Urban places are the dominant location for where people live today. This dominance may surprise you. For example, what region of the United States is the most urbanized (urbanized means proportion of the population living in urban places)? Give it some thought, then look for the answer at the end of this outline.
Is the city a safe place to live? Many believe it is not, it is where crime occurs, where the poor live, it is a place where strange things happen and stranger kinds of people live. Test this by asking your friends what Capital Hill is like in Denver, if they think it is safe to walk in these places during the day or evening. Most will say no.
Is the city clean? Again most will say no. When we think of air pollution we think of Los Angeles or Denver in the winter time.
Yet at the same time it is the city where the exciting things are happening, it is where theater is located, it is where many of the interesting people live, it is where the action is in the evening.
Cities are seen as being crowded and congested. People crowd in on one another whether walking or living in high rise tenements, apartments or condominiums. The center of the city is dominated by skyscrapers that dwarf human activity, so much so that many people feel completely turned off by the downtown spaces. Traffic is heavy, streets are congested.
At the same time there pockets of interesting places, of places to rest and to watch the urban scene go by.
Are people friendly in the city, on the street? Do you know anyone that you see on the downtown street? Does anyone care? Do you look people in the eye as you pass?
Relationships in the city are dominated by impersonality and the stranger. The interactions are at best courteous, but largely secondary. Diversity abounds, you really do not know who you will meet next, if they will even speak the same language that you do. It is all of these things that repulse us about the city, yet at the same time make the city attractive.
The earliest city is Ur in Mesopotamia (the fertile crescent of what is now Iran and Iraq, ancient Persia. These cities came into being about 4,000 B.C. According to Gideon Sjoberg certain prerequisites were necessary for the development of the city:
Early cities were often defensive, walled to protect the citizens from marauders. Others were centers for trade and commerce. Gideon Sjoberg in the Preindustrial City: Past and Present gives an overview of what the early cities were like, where and how they came into being. They were often the hub of government and religious life in the society they came to dominate.
In the small community the behavioral and spatial community coincide, overlap. In the urban place this is not the case, there is usually separation of behavioral and spatial community. That is, close friends and associates do not live in the immediate neighborhood, in fact they may live across the city or in a suburb.
where located, correspondence to neighborhood area
boundaries
The boundaries are often indefinite. For example, describe the limits to the Park Hill Neighborhood in Denver or the area known as Capitol Hill -- what are the boundaries. Depending upon your familiarity with these areas, the boundaries are likely to differ
This will be true for the people that live in different parts of the neighborhood as well. In Park Hill those north of 26th Ave will likely extend the boundary toward Martin Luther King Blvd (32nd), while those in the southern part are likely to set the boundary at 26th or even possibly 21st.
Some boundary elements:
physical characteristics
Ferdinand Toennies
This is an idea coined by Louis Wirth in an article of the same name published in 1939. Wirth did his graduate work at the University of Chicago and, as did most sociology students at Chicago, analyzed the city of Chicago and its social characteristics. In this interpretation and attempt to understand the problems of adjustment that newcomers were having Wirth coined the term "urbanism as a way of life." In this term he meant to capture all of the things that people experienced when moving to the city: the impersonality, the individuality, the choices and options, the tolerance for things different. All of these were new experiences for the urban migrant (whether simply coming from an Illinois farm or from an Eastern European village).
(some census definitions included)
any incorporated place of 2,500 or more people (census definition)
any part of the county that is built up and meets the size definition above, does not necessarily have to be incorporated. For example, all of the area south of Greenwood Village and east of Littleton is an "urban area." That is it is not incorporated and is built up, the houses are closer together than one finds in rural areas, there are businesses scattered through the area. (census definition)
a central city of at least 50,000 people and the county in which the central city is located. This is an idea designed to capture the influence of an urban place on its surroundings. The Denver SMSA includes the city and county of Denver, Arapahoe, Adams, Boulder, Jefferson, and Douglas counties. The population of this area is about 2 million. These suburban counties are linked to the Denver SMSA because a large part of the population works in the central city -- Denver.
Stark uses the term "metropolis," this is a vague term that usually is reserved for large cities, but the question becomes then: What is a large city? Clearly places like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City count, but what about Boise, Idaho or Spokane, Washington or Grand Junction, Colorado? All of these places are classified as SMSAs.
usually a smaller satellite community adjacent or close to a larger city. Aurora, Golden, Green Mountain, Highlands Ranch, Littleton, Northglenn and so on are all suburbs of Denver
Assumed that the city consists of a series of zones with the Central Business District at the center. Arranged immediately outside this zone are the working class homes and light manufacturing. In the next zone are the residences of the middle class, beyond that the upper class residences.
The city grows by expanding outward, the CBD invades the working class zone, who in turn are displaced into the middle class and so on. This growth creates an area immediately around the CBD known as the Zone in Transition (ZIT). This is an area undergoing change in land use pattern -- from residential to commercial. Land values are rising and the value of buildings is going down, so the area is run down and not kept up. For examples in Denver, look to the north of downtown, or in the part of City Park neighborhood closest to downtown. There you will find houses and apartment buildings in poor repair or actually abandoned and boarded up
Often these areas are seen as a 'blight' and attempts are made to urban renew them out of existence. They are a blight because they tend to attract marginal businesses and people (pawn shops, porn shops, sleazy bars, flop houses, and the kind of people that patronize such places). Note that this is also the place where people live who cannot afford the 'nicer' neighborhood rents. These are often newcomers, immigrants, the poor and minorities. Urban renewal does not do away with the activities and people, it simply moves them about in the city. For example, when Larimer Street and the area now called "Lower Downtown" underwent this kind of 'renewal' the people, pawn shops and porn shops simply moved to other widely dispersed parts of the city. These are now viewed as 'blighted' neighborhoods! But also notice that they are dispersed across the city instead of being concentrated in one place as they were before the 'urban renewal' effort
The pattern here is similar to the concentric zone, but occurs in 'sectors' instead of rings. For example in Denver, the upper class neighborhoods have always been to the south east of the capitol building. As the city has grown, the upper class has abandoned the close in areas and moved southeast. The north east has tended to be middle class and minority, this still holds, but has moved further east. The northwest is an area of Catholic immigrants, it still is, but the groups have moved further west as the close in areas commercialized.
Again Denver is exemplary. Aurora on the east, Englewood and Littleton on the South and Golden to the west were at one time all separate communities. As all have grown, they merge to form nodes within the larger urban complex. Modern development creates similar kinds of nodes around shopping centers: Northglenn Mall, Southglenn Mall, Southwest Plaza, Aurora mall and so on. These constitute separate nodes within the complex.
A process characterizing the change of a neighborhood or physical area of the city. Either an activity (residential, commercial, manufacturing, wholesale) or an ethnic / racial group is first invaded by another activity (residential by commercial, commercial by manufacturing) or ethnic / racial group (Italian by Jewish, Jewish by African American, African American by Hispanic). Succession has occurred when the new activity or group has displaced or replaced the original activity.
(described in Stark)
(described in Stark)
spatial organization within the city is often based on what business or groups have to communicate with one another. Changes in communication have drastically altered both the internal structure of the city and how cities are related to one another.
For example, New York City is the financial capital of the United States and has access to capital markets of the world. In an age when communication was either personal or based on paper, it was necessary for business headquarters to be close to these sources of finance. However, as communications have changed to electronic physical closeness is no longer important. Thus business headquarters can be located any place and are.
Similarly within the city, banks, title companies, law offices and so on had to be close together so that documents could be transmitted quickly and easily. Again this is no longer necessary.
The West (Pacific and Rocky Mountain)
As you can see in the examples below the population is concentrated in a relatively small part of the states. All of these states have large rural AREAS, but very little rural population because so much of the states' areas are uninhabitable. Compare Colorado with New York state, New York actually has a larger proportion of the population living in rural areas, because water, tillable land is much more evenly distributed than it is in Colorado
begin at Wyoming border (Ft. Collins) continue along the Front Range to New Mexico -- a strip about 30 miles wide will encompass about 80 % of the population of the state, the only large population concentration left is Grand Junction.
Laramie, Cheyenne, Casper, Rock Springs -- where else is there any population?
Logan to Provo, again virtually no population beyond this strip
population concentrated along the Snake River (Twin Falls to Boise)
Reno and Las Vegas
Albuquerque, Santa Fe
Tucson, Pheonix, Flagstaff
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, the Central Valley
Medford to Portland ( mostly the Willamette Valley)
Seattle/Tacoma, Spokane, Vancouver
has become the dominant feature of the contemporary western urban industrial societies such as the United States. The pace of life is affected, the quality is changed, we have a love / hate relationship with it. We attempt to escape it by moving to the suburbs, but bring the problems of the central city with us (pollution, crime, crowding, blight)
The urban place is and will continue to be the dominant characteristics of our society. Many problems are associated with this way of life, but there many more advantages that compensate for these problems. Civilization is urban, 'culture' is urban, action is urban. These all make the city and its bright lights attractive.
The web has made possible a whole new way of experiencing the world and its communities. Today you can find 'webcams' fixed on a particular view of the city. I have collected a few of these so that you can go live to a variety of cities around the world, here are some citycams of the world.
| Introduction to Social Change | ||
| Unit 13: Population Growth and Change | Unit 14: Urban Growth | Unit 15:Organizational Growth and Change |
| Topical Outline | ||
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by Richard H. Anderson, the Department of Sociology and the University of Colorado at Denver.
This page last revised: April 26, 2000. Please contact Richard H. Anderson (randerso@carbon.cudenver.edu) if you experience any problems or have comments about these pages.