Midterm Flashcards
(READING - KEY POINTS) Sjoberg, G. 1955. The Preindustrial City. American Journal of Sociology
PREINDUSTRIAL
economic organization: is vastly different from a modern industrial center
- lack inanimate sources of power = must rely on animals and humans
- little fragmentation or specialization of occupational sectors
- usually community based without fixed prices with an unstandardized price range
social organization: literate elite control and depend their existence on the mass populace (governmental, religious, and educational institutions) against the masses
- no social mobility = importance of kinship and lineage making marriage an important tool
- heavy importance of religion
- isolated due to lack of mass communication
INDUSTRIAL
- rational and centralized economic organization - recruitment is based on universalism more than particularism
- system of mass education that emphasized universalistic rather than particularistic criteria + mass communication
- city as a center of acculturation
**Key themes of lecture (Urbanization for causes of psychological disposition, and community lost thesis)
- theory that neighbourhood social cohesion is weaker today than in the past
- city experience can be separate from human experience and cause a shift in psychological disposition
Community Lost Thesis:
-Pessimistic - moral ambivalence over the city
Thesis informed by fear of mass movements
Declining trust, civic, engagement
- More consumption of media and less face to face interactions
Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society)
Gemeinschaft (community) - Traditional bonds of kinship, emotional bonds, simple division of society, homogenous, “folk society”
Gesellschaft (society) - social relations on impersonal and instrumental associations, division of labour, detachment from binding norms and traditional mores, rational social order upheld by laws, rational
industrial revolution transition
Major transition for sociological concern of urbanization?
- The transition from traditional rural life to modern industrial order was a foundational concern for sociologists
- Was a fundamental part of the community lost?
- Pessimistic outlook on industrial social order
Sense of historical movement toward pre-industrial society follows the trajectory of alienation
Georg Simmel
- Berlin 1858-1918
- German sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic
- Marginalized by academic institutions, but had cultural status in Berlin
- Simmel approaches how different aspects lead to subjective life
- The metropolitan environment produces intensification of emotional life
- Sensory overload: rapid crowding, changing images, discontinuity, unexpected impressions
- The complex division of labour promotes rational efficiency - fragmented relations
- Requires calculating exactness, and punctuality - optimize use of time, search ahead of time
Psychological Defenses Against Metropolis
- Urbanites adopt a blase attitude to guard against sensory overload
- Mental distances are given physical proximity
react with the head rather than the heart - Intellectuality characteristics of mental life in the metropolis
- Dissociation as a form of socialization - forms more unique individual identities
Benefits of urban communities?
- Greater personal freedom, search for a more transcendent order
- Urbanite becomes more cosmopolitan to form bonds outside of ascriptive ties, concentric circles to cross-cutting group memberships
- Freedom to form new bonds and communities based on interests of one’s own choosing
- Hobbies, cultural tastes, music, film, lifestyle, scenes
Group affiliations in small towns are constraining
“Urbanism as a way of life” - Louis Wirth (1897-1952)
Chicago school - influenced by Simmel
- Published in 1938
- Saw urbanization as a transition to a new way of life - what dimensions define a city
- Defined it as a permanent settlement distinguished by size, density, and social heterogeneity
- Based his theories around these inter related dimensions
- Law of large numbers - the greater the number the greater the potential differentiation between them
- Makes it impossible to know everyone - making it impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmented
- Gives rise to a Schizoid personality - large size produces anomie - a breakdown of social order
Chicago school on density and heterogeneity impacts
Density:
- An increase in numbers in constant area - density reinforces the effect of size by increasing differentiation and specialization
- Produces competition for space - with specialized functions
- Mosaic of social worlds
Frequent physical contact with social distance produces loneliness and tensions
Heterogeneity:
- Break down the rigidity of stratification and complicate class structure
- Heightened social mobility, an individual subject to fluctuating status
- Overlapping affiliation
- Transitory habitat
- Depersonalizing can have a levelling effect where individuality is replaced by categories
- Residential turnover is the norm in city spaces
Chicago school on urbanism
Urbanism as an ecological perspective (as a physical structure comprising a population base, technology, and ecological order)
- The dominance of the city over the hinterland, population reproduction derived from consequences of characteristics
Urbanism as a form of social organization (social structure, institutions, relationships)
-The undermining of traditional social order, and leisure economy, in lieu of communal services
Louis Wirth on urban personality and collective behaviour
- Rely on secondary associations we choose ourselves through voluntary groups
- Wirth is skeptical about how these anchor individuals
- Says mental health is not significantly aided by this
- Says people are manipulated by symbols and stereotypes causing the masses to be controlled
(READING - KEY POINTS) Hiller, Harry. “Canadian Urbanization in Historical and Global Perspective”
Consequences/impacts of domestication of animals/plants (agricultural revolution)
- food surplus - supported city dwellers who could freely be released from food production
- Complex divisions of labour - non=argricultural pursuits
- Supported hierarchical society leaders could extract surplus in the form of tax
- Administrative structure to manage surplus that rewards those who conformed to leaders who asked for surplus versus those who did not conform
- Social inequalities - others were able to live leisurely while others were labourers
LEADS TO
- City is dependent on hinterland to support its needs/emergence of trade producces capitalism and market economy
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
- Machines had capacity to manufacture consumer products
- Different kind of labourers required more complex class system of poor labourers, middle class merchants
- Slums and middle class suburbs emerge in industrial revolution
- Image of industrial city as polluted, crowded, with poor working conditions (LONDON)
RISE OF NATION-STATE
- Central governments consolidate their power over their own territories
- Administrative centers structured by representatives of the imperial government
- Served as intermediaries between empire and colonial hinterland (become primate cities)
- globalization and colonialism leads to = core countries and peripheral countries rely on each other - with the core country maintaining the power
DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
-Vertical disintegration - find production wherever labour is cheaper - segmented production
- Manufacturing was then transferred away from core countries - resulting in deindustrialization
- Now considered post=industrial cities with industrial processes offloaded to cities where labour is cheap
-Now core cities are dominated by the service industry
POSTINDUSTRIALIZATION
- Migration to cities at a rate new residents can’t be integrated is called overurbanization
- The inability to find standard employment - results in subsistence urbanization - the struggle for survival is the main objective of daily living
- A global city has a heightened position of command and control centre in the global economy
- Usually have multinational enterprise - results in increase of expensing housing pushing out middle class
- Cities become more expensive - growth shifts to regional areas or towns near the core
- Regionalization of the urban population
(READING - KEY POINTS) Hiller, Harry. “The Dynamics of Canadian Urbanization”
- Urbanization patterns are the result of deliberate decisions and human action
- The political economy perspective - points out that decisions made by people in power impact how urbanization proceeds.
RELATIONSHIP OF METROPOLIS AND HINTERLAND
- Places that provide staple products to sustain metropolis that are critical to the whole national economy
- The relationship is symbiotic but tipped in favour of the dominant city
- Montreal has agricultural land around it - providing a hinterland to make settlements more permanent - Geographically closest inlet to the city
POST WW2 URBAN DEVELOPMENT
- Technology: shift from staples and water transportation to industry and rail means a larger population and more complex territory can develop
- Industrial capitalism
Methods of getting around
Steel urban density in residential high-rises
Suburbanization of residence - leads to the growth of urban regions not just cities
external: WW excelerating industrial demand + migration
Internal : rural depopulation becomes cause of urban growth to search for employment
SHIFTING MARKETS
- shift from European to north American markets - makes toronto more important than montreal
- immigration is important to gateway cities (vancouver, toronto, montreal) as primary demographic growth
URBAN RESTRUCTURING
- emergence of post-industrial city
- employment more technical and specialized
- away from blue collar to white collar
- increasing densification, walkability, and diversity
(READING - KEY POINTS) Guay, Louis and Pierre Hamel. “Urban Change and Policy Responses in Quebec”
CHICAGO SCHOOL
- Chicago School of Sociology was the first to provide a comprehensive understanding of urban areas
- Two factors worked in producing the form and content of city life
- Ecological form and the social and cultural factors that put people in homogeneous urban areas
- Post-fordism (crisis of regulation) and post-modernism (highlighting the cultural diversity emerging in large metropolitan areas in a global context)
QUEBEC
- Quiet revolution = Improve public infrastructure and public utilities, reform municipal planners,
gave political power to surrounding montreal bodies
- Development pole - large urban area comprising a diversity of economic activities, tertiary dynamic activities like engineering, accounting, and marketing services for businesses etc.
- Investing in Montreal would produce trickle down effect
- Start of conflict between Quebec regions and Montreal
ECONOMY INVESTMENT
- new service and knowledge-based economy
- The city’s capacity to bring economic restructuring of neighbourhoods is enabled - requires fiscal incentives and outward investments
- Urban authorities and municipal administrations can influence economic decision-making through investments in urban infrastructures
- Heritage buildings being restored by the provincial gov are also profitable
URBAN CULTURAL POLICY
- must offer young and educated ppl a city life with art
(READING - KEY POINTS) Cressey, Paul G. 1932. The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life.
- Women can be afforded new social changes in cities
- Theory of retrogressive cycles
- Tendency to solve social and personal problems by “moving on” to a new social group and world
- Examining the sociological background of taxi-dance hall girls - seeing it as a break from stable community groups like church and family
- gives women freedom as dance halls exist in many city centers
- Emancipating from moral order allows people to indulge in pleasures where they feel less inhibited
- Demand for more stimulation
- Growth of commercialized institutions to
meet demand - Growing promiscuity of city life, and new
social types it gives rise to
(READING - KEY POINTS) Burgess, Ernest. 1925. “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project.”
PHYSICAL GROWTH
- The metropolitan area of a city which overruns its geographic limits expands radially on the map
- Loop encircling the downtown area
- Each inner zone extend by invasion to next outer zone - called succession
CONCENTRATION AND DECENTRALIZATION
- Process of reorganization into a centralized decentralized system of communities into business areas
- Public utilities are entrenched in the mechanization of cities but don’t mean anything to social organization
- Expansion affects social organization
- Acquire culture by birth - family adjusted to the social environment of the particular city
- Disorganization as preliminary to the reorganization of attitudes and conduct is almost invariably the lot of the newcomer to the city
- Mobility of city life can demoralize a person
Chicago School
- Chicago schools have relational approaches to the city
-Chicago School founded the Department of Sociology in 1892 - Chicago as a site of rapid change. Grew from a small town into a great city of more than one million people between 1850 and 890
- Massive population growth in a small amount of time as center of the rail lines
Chicago School: Human ecology
- City is an organism with complex differentiated parts integrated into the larger urban society
- Different parts of the city were “natural areas” - locales for most basic institutions and activities
- Introduced neighbourhood as a unit of analysis
Chicago School: City as a mosaic of minor communities
- The city is composed of different local communities situated within territorial space
- Unanticipated consequence of people attempting to live together
- Urban communities have a social and moral order
- Cultural norms that enforce behaviour
- Communities can be more or less organized
If they have collected interests supported by institutions (churches. schools) - Social disorganization means lack of moral order: crime, suicide, vice
Chicago school: Ecological processes
- Focused on different interactional dynamics (i.e - competition, invasion, succession, adjustment, etc) operating at different levels
- How are they able to adapt to new factors that change the status quo (Darwinian aspects) - immigration, railway etc
- Cities, neighbourhoods, individuals
- Competition among settlements at the regional level
Growth of the city: Ernest Burgess
- Concentric zone model - an enduring model of urban development
- Earliest theoretical models to explain city growth
Urban order emerges from competition for valuable space - Urban development grows radially from the central business district (zone 1)
Zones
Zone II - transition zones - factories, warehouses, rooming houses
Zone III - working-classs zone - close enough to commute to work, second-generation immigrants
Zone IV - Residential Zone - Well-educated, middle-class families, single family homes with yards
Zone VI - Commuter Zone - suburbs, those who can afford larger more expensive housing
TERMS
Extension - city growing outwards
Succession - social mobility, immigrant assimilation
Concentration - CBD is the pulsating core of the city, the centre for transportation, and major economic, cultural and political institutions
(Idea of expansion impacting personalities - if the change is happening too fast)
Chicago School: Urban Ethnography
- City as a laboratory
- Development of methods for urban ethnography = fieldwork, mapping, survey data, interviews
- Ethnography is the study of people as they live their lives
- Enables them to enter the social world - more grounded studies
Wirth on social relations in the city
- Size, density, heterogeneity of the city, and social relations, are more likely to be impersonal, and superficial
- city dweller became anonymous, isolated, secular
- Wirth falls in line with mass society theory - urbanites are socially atomized and psychologically alienated, susceptible to manipulation by bureaucratic power
- The levelling effect in society as people weren’t anchored to one community
Herbert J Gans criticizes Wirths’ theory
- Wirth’s theory doesn’t withstand empirical scrutiny
- Wirth emphasizes central or inner city, but the theory does not apply to whole city settlement as it was mainly industrial ones - does not address the diversity of inner cities
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