Urban Sociology

URBAN SOCIOLOGY
Definition :
Urban sociology is the sociological study of life and human
interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of
sociology seeking to study the structures, processes, changes
and problems of an urban area and by doing so provide inputs
for planning and policy making. In other words it is the
sociological study of cities and their role in the development of
society. Like most areas of sociology, urban sociologists use
statistical analysis, observation, social theory, interviews, and
other methods to study a range of topics, including migration
and demographic trends, economics, poverty, race relations
and economic trends.

RISE OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY
But as a more general contribution of human
ecology and urban sociology, social area analysis
was found to be lacking. It was a descriptive
methodology, this time with a visual application,
but it did not provide an analytical model that
could explain why particular groupings of
sociological variables (ethnicity, social class and
family status) might be mapped in one area of the
metropolitan region and not in another.

Early sociologist were
concerned with the
impact of urbanization
on European society.

• FERDINANAD TOENNIS : Is an early German social philosopher who
lived from 1855 to 1936. He sketched out an evolutionary view of
the development of human society. The great period of
industrialization that transformed European societies
beginning in the late 1700s signified a change from community
to association. His ideas are often used to highlight differences
between village life of the preindustrial period and urban life
of the industrial period, and between small-town life and that
of the large city more generally. Toennis saw that the transition
from community (were individual families have long histories,
individuals interact with one another on a personal basis
because they often work together or a related to one another,
and all jobs are interdependent on one another) to society
(where individuals often interact with others whom they donot
personally know and work at jobs that are seemingly unrelated
to one another) resulted in a weakening of social ties and a
share sense of belonging to a meaningful community.

• EMILE DURKHEIM: was appointed to the first chair of
sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1883.He also wrote
about the changes brought about by industrialization. In his
work the Division of Labor in society. Durkheim discussed
many of the same issues presented earlier by Toennies. This
time under the labels of mechanical solidarity and organic
solidarity. In the preindustrial village, individuals were held
together by the mechanical bonds of kinship and social
interdependence-mechanical because they were
predetermined and could not be changed as long as the
individual remained within the local village. In the industrial
city, individuals were no longer bound by the mechanical
bonds of kinship: instead they could work at new types of
jobs and have greater opportunities for interaction with a
wider range of people.

• FRIEDRICH ENGELS: a contrasting view to that of
Durkheim was the perspective of German
sociologist Friedrich Engels who lived in England
in the mid- 1800s. Engels wrote a classic study.
The Condition of the working class in England,
which devoted a chapter to what he called `The
Great Towns`. According to Engels the evils of
industrialization and capitalism were intensified
by the space of the city.

• GEORGE SIMMEL: the most influential European in Us
urban sociology at the beginning was George Simmel. He
viewed the city in cultural terms and was concerned with
the way urban life transformed individual consciousness.
Any good discussion of American urban sociology must
begin with explaining an important distinction. There are
two distinct organizing topics in the field: urbanization
and urbanism. Urbanization refers to the city formation or
building process. It studies the way social activities locate
themselves in space and according to interdependent
processes of societal development and change. Its analysis
is often historical and comparative. Urbanization charts
and tries to understand the rise and fall of great cities.

Urbanism, in contrast, takes the city formation process as given and seeks instead
to understand the ways of life that transpire within this container. Urbanism deals
with culture, with meanings, symbols, patterns of daily life, and processes of
adjustment to the environment of the city, but also with conflicts, with forms of
political organization at the street neighborhood and city levels. Simmel was
concerned with modernity, or the transition from a traditional society
characterized by social relation based on intimacy or kinship (known as primary
relations), by a feudal economy based on barter to an industrial society situated
within cities and dominated by impersonal, specializes social relations based on
compartmentalized roles(known as secondary relations), and by a money
economy based on rational calculation of profit and loss. For Simmel, the subtle
aspects of modernity were displayed most clearly within the large city or
metropolis and through consciously directed behaviors. Simmel gives us a social
psychology of modernity that Robert Park took to be the sociology of urbanism, or
`urban sociology`.

Robert Park: (1865-1944) may will be the most interesting
figure not simply in the development of the Chicago School
Of Urban Sociology but in the history of American sociology
more generally. Born at the end of the Civil War, Park
attended the University of Michigan and began his career as
a newspaper reporter.

In 1913, at age 49, Park joined the faculty of University of
Chicago. Parks approach to the sociological study of the
urban environment was clear: he urged his students to
“get the seat of their pants dirty” by getting out into the
neighborhoods of the city, studying the many different
groups of people who had came there. While Park worked
on his own study of the development of the immigrant
press in the United States, he and Ernest Burgess
conducted undergraduate classes and graduate seminars
that required students to go into the community, collect
data from business people, interview area residents and
report back with there information.

Robert Park and his associates at the University of Chicago were less
concerned than was Simmel with the city dwellers encounter with
modernity and more involved in detailed study of the specific Chicago
milieu. They were responsible for a number of important conceptual
advances in the field of urban sociology. From the very first the Chicago
school urbanists adopted a conceptual position that we call human
ecology- the study of the process of human group adjustment to the
environment. While European thinkers such as Weber, Marx and Simmel
viewed the city as an environment were larger social forces of capitalism
played themselves out in a human drama, Chicago School urbanists
avoided the study of capitalism preferring instead a biological based way of
conceptualizing urban life. For them urban analysis was a branch of human
ecology. There ideas brought them closest to the work of the philosopher
Herbert Spencer who also viewed society as dominated by biological
rather than economic laws of development. Economic competition in this
view, was a special case of the struggle for survival. All individuals in the
city were caught up in this struggle and adjusted to it in various ways.

According to Robert Park, the social organization of the city
resulted from the struggle for survival that then produced a
distinct and highly complex division of labor, because people
tried to do what they were best in order to complete. Urban
life for Park was organized on two separate levels: the “biotic”
and the “culture”. The biotic level refers to the forms of
organization produced by species competition over scarce
environmental resources. The cultural level refers to the
symbolic and the psychological adjustment processes and to
the organization of urban life according to shared sentiments
much like the qualities Simmel also studied.

In Park`s later work ,however the complex notion of
urbanism as combining competition and cooperation or
the biotic and the cultural levels was dropped in favor of
an emphasis on the biotic level alone as the basic
premise of urban ecology. This led to some of the early
critiques of the ecological perspective faulting it for
ignoring the role of culture in the city or what Simmel
would call the important influence of modernity and for
neglecting the basis of community which was social but
not biological.

ERNEST BURGESS’S MODEL OF URBAN
GROWTH
Ernest W Burgess developed a theory of city growth
and differentiation based on the social Darwinist or
biologically derived principles that were common in the
work of Park and McKenzie. According to Burgess the
city constantly grew because of population pressures.
This in turn triggered a dual process of central
agglomeration and commercial decentralization; that is
spatial competition attracted new activities to the
center of the city but also repelled other activities to
the fringe area. As activities themselves located on the
fringe, the fringe itself was pushed further out from the
city and so on. Thus the city continually grew outward
as activities that lost out in central city competition
were relocated to peripheral areas.

ERNEST BURGESS`S MODEL OF URBAN GROWTH
The importance of Burgess`s model cannot be overemphasized.
First he explained the pattern of homes, neighborhoods, and
industrial and commercial location in terms of the ecological
theory of competition over “position” or location. In short
competition produced a certain space and a certain social
organization in space. Both of this dimensions were pictured in
the concentric zone model. Those who could afford it leaved
near the center; those who could not arranged themselves in
concentric zones around the city center. Such a model required
among other things that the center have the most jobs and
social activities and hence that it be the most desirable
location. This view was challenged in the models of Hoyt and
Harris and Ullman.

ERNEST BURGESS’S MODEL OF URBAN GROWTH
Second, Burgess’s model explained the shifting of
population and activities within the space of the city
according two distinct but related processes: centralization
and decentralization. His theory explicitly related social
processes to spatial patterns a most importantly link for all
theorizing about the city that was to follow and a view
that is quite compatible with the aims of the new urban
sociology.

ERNEST BURGESS’S MODEL OF URBAN GROWTH
Finally Burgess revealed that the characteristics of the social
organization of the urban population were spatially deployed.
A gradient running from the center to the periphery
characterized the attributes of the urban population. Individual
traits such as mental illness, gang membership, criminal
behavior and racial background were found to be clustered
along the center gradient of the city. Cutting across the urban
form from the Central Business District(known as the CBD) to
the outskirts Chicago School researchers using census data,
found that the incidents of social pathology decreased while
homeownership and the number of nuclear families increased.
The inner zones, therefore, were discovered to be the sites of
crime, illness, gang warfare, broken homes and many other
indicators of social disorganization or problems.

LOUIS WIRTH: URBANISM AS AWAY OF LIFE
Louis Wirth defined a different theory of urban space. He
wanted to know what it was about the city itself that
produced unique behaviors that might be called an “urban
way of life”. Wirth returned to Simmel. However while
Simmel (and Weber and Marx) attributed much of the city
way of life to the influence of larger systemic forces
especially capitalism and its money economy. Wirth aimed
for a generalized theory that ignored forces having origins
outside the city. He studied the characteristics of people in
the city and how life there might produce a distinct “urban”
culture. Hence, “urbanism” or an urban way of life became
the dependent variable to be explained.

Wirth settled on the isolation of three factors. Urbanism
was produced in relatively large (population size) densely
populated settlements containing heterogeneous people
(different backgrounds); that is urbanism was a product of
large population size, density, and heterogeneity. Wirth’s
approach was an important advance because he provided a
set of factors that could be analyzed statistically according
to there effects. Hence it was a theory with true predictive
power. Given a sample of cities the higher each one scored
on the three factors of size, density, and heterogeneity, the
more we could expect it to house a true urban culture.

In the years following Wirth’s work his theory has been
exhaustively tested mainly because it was so clearly stated.
Unfortunately the core assertion that size, density, and
heterogeneity cause behaviors considered urban has not
been borne out. However while the theory contains some
truth we cannot say along with Wirth that the factors he
chose produce such results. The large city merely
concentrates the effects of social forces producing city
culture. Surely we know that rural area are just as afflicted
by crime as is the central city, although the types of crimes
and there intensity may vary.

Finally, Louis Wirth held strongly to the view that the true
effects of urbanism would occur as a matter of evolution as
cities operated on immigrant groups to break down
traditional way of interacting over time. In the main, Wirth
can be remembered as showing us a style of doing urban
research that differed from Chicago School field work.
While other took to the streets to record the everyday life
found in cities. Wirth inspired a subsequent generation to
plow through census data and derive statistical regularities
of urban living.

RISE OF URBAN SOCILOGY
Roderick McKenzie and Metropolitan Community:
Roderick Mckenzie a student of Park and Burgess ,sought
to apply the principals of human ecology not just to the
city but to the broader metropolitan region. McKenzie
saw the development of the metropolitan region as a
function of changes in transportation and communication
that produced new forms of social organization . This
stages of development were the pre-railway era (before
1850) the railway era (1850-1900) and the motor
transportation area(1900 to present). McKenzie
considered technological change as the key variable in
producing spatial patterns in urban society.

McKenzie’s ideas were recognized as a significant
contribution to the field at the time. In some respects,
his approach may be viewed as a precursor to the
general concept of the multicentered metropolitan
region emphasized by the sociospatial approach. But
Mckenzie did not have a great influence on later
sociologists. In the 1950s a new field of study , regional
science , began investigating metropolitan regions from
the perspective of economic geography , an approach
with less appeal to urban sociologists. McKenzie’s focus
on the metropolitan region conflicted with the more
general tendency of urban sociologists.

From Human Ecology to Urban Ecology :
In 1945 Walter Fircy published a study of land use in Boston
titled “Sentiment and Symbolism as Ecological Variables”. He
noted that large areas of land in downtown Boston were
reserved for noneconomic uses. Parks and cemeteries as well as
a 48 –acre area in the center of the city that had formed the
original “commons” of the community had never been
developed . In addition an upper-class residential neighborhood
known as Boston Hill retained its privileged position as a home
to wealthy and established Boston families despite its location
near the downtown area . Each of these observations runs
counter to the concentric zone model. Firey suggested that
“sentiment” and “symbolism” are important ecological factors
that influence spatial patterns of development in urban space.
Firey presented in this important piece of research his work is
often referred to as the “sociocultural school” of human
ecology.

Social Area Analysis:
Social area analysis is associated with the work of Eshrev Shevky
and Wendell Bell(1955). This method of urban analysis ranked
areas with in a city or metropolitan area on the basis of the
social characteristics of the population, including social
status(education, occupation and income) and family status(
number of children, weather the mother worked, and type of
dwelling unit). Areas that scored high on social status and family
status(typically suburban communities) could be compared with
areas that scored low on the same measures. Social area
analysis produced details maps showing the location of class
and ethnic groups in the San Francisco Bay area.

Factorial ecology:
The development of new computer technologies
brought sweeping changes to the field of human
ecology. Urban sociologists no longer had to limit their
research to field studies of urban communities; now
they could assemble data for the entire cities and look
for associations among, for example the educational
level, incomes and employments status of urban and
suburban residence factorial ecology made use of this
techniques and through the 1950s and the 1960s
produced a large number of studies that greatly
increased our knowledge of the structure of the cities
not just in the United States but across the world.

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CITY
Marx, Weber and Engels: the classical sociologist Karl Marx,
Weber turned to historical analysis to explore their ideas
regarding the general laws of social development. Both
understood that societies were organized around
integrated system of economics, politics, and culture. Marx
emphasized the dominance of economic considerations in
analysis. While Weber sought to show how cultural and
political factors also affected individual behavior and social
history along with economic activity. The two approaches
served to complement each other.
While Marx wrote extensively about the new social classes
(proletariat and bourgeoisie) created by industrial
capitalism, he did not believe there were only two social

Class groups as is commonly thought. In his analysis of the
failure of the 1848 revolution in France. Marx identified
seven social class groups and discussed why each group
supported (or opposed) a new government. Industrial
workers and small shopkeepers in the cities might support
the revolution for example because their economic and
political interests would benefit from a change in the
government whereas farmers in the countryside and large
merchants in the cities might oppose it because their
economic and social interests were dependent on
maintaining the current government. In this sense Marx’s
view of social classes may be seen as a precursor to modern
day thinking about interest groups competing within the
political arena.

Marx also recognized that the interests of capital and labor are not
one and the same a radical departure from modern day economic
theory the idea that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. Because profit
results from the difference the costs of production(raw material,
machinery and labor) and the price for which a commodity can be
sold in the market capitalist producer will look for any way possible
to reduce the costs of production. Marx’s analysis is as relevant for
the monopoly capitalism of the present day as it was for the
industrial capitalism of his time. In just the last several decades we
have seen the displacement of workers by automation a dramatic
increase in immigration and the movement of manufacturing to the
Third World countries all of these the consequence of corporation
seeking to lower there labor costs and all having a tremendous
impact on the people and the built environment of urban and
suburban settlement across the world.

POLITIAL ECOMOMY AND THE CITY
Marx wrote a very little in his classic Capital while Weber
included some passages about the nature of the city in a
much larger text, Economy and Society. For Marx the early
history of capitalism was a struggle between social relations
located within urban areas and those situated in the
countryside within feudal manors. For Weber the city
developed because of its political powers in particular the
independence of city residents and their local government
from feudal relations of authority. In both cases Marx and
Weber showed how models of social organization such as
feudalism or capitalism work through a form of space the
city and social relations situated within that spatial form.
Perspective that informs the approach of political economy
to settlement space.

For example Weber argued that during the feudal
period in the European Middle Ages traders and
craftspeople set up towns and bargained for
protection from the king against the activities of local
feudal lords. In these towns, capitalism began to
thrive through trade in goods and eventually overtook
the feudal economy. Thus as capitalism became a
dominating force in Europe it also crated the modern
city. The political economy perspective studies social
processes within urban space and links them to
processes occurring at the general level of society.

While Marx and Weber had comparatively
little to say about the industrial city of
capitalism. Friedrich Engels devoted some
time to the topic. His study of the working
class situation in nineteenth-century. England
and his field observations of the “great
towns”. Manchester in particular. For Engels
the large and industrial city was the best place
to study the general aspects of capitalism as a
social system.

FUNCTIONS OF URBAN LOCAL
GOVERNMENT BODIES
Due to rapid urbanization the role and function of
the urban local government institutions in
Bangladesh has been gaining significance in the
recent years. The Paurashavas and City Corporations
has been set up under separate statuses passed by
the Jatiya Sangsad. The Corporation function in the
major metropolitan cities where civic problems
acquires an enormous complexity while Paurashava
exists in medium sized and small towns.

FUNCTION OF URBAN LOCAL
GOVERNMENT BODIES
• Compulsory function
 Construction and maintenance of roads.
 Removal collection and disposal of refuse, wastes and
rubbish.
 Provision of maintenance of street lightening.
 Maintenance of public streets and provision for
watering them.
 Provision and regulation of water supply.
 Construction and maintenance of shopping centers.
 Plantation of trees on roadsides.
 Regulation of unsanitary builders.

GOVERNMENT BODIES
 Prevention of infectious diseases and epidemics.
 Registration of birth, death and marriage.
 Provision for maintaining slaughterhouses.
 Provision for maintenance of drainage.
 Control over erection and re-erection of
buildings.
 Provision for maintaining graveyards and
cremation grounds.
 Control over traffic and public vechile.

GOVERNMENT BODIES
• Optional Function
 Checking adulteration of food and drinks.
 Control over private market and shopping
centers.
 Maintenance of educational institution and
provision for stipends to meritorious students.
 Provision for flood and famine relief.
 Provision for maintaining parks, gardens and play
grounds.
 Establishment of welfare homes and orphanages
and prevention of beggary.

GOVERNMENT BODIES
 Establishment of public dispensaries, provision of
public toilets.
 Establishment of veterinary hospitals, registration of
castle sales and improvement of livestock.
 Celebration of public holiday.
 Reception of distinguished visitors/persons.
 Establishment of public libraries and reading rooms.
 Promotion of community development projects.
 Naming of roads and numbering of houses.

GOVERNMENT
• Functions Actually Performed: The Paurashava /City
Corporation is empowered to discharge a variety of
municipal and civic functions as described above. In
practice, however, they cannot perform all this
functions due to acute paucity of funds, poor and
irregular collection of taxes, non-realisation of taxes
from government, semi government and autonomous
offices for years together and in sufficient
government grants. The Paurashava functions are
many but its resources are extremely limited. Due to
financial constraints the Paurashavas, in reality,
perform the following functions only:

FUNCTION OF THE URBAN LOCAL
GOVERNMENT
 Construction and maintenance of roads, bridges,
culverts, etc.
 Removal, collection and disposal of refuse, wastes,
rubbish, etc.
 Provision and maintenance of street lighting.
 Provision of water supply.
 Construction and maintenance of community and
shopping centers.
 Provision and maintenance of graveyards and
cremation grounds.

FUNCTION OF THE URBAN LOCAL
GOVERNMENT
 Irradiation of mosquitoes.
 Registration of births, death and marriages.
 Maintenance of slaughterhouses.
 Control over private shopping centers.
 Provision and maintenance of parks and gardens.
 Naming of roads and numbering of houses.
 Provision of public toilet.

GOVERNMENT
• Additional Functions Performed by Paurashava/
City Corporations: apart from the functions
stated earlier the Paurashavas/ City Corporations
discharge a few additional functions as well.
Although they remain busy with their formal
function they are nevertheless, required to
provide some other services to the people. The
function of this nature are mentioned bellow:

GOVERNMENT
• Issuance of Certificates: the Paurashava/ City
Corporation usually issues different kinds of
certificates as and when required by town and city
dwellers. These are characters certificate, nationality
certificate, birth and death certificate, succession
certificate, etc. The people used these certificates for
various purposes. The character and nationality
certificates are for necessary for jobs and admission
to educational institution. Birth, death and
succession certificates are used for mutation for land
holdings. The succession certificate is issued to the
legal heirs of the deceased.

GOVERNMENT
• Judicial Jurisdictions: According to the
Conciliation of Disputes( municipal areas) Act,
2004, the Paurashava has judicial functions as
well. It discharges these through the formation of
a Conciliation Board.

URBAN PROBLEMS
Early observers of the city life saw immigrants from the
rural areas with stable family traditions turning to
alcoholism, robbery, child abuse and prostitution.
Something about living in the large city, it was
suggested, created social disorganization – broken
families and broken lives – and this in turn led to all
sorts of urban problems.
Several theories explaining the link between urban
living and social disorganization have been proposed
over the years, including the break down of primary
groups relation, the compositional approach, and the
subcultural theory. All these theories are derived from
Luis Wirth`s essay “Urbanization as a way of life” and
the subsequent interpretation of this classic work from
Chicago School Of Urban Sociology.

Sociologists like Herbert Gans(1968) and Claude
Fisher(1975) contributed in the field of crime.
• Racism
• Poverty
• Crime
• Drugs
• Street gangs
• Suburban crime

THE FISCAL CRISIS AND PUBLIC SERVICE PROBLEMS
Urban problems are difficult to solve when
insufficient money is available to local governments.
A fiscal crisis starts when the revenues obtained by
government fall short of the expenses of running a
city.
FISCAL CRISIS
The fiscal crisis of the cities has two components.
During the 1970 many cities faced budgetary
shortfalls because of rising cost coupled with
decreasing revenues caused by the decline in
manufacturing and the rapid deterioration of urban
economies.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM
One outcome of the decline in government spending has
been a progressive deterioration of the urban
infrastructure, specially roads, water system, bridges,
public buildings and streets.
HOUSING
In the United States, family well-being depends to a
great extent on where one`s home is located.
Differences in wealth and the location of the family
home determine the opportunities available to
individuals. Where one lives determines the quality of
the school one attends but it also determines the safety
of the local streets and how much one`s property will
increase by value.

URBANIZATION IN THE INDUTRIALIZED
WORLD
Western Europe: The countries of Western Europe have
been urbanized for centuries. They have a well
developed urban hierarchy with city population ranging
from over 5,000 to 100,000 to over 1 million. Recently
this region has experienced a restructuring of
population and economic activities similar to those
occurring in the United States. Many central cities are
declining and there is a marked increase in the
development of the suburban settlement space. At the
same time many new towns are experiencing rapid
growth resulting in metropolitan regions similar to
those found in the United States.

THIRD WORLD URBANIZATION
Changing Perspectives On Third World Urbanization: In
approaching the issue of urbanization in developing
countries, a number of misconception must be
dispelled. First, such societies are commonly through
to be primitively developed compared to the United
States . In the fact however, countries such as Brazil,
Mexico and Korea are highly industrialized with factory
workers numbering in hundreds of thousands. Some of
the largest cities in the world such as Sao Paulo and
New Delhi are not only located in the developing
countries but are also vibrant, dynamic urban centers.
However these societies seem to share a pattern of
uneven development that is even more extreme than
that found in the older developed nations.

Urban Sociology

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