural innovations
that led to a food supply of sufficient magnitude to support both
the cultivators and a new class of urban residents. These
agricultural innovations, mainly irrigation-based public works,
required a more complex social order than that of an agrarian
village. Urbanization at its base is thus distinguished from the
settled agrarian life that preceded it in two important respects:
it embodies a multifaceted social hierarchy and relies on
sophisticated technologies to support the activities of daily

living (Childe 1936). These uniquely urban characteristics
consistently define both urbanization and civilization from the
past to the present.
Just as civilization emerged from urbanization in the past, so
too does the future course of civilization hinge on our ability to
incorporate the reality of contemporary urbanization into our
responses to twenty-first-century challenges that include
climate change, the elimination of severe poverty, ecological
balance, the conquest of communicable diseases, and other
pressing social and environmental problems. This is the case
because since 2007 more than half of the world’s population
resides in urban settings—a historic first.
Urban life can be defined, following Louis Wirth (1938), as life
in permanent dense settlements with socially diverse
populations. According to Lewis Mumford (1937), the city plays
a critical role in the creation and maintenance of culture and
civilization. Finally, following Henri Pirenne (1925), the crucial
role of trade and production should be stressed. Thus
urbanization involves an ongoing threefold process: (1)
urbanization geographically and spatially spreads the number
and density of permanent settlements; (2) settlements become
comprised of populations that are socially and ethnically
differentiated; and (3) these urban populations thrive through
the production and exchange of a diverse array of manufactured
and cultural products.
THE CONTEMPORARY SPREAD OF URBANIZATION
Although city life extends back at least ten millennia, the shape
and size of modern urban settlements have roots that extend
back only about 250 years to the Industrial Revolution, which
marked a significant transformation in the role of cities as loci
of critical productive activity and not just as cultural and
political centers for a surrounding agrarian countryside. The
present characterization of the world as predominantly urban is
the cumulative result of this urbanization-industrialization
trend. Industrial urbanization emerged first in the countries of

the West, then in the countries of Latin America and the
Caribbean, and is now strongly evident in Asia and Africa
(Garau et al. 2005).
According to United Nations projections, by 2030 the increase
of 2.06 billion in net global population will occur in urban
areas. Over 94 percent of that urban total (1.96 billion) will be
in the world’s less-developed regions (UN Population Division
2004). This means that virtually all of the additional needs of
the world’s future population will have to be addressed in the
urban areas of the poorest countries.
UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency responsible for
promoting sustainable urban development, estimates that
roughly one-third of the current urban population of about three
billion live in places that can be characterized as slums. The UN
classification schema for slums is a fivefold measure: lack of
access to safe drinking water, lack of access to sanitation,
inadequate shelter, overcrowding, and lack of security of tenure.
If a place of residence meets any one of these measures, it is
classified as a slum. By the year 2030, if nothing is done, the
proportion of the urban population living in slums will rise to
43 percent (1.7 billion in an urban population of 3.93 billion).
All of these people will be living in the urban slums of
countries in the developing world, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa
and Southeast Asia (UN-HABITAT and Global Urban
Observatory 2003).
DENSITY, DIVERSITY, AND URBANIZATION
Urbanization is most powerfully observed through physical
density (comparatively large numbers of people living in
comparatively small areas). The ratio of population size to land
area is the standard metric for evaluating density. It is a precise
measurement that is not easily interpreted because neither the
numerator (population size) nor the denominator (land area) is
static. Political boundaries are only marginally helpful in
defining the effective size of an urban settlement because at any
moment changes in communications and transport technology
alter the size of the relevant space over which urban residents

live and work. Until the end of the eighteenth century, cities
were spatially compact places with a radius of about one to two
miles—the distance an individual could comfortably walk in
carrying out daily activities. With the arrival of
industrialization, effective urban size spread rapidly through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary urban or,
more properly, metropolitansettlements easily encompass radii
of 50 miles or more. This is a result of the continual
improvement in rapid overland and even air travel modes and
digital and wireless communications technology. The exact
spatial configuration of any metropolitan settlement is a
compromise between activities that must remain within walking
distance and those for which residents are willing to travel
(Schaeffer and Sclar 1980).
These spatially widening metropolises are not uniform in terms
of their residential population densities. Hence density
measurements alone tell us little about the quality of urban life.
This quality can vary widely within the comparatively small
confines of any metropolitan area. It is especially important to
understand that high density per se is not an indicator of
compromised living conditions. Metropolitan New York, which
includes both the central city and the surrounding suburbs, has
an average population density of over 5,300 people per square
mile (ppm2), but the wealthiest part of the region, Manhattan
Island, has a density that exceeds 66,000 ppm2. By way of
comparison Nairobi, Kenya, has a city-wide density of over
1,400 ppm2, but its centrally located slum, Kibera, considered
the largest in Africa, has an estimated population density of at
least 100,000 ppm2. While Kibera’s density significantly
exceeds Manhattan’s, the major determinant of the differences
in quality of life relate to the quality of shelter and the ancillary
urban services, such as water, sanitation, public safety, and
most importantly transportation. Very poor urban residents must
exchange life in high-density, poorly serviced places for the
ability to walk to the places in the urban center where they earn
a livelihood.

The major urban challenge of the twenty-first century concerns
the ability of governments to effectively provide Page 547 |
Top of Articleadequate shelter and to plan and deliver services
for metropolitan-wide areas in developing countries. The
difficulty in meeting the challenge is rooted in part in the fact
that the historical political boundaries of the central city and
suburban (i.e., satellite city) subunits of government typically
derive from an earlier century, before contemporary transport
and communications technology redefined effective spatial
relationships. The urban economies of modern metropolises now
run beyond the legal jurisdictions of the subunits of government
responsible for infrastructure and public services. The
insistence of international financial agencies and donors on
governmental decentralization in developing countries has only
served to exacerbate this problem because it has left these
governmental subunits with the responsibility but without either
the technical ability or revenue sources. The result is that
necessary regional planning and infrastructure investment to
address the challenges of urbanization are often stymied.
Urban population growth is largely migration driven. On one
side there is the push of rural poverty and on the other the pull
of urban opportunity. This migration-driven growth is further
exacerbated by natural rates of urban population increase (birth
rates that exceed death rates). Social life in urban settlements is
thus more complex than its village counterpart. The transactions
of daily living in villages are governed by a social economy
where goods and services are exchanged on the basis of social
roles and rules of reciprocity rooted in longstanding customs
and religious observances. The transactions of urbanization that
confront the new arrivals are, in whole or in part, defined by the
impersonal exchange relationships typical of a market economy.
This transition is never a simple one-for-one exchange.
Because urban populations are continually in flux and often
simultaneously expanding, they are often characterized by a
multiplicity of informal and formal social relationships and
institutions in a similar state of flux. The variations among an

informal social economy and a formal market economy in any
city at any moment in time are highly reflective of the larger
external forces, such as globalization and migration, that are
continually redefining the roles of different cities in a world of
complex trading and production relationships. In the slum of
Kibera, many of the activities of daily life, including the
provision of vital public services such as water, sanitation, and
public safety, are governed by an informal local, but powerful,
social economy (Lowenthal 1975). In contrast, life in the
working-class neighborhoods of cities in developed countries is
typically an amalgam of informal social institutions imbedded
in formal mechanisms of municipal public-service delivery. For
the wealthiest residents of these same cities, virtually all the
services they consume are provided via the formal institutions
of government or market exchanges.
URBANISM AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
Many of the patterns of contemporary urban development are
extensions of those set in place in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. These patterns were based on three assumptions: (1)
energy was relatively inexpensive; (2) safe drinking water was
abundant; and (3) the environment could absorb all the waste
products of urbanization. None of these assumptions is any
longer valid. Consequently, urbanization in the twenty-first
century will have to be reconceived in both social and
environmental terms. The world cannot afford the political
instability and social costs of massive pockets of urban slum
dwellers, nor can it accommodate urban growth through a
further spatial spread that relies on urban transport powered by
carbon-based energy sources and the discharge of waste
products into both the local and global atmosphere. A healthy
and vibrant environment is now a scarce but vital good.
Environmental problems are principally generated by the
disorderly sprawl of urban settlements into the surrounding
countryside. In the developed world, metropolitan areas
organized around private automobile travel among low-density
suburbs and tied to a central business district generate high

volumes of automobile travel in the absence of tight land-use
regulation and good public transport. This development pattern
has led to increased mobile source pollution within the
metropolitan areas and significant greenhouse gas emissions
that endanger the whole planet. Sprawl requires an ever-
increasing spread of impermeable (i.e., paved) ground surfaces.
This in turn leads to the runoff of polluted waters into the
groundwater supplies. The paved surfaces absorb heat from the
sun and create urban heat islands that require more energy
consumption and the emission of pollution and greenhouse
gases to cool homes and offices. In addition, there are
inadequate landfills to collect all the refuse of these high-
consumption urban centers.
In the developing world, the problems are similar but more
acute in their direct manifestation. The high rates of population
growth lead to a pattern in which urban settlement runs ahead of
infrastructure improvement. This leads to the establishment of
informal settlements (i.e., slums) characterized by an absolute
lack of safe drinking water and sanitation. The lack of adequate
public transport and public health protection systems leads to a
congestion of private cars and informal transports in the center
of cities, which exacerbates the air quality problems and
greenhouse gas emissions. The social costs of the lack of these
services fall disproportionately on the poorest residents of these
burgeoning metropolitan areas. These costs take the form of
excessive mortality and morbidity rates, low rates of labor
productivity, and the reinforcement of an ongoing trap of urban
poverty.
Climate change generated by greenhouse gas emissions adds yet
another layer of special urgency to these pressing social
problems. It is the very concentrated nature of cities—their
population densities and their centrality in social functioning—
that makes them and their residents so vulnerable to the hazards
and stresses that climate change is inducing. Rising sea levels
and warming water make serious climatic assaults on cities

more frequent. Devastating storms and floods that hit once in a
century now occur in far shorter cycles. The impacts are not
equitably distributed. The poorest urban residents tend to live in
the riskiest portions of the urban environments—flood plains,
unstable slopes, river basins, and coastal areas.
Although the challenges of urbanization are formidable, the
technical knowledge for their solutions exists. The question for
the twenty-first century involves the ability of the international
community, nations, and local governments to create
institutions of urban planning and democratic governance that
can effectively apply these solutions at a sufficiently broad
scale that they can make a measurable difference.
SEE ALSOCities
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Childe, V. Gordon. 1936. Man Makes Himself. London: Watts.
Garau, Pietro, Elliott Sclar, and Gabriella Carolini (lead
authors). 2005. A Home in the City. UN Millennium Project:
Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers. London
and Sterling, VA: Earthscan.
Lowenthal, Martin. 1975. The Social Economy of the Urban
Working Class. In The Social Economy of Cities, eds. Gary
Gappert and Harold M. Rose, 447–469. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage.
Mumford, Lewis. 1937. What Is a City? Architectural
Record 82: 58–62.
Pirenne, Henri. [1925] 1948. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and
the Revival of Trade. Trans. Frank D. Halsey. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Schaeffer, K. H., and Elliott Sclar. 1980. Access for All:
Transportation and Urban Growth. New York: Columbia
University Press.
UN-HABITAT and Global Urban Observatory. 2003. Guide to
Monitoring Target 11: Improving the Lives of 100 Million Slum
Dwellers. Nairobi, Kenya: Author.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs:
Population Division. 2004. World Urbanization Prospects: The

2003 Revision. New York: Author.
Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American
Journal of Sociology 44: 1–24.
Elliott D. Sclar
"Urbanization." International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 8,
Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 545-548. Gale Virtual
Reference
RL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=ba471bc7. Accessed 26
June 2019.
Human Ecology and Environmental Analysis
LAKSHMI K. BHARADWAJ
Encyclopedia of Sociology. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. New York,
NY: Macmillan Reference USA, 2001. p1209-1233.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Macmillan Reference USA,
COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage
Learning
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Page 1209
HUMAN ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS
With the growing awareness of the critical environmental
problems facing the world today, ecology, the scientific study
of the complex web of interdependent relationships in
ecosystems, has moved to the center stage of academic and
public discourse. The term ecology comes from the Greek
word oikos("house") and, significantly, has the same Greek root
as the word economics, from oikonomos("household manager").
Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who coined the
word ecology in 1868, viewed ecology as a body of knowledge
concerning the economy of nature, highlighting its roots in
economics and evolutionary theory. He defined ecology as the
study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin
as the conditions of the struggle for existence.

Ecologists like to look at the environment as an ecosystem of
interlocking relationships and exchanges that constitute the web
of life. Populations of organisms occupying the same
environment (habitat) are said to constitute a community.
Together, the communities and their abiotic environments
constitute an ecosystem. The various ecosystems taken together
constitute the ecosphere, the largest ecological unit. Living
organisms exist in the much narrower range of the biosphere,
which extends a few hundred feet above the land or under the
sea. On its fragile film of air, water, and soil, all life depends.
For the sociologist, the most important ecological concepts are
diversity and dominance, competition and cooperation,
succession and adaptation, evolution and expansion, and
carrying capacity and the balance of nature. Over the years, the
human ecological, the neo-Malthusian, and the political
economy approaches and their variants have come to
characterize the field of human ecology.
CLASSICAL HUMAN ECOLOGY
The Chicago sociologists Louis Wirth, Robert Ezra Park, Ernest
W. Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie are recognized as the
founders of the human ecological approach in sociology. In the
early decades of the twentieth century, American cities were
passing through a period of great turbulence due to the effects
of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The urban
commercial world, with its fierce competition for territory and
survival, appeared to mirror the very life-world studied by plant
ecologists. In their search for the principles of order, human
ecologists turned to the fundamental process of cooperative
competition and its two dependent ecological principles
of dominance and succession. For classical human ecologists,
such as Park (1936), these processes determine the distribution
of population and the location and limits of residential areas.
City development is then understood in terms of succession—an
orderly series of invasion—resistance—succession cycles in the
course of which a biotic community moves from a relatively
unstable (primary) to a more or less permanent (climax) stage.

If resistance fails and the local population withdraws, the
neighborhood eventually turns over and the local group is
succeeded by the invading social, economic, or racial
population. Each individual and every community thus finds its
appropriate niche in the physical and living environment. In the
hands of the classical human ecologists, human ecology became
synonymous with the ecology of space. Park and Burgess
identified the natural areas of land use, which come into
existence without a preconceived design. Quite influential and
popular for a while was the "Burgess hypothesis" regarding the
spatial order of the city as a series of concentric zones
emanating from the central business district. However, Hawley
(1984) has pointed out that with urban characteristics now
diffused throughout society, one in effect deals with a system of
cities in which the urban hierarchy is cast in terms of functional
rather than spatial relations.
Since competition among humans is regulated by culture, Park
(1936) made a distinction between the biotic and cultural levels
of society: above the symbiotic society based upon competition
stands the cultural society based upon communication and
consensus. Park identified the problematic of human ecology as
the investigation of the processes by which biotic balance and
social equilibrium are maintained by the interaction of the three
factors constituting what he termed the social
complex(population, technological culture [artifacts], and
nonmaterial culture [customs and beliefs]), to which he also
added a fourth, the natural resources of the habitat. However,
while human ecology is here defined as the study of how the
interaction of these elements helps maintain or disrupts the
biotic balance and the social equilibrium, human agency and the
cultural level are left out of consideration by Park and other
human ecologists.
NEOCLASSICAL HUMAN ECOLOGY
Essentially the same factors reappear as the four POET

variables (population, organization, environment, and
technology) in Otis Dudley Duncan's (1964) ecological
complex, indicating its point of contact with the early human
ecological approach. In any case, it was McKenzie who, by
shifting attention from spatial relations to the analysis of
sustenance relations, provided the thread of continuity between
the classical and the neoclassical approaches. His student Amos
Hawley, who has been the "exemplar" of neoclassical human
ecology since the 1940s, defines human ecology as the attempt
to deal holistically with the phenomenon of organization.
Hawley (1986) views the ecosystem as the adaptive mechanism
that emerges out of the interaction of population, organization,
and the environment. Organization is the adaptive form that
enables a population to act as a unit. The process of
system adaptation involves members in relations of
interdependence in order to secure sustenance from the
environment. Growth is the development of the system's inner
potential to the maximum size and complexity afforded by the
existing technology for transportation and
communication. Evolution is the creation of greater potential
for resumption of system development through the incorporation
of new information that enhances the capacity for the movement
of people, materials, and messages. In this manner, the system
moves from simple to more complex forms.
Hawley (1984) has identified the following propositions, which
affirm the interdependence of the demographic and structural
factors, as constituting the core of the human ecological
paradigm:
1. Adaptation to environment proceeds through the formation of
a system of interdependences among the members of a
population,
2. system development continues, ceteris paribus, to the
maximum size and complexity afforded by the existing facilities
for transportation and communication,
3. system development is resumed with the introduction of new
information that increases the capacity for movement of

materials, people, and messages and continues until that
capacity is fully utilized. (p. 905)
The four ecological principles of interdependence, key
function, differentiation, and dominance define the processes of
system functioning and change. A system is viewed as made up
of functioning parts that are related to one another. Adaptation
to the environment involves the development of
interdependence among members, which increases their
collective capacity for action. Differentiation then allows
human populations to restore the balance between population
and environment that has been upset by competition or
improvements in communication and transportation
technologies. As adaptation proceeds through a differentiation
of environmental relationships, one or a few functions come to
mediate environmental inputs to all other functions. Since
power follows function in Hawley's view, dominance attaches to
those units that control the flow of sustenance into the
ecosystem. The productivity of the key function, which controls
the flow of sustenance, determines the extent of functional
differentiation. As a result, the dominant units in the system are
likely to be economic rather than political.
Since the environment is always in a state of flux, every social
system is continuously subject to change. Change alters the life
condition of all participants, an alteration to which they must
adapt in order to remain in the system. One of the
mostPage 1211 | Top of Articlesignificant nonrecurrent
alterations is cumulative change, involving both endogenous
and exogenous changes as complementary phases of a single
process. While evolution implies a movement from simple to
complex, proceeding through variation and natural selection,
cumulative change refers to an increase in scale and complexity
as a result of increases in population and territory. Whether the
process leads to growth or evolution depends on the concurrent
nature of the advances in scale and complexity.
Generalizing the process of cumulative change as a principle
of expansion, Hawley (1979, 1986) applies this framework to

account for growth phases that intervene between stages of
development. When scale and complexity advance together, the
normal conditions for growth or expansion arise from the
colonization process itself. Expansion, driven by increases in
population and in knowledge, involves the growth of a center of
activity from which dominance is exercised. The evolution of
the system takes place when its scale and complexity do not go
hand in hand. Change is resumed as the system acquires new
items of information, especially those that reduce the costs of
movement away from its environment. Thus an imbalance
between population and the carrying capacity of the
environment may create external pressures for branching off
into colonies and establishing niches in a new environment.
Since efficiencies in transportation and communication
determine the size of a population, the scope of territorial
access, and the opportunity for participation in information
flows, Hawley (1979) identifies the technology of movement as
the most critical variable. In addition to governing accessibility
and, therefore, the spread of settlements and the creation of
interaction networks among them, it determines the changes in
hierarchy and division of labor. In general, the above process
can work on any scale and is limited only by the level of
development of the technologies of communication and
transportation.
Hawley (1986, pp. 104–106) points out how with the growth of
a new regional and international division of labor, states now
draw sustenance from a single biophysical environment and are
converted to subsystems in a more inclusive world system by
the expansive process. In this way, free trade and
resocialization of cultures create a far more efficient and cost-
effective global reach. The result is a global system thoroughly
interlinked by transportation and communication networks. The
key positions in this international network are occupied by the
technologically advanced nations with their monopoly of
information and rich resource bases. However, as larger
portions of system territories are brought under their

jurisdiction, the management of scale becomes highly
problematic. In the absence of a supranational polity, a
multipolar international pecking order is then subject to
increasing instability, challenge, and change. With mounting
costs of administration, the system again tends to return to
scale, resulting in some degree of decentralization and local
autonomy, but new information and improvements in the
technologies of movement put the system back into gear and
start the growth process all over again. In the modern period of
"ecological transition," a large portion of the biophysical
environment has progressively come under the control of the
social system. Hawley, therefore, believes that the growth of
social systems has now reached a point at which the
evolutionary model has lost its usefulness in explaining
cumulative change.
Hawley points out that while expansionism in the past relied on
political domination, its modern variant aims at structural
convergence along economic and cultural axes to obviate the
need for direct rule by the center. The process of modernization
and the activities of multinational corporations are a prime
example of this type of system expansion, which undermines
traditional modes of life and results in the loss of autonomy and
sovereignty by individual states. Convergence of divergent
patterns of urbanization is brought about by increased economic
interdependence among nations and the development of
compatible organizational forms and institutional arrangements.
This approach, as Wilson (1984, p. 300) points out, is based on
the assumption that convergence is mainly a result of market
forces that allow countries to compete in the world on an equal
basis. He cites evidence that shows how the subordinate status
of non-Western nations has hindered their socioeconomic
development, sharpened inequalities, increased rural-to-urban
migration and rural–urban disparities, and led to the expansion
of squatter settlements.
Human ecological theory accounts for the existence of an
international hierarchy in terms of functional differences and

the operation of itsPage 1212 | Top of Articleuniversal
principles of ecosystem domination and expansion. Quite
understandably, underdevelopment is defined by Hawley simply
in terms of inferiority in this network. Since not all can enjoy
equal position on scales of size, resources, and centrality with
respect to information flows, Hawley believes that the resulting
"inequality among polities might well be an unavoidable
condition of an international division of labor, whether built on
private or state capitalist principles" (1986, pp. 106, 119).
As the process moves toward a world system, all the limiting
conditions of cumulative change are reasserted at a higher level.
On the one hand, a single world order with only a small
tolerance for errors harbors the seeds of totalitarianism
(Giddens 1990). On the other, there is also the grave danger that
a fatal error may destroy the whole system. Human ecologists,
however, rely on further expansion as the sure remedy for the
problems created by expansion. To restore ecological balance,
they put their faith in the creation of value consensus, rational
planning, trickle-downs, market mechanisms, technological
fixes and breakthroughs, native "know-how," and sheer luck.
The real irony of this relentless global expansion elaborated by
Hawley lies, however, in the coexistence of the extreme
opulence and affluence of the few with the stark poverty and
misery of the majority at home and abroad. The large
metropolitan centers provide a very poor quality of life. The
very scale of urban decay underscores the huge problems facing
the city—congestion, polluted air, untreated sewage, high crime
rates, dilapidated housing, domestic violence, and broken lives.
One therefore needs to ask: What prospect does this scale and
level of complexity hold for the future?
HUMAN ECOLOGY AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF
"CHAOS"
Chaos theory is the latest attempt to unravel the hidden
structure in apparently random systems and to handle chaos
within and between systems. In this view, order and disorder

(chaos) are seen as two dimensions of the same process: Order
generates chaos and chaos generates order (Baker 1993, p. 123).
At the heart of both lies a dynamic element, an "attractor," that
creates the turbulence as well as re-creates the order. In the
human–social realm, Baker has identified center–periphery,
or centriphery, as the attractor. Baker, however, uses the
concepts of center and periphery more broadly to cover not only
their application in the dependency approach (which views the
exploitation and impoverishment of the non-Western peripheral
societies as basic to the rise of the dominant Western capitalist
center), but also to carry the connotation of humans as "world-
constructors." Centriphery is, then, the universal dynamic
process that creates both order and disorder, as well as accounts
for the pattern of human social evolution. The center has an
entropic effect on the periphery, causing increasing randomness
and denuding it of its resources. But as the entropic effects
mount, they are fed back to the center. Beyond a certain point,
the costs of controlling the periphery become prohibitive.
Should the center fail to come up with new centering strategies,
it may split off into subcenters or be absorbed by another more
powerful center. Baker is thus led to conclude that "although
the effect of feedback is unpredictable, the iteration of a pattern
leads to turbulence. The mechanism for change and evolution
are endemic to the centriphery process" (Baker 1993, p. 141).
Several things need to be noted about this approach. For one,
since these eruptive episodes are random, "the emergence of
repeated patterns . . . must be seen as random . . . not as
mechanically predictable occurrences. Among other things, the
precise character of the emergent pattern cannot be predicted,
even though we would no longer be surprised to find a new
thing emerging" (Francis 1993, p. 239). For another, Baker's
centriphery theory is essentially Hawley's human ecological
theory recast in the language of chaos theory, with the
important difference that a specific reference is now made both
to the role of agency as "world-constructors" involved in
"categorizing, controlling, dominating, manipulating, absorbing,

transforming, and so on," and to their devastating impact on the
peripheralized "others," the victims of progress, who suffer
maximum entropy, exploitation, impoverishment, death, and
devastation. Even so, Baker's is the latest, though undoubtedly
unintended, attempt to generalize and rationalize Western
expansionism and its "chaotic (unpredictable) . . . devastating,
and now increasingly well known, impact on native peoples"
(BakerPage 1213 | Top of Article1993, p. 137). As such, the
centriphery process, said to explain both order (stability) and
disorder (change), is presented not only as evolutionary and
irreversible, but also as natural and universal: "Thus, the
Western world became a center through the peripheralization of
the non-Western world. And within the Western world,
particularly in North America, the city, which peripheralized
the rural hinterland, became the megapolis whose
peripheralizing effects were simultaneously wider and greater."
(p. 136)]
Not only the recurrent iteration of this pattern but even its
"unpredictable" outcomes (new strategies of control, splitting
off into new subcenters, absorption into a larger center, etc.),
are also prefigured in Hawley (1986). Its process is expansion,
and its "attractor" is none other than the old master principle of
sociology: domination or control (Gibbs 1989). While
Friedmann and Wolff (1982) characterize world cities as the
material manifestation of the control functions of transnational
capital in its attempt to organize the world for the efficient
extraction of surplus, Lechner (1985) leaves little doubt that
Western "[materialism] and the emphasis on man's relation to
nature are not simply analytical or philosophical devices, but
are logically part of an effort to restore world-mastery" (p.
182).
"ECOLOGICAL DEMOGRAPHY"?
Since the study of organizational dynamics as well as the
structure and dynamics of population are at the core of
sociology, Namboodiri (1988) claims that rather than being

peripheral to sociology, human ecology and demography
constitute its core. As a result, he contends that the hybrid
"ecological demography" promises a more systematic and
comprehensive handling of a common core of sociological
problems—such as the analysis of power relations, conflict
processes, social stratification, societal evolution, and the
like—than any other competing sociological paradigm.
However, although human ecologists recognize the possibility
of other pairwise interactions in addition to competition, and
even highlight the points of convergence between the human
ecological and the Marxist point of view (Hawley 1984), human
ecology as such does not directly focus on conflict in a central
way. In this connection, Namboodiri (1988) points out how the
very expansionist imperative of human and social systems,
identified as a central postulate by human ecologists, generates
the possibility of conflict between the haves and the have-nots
far more in a milieu of frustrated expectations, felt injustice,
and a growing awareness of entitlements, which includes claims
to their own resources by nations and to a higher standard of
living by deprived populations. How these factors affect the
development of and distribution of resources and the
relationships among populations by sex, race, ethnicity, and
other stratifiers should obviously be of concern to a socially
responsible human ecology, one that moreover should be
responsive to Borgatta's call for a "proactive sociology" (1989,
1996).
The general neglect of cultural factors and the role of norms and
agency in human and organizational interaction has also been a
cause for concern to many sociologists. While some latitude is
provided for incorporating social norms in specific analyses
(e.g., in the relationship between group membership and
fertility behavior), their macro-orientation and focus on whole
populations compels human ecologists and demographers to
ignore the role of the subjective values and purposes of
individual actors in ecological and demographic processes
(Namboodiri 1988, pp. 625–627).

THE HUMAN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH: AN EVALUATION
While the human ecological approach has strong theoretical
underpinnings and proven heuristic value in describing Western
expansionism and the colonizing process in supposedly
objective terms, its central problem is one of ideology. Like
structural functionalism, it is a theory of the status quo that
supports existing institutions and arrangements by explaining
them as the outcome of invariant principles: "Its concerns are
the concerns of the dominant groups in society—it talks about
maximizing efficiency but has nothing to say about increasing
accountability, it talks of maintaining equilibrium through
gradual change and readjustment and rules out even the
possibility of fundamental restructuring" (Saunders 1986, pp.
80–81). Not surprisingly, human ecologists downplay the role of
social class by subsuming it under the abstract concept of a
"categoric unit." They also fail to analyze the role of the state
and of the interlocking power of the political, military,
andPage 1214 | Top of Articleeconomic establishment, which
are centrally involved in the process of expansion and
colonization of peoples and cultures. These omissions account
for their total lack of concern for the fate of the "excluded
others" and the "dark side of expansionism": colonial
exploitation, war, genocide, poverty, pollution, environmental
degradation, and ecological destruction. Hutchinson (1993)
blames the human ecologists for neglecting or downplaying the
role of socioeconomic practices and government policies in
creating rental, economic resource, and other differentials. He
claims that their analyses tend to be descriptive because they
take for granted the existence of phenomena such as
socioeconomic or racial and ethnic segregation rather than
looking at them in terms of spatial processes that result from
the competition between capital and labor.
ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE NEW HUMAN
ECOLOGY

The mounting public concern since the 1970s about fuel
shortages, oil spills, nuclear power plant accidents, acid rain,
dying lakes, urban smog, famine and death in the Sahel,
rainforest destruction, and the like has made social scientists
realize that overexploitation of the ecosystem may destroy the
very basis of our planetary survival. Many environmentalists
have blamed the voracious appetite of industrial societies and
their obsession with growth for the destruction of the fragile
balance among the components of the ecological complex.
Having encountered a seemingly unlimited frontier and an
expanding economy, the West has come to believe that
expansion is in the nature of things. A major reason for the
neglect of the physical environment by American sociologists
has, therefore, been the anti-ecological worldview of the
dominant social paradigm that has been shaped by this belief.
At the same time, the exaggerated emphasis by human
ecologists on culture, science, and technology as "exceptional"
human achievements has led to the illusion that humans are
"exempt" from bioecological constraints to which all species are
subject. This awareness has led Catton and Dunlap (1978) to
develop the fields of new human ecology (Buttel 1987) and
environmental sociology to deal with the reciprocal interaction
between human activities and the physical environment. They
believe that the POET model, broadened to include the role of
human agency and culture, provides a useful analytical
framework for grounding environmental sociology in the
ecological perspective.
In a comprehensive review of the new field, Buttel (1987) has
pressed for shifting the focus of environmental sociology from
the imbalance of population and resources, emphasized by
Catton, to the reality of the unequal distribution of these
resources. Allan Schnaiberg's idea of the "treadmill of
production" (1980), which emerges from a dialectical
relationship between economic growth and ecological
structures, points to the need to focus on production institutions
as the primary determinants of economic expansion and to

incorporate a conflict dimension in environmental analysis.
Buttel's own work in environmental sociology draws on the
"political economy tradition" of the neo-Marxists and the neo-
Weberians. Catton's major contributions, on the other hand, are
in the neo-Malthusian tradition. While the problem of order
created by the harsh realities of industrial life and expansionism
had earlier defined the central problematic of sociology and
human ecology, the problem of survival now defines the central
problematic of environmental sociology and the neo-Malthusian
new human ecology: to the earlier question of how social order
is possible is now added the more urgent concern with survival
itself.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY APPROACH AND THE NEW
URBAN SOCIOLOGY
The conservative nature of the classical and neoclassical human
ecology paradigms has also come under attack from theorists
who focus on the internal contradictions and the global reach of
capitalism to understand urban phenomena.
Smith (1995) has argued that a new urban sociology paradigm,
which draws on neo-Marxist sociological theory, urban political
economy, dependency theory, world-system analysis, and
critical theory, has now become dominant and largely
supplanted human ecology and the old urban sociology approach
to the study of urban phenomena. The conflict between the two
approaches is an aspect of the old conflict between the
structural-functional and the neo-Marxist (conflict) perspectives
in the field of sociology generally. WhereasPage 1215 | Top of
Articlehuman ecology's main concern is with how technological
change enables population aggregates to adapt to their
environment through changes in social and spatial organization,
the new perspective underplays the role of technological
determinants or functional imperatives in shaping the urban
landscape. It focuses instead on social inequality and conflict,
and highlights the role of economic and political elites, states
and other institutional actors, and powerful global forces in

order to analyze the problematic "underside" of modern city
life: urban poverty, housing segregation by race and social
class, urban fiscal crises, deindustrialization, structured
inequality in the built environment, and the massive level of
human misery associated with the rapid growth of megacities in
the Third World (Smith 1995, p. 432.) The new approach looks
at urban growth within the context of the international division
of labor engendered by the global reach of the expansionary
logic of competitive capitalism. This process, which translates
aspects of competitive capitalism into geographic space,
involves "the creation and destruction of land and built
environments we term 'cities.' [Moreover,] this leads to
concentrations and locational shifts of human populations,
infrastructure, and buildings within the urban landscape
(resulting in suburbs, neighborhoods, slums, etc.)" (Feagin
1988, p. 23, quoted in Smith 1995, p. 438).
A "new urban paradigm" in the political economy tradition has
been put forward by Gottdiener and Feagin (1988) as an
alternative to the human ecological and the expansionist
paradigms discussed earlier. Rather than treating societies as
mere population aggregates or as unified biotic communities,
the new urban paradigm treats them as specified by their mode
of production. In this view, crisis tendencies and profit
generation constitute the core of societal development, which is
seen as dominated by the process of capital accumulation. Thus,
to take one example, conventional human ecologists like to
regard central-city restructuring as a consequence of adaptation
to increasing population size and the growing complexity of
social organization. They then relate these changes to the size
of the metropolitan hinterland. The new urban paradigm, on the
other hand, emphasizes the impact of the global economy,
multinational corporations, the shift to functional specialization
in world-system financial and administrative activities, the
constant subsidization by the state, the efforts of pro-growth
coalitions, and changes in labor-force requirements leading to
some renovation and central-city gentrification. It tends to focus

on power and inequality, the production and reproduction of
capital accumulation, crisis adjustment in sociospatial
organizations, and such other processes. The following are some
of the basic questions that the new urban sociology paradigm
seeks to answer: What is the character of power and inequality?
How do they relate to "ecological" patterns? How do production
and reproduction processes of capital accumulation, as well as
the processes of crisis adjustment, manifest themselves in
sociospatial organization?
THE CRISIS OF THE NEW URBAN SOCIOLOGY
However, having apparently supplanted human ecology, the new
urban sociology itself appears to be in a state of deep crisis
(Hutchinson 1993). Among other things, many of its
practitioners are now claiming that the new urban sociology
lacks a paradigm equivalent to that of human ecology; that its
contribution is critical rather than substantive; that its
viewpoint is far more ideological than empirical; and that it
lacks a unifying focus, there being as many new urban
sociologies as there are its practitioners (La Gory 1993, p. 113).
At the same time, while asserting that "what is most salient
about the new approach is . . . its direct challenge to the theory
and method of ecology," Gottdiener and Feagin (1988) deride
the attempt "to pick and choose from some of the new literature
. . . areas of compatibility, thereby turning the new approach
into a mere footnote of the old" (p. 167). However, in view of
the inadequacy of both approaches, La Gory (1993) suggests the
use of network analysis as the preferred strategy for devising a
revised urban paradigm that is informed by both the strengths
and shortcomings of these two perspectives. And noting the
considerable conceptual convergence between the two
approaches, Smith (1995) argues for a synthesized urban theory
that will require the fleshing out of Hawley's theory of social
organization, technology, and population distributions by
incorporating the contributions of the new urban theory
regarding the nature and content of the global competitive
capitalist system. Thus, Smith claims that while the

newPage 1216 | Top of Articleurban sociology can provide
human ecology with a better understanding of power and
dominance and how class interests play a central role in shaping
urbanization, human ecology can help the new urban theory pay
more attention to the demographic processes and variables in
order to develop a theory of demographic change under global
capitalism.
ECO-CATASTROPHE AND ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE
Industrial and industrializing nations are now beset with more
or less the same devastating problems of air, land, and water
pollution and environmental destruction. Large numbers of
lakes and rivers that were not naturally eutrophic have now
become so as a result of pollution and chemical runoffs. In the
United States, Love Canal and Times Beach, Missouri, made
headlines in the 1980s as much as Chernobyl did in 1986 in the
Soviet Union. Sulfur dioxide emissions from industrial and
power plants cause acid rain that inflicts irreparable damage on
buildings, monuments, marine life, trees, and plants. More than
60,000 synthetic chemicals are now on the market, of which a
sizable number contaminate the environment and pose health
hazards. Over half a million tons of toxic wastes are produced
each year in the United States, while the five-year cost of
cleaning nuclear waste, which remains dangerously radioactive
for thousands of years, may well exceed $30 billion. The soil,
lake water, and groundwater near nuclear power and weapons
plants are heavily contaminated with such toxins as mercury,
arsenic, and many types of solvents, as well as with deadly
radioactive materials such as plutonium, tritium, and strontium-
90. The contamination is so bad in eight states that huge tracts
of land are said to be totally unfit for human habitation and
pose serious health hazards for the surrounding communities.
The siting of dump sites in minority communities and the
international shipment of hazardous waste to non-Western
nations raise serious issues of environmental justice. With an
annual production of solid waste that doubled between 1960 and

the late 1990s to nearly 225 million tons, the United States is
producing more garbage than any other nation in the world and
will soon be facing a huge problem of disposal as its 2,300
landfills run out of room and their leachates pose serious threats
of toxicity.
The environmental destruction is far more serious and
widespread in eastern Europe and the republics of the former
Soviet Union. These countries are the sites of some of the
world's worst pollution. Lakes and rivers are dead or dying.
Water is so contaminated in some areas that it is undrinkable.
Chemical runoff and sewage and wastewater dumping have
created serious groundwater contamination. Lignite (brown
coal), the major source of energy for industry and homes in
some of these nations, is responsible for the heavy
concentration of sulfur dioxide and dust in the air that has
caused serious respiratory problems and additional health
damage. The haze-covered cities are an environmental disaster.
According to Worldwatch estimates, the former Soviet Union
alone accounted for a fifth each of global carbon dioxide and
sulfur dioxide emissions—the former are implicated in global
warming; the latter are the principal ingredient of acid rain.
These environmental problems thus not only span
transboundaries, they also cut across ideological labels.
In non-Western nations, a million people suffer acute poisoning
and 20,000 persons die every year from pesticides. Pesticides
are a major source of environmental and health problems in the
United States as well. But the United States alone exports more
than half a billion pounds of pesticides that are restricted in or
banned from domestic use. The ecology, natural environment,
and resources of these non-Western nations are being destroyed
and contaminated at a frightening rate. Irreversible damage is
being done by large-scale destruction of rainforests and the
intensive use of marginal lands, as well as by the imbalances
that result from population pressures and the practices of
multinational firms and national elites. Desertification now
threatens a third of the earth's land surface. Poverty, hunger,

starvation, famine, and death are endemic throughout much of
the world.
RELATION BETWEEN POPULATION AND THE
ENVIRONMENT
What lends urgency to the current population–resource crisis for
the West is the fact that while human numbers are declining or
standing still at most in industrial societies, they are increasing
disproportionately in the rest of the world, aPage 1217 | Top
of Articleworld divided today not only economically and
sociopolitically, but also demographically. The technological
mastery of the world has resulted in a higher material standard
of living in the West, but it has also spelled economic
polarization, ecological ruin, and environmental disasters
worldwide. At the same time, hunger, famine, poverty, and
overpopulation in the rest of the world have raised critical
issues of equity, justice, security, and human survival. While
the close link among poverty, population growth, and
environmental degradation is invariably highlighted by the neo-
Malthusians and the media, the impact of unsustainable patterns
of consumption and production on the environment does not
receive equal emphasis. Much more disconcerting is the fact
that the use of the population argument tends to divert attention
away from the role of exploitative and oppressive social
institutions and arrangements. Schnaiberg and Gould (1994)
find the lack of control over industrial production systems
rather than population growth to be the main factor contributing
to the underdevelopment of Southern societies. Without
minimizing the danger of overpopulation, they find clear
historical evidence that the worldwide environmental disruption
has been caused not by population growth but by the enormous
expansion of production, profits, and surplus in the past
century. And based on available evidence, Humphrey and Buttel
(1982) have been led to conclude that "[one] of the most
important findings to come from the study of the relationship
between population size and the environment is the misplaced

importance given to world population size as cause of natural
resource scarcities and pollution . . . . [We do not] imply that
world population growth should be . . . neglected as a cause of
environmental problems, [but] a fixation on it as the major
reason for pollution and energy crises would be sociologically
misguided" (p. 60).
Depending on their consensus or conflict orientation, we find
that the dominant perspectives on the population–resource
dynamic place differential emphasis on the alternative modes of
resolving competition over scarce resources. In this respect, the
modern division of labor, highlighted by Durkheim, is but one
of several modes of resolving competition over scarce
resources. Schnore (1965, pp. 12–13) offers a number of
alternative survival strategies, which may involve one or a
combination of the following: (1) demographic changes
resulting in the elimination of excess numbers (increase in the
death rate, decrease in the birthrate, and migration); (2)
technological changes that allow for the expansion of the
resource base (the exploitation of unused or existing resources,
availability of new areas and new resources, resource
substitutions, etc.); and (3) organizational changes that allow
for the support of larger numbers (occupational and territorial
differentiation, revolutionary changes that redistribute the
surplus among the many, and reduction in the general level of
living to support increased numbers).
For human ecology, the most salient aspect of the population–
environment relationship is the way it affects human survival
and the quality of human life. Under the impact of the
interlocking crises of overpopulation, resource depletion, and
environmental degradation, issues of sustainability and survival
have come to occupy center stage. Corresponding to the main
approaches in human ecology, three broad positions may be
identified for discussion: the pro-growth (expansionist), the
neo-Malthusian, and the political economy perspectives. Our
discussion of these positions is followed by a consideration of
the Brundtland Report, issued by the World Commission on

Environment and Development, and of the traditional-Gandhian
view of the ecological crisis. Extended treatment of the issues
involved may be found in Catton (1980), de la Court (1990),
Humphrey and Buttel (1982), Mellos (1988), and Schnaiberg
and Gould (1994).
The Pro-Growth (Expansionist) Perspective. To explain the
growth patterns of modern society, this approach builds on the
foundations of "the new synthetic theory developed in the
biological sciences in the last forty years, . . . mixing in
elements of neo-Malthusian theory, Marx's historical
materialism, and modern systems theory" (Lenski 1979, p. 14).
It seems quite likely, however, that the basic elements of
expansionism, now presented as a natural universal process,
were derived from the fundamental American experience of
abundance and an open frontier conceived as a process. As
Avery O. Craven (1937) put it more than sixty years ago, the
basic idea was "that American history . . . presents a series of
recurring social evolutions in diverse geographical areas as a
people advance to colonize a continent. The chief characteristic
isPage 1218 | Top of Articleexpansion; the chief peculiarity of
institutions, constant readjustment . . . . Into . . . raw and
differing areas men and institutions and ideas poured from older
basins, there to return to a more or less primitive state and then
to climb slowly back toward complexity . . . . The process was
similar in each case, with some common results but always with
'essential differences' due to time and place" (quoted in Potter
1954, p. 145–146.)
In expansionist thinking, scale, complexity, and acceleration—
that is, the constant broadening of the limits of the maximum
permitted by prevailing circumstances—mark the human–
environment encounter. Hawley's version of human ecology,
with its focus on population growth and differentiation as
significant processes of continuous change, provides a concise
exposition of the pro-growth or expansionist view on the
population–resource problematic. Hawley believes that
industrial systems have no known upper limits on either the

number of specializations or the size of the populations that can
be supported. Similar pro-growth sentiments are expressed by
other expansionist thinkers. Asserting that resource supplies are
finite but unbounded, Hawley (1986, pp. 110–111) questions the
neo-Malthusian assumption that overpopulation and overuse
will soon exhaust a declining supply of fixed resources. While
acknowledging the threat of overpopulation and pollution to the
quality of the environment, he points to the inherently
expansive nature of populations, technology, and organization
that has resulted in a long history of resource expansion through
more efficient extraction and use of new and existing resources,
new resource development, and resource substitutions. With
regard to global food-producing resources, he presents evidence
to show that the size of arable land, its productivity, and its
agricultural output can be increased beyond the rate of
population growth. He blames poverty and the structural
conditions that generate it for the chronic food shortages in
parts of the world and points to the indispensability of further
increments of growth and the creation of central organizations
capable of tackling these and other environmental problems.
Contrary to the view of the Malthusians, he holds that the
expansive power of populations by itself does not cause war,
resource depletion, or environmental degradation; it does so
only under specific organizational circumstances. Hawley
(1986, p. 26) views these outcomes as the result of the
maladaptation or malfunctioning of organization, with
disequilibrium opening the possibility for evolutionary change
through a movement to a higher level of complexity.
While Colin Clark directly links population numbers to power,
Herman Kahn (1974) views population increase as a necessary
stimulus to economic growth and believes the earth can easily
support 15 billion people at $20,000 per capita for a
millennium. In fact, he believes that the wider the gap between
the rich and the poor, the more the riches will percolate
downward. In any case, he is unconvinced that the rich would
agree to part with their income to ensure a more equitable

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