Karp City Life

Being Urban
Being Urban
A Sociology of City Life, Third Edition
DAVID A. KARP, GREGORY P. STONE,

WILLIAM C. YOELS, AND
NICHOLAS P. DEMPSEY
Copyright © 2015 by David A. Karp, Gregory P. Stone, William C. Yoels, and Nicholas P.
Dempsey
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission
in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Karp, David A.
Being urban : a sociology of city life / David A. Karp, Gregory P. Stone, William C. Yoels,
and Nicholas P. Dempsey. — Third edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–275–95647–9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–275–95654–7
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–4408–2856–0 (ebook) 1. City and town life—United
States. 2. Sociology, Urban—United States. I. Title.
HT123.K37 2015
307.76—dc23 2015007990
ISBN: 978–0–275–95647–9 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978–0–275–95654–7 (paperback)
EISBN: 978–1–4408–2856–0
19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
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To my wonderful grandson Yadi Yoels, who lights up
my life with his joy and laughter.
—W.C.Y.
For the extraordinary joy they provide, I thank Cody,

Emily, Jayden, Malia, Sydney, and Tyler.
—D.A.K.
To Jack, Bridget, and Angela.

—N.P.D.
Contents
Preface to the Third Edition ix

Preface to the Second Edition xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Part I Issues and Perspectives in Urban Sociology 1

Chapter 1 Classical Conceptions of Urban Life 3
Chapter 2 Classical Observations of Urban Life 23
Part II Experiencing City Life 51

Chapter 3 The Rediscovery of Community 53
Chapter 4 The Social Organization of Everyday City Life 87
Chapter 5 Lifestyle Diversity and Urban Tolerance 119
Chapter 6 Women in Cities 149
Part III Urban Institutions and Social Change 173

Chapter 7 Power, Politics, and Problems 175
Chapter 8 Sports and Urban Life 219
Chapter 9 Arts in the City 251
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 10 New Urban Dynamics: Gentrification,

Suburbanization, Globalization, and the
Federal Divestiture 273
References 289
Index 317
Preface to the
Third Edition
O ver 20 years have passed since we published the previous edition of

Being Urban. In that time, the world has become predominately urban—for
the first time most human beings live in cities. Many U.S. cities have seen their
fortunes continue to decline. Others have seen dramatic turnarounds—where
once New York was dirty and crime ridden, and on shaky financial grounds, it
is now a global powerhouse with an almost-Disneyland feel in some places.
All cities have had to contend in an increasingly globalized world, where eco-
nomic and political events in faraway places impact the internal dynamics of
even isolated cities. Suburbs have grown. The Internet is now available to
almost every American, and some commentators have even wondered if cities
would be dying out by now (they’re not). Disasters—9/11, Katrina, Sandy—
have taken huge tolls on cities, and the cities have bounced back.
With so much changing and having changed, one might rightly wonder
whether a book like Being Urban, written from the interactionist perspective
with roots in the first half of the last century, is still relevant. If cities have
changed so much, shouldn’t urban life now be of a totally different nature than
it used to be? If everybody is reading smart phones on the subway, are they any-
thing like people were in the days of newsprint and payphones? Actually, we
believe that people are very much the same—and that the lessons we offer in
Being Urban are still very relevant, perhaps now more than ever. Now that we’re
moving back into cities. Now that urbanites are contending in a global
economy. Now that our cities are again brimming with immigrants looking to
make it big in their new home. Now that we, perhaps ironically, are networked
with more people than ever through those smart phones.
x PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
In fact, the interactionist paradigm that informs Being Urban is key to

understanding much of what goes on in cities, as well as to understanding
many of the most important sociological inquiries into urban life that are pro-
duced today. Interactionism simply holds that people are conscious of the
impressions that they make on others whenever they take an action. People’s
actions are regarded as meaningful and significant by observers. “Thus,”
writes Herbert Blumer, “human interaction is mediated by the use of sym-
bols, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one another’s
actions” (Blumer 1969:79). By taking account of how people do this in urban
settings, from the smallest scale of people bumping into each other on the
street corner, to the larger level of people interacting in neighborhoods, to
even larger questions of how politics and economies are coordinated, we
stand to learn much about the inner workings of cities.
Of course, this is not to say that the changes that have happened in and to
cities are not important. This revised and expanded third edition explores the
ways that cities have been changing, and applies the interactionist paradigm to
help understand contemporary urban dynamics such as gentrification, glob-
alization, and New Urbanist development plans.
WHAT’S NEW IN THE THIRD EDITION

For the most part, Chapters 1 and 2 remain the same, outlining the contri-
butions of classical sociological theory to our understandings of cities. Chap-
ter 2 has added a discussion of Henri Lefebvre’s contributions to urban
sociology, as we have noted that an important thread to studies of cities in
recent years owes a great debt to the work of Lefebvre and other Marxist soci-
ologists.
Chapter 3, our discussion of community studies, both describes the rich
tradition founded by the Chicago school and explores how that tradition
has continued to grow and inform recent studies of neighborhoods and urban
community in general. We show how research has demonstrated consistently
that people form important connections with one another in cities, and that,
indeed, much of the action going on in cities is based in groups—from neigh-
borhood organizations to informal groups of street vendors.
In Chapter 4, we delve into the details of everyday interaction in cities.
We consider how people make efforts to get along in the city’s crowded
spaces, and show how life in cities is a remarkable achievement, an intricate
interweaving and coordination of diverse people’s activities. Despite the per-
sistence of various negative images—that cities are crime ridden, anonymous,
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xi
and dangerous—we discuss numerous findings that show that people in the
city do a remarkable job getting along with, and looking out for, each other.
In addition to examining classic studies of interactions in urban space, we dis-
cuss how new technologies like smart phones have worked their way into
urban dynamics, and how New Urbanist design has been working in recent
years to make cities more open to interactions.
Our discussions of tolerance for diversity in both lifestyles and ethnicity in
Chapter 5 has been augmented to consider how urban dynamics have
changed in recent years, with some places more accommodating than ever
to diversity, and others acting as “last stand” islands of intolerance. We also
discuss studies that show how some segments of the professional class seek
out quirky and diverse neighborhoods—and how that can feed gentrification.
Women’s gains in the workplace and politics have been remarkable over
the last 25 years, and our discussion of women in cities in Chapter 6 reflects
those changes. We discuss the gains that women have made in pay equity, as
well as the changing dynamics of gender equity in different kinds of jobs.
Some recent studies even note that recent shifts in urban economies may favor
the kind of occupations (like clerical, medical, and service work) that are
dominated by women. Chapter 6 goes on to discuss the important contribu-
tions women have made in community building and voluntary organizations.
We also take note of the troubling persistence of patriarchy in public spaces—
women continue to experience marked levels of sexual harassment in public,
not to mention sexual assault. We discuss how this can limit the range of
motion of women within the city, but we also discuss how women are work-
ing to reclaim public spaces and overcome the culture of harassment.
Chapter 7 provides a wide-ranging discussion of urban politics and social
problems. Recent data continue to show an increasing concentration of
wealth and power at the upper end of the social spectrum. But we also look
into recent findings on increases in political participation since the Motor
Voter act of the 1990s. We take stock of recent developments in campaign
financing, in addition to explaining how the very structure of urban gover-
nance significantly affects the accountability and the decisions of urban politi-
cal leaders. Chapter 7 goes on to explore recent findings regarding a number
of problems that plague some cities—including the segregation of minority
poverty into marginal neighborhoods, rises in single-parent families, and
low high school graduation rates.
The next two chapters discuss activities that might be classified as leisure—
sports and the arts—but we couch these discussions in a recognition that
these activities have an importance to cities beyond pure entertainment. Both
bring people together as a sort of community building. And both are big
xii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
business. Our discussion of sport in Chapter 8 has been updated to recognize

the changing dynamics of the sports business, and in particular revises our dis-
cussion of the racial makeup of college and professional sports teams in the
United States, which are more diverse now than ever before. Chapter 9 is
entirely new, and explores the relationship of the arts to urbanism. We discuss
how artistic production relies in many ways on the density of audiences, sup-
pliers, and artists in cities, and also how the arts enliven the experience of
dwelling within cities. We further consider how recent studies of urban popu-
lation and economic dynamics pay increasing attention to the artistic offerings
different cities make, and see a strong local arts community as a driver of
urban growth and success.
Finally, Chapter 10 concludes with a discussion of the dynamics that we
believe are most important to understanding how cities are changing today.
We first discuss globalization—the increased interconnectedness of econo-
mies, information, and culture on a global scale—and how it has had a trans-
formative effect on cities. Some have become centers for a new economic
order, while others like Detroit have lost much of their productive economy
to foreign nations. We address the increased inequality in cities, frequently
noted in a job structure that is bifurcated between highly compensated skilled
service professions and unskilled service jobs that barely pay subsistence
wages. Next, we consider issues of federal divestiture from financing urban
programs in the United States. Where once cities could rely on a relatively
great degree of support from the national tax base, now it is no longer the
case. Fourth, we consider the resilience of mid-sized cities, and the new roles
they play in a postindustrial economy. Finally, we consider the movement of
the U.S. population in and out of inner-city areas and suburbs. Where once
we observed massive out-migration from cities to suburbs, that trend has
recently reversed. And where we could once assume that suburbs were rea-
sonably well-to-do, we have in recent years observed the rise of low-income
suburbs.
Preface to
the Second Edition
T he growth of cities and the urbanization of social life have long stood at
the center of social science inquiry. Urban housing, politics, intergroup rela-
tions, class and stratification patterns, economic structure, demographic
trends, and the nature of communities are among the most frequent areas of
scholarly investigation. Indeed, so much has been written on the city in recent
years that it is virtually impossible for even urban specialists to keep abreast of
the literature.
In Being Urban we have not tried to cover the full range of issues and
topics found in most urban sociology textbooks. Rather, we want first of all
to pose some of the social psychological questions typically neglected in most
treatments of the urban scene. Second, we want to illustrate how our answers
to these questions lead us to reevaluate certain traditional, longstanding
images of the city. In this respect we view ours as a work of revision. We do
not seek to disprove or reject traditional and current sociological understandings
of the urban place. We wish, instead, to indicate how these understandings may
be incomplete or partial. Finally, the authors share a common theoretical orien-
tation that gives impetus and unity to this enterprise. By offering a theoretically
integrated perspective on experiencing city life, we will demonstrate throughout
this work the value of symbolic interaction theory for analyzing the meanings of
being urban.
The perspective of symbolic interaction is based on the uncomplicated idea
that the social world is composed of acting, thinking, defining, reacting, and
interpreting human beings in interaction with one another. Persons are not
merely puppets pushed around by forces over which they have no control.
xiv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Interactionists hold a picture of social life in which persons are the architects of
their worlds. Reality is, then, socially constructed, and to understand human
behavior we must inquire into those processes through which persons construct
and transform their social worlds. For those who accept the validity of these
premises, the major concern of any social psychological treatment is to establish
the relationship between the meanings persons attach to their environments and
the consequences of these definitions of the situation for their behavior.
As we note throughout this book, however, the conditions under which
such symbolic definitions of the situation take place are themselves functions
of the power at the disposal of the groups involved. In short, the participants
in various social worlds have differential access to the production and distri-
bution of scarce, highly valued resources. As a result, any focus on the mean-
ings of urban life must remain sensitive to the larger institutional and
historical dimensions of the urban experience. In writing the second edition
of Being Urban we have tried to illustrate throughout the nature of the
dynamic interplay between historically based structural conditions and per-
sons’ interpretations of and responses to those conditions. As well, this edi-
tion reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary thinking and draws heavily
upon works by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and psycholo-
gists to supplement the underlying interactionist view of urban life.
The second edition contains two new chapters: Chapter 6, “Women in
Cities: The Absence of a Presence,” and Chapter 8, “Sports and Urban Life.”
These are topics that receive virtually no coverage in current urban sociology
texts. In addition, Chapter 7, “Power, Politics, and Problems,” and Chapter 9,
“Urbanism, Suburban, and Cultural Change,” have been almost totally rewrit-
ten. All the other chapters have been updated and revised in varying degrees.
Where relevant, we have tried to call attention to the experience of women
in cities throughout the book in addition to the in-depth treatment of
Chapter 6. The uniqueness of the first edition’s focus on the social organization
of everyday city life and urban tolerance is further enhanced by the treatments of
women in cities and of sports and urban life.
Having made our general intentions clear, we want to explain how they are
to be fulfilled. We have organized the book so that readers will become pro-
gressively acquainted with the major theoretical traditions basic to an urban
social psychology. Simultaneously, we indicate in each chapter how these tra-
ditional views may be critiqued and extended. In this respect we will not be
offering any further explanations of symbolic interaction theory; rather, we
will be exercising that theory.
In Chapters 1 and 2 we examine the effects of the Industrial Revolution on
the origins and development of urban sociology. In these chapters we look at
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xv
the recurrent themes and concerns essential to a social psychological view of

city life. Themes such as alienation, freedom, and social integration are dis-
cussed, with the focus on their differing treatments in the works of classical
European and early American sociologists. We review only the ideas of those
who have had a definitive influence on the development of urban sociology.
In Chapter 1 we analyze how the transformation of European social life
during the nineteenth century is reflected in Sir Henry Maine’s distinction
between societies founded on status relations and those founded on contract
relations, in Tonnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and
in Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity.
The overall image presented in these theoretical writings on the modern
urban structure is an abidingly negative one. The theoretical conceptions of
the city described in this chapter were influential guiding forces in the empiri-
cal investigations of urban sociologists at the University of Chicago in the
1920s and 1930s.
Chapter 2 demonstrates how the theoretical conceptions of urban life for-
mulated by the thinkers discussed in Chapter 1 were carried over and
expanded in the works of early American sociologists, which reaffirm an
essentially negative image of the city. The observations of Robert Park and
his students by and large supported the idea that the city destroyed the com-
munal bonds characteristic of nonurban life.
Chapters 1 and 2, taken together, outline the major themes inherited by
more recent sociologists. In the next two chapters we provide evidence that
communal ties do exist in large cities. We want to show how the works of
more recent writers necessitate a new paradigm for the study of urban social
relations.
Chapter 3 illustrates how persons faced with the city’s impersonal rational-
ity will seek out alternatives in the environment to provide a source of person-
alization, identity, and community involvement. The thrust of the work of
the writers discussed in Chapter 3 is that community is not dead in the city.
It took several years to realize this because our former conceptions of commu-
nity stood as obstacles to our seeing the transformations in social life that have
occurred in urban settings. The rediscovery of community depended, in part,
on sociologists’ ability to forge new tools for looking at the urban world. We
find these tools in the works of the sociologists mentioned. The rediscovery of
community provides us with the platform necessary for our argument in
Chapter 4, where we show that a clear social organization exists in even the
most anonymous public sectors of large cities.
The guiding question for Chapter 4 is, “In what ways are persons relating
or failing to relate to one another in ‘anonymous’ public settings?” At first
xvi PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
glance, it would appear that in most urban public settings persons do not
interact at all with one another. Persons seem to avoid each other, to close
themselves off from communication with each other. We argue in this chapter
that ordered everyday life demands a high degree of cooperation among per-
sons. We elaborate on a paradox of public urban interaction whereby persons
must systematically take each other into account in order to avoid unwanted
encounters. We develop a minimax hypothesis of urban life in an attempt to
capture the complexity of urbanites’ daily encounters. Urbanites seek to min-
imize involvement and to maximize social order. We try to show how urban
persons are required to strike a balance between involvement and indiffer-
ence, intimacy and anonymity; how they collectively create and maintain a
kind of public privacy.
Chapter 5 examines the issue of urban tolerance. One of the hallmarks of
the great metropolis is that it fosters a tolerance for differences in behavior
and group lifestyle. The freedom and individualism fostered in urban contexts
stand in contrast with the pettiness and prejudices of small-town life. The very
characteristics that define urban life—size, density, and heterogeneity—allow
the emergence of distinctive subcultures that help to resolve personal crises.
The fundamental concern of this chapter is to understand the basis for urban
tolerance and the conditions under which it breaks down. One goal of the chap-
ter is to resolve two apparently contradictory explanations of urban tolerance.
One argument is that tolerance for lifestyle differences exists because urbanites
have learned how to interact with a diversity of peoples. A second argument is
that tolerance is sustained only because groups are generally segregated and iso-
lated, because each group inhabits its own “moral region.” A central effort in
the chapter is to create a theory stressing the notion of controlled contact as a
bridge between these competing explanations of tolerance.
Chapter 6 focuses on women’s experiences in cities. We examine women’s
situation in the paid labor force, participation in community voluntary associ-
ations, and movement in the public sphere of what we call gendered spaces.
Our work here calls attention to the issue of women’s “invisibility” in most
treatments of the urban scene.
In Chapters 1 through 6, then, we largely explore the nature of the inter-
actions among individuals in the urban milieu. A focus solely on individuals
as a means of understanding the quality of city experience is, however, incom-
plete. In the remaining chapters, therefore, we consider the interrelationships
between urban social groups and the effects of larger institutional arrangements.
Chapter 7 explores a broad range of issues affecting urban political life.
We elaborate on the pervasive and pronounced effects of hierarchical exclu-
sionary political processes that promote a self-sustaining pattern of political
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xvii
dominance by better-off sectors of the population. We also note, however,

that even in the face of such tendencies, countervailing forces promoting
grassroots participation in cities may be found. We also illustrate the vicious
cycle of urban problems that results from the intertwining connections
among racially based economic inequality, joblessness, family structure, and
schooling.
Social scientists often study some area of social life because it reflects on a
wide variety of events, processes, or phenomena. This is certainly so in the
case of sports. In the first half of Chapter 8, “Sports and Urban Life,” we
use sports as a medium for analyzing a number of institutional processes cen-
tral to the growth and development of cities. We show how the development
of sports in the United States and the development of cities mirror each other,
parallel each other. Analysis of sports is, for example, an interesting way to
analyze how ethnic and racial groups become assimilated into American soci-
ety. We also illustrate how sports intersected with such distinctively urban
phenomena as the development of journalism and the mass media, new forms
of communication such as the telegraph and the radio, and the development
of mass transportation systems. We also explore how processes of urbaniza-
tion and industrialization influenced images of work and leisure. In the sec-
ond half of this chapter we use sports as a medium for analyzing a number
of social psychological processes. Here our focus shifts from the connection
between sports and urban institutions to the role of sports at the level of
the social psychology of everyday life. Expanding upon our discussion in
Chapter 3, we consider the role of sports in fostering a sense of community
identification and pride. Additionally, we consider how such diverse places
as playgrounds and poolrooms provide forums for expressions of self, iden-
tity, and individualism in an urban world.
All endings should reflect and account for their beginnings as well as pro-
vide the basis for new beginnings. If the literature dealt with and the theoreti-
cal perspective offered in this book raise questions for the reader, then our
earlier chapters will have succeeded. One such question must center on the
future of city life. The purpose of the last chapter is to discuss the demo-
graphic, cultural, and historical factors that lie behind the ongoing transfor-
mation of American cities. After World War II there was a massive loss of
middle- and upper-middle-class urbanites, who fled to the suburbs. We con-
sider how the fate of cities is connected to the dramatic growth of suburbs.
We also analyze how the imperatives of advanced capitalism are differentially
influencing older industrial cities and the Sunbelt cities in the United States.
Last, we view these urban changes within a still larger frame. We are entering
a postindustrial era, an era characterized by the decline of a production
xviii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
economy and the emergence of a service economy. Such a change has wide-
spread and radical implications for the meaning of work, consumption, and
general cultural values. The latter part of Chapter 9 traces through some of
the cultural implications of this new urban revolution.
Acknowledgments
W e would like to thank a number of persons whose help and encourage-

ment have been instrumental in the completion of this book. Wendell Bell
(Yale University) and W. Clark Roof (University of Massachusetts) reviewed
the manuscript for the first edition in detail, and their comments were most
helpful. Through the years Mike Flaherty, Mark Hutter, and Lyn Lofland
have been supportive and encouraging colleagues.
Eunice Doherty, Barbara Harlow, and Roberta Nerenberg patiently and
with great skill typed several drafts of earlier editions of Being Urban. They
also read our work with discerning eyes and alerted us to a number of points
requiring clarification. Tinker Dunbar of Sterne Library at the University of
Alabama, Birmingham, offered a great deal of assistance in tracking down
references. Will Schantz provided valuable help in cross-checking references
for the current edition.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge our intellectual indebtedness to
Greg Stone, who died in 1981. His enormous influence on our thinking will
be evident throughout this revised edition.
PART I
ISSUES AND
PERSPECTIVES IN
URBAN SOCIOLOGY
CHAPTER 1
Classical Conceptions
of Urban Life
T he development of sociology as a discipline, as Nisbet (1966) demon-

strated, arose out of the social and ideological upheavals brought about by
the French and Industrial Revolutions. Indeed, from its earliest beginnings,
sociology was simultaneously a response to and a critique of the emergence
of a secular urban industrial order in nineteenth-century Western civilization.
The rapid development of urban industrial centers throughout the nineteenth
century precipitated a still-ongoing conversation about the nature of the
social bond. Foremost in the minds of individuals writing about society
during the nineteenth century is the contrast between forms of social life seen
as rooted in a small agrarian or feudal order and the kinds of social relations
viewed as characterizing an urban industrial order.
What kinds of social developments, in particular, were nineteenth-century
social theorists responding to in their writings? Nisbet noted five “Themes
of Industrialism” that were especially influential in the thinking of the early,
or classical, sociologists: “the condition of labor, the transformation of prop-
erty, the industrial city, technology and the factory system” (1966:24).
While Nisbet listed the industrial city as a specific theme, for our purposes
in Being Urban it is important to note that, in one way or another, all five of
the above themes overlap and have their common center in the development
of the industrial city.
Concomitant with the emergence of an industrial city is the development
of new social categories, such as the working class (or proletariat in Marx’s
4 BEING URBAN
sense), which coalesced in the city and formed the mass base for the work-
force of the developing factory system. The social heterogeneity and apparent
formlessness of this social class occasioned great concern among the classical
sociologists. The explosive potential of this class, which was no longer bound
by the traditions of the former feudal society nor tied to the larger society
through property ownership, made the classical sociologists apprehensive
about the fragility of the social bonds in the cities. Marx himself, as Nisbet
noted, was ambivalent about the development of the working class. On the
one hand, he saw its uprooting from its previous rural conditions as a
necessary catalyst for the eventual transformation of the capitalist system.
At the same time, however, he voiced concern over the living and working
conditions that confronted its members.
New forms of property, such as industrial and finance capital, also focused
the attention of the classical sociologists on the urban industrial order. Previ-
ously, the ownership of land, transmitted from one generation to the next,
ensured the continued dominance of certain elites in Western European soci-
ety. With the development of these new forms of property, however, an
emerging middle class, concentrated in the cities, was accumulating wealth
at a rapid rate; as nouveau riche, they were attempting to buy their way into
the sacred preserves of the traditional landed gentry. The cities became the
arenas within which this status struggle took its most dramatic form. In the
United States the period after the Civil War witnessed the robber barons’
full-scale assault on the status prerogatives of the traditional elites who traced
their lineage and landowning heritage back to the earliest colonial times
(Hofstadter 1955; Levine 1988). During the Gilded Age, these elites used their
newfound wealth to endow various high-culture organizations, from museums
to operas and universities, in all major American cities (Warner 2012).
The development of technology and the emergence of the factory as a
socially organized system of labor were instrumental in attracting newcomers
of varied social origins to the cities. Much of this migration was a result of pol-
icies (in England, for example) whereby local peasants were prevented from
farming through the passage of enclosure acts. As a result, they were forced
off the land and had to seek a livelihood in urban factories. The most dramatic
effect of technology on the social life of the masses, however, was its role in
separating work from the household situation. As Peter Laslett (1971:18)
noted in his impressive study, The World We Have Lost: England Before the
Industrial Age, “The factory won its victory by outproducing the working
family, taking away the market for the products of hand-labour and cutting
prices to the point where the craftsman had either to starve or take a job under
CLASSICAL CONCEPTIONS OF URBAN LIFE 5
factory discipline himself.” It is also important to note the following

statement by Laslett:
In the vague and difficult verbiage of our own generation, we can say that the
removal of the economic functions from the patriarchal family at the point of
industrialization created a mass society. It turned the people who worked into
a mass of undifferentiated equals, working in a factory or scattered between
the factories and mines, bereft forever of the feeling that work was a family affair,
done within the family. (1971:19)
As our brief discussion indicates, a profound shift in the basis of social

organization attended the growth of cities in Western civilization during the
nineteenth century, with far-reaching consequences for institutional and per-
sonal life. Probably the most important advances in sociological theory have
originated from the many attempts made by social scientists and social philos-
ophers to explain this fundamental transformation in the nature of the social
bond. While we may speak here of a “fundamental transformation,” we must
simultaneously recognize that the nature of a social bond between persons is
continuously in a state of transformation. Our society, for example, has
moved beyond what might be called the epoch of urban industrialism into
one characterized variously as the “age of high mass-consumption” (Rostow
1960), the “postindustrial society” (Bell 1973), “Post-Fordism” (Harvey
1990), the “postmodern condition” (Harvey 1990; Jameson 1984; Lyotard
1984), or a society dominated by “globalization” (Sassen 2012). (For a
review of these “post” theories of society, see articles by Antonio (2000)
and Scott (2007).) With this in mind, let us examine some of the specific
classical conceptions of the city offered by sociologists writing in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries.
A FRAME OF REFERENCE: THE CITY AND

BEING URBAN
With the purpose of providing a theoretical reference for this book, this
section deals with some major contributions that classical sociologists made
to the study of urbanism and being urban. Our objectives here are twofold:
1. to demonstrate how three major theories of social organization proposed

similar, but not identical, conceptual schemes in terms of which more
specialized theories of urban life have been constructed and,
6 BEING URBAN
2. to show how sociological interpretation of urbanism in terms of these

schemata has resulted in a neglect of the place of interpersonal relations
in urban social organization.
The review of these contributions is necessarily selective. Any thorough

survey of all the attempts that have been made in sociological theory and
research to describe and to explain the effects upon social relationships flowing
from the rise of cities would encompass the entire history of sociological theory.
Five criteria have guided the selection of sociologists discussed in Chapters 1
and 2: (1) relevance for the sociological interpretation of being urban, (2) rec-
ognized prominence in the field of social organization, (3) social-psychological
relevance, (4) the historical and logical interrelatedness of their contributions,
and (5) their diversity of national background.
It should also be noted that none of the theorists discussed in Chapters 1 and 2
paid particular attention to the experience of women in cities. In fact, their writ-
ings reflect a taken-for-granted acceptance of women’s “natural” place in the
private world of home and family. Their writings, unfortunately, also refer to
humankind in masculine terms of “he,” “his,” and “him.” In such matters,
then, they were clearly prisoners, so to speak, of the climates of opinion current
in those times and places. Despite such limitations, however, their works still
constitute the fundamental starting point for later thinking about urban life.
We will supply a correction to their oversights concerning women throughout
the remainder of the book, especially in Chapter 6.
SIR HENRY SUMNER MAINE: STATUS AND CONTRACT

Maine, an Englishman writing in the latter part of the nineteenth century,
was most concerned in his research with depicting and ascertaining the ori-
gins of the early village–community and its institutions. In his book Ancient
Law (1870), Maine made the additional contribution of providing a frame-
work to analyze the changing basis of social solidarity.
Maine began his analysis with an inquiry into the origins of codified law
(that is, law formulated in a written code), and he concluded that two distinct
periods of legal development preceded the emergence of written legal codes.
He called the first of these periods the age of “heroic kingship,” since, in the
ordinary sense of the word, there was no law present. During this period the
actions of every person were controlled largely by the personal whims and
wishes of patriarchal despots. According to Maine, the later development of
legal precepts had its origin during this period in the judgments of these des-
pots, who founded such judgments at times upon custom or usage, and at
other times upon personal whim or caprice. In effect, law at this stage was
largely a result of the pronouncements of the heroic leader.
The period of heroic kingship was transformed as a result of the develop-
ment of an oligarchy—a small group of persons who collectively seized power
from the heroic kings. This phenomenon ushered in the period of “customary
law,” that is, law based primarily upon custom and tradition. Customary law
was known only to a privileged minority who exercised a monopoly over the
secrets of the law.
According to Maine (1870:15), the monopoly of the oligarchy was not dis-
solved until the diffusion of writing paved the way for the written specification
of law. Once literacy develops in a population, the monopolistic control of secrets
about the law is weakened, since individuals are in a more favorable position to
communicate with others and to question the decisions of governing elites.
Maine did not conceive of law as a transcendent, self-evolving agency.
The changes in law as it progressed from the pronouncements of heroic kings
to a written code were viewed as responses to changes in the more fundamen-
tal conditions of life. For Maine, the fundamental conditions of life were
rooted in the social relations of people, which were transformed as the fam-
ily’s importance in determining one’s life chances gave way to individual
responsibility. That is, as the role of the family decreased in importance, there
was a simultaneous enlargement of opportunities for personal choice and
decision making—for example, in the areas of choice of spouse, freedom of
physical movement, and occupational preference.
Since earliest human groupings were tribal clans—a social organization
based on bloodlines—the large-scale population growth of the clans was
problematic. Through the development of a legal fiction, however, it became
possible to incorporate nonmembers into the group. Such a process of adop-
tion greatly facilitated the incorporation of conquered peoples and the con-
tinued growth of the clan. In his treatment of this issue, Maine provided a
beautiful example of functional analysis—that is, of the functions of law (or
legal fictions) in society.
In examining the view that the origin of society is to be found in a social
contract, an unwritten agreement about the nature of social relationships
arrived at by freely consenting individuals, Maine noted:
Society in primitive times was not what it is assumed . . . to be at present, a collec-

tion of individuals. In fact, and in view of the man who composed it, it was an
aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying
that the unit of ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the Individual.
(1870:126; italics added)
8 BEING URBAN
The transformation of society’s basic units was not accomplished suddenly

and all at once. A new principle of community organization gradually
replaced that of kinship. People now became related through their physical
proximity rather than through common lineage. The family, however, per-
sisted as a “fictitious” (in Maine’s sense of the word) source of authority.
In other words, the role of legal fictions in facilitating social change assumed
prominence, since it permitted the family circle to escape its earlier household
limits and to distribute itself over territory. By “legal fictions” Maine was
referring to the phenomenon whereby nonblood members of the original
family had been incorporated, through a process of adoption, into the family
unit and treated as if they were in fact legally members of the original family.
Thus, the notion of “legal fiction.”
Once the principle of local geographic residence was established as a basis of
community organization, the way was paved, according to Maine, for the disso-
lution of the family and the emergence of the individual as the fundamental unit
of society. And this meant, of course, an unqualified change in the nature of
social relations. No longer were the relations of individuals defined by family ori-
gin and position (that is, status); they now arose out of mutual agreement (that
is, contract). Hence, we can see clearly how Maine conceived the major change
in the social bond as being the process whereby contract replaced status as the
fundamental condition of human association. Maine asserted that this trend
was not only universal but also irreversible in Western culture, for “whatever
its pace, the change has not been subject to reaction or recoil” (1870:169).
The remainder of Maine’s Ancient Law is devoted to an application of the
above principles to the study of property, contract, and crime; those consider-
ations are not relevant here. What would seem to be relevant is the fact that
the general propositions formulated by Maine were explicitly recognized
and taken into account by sociologists in their later attempts to understand
and explain essentially the same kind of change in social relations. These later
attempts are indicative of social theorists’ continuing concern with this issue.
In the writings of Ferdinand Tönnies and Emile Durkheim, we see a treat-
ment of the historical change in social relations that was clearly influenced
by Maine’s distinction between status and contract. We turn first to Tönnies’s1
distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.
FERDINAND TÖNNIES: GEMEINSCHAFT AND

GESELLSCHAFT
In his attempt to describe and explain theoretically the changing modes of
social relationships that accompanied the emergence of capitalism in Western
civilization, Ferdinand Tönnies owed much to the work of Maine, and, like
Maine, he was influenced by the works of Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-
century English social contract theorist. Unlike Maine, however, Tönnies, in
his formulation of Gesellschaft, accepted many of the notions put forth by
Hobbes concerning the inherent conflict between the individual and society.
It is misleading, however, to draw too close a parallel between the contribu-
tions of Maine and Tönnies. Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, first
published in 1887, seems to differ from Maine’s Ancient Law in at least three
important respects. First, although Tönnies did apply his concepts to the
analysis of social change, he was concerned primarily with distinguishing
types of social relationships that had no necessary empirical historical refer-
ence. The terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were intended to be applied
in either contemporary or historical analysis. They were thus formulated inde-
pendently of the characteristics of any particular society, past or present.
This is what is meant by saying that they had no necessary empirical historical
reference. Second, Tönnies’s methodology contrasted sharply with that
employed by Maine, whose concepts “status” and “contract” were designed
to refer explicitly to historical situations that had actually occurred. Tönnies,
on the other hand, formulated his concepts in terms of ideal types, that is, as
notions allowing for the comparison of particular kinds of social relations,
even though such relations might not exist in a pure form. Third, Tönnies
resorted to a psychological level of analysis, that is, the level of individual
motivation, in his explanation of sociological events. In this regard Maine
was more accurately the sociologist of the two, seeking to explain institutional
change in terms of institutional agencies rather than individual motivations.
If it can be said that Maine was more the sociologist, it should also be said
that he was the more naive theorist. By focusing primarily on the operation of
large institutional arrangements, he tended to lose sight of the importance of
individuals’ relations with one another. Tönnies’s emphasis on the psycho-
logical level, however, also gives rise to problems. “Human will” was for
Tönnies the fundamental basis of social relations, and the resultant blurring
of analytical distinctions between individual and social phenomena accounts
in large part for the difficulty that he apparently had in communicating this
theory.
“Human wills stand in manifold relations to one another. . . . This study
will consider as its subject of investigation only the relationships of mutual
affirmation” (Tönnies 1940:37). These two introductory sentences state
the central unit of inquiry and delimit the scope of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft
und Gesellschaft. Significant here is the fact that Tönnies focuses his inquiry
on relations of mutual affirmation, that is, on relationships based on a
10 BEING URBAN
shared liking or respect. He did not consider conflict relationships in his

analysis. The principal objective of his study was the description and
explanation of the ways that human wills enter into relationships of mutual
affirmation.
To realize this objective, Tönnies constructed a continuum along which all
concrete relationships of mutual affirmation could be placed as they approxi-
mated either of two theoretically distinct (but not necessarily opposed) con-
cepts. He defined Gemeinschaft as the kind of traditional community that
existed in a feudal organization where persons were bound together by shared
values and sacred traditions. In the Gemeinschaft, social solidarity stemmed
from members’ common identity and kinship. In contrast, industrialization
and the rise of urban centers marked the transition to a Gesellschaft type of
society, with its heterogeneity of values and traditions. In such a situation,
according to Tönnies, individual differences operate to reduce social solidar-
ity and individualism becomes the paramount value at the expense of commu-
nal cohesiveness.
The construction of Gemeinschaft as ideal type proceeded from “the
assumption of perfect unity of human wills as an original or natural condition
which is preserved in spite of actual separation” (Tönnies 1940:99). Tönnies
cited the relationship of the mother to her child, the sexual union of a man
and his wife, the bond that unites brothers and sisters in a family circle, and,
less exactly, the relationship of the father, in the capacity of an educative and
authoritative model, to his children. Other kinds of relationships approaching
the type included kinship, the neighborhood, friendship, and authority in the
sense of dignity based on courage,2 age, or wisdom.
Tönnies expressed the logic of Gemeinschaft in terms of three metaphorical
“laws”:
(1) Relatives and married couples love each other or easily adjust themselves to
each other. They speak together and think along similar lines. Likewise do
neighbors and friends. (2) Between people who love each other there is under-
standing and consensus. (3) Those who love and understand each other remain
and dwell together and organize their common life. (1940:55)
Gemeinschaft, then, is an ideal construct that abstracts the essence of the

organization of the common life among people who share a sympathetic con-
sensus and physical proximity. Moreover, although this condition is most
closely approximated in the home or the household, it persists under the
impact of such patently disruptive factors as the emergence of town and coun-
try distinctions, the manor, and the village.
In contrast with Gemeinschaft relationships—in which human beings are

essentially united despite the presence of apparently divisive influences—
Gesellschaft relationships are entered into by individuals who are “essentially
separated in spite of all uniting factors” (1940:74). It is in this sense that
Gesellschaft must always be seen as an artificial, “mechanical,” rationally con-
trived structure of human relationships. For when Gesellschaft associations
are removed—when the artificial structure is destroyed—a residue remains
in which “everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition
of tension against all others” (1940:74). Gesellschaft, for Tönnies, is an elabo-
rate superstructure of human relationships precariously erected upon an
incipient Hobbesian war of all against all. He notes that in the Gesellschaft,
“the relation of all to all may therefore be conceived as potential hostility or
latent war” (1940:88).
In his formulation of Gesellschaft, Tönnies was heavily influenced by his
antipathy to the social contours of contemporary Germany. Having observed
the social consequences of the growth of capitalism and industry in late-
nineteenth-century Germany, he was inclined toward an idealization of the
past rather than toward Marx’s “future heaven.” Thus, he yearned for a return
to the loving sentimentality of the Gemeinschaft.
The associations of Gesellschaft are typically contracted in commodity
exchange and sealed by promises and conventions that are as likely to be
breached as to be fulfilled. For Tönnies, then, the development of Gesellschaft
is part and parcel of the growth of commerce or trade. As commerce and trade
become further elaborated, Gesellschaft becomes more pervasive. The crucial
agent in its furtherance is the merchant, and, for Tönnies, Gesellschaft is liter-
ally the instrument of the merchants and capitalists. They are the natural
masters of a Gesellschaft that is called into being for the pursuit of their aims.
(For a more recent treatment of Tönnies with reference to Gesellschaft, see
Muller (2002)).
It is the essence of Gesellschaft that no social relationship has value in and of
itself. Tönnies’s depiction of life in the Gesellschaft is strikingly similar to
Marx’s portrayal of life under the beginning stages of industrial capitalism.
Tönnies, like Marx, sees this as a situation in which people relate to one
another only through a cash nexus. Here is alienation in its most dramatic
form—people measuring each other’s and, even more important, their own
worth by the yardstick of monetary value. This image of urban life became a
standard ingredient in the classical conception of urban relations. The notion
that no social relation has value in and of itself, that “money is desired by no
one for the sake of keeping it, but by everyone with a view to getting rid of
it” (Tönnies 1940:81), was later portrayed by Simmel as the ultimate essence
12 BEING URBAN
of interpersonal relations in the city. Relations in Gesellschaft, then, are char-

acterized by an inherent instability. It is a loosely coordinated structure held
together by the interests of discrete individuals—individuals working for their
own interests.
Viewed historically, the demands upon the merchant who commands the
Gesellschaft are altered with the rise of industry. Early in the development of
Gesellschaft, the merchant rules by virtue of controlling the disposition of
commodities in commerce. Yet this rule must be consolidated by dominating
labor and the retailing of manufactured goods as the production of these
goods passes through the phases of “(1) simple cooperation, (2) manufac-
ture, (3) industry based on machinery (‘large scale’ industry)” (Tönnies
1940:102). When the merchant class dominates the commodity market, the
labor market, and the retail market, Gesellschaft may be said to have realized
itself historically.
A little reflection upon the assumptions underlying the conceptualization
of Gesellschaft, as depicted above, suggests that they are essentially analogous
to the assumptions of such classical economic thinkers as Adam Smith and
David Ricardo. These assumptions were enumerated by Mayo (1945:40):
1. Natural society consists of a horde of unorganized individuals.

2. Every individual acts in a manner calculated to secure his self-preservation
or self-interest.
3. Every individual thinks logically, to the best of his ability, in the service of
his aim.
It is clear, then, that if you presume society is built on a horde of individ-

uals working rationally in their own self-interests, you must explain the social
organization of society as a consequence of self-interest or the exercise of
individual volitions. Tönnies made this premise explicit in the proposition
that Gesellschaft associations were “willed” into being by concrete individuals
capable of perceiving that such relationships would benefit their own (individ-
ual) interests.
In pursuing his analysis, Tönnies devoted the bulk of his volume to the
elaboration and description of two contrasting forms of human will. “Natural
will,” the basis of Gemeinschaft, is conceived by Tönnies as an innate, unified
motivating force that directly determines personal activity. “Rational will,”
the basis of Gesellschaft, on the other hand, emerges from experience and is
produced out of conscious deliberation.
It is important to note that while in Tönnies’s terms, “natural will”
(or passion) and “rational will” (or reason) can be distinguished analytically,
they are always intertwined empirically. Thus, no passion can occur without
reason, by which the passion finds its expression, and vice versa. The implica-
tion of this point is far reaching because it clarifies why the terms Gemein-
schaft and Gesellschaft are not unreservedly antithetical (as are Maine’s
notions of status and contract, terms that are viewed as entailing two different
types of relationship). In short, there is a tendency, rooted in individual will,
for every Gemeinschaft to become a Gesellschaft and (what was largely
neglected by urban sociologists who based their theories in part upon these
distinctions) for everyGesellschaft to become a Gemeinschaft.
This crucial insight for urban sociology unfortunately is obscured in the
work of later theorists such as Louis Wirth, who presents a notion of urban
life’s becoming more and more impersonal, more rational, more calculating.
But Wirth misses the point—central to symbolic interaction, we might
add—that people do not live in their immediate environment; rather, they live
in their interpretations of their environments. Thus, as the city becomes more
impersonal, we may expect people to transform the city symbolically, inject-
ing into it some sentiment, some passionate sources of life, thereby recasting
the symbolic environment of the city. Had Tönnies carried out some system-
atic observations deriving from the implications of his own theorizing, he
might have found that even a supposed cradle of impersonality—the urban
marketplace of sellers and buyers—may be buttressed by the comforting
cushion of intimate and friendly relations. In contemporary New York City,
we can observe this in the importance of long-term interpersonal, often
familial, relations for transactions in the diamond market (Shield 2002;
Siegel 2009).
Tönnies’s emphasis on the priority of individual volitions affirmed his
belief in the necessity of building sociological concepts upon a psychological
base. In reviewing Emile Durkheim’s book The Rules of Sociological Method
in 1898, he took issue with Durkheim’s notion that the study of individual
behavior could be understood through the investigation of the individual’s
membership in social groups. Although this marked one of the chief differ-
ences between the theoretical systems of Tönnies and Durkheim, it was not
the only difference. In 1889 Durkheim had, in reviewing the 1887 edition
of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, rejected Tönnies’s notion that present-day
industrial society is a mechanical and artificial structure (as opposed to the
organic and natural structure of earlier society). Contemporary society, Durk-
heim held, is clearly as “organic” and “natural” as life was before the
emergence of a complex and extensive division of labor.3 This thesis was
documented in 1893, when Durkheim published The Division of Labor in
Society.
14 BEING URBAN
EMILE DURKHEIM: MECHANICAL AND ORGANIC

SOLIDARITY
Like Tönnies, Durkheim was disturbed about the drift of contemporary
civilization; he was particularly concerned with the issue of occupational spe-
cialization. During the period in which Durkheim wrote about the division of
labor—the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century—there
was an intense intellectual argument that particularly emphasized the negative
consequences of occupational specialization. The question that Durkheim
raised in regard to this issue centered on whether there was any moral func-
tion in specialization. Contemporaries of his, such as Tönnies, argued that
specialization contributed to the disintegration of the larger social order.
Durkheim’s response was that, that which is moral contributes to both solid-
arity and the healthy continuity of society. For him, the division of labor had
this function. Durkheim developed the further argument that this was the
most important method by which people were linked to one another in com-
plex societies. To test his argument, societies in which the division of labor
had not progressed so extensively were sought for comparison with industri-
alized societies. He looked for relatively small, isolated communities—such
as the Australian Aborigines—as testing grounds for this theorizing.
Durkheim’s selection of such communities derived from his assertion that all
societies have some division of labor—such as by sex, age, or family status—
but in small communities the division of labor differs from that in complex
societies.
According to Durkheim, Western civilization was caught up in an irrevers-
ible historical trend from an aggregate of undifferentiated, homogeneous
“social segments” to a unity of heterogeneous, functionally interrelated
“social organs.” Theoretically, the social segment is composed of mentally
and morally homogeneous people whose beliefs, opinions, and manners
are similar. These similar sentiments are representations (or rather, re-
presentations) of society’s collective life. They represent those forms of
behavior that have been repeated to the extent of becoming habitual. Taken
together, such collective representations comprise the collective conscience
of an earlier society, that is, “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common
to the average members of a society” (Durkheim 1984:38–39). Because it is
a commonality of beliefs and sentiments, and because it may be perceived in
a special sense as external to, and constraining, individual conduct and
thought, the collective conscience is referred to as a thing, sui generis. We call
attention once more to the fact that Tönnies, in his review of Durkheim, took
issue with this conceptualization of social life.
Much debate has ensued among sociologists about whether Durkheim was
saying that society is really a thing. In our view, all he is saying is that we
should look upon society as a social object that can be examined. By saying
that this conscience is external to, and constrains, the conduct and thought
of society’s members, Durkheim means that no particular person is respon-
sible for that commonality of beliefs.
Ordinarily, no single person can master the entire range of beliefs and sen-
timents that make up the collective consciousness or conscience. No specific
individual reading this book, for example, is responsible for the English lan-
guage. Perhaps someone may introduce one or more words in our lifetime,
but an individual’s contribution will still be minimal. In this sense, language
is external to any given individual member of society. Sports may serve as
another instance. With reference to football, for example, no living football
player is responsible for the rules of the game; such rules are external to any
individual player.
In effect, then, when Durkheim says that society is real, he is not saying
that it is something physically outside of us that commands individual behav-
ior. Rather, he is saying that it is more than any one person is responsible for
and that it severely limits alternative forms of behavior. Through this collec-
tive conscience, then, the behavior of society’s members is brought into line.
Through the diffused constraining power of the collective conscience, solid-
arity is ensured in the social segment, and the activity of its members is
brought more or less automatically into harmony. Solidarity conditioned in
this manner is termed “mechanical solidarity.” In other words, mechanical
solidarity “for Durkheim is the condition typical of early segmentary, rela-
tively homogeneous society when sentiments and beliefs are shared in
common, where individuation is minimal, and collective thinking is maximal”
(Tiryakian 2005:306).
Given such a view of mechanical solidarity, the question now arises as to
how Durkheim was able to detect the operation of mechanical solidarity. Like
his predecessor Maine, Durkheim turned to the operation of law in his own
investigation of this issue. In Durkheim’s view, “we may be sure to find
reflected in the law all the essential varieties of social solidarity” (1984:25),
as the law represents the entire institutional basis of a society.
To the extent that the sanctions attached to the legal rules of a society are
repressive in nature, that is, demanding retaliation and punishment, they
reflect the presence of mechanical solidarity. In its most unqualified form,
the collective conscience is represented by an impersonal form violently and
passionately embraced by the society’s members. Consequently, offenses
against it evoke an immediate and direct response. Such offenses must be
16 BEING URBAN
repressed, for they symbolically threaten and violate the integrity of the soci-
ety as a whole. Punishment of offenders in these instances not only guarantees
conformity to social rules but—more important—also serves as an occasion
for reinforcing the sentiments that make up the violated collective conscience.
Durkheim is here making a very important observation. In effect, he is say-
ing that without the existence of sinners you cannot have a church, because
the existence of sin provides the opportunity for believers to reaffirm the faith
that has been offended by the sinner. It is impossible, therefore, for a church
completely to eliminate sin from the world and to propagate its faith to the
entire society. In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim points out that
in a community of saintly monks, “faults that appear venial to the ordinary
person will arouse the same scandal as does normal crime in ordinary con-
sciences” (100).
The test of mechanical solidarity is found in the sanctions exerted when the
rules of society are violated. In a sense, then, to the extent that a common
morality exists in a particular society, the society comes to depend upon its
deviants for the maintenance of social boundaries. In contemporary society,
we may observe this in the treatment of transsexuals and transvestites as
radical others, used by the media to define the boundaries of “normal” sex-
uality (Gamson 1998). Kai Erikson (2005), in his provocative book Wayward
Puritans, showed how Durkheimian ideas about social boundaries clarify the
nature of the witch-hunts in colonial America. With reference to deviance,
Erikson notes:
Like an article of common law, boundaries remain a meaningful point of refer-

ence only so long as they are repeatedly tested by persons on the fringes of the
group and repeatedly defended by persons chosen to represent the group’s
inner morality. Each time the community moves to censure some act of
deviation, then, and convenes a formal ceremony to deal with the responsible
offender, it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and restates where the
boundaries of the group are located. (2005[1966]:13)
In contrasting the notion of repressive law with the kinds of law that char-
acterize present-day advanced industrial societies, what is strikingly apparent
is the paucity of offenses in such societies that are construed as offenses
against society in general. What has happened is that there has been a trans-
formation in the character of offenses so that punishment is no longer repres-
sive in many cases; rather, it has become more restitutive (that is, offenders are
expected to repay those offended by their transgression). Civil litigations offer
examples of restitutive law in action. The civil suit does not often imply a
crime against society—a moral offense—and, accordingly, the defendant in

such cases is seldom subject to general social censure. Instead, one is asked
to make amends to the party or parties injured.
What kinds of offenses, Durkheim asks, culminate in civil suits? Usually, he
observes, they are either offenses against rights or breaches of (usually con-
tracted) obligations. Adherence to the rules built up to guarantee the invio-
lability of rights, however, has little positive influence upon the formation of
solidarity associations between people. Obedience to the law requires merely
that the members of society abstain from infringing upon the privileges of
one another. The solidarity that results is of a negative character. It takes the
form of persons not doing certain things to one another. But, as Durkheim
notes, this “negative solidarity is only possible where another kind [of solidar-
ity] is present, positive in nature” (1984:75). The positive force making for
social solidarity in this regard is manifested by legal forms, such as domestic
law, contract law, commercial law, procedural law, administrative law, and
constitutional law, which, taken together, can be called “cooperative law,”
since such laws specify obligations that members of various social circles have
toward one another.
Contracted relationships best exemplify the form, but not the basis, of sol-
idarity associations in societies distinguished by an extensive division of labor.
Durkheim writes that “the contract is indeed the supreme legal expression of
cooperation” (Durkheim 1984:79). Here obligations are established and
their fulfillment guaranteed so that individuals with different interests may
be brought together in complementary relationships. Unlike Tönnies, Durk-
heim did not perceive contracts as discrete associations of otherwise unrelated
persons who came together momentarily for the sake of a contract and then
disbanded the relationship after the contract’s fulfillment. Contracts can be
built only upon implicit social foundations. As Durkheim notes, “Every con-
tract therefore assumes that behind the parties who bind each other, society
is there, quite prepared to intervene and to enforce respect for any undertak-
ings entered into” (1984:71).
Anytime one enters into a contract, much of the arrangement is taken for
granted in spite of all the small print. What this means is that this body of
beliefs (this mechanical solidarity) never completely disappears, even in
advanced industrial societies. Such beliefs must persist to a certain extent so
that contracts can be enforced. The role of Jews in the New York diamond
market is, again, a good example of the persistence of such traditionalism: in
the diamond market, huge monetary deals are concluded with nothing more
than a verbal agreement and handshakes (Shield 2002; Siegel 2009). With
reference to these implicit beliefs, we can, for example, examine the continued
18 BEING URBAN
necessity many people feel to have all parties physically present for the con-
summation of large business deals. While many had predicted that increased
electronic communication could finally rid us of the necessity of such physical
meetings, Boden and Molotch have shown that the physical appearance of the
people making deals is often critical to the success of the venture, in a situa-
tion they refer to as the “compulsion of proximity” (Boden and Molotch
1997). People make assumptions based on the appearances of others, which
are anchored in the belief systems of society (see, for example, Shannon and
Stark 2003; Stone 1962; Wookey, Graves, and Butler 2009). In effect, then,
elements of mechanical solidarity can still be found in societies organized in
terms of an extensive division of labor.
Cooperative law is not charged with the sentiment and passion of repres-
sive law, nor is it diffused so that it is incorporated into the conscience of every
member of society. Nevertheless, its solidarity-building role is apparent, for co-
operative laws “determine the manner in which the different [social] functions
should work together in the various combinations of circumstances that may
arise” (Durkheim 1984:82). The society held together by the concurrence of
functions in this way displays what Durkheim called “organic solidarity.”
In sum, Durkheim isolated two contrasting types of social solidarity—the
one mechanical, the other organic. Of the two, he wrote that “the first binds
the individual directly to society without any intermediary. With the second
kind, he depends upon society, because he depends upon the parts that go
to constitute it” (1984:83). Placing the two types in historical perspective,
Durkheim argued that societies, insofar as they advance at all, advance from
a condition of mechanical solidarity to a condition of organic solidarity, and
the progressive preponderance of the division of labor is the prime impetus
for such an advance.
Accordingly, the next problem to which Durkheim turned in his inquiry
was the explanation of the development of organic solidarity through the
growth of the division of labor. Proceeding deductively, he singled out three
interrelated factors related to the increase of organic solidarity in society:
(1) dynamic density, that is, the rate of communication between societal
members;4 (2) material density, that is, “the real distance between individ-
uals” (1984:201); and (3) volume, that is, the geographical space defining
the physical boundaries of a particular society.
In Durkheim’s view, the growth in any one of the above factors was depen-
dent upon simultaneous growth in the other two. In short, the conditions for
the division of labor are multiple and interrelated. Nor are volume, material
density, and dynamic density5 sufficient to account for the growth of the
division of labor. They alone cannot explain the dynamic of that process.
For Durkheim, the division of labor is, ultimately, a further reflection of a

response to the biological struggle for existence and competition for control
of scarce resources.6
The significance of the collective conscience for the establishment of social
solidarity in society is progressively weakened with the emergence of organic
solidarity as a new organizing principle. As Durkheim notes:
This is not to say that the common consciousness is threatened with total
disappearance. . . . There is indeed one area in which the common consciousness
has grown stronger, becoming more clearly delineated, viz., in its view of the
individual. As all the other beliefs and practices assume less and less religion as
a character, the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion. (1984:122)
In effect, then, Durkheim is suggesting that as traditional forms of religion

decline, the belief in the worth of the individual gradually develops into a reli-
gion itself. Erving Goffman, one of sociology’s most influential social psy-
chologists, was deeply influenced by this idea of Durkheim’s (see especially
Goffman (1959, 1963, 1971)), and one might say his work is an effort to
demonstrate how the development of the self is a product of socially con-
structed interaction rituals (see, for example, Smith (2011)). As Goffman so
aptly notes:
It is strange and more Durkheimian than it should be, that today, at a time when
the individual can get almost everything else off his back, there remains the cross
of personal character—the one he bears, albeit lightly, when he is in the presence
of others. (Goffman 1971:187)
It may be, as Durkheim argued, that in complex societies, individuation is

buttressed by a cult. When we look at the city, however, it is not a case of indi-
viduals set apart under conditions of urbanism but, rather, a separation of
social groups or social circles. Such a phenomenon, we may argue, makes
for greater freedom than the cult of individualism implies, for here we have
a multiplicity of different selves that we can realize in a number of varying
social circles. We will elaborate on this point throughout this book, as we
make the argument that while “individualism” is typically thought of in terms
of unique personality features, the analysis of urban social life shows that our
“individualism” is really a socially constructed phenomenon in which the
development of “multiple selves” is fostered and enhanced by opportunities
to participate in a variety of urban groupings and communities.
Durkheim further argued that with the transformation of the division
of labor, new sentiments are introduced into other areas of social life.
20 BEING URBAN
Durkheim recognized the proliferation of contractual relationships in contem-

porary society, but, as has already been mentioned, he denied that the contract
functioned as a basis of social solidarity. Noncontractual elements underlying
and regulating the formation of contracts must develop simultaneously. Any
society, in any condition of solidarity, is, at bottom, a moral order. Durkheim
found that “men cannot live together without agreeing, and consequently with-
out making mutual sacrifices, joining themselves to one another in a strong and
enduring fashion. Every society is a moral society” (1984:173).
Having demonstrated the social function, or the moral value, of the divi-
sion of labor, Durkheim turned to an examination of the effectiveness with
which the function was performed in modern life. Asserting that the full
moral value of the division of labor was not realized in contemporary society,
he conceptualized that fact in terms of three distinct types of division of labor
that were dysfunctional in that they prevented the division of labor from per-
forming its solidarity-building role. First, the interdependent parts of society
cannot be efficiently coordinated when the division of labor is anomic.
Anomie (social normlessness) results from economic crises such as inflation,
depression, strikes, boycotts, or any crisis that does not contribute either to
the adequate formulation of moral values or to the achievement of social
ends. Second, if the division of labor is based on a compulsory caste or class
system, it “sometimes gives rise to miserable squabbling instead of producing
solidarity . . . because the distribution of social functions on which it rests does
not correspond, or rather no longer corresponds, to the distribution of natu-
ral abilities” (1984:311). Finally, the division of labor may assume a character
such that “functions are distributed in such a way that they fail to afford suffi-
cient scope for individual activity” (1984:323). Thus, it is possible for us to
become so finely specialized that there is not enough work to be done to give
meaning to individual activity. There may be no meaning forthcoming from
the effort in which one is involved. In musical performances, for example,
there is an optimum number for a jazz group because there are only so many
parts to be played—drums, bass, guitar, piano, and so on; with too many per-
formers, some people would feel they are playing redundant parts to the
others. In such a case, functions are distributed so that they offer sufficient
tasks to give everyone the sense that they are making important contributions
(cf. Becker 2008[1983]; Dempsey 2008).
It is to such “abnormal” forms of the division of labor, rather than to the
division of labor itself, Durkheim concludes, that we must look for the source
of the moral “inadequacies” of our age.
CONCLUSION
Small wonder that all these—an Englishman intent on critiquing the
method of the social contract theorists, a German concerned with the chang-
ing character of human wills in industrial society, and a Frenchman concerned
with the moral value of occupational specialization—should have addressed
like questions and consulted the same authorities, as well as one another, in
quest of solutions. That scholars of diverse national origins and unlike inter-
ests inquired into the varied roots of human association is demonstration
enough of the problem’s salience. Furthermore, the problem is still the cen-
tral problem of sociology. Sociological thought continues to converge on
the following questions: What is the nature of the social bond? How has the
basis of the social bond been historically transformed?
The persistent devotion of social scientists to the question raised by Maine,
Tönnies, and Durkheim emphasizes the strategic place that such inquiries still
assume in the extension and refinement of sociological knowledge. To cite
only a few prominent examples, the debate over how and whether societies
proceed from a basis in the sacred through secularization continues to engage
sociologists of religion (Greeley 2003; Sherkat and Ellison 1999); sociolo-
gists of culture continue to appraise the resiliency of the cultural products of
folk society, often in the guise of studies of “authenticity,” in the face of the
mass culture characteristic of urban environments (Grazian 2005; Peterson
1999); and urban sociologists have continuously fretted over the distinction
between “society” built upon the consensus and understanding of its mem-
bers and “community” integrated by the interdependence of population
aggregates (Fischer 1982), now often in the guise of studies of “neighbor-
hood effects,” “social capital,” or “collective efficacy” (Sampson 2012;
Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Wilson and Taub 2006).
The theoretical contexts proposed by Maine, Tönnies, and Durkheim con-
tinue to be refined as the study of social organization is extended and given
precision by contemporary sociologists. Yet (at least in the case of Tönnies
and Durkheim) the distinctions between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and
between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity, were more than devices
for the conceptual delimitation of contexts within which human association
could be investigated. The social types were related to one another as the
basic terms of theoretical propositions. Neither Tönnies nor Durkheim, as
we have shown, was content to rest his inquiry with the demonstration that
all human existence ranged between polar types of social organization. Both
perceived the interdependence of the typical elements in concrete reality.
22 BEING URBAN
The impact upon Tönnies’s theoretical system of Maine’s distinctions

between the familial and territorial bases of social relations, on the one hand,
and between status and contract, on the other, is clear. As a matter of fact, the
notion of contract is central to Tönnies’s construction of Gesellschaft as a pure
type. Similarly, but in a less detailed way, Maine’s thinking influenced Dur-
kheim’s study of the division of labor, and it is not unlikely that Durkheim
was affected in that work by Tönnies’s writings more than a perusal of the
citations and references would indicate. 7 Accordingly, the conceptual
schemes developed by these three men do have many similarities, although
each is clearly distinguishable from the others. Probably more than anything
else, the dependence of these scholars upon one another has contributed to
the superficial and erroneous equation of the different schemata by many
sociologists in their effort to organize and to contrast in a theoretically signifi-
cant way the empirical characteristics of rural and urban life. This lumping
together of heterogeneous concepts from diverse theoretical schemes for the
sake of classification rather than analysis has had a definitive influence upon
the character of urban sociology.
NOTES
1. For a critique of Tönnies that takes us up to at least the twentieth century, see
Herman Schmalenbach, “The Sociological Concept of Communion,” a free transla-
tion by Kaspar D. Naegele and Gregory P. Stone, in Talcott Parsons et al. (eds.),
Theories of Society (New York: Free Press, 1961), 331–47, as well as more recent work
by the historian Jerry Muller (2002).
2. This phrase seems more accurately to render Tönnies’s meaning than does the
translated “authority based on power or force.” See Tönnies (1940:47–53, esp. 47, 51).
3. These reviews are discussed by Loomis in his introduction to the Tönnies trans-
lation (1940:xviii).
4. Durkheim drastically underestimated technological developments in commu-
nication as affecting the moral density of society, but he was, after all, writing at the
end of the nineteenth century.
5. Throughout his career, Durkheim was concerned with this question of the
importance of moral or dynamic density, which we choose to call the rate of commu-
nication or the rate of symbolic interaction. On this point see Stone and Farberman
(1970).
6. In another work (1938:92–93), Durkheim recognized the implicit inadequacy
of explaining the division of labor by biological factors.
7. Although Durkheim never made explicit reference to Tönnies in his principal
works, Sorokin (1928:491) has noted: “One cannot help thinking that Durkheim inten-
tionally gave to his social types names which were opposite those given by Tönnies.”
CHAPTER 2
Classical Observations
of Urban Life
I n Chapter 1 we dealt at length with the treatments of urban industrial

society put forth by the classical sociologists. In this chapter we shall examine
the manner in which those conceptual schemata influenced the kinds of
observations of urban life made by a later generation of sociologists.
THE CITY AND THE SOCIOLOGIST

Tönnies spoke of “the city . . . where the general conditions of Gesellschaft
prevail” (1940:265), and Durkheim submitted the proposition that “so long
as the social organization is essentially segmentary towns do not exist”
(1984:202). When they have made use of the conceptual apparatus of
Durkheim or of Tönnies, urban sociologists have paid little heed to the qual-
ifications contained in such remarks; and they have characterized the city,
often absolutely, in terms of Gesellschaft and organic solidarity. In this regard,
they seem not to have recognized that the value of a concept is never realized
solely from its application as a classificatory device. A concept is valuable to
the extent that it facilitates the discrimination of empirical events so that the
relationships among them may be better perceived and more adequately
explained. Sociologists have used the terminology of Maine, Tönnies, and
Durkheim to differentiate the character of urban living from that of rural exis-
tence and to detect the social consequences of urbanization. Interest in this
regard has been mobilized around the investigation of the historical impact
24 BEING URBAN
of contract upon status, Gesellschaft upon Gemeinschaft, and organic solidar-

ity upon mechanical solidarity. The place of status in contract, of Gemein-
schaft in Gesellschaft, or of the social segment in the solidary society has been
slighted and often unperceived. More often than not, the status, Gemein-
schaft-like, or segmental, elements that have been perceived as occurring in
the context of urbanism have been described as rural survivals or remnants
from some earlier form of social organization. As a consequence, urban soci-
ologists have been preoccupied with the disorganizing, alienating, and indi-
vidualizing influences of urbanism. Certain disruptive results of the rise of
cities have been completely studied, but social life in the city was never
adequately explored until the mid-1940s. Urban sociologists had not system-
atically taken into account in their researches either Tönnies’s proposition
that every Gesellschaft tends to become a Gemeinschaft or Durkheim’s axiom
that every society is a moral order.
GEORG SIMMEL: THE METROPOLIS AND

MENTAL LIFE
Simmel’s writings on the city may be viewed as a transitional link between
the conceptual models provided by nineteenth-century sociologists and the
observations of urban life made by sociologists at the University of Chicago
in the early part of the twentieth century. Like Durkheim and Tönnies, the
German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized the study of the historical
transfiguration of social solidarity in Western civilization as a legitimate prob-
lem. Simmel’s (1971:324–339) discussion of the metropolis and what might
be termed the urban personality type centered on the question of how the indi-
vidual maintains his “existence against the sovereign powers of society”
(1971:324) (in this case, forces exerted by the metropolitan environment). Such
a question is obviously a significant one for a social psychology of urban life.
Simmel isolated several distinctive features of the metropolis that elicit
from the metropolitan dweller a unique pattern of responses not found
among the inhabitants of small towns. Primarily, the large city can be seen
as a setting for contrasting physical and social stimuli so numerous and diverse
that any single individual exposed to them cannot possibly respond to them
all, nor can one escape a subliminal awareness of their presence. Conse-
quently, the first difference that one might detect between the resident of
the metropolis and the resident of the small town is the heightened awareness
and greater critical acumen of the former in contrast with the depressed
awareness and greater naiveté of the latter: “Instead of reacting emotionally,
the metropolitan [personality] type reacts primarily in a rational manner, thus
CLASSICAL OBSERVATIONS OF URBAN LIFE 25
creating a mental predominance through the intensification of conscious-

ness” (1971:326). This may be attributed to the fact that the urban dweller
must select from a ubiquitous shower of highly varied stimuli the ones appro-
priate for a particular response. That the metropolis is characteristically
the seat of a money economy gives added impetus to the development in
the urban person of a detached, rationalistic view of the world: “Money
economy and the dominance of the intellect stand in the closest relationship
to one another” (1971:326). Moreover, in the city, time is an all-important
coordinator of human activity. Without a meticulous devotion to punctuality
on the part of most of its inhabitants, the metropolis would become a bedlam.
The necessity of arranging a schedule for transportation to and from one’s place
of work, for example, heightens the significance of punctuality for the urban
dweller. The interlocking activities of varied businesses in the urban area also
reinforce a respect for punctuality, so as to maximize operating efficiency.
Insofar as the intense stimulation of the metropolis and the prominence of its
money economy promote the intellectuality of the urban person, they also culti-
vate in one a characteristically blasé reaction to events. The incessant bombard-
ment of incompatible stimuli upon individuals ultimately exhausts their mental
energies and renders them incapable of response to every new occurrence.
In the same fashion the blasé response is evinced by the money economy: “The
essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward the distinctions between
things . . . and . . . to the extent that money, with its colorlessness and its indiffer-
ent quality, can become a common denominator of all values it becomes the
frightful leveler—it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their spe-
cific values and their uniqueness and incomparability” (1971:329–330).
Almost every day the metropolitan person is somehow involved in the
exchange of dollars and cents. Perpetually reminded of the purchasability of
things, one makes a habit of evaluation. Inevitably this habit mediates one’s
estimation of others and, reflexively, of one’s own worth. Dwarfed by an awe-
some and overpowering milieu, urbanites, in the struggle to maintain their
self-esteem, devalue the objects and persons that surround them. In its most
controlled state, this mechanism is expressed as a typical reserve that sets indi-
viduals apart from the objects and persons challenging their ideal self-image.
Often “the inner side of this external reserve is not only indifference
but . . . a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion which in a close
contact which has arisen in any way whatever, can break out into hatred and
conflict” (1971:331). Those processes that pit persons against persons in
the city and disrupt the collective life are a sine qua non of urban existence.1
Here again we are presented with the notion that underneath the social
order of the city lies the hostility of each person against every other. Simmel,
26 BEING URBAN
like Tönnies, is here echoing a kind of Hobbesian motif. For Simmel, this
“chip-on-the-shoulder” demeanor of the city dweller is one guarantee of the
great personal freedom that abounds in metropolitan life. But personal free-
dom, in Simmel’s view, is more basically a product of a “universal tendency”
underlying the rise of the metropolis and the development of all social group-
ings. Any group is originally “a relatively small circle almost entirely closed
against neighboring foreign or otherwise antagonistic groups” (1971:332).
In it the self-expression of numbers is circumscribed by dogma and petty
prejudice. As the group extends itself over territory and increases its size and
importance, its structural rigidity and negative orientation to other groups
are considerably weakened. Consequently, the demands that it makes upon
its members are weakened, and personal freedom is enhanced so that “the
citizen of the metropolis is ‘free’ in contrast with the trivialities and prejudices
which bind the small town person” (1971:334). One must occasionally pay a
price for this increment of freedom in the currency of an overpowering sense
of loneliness and deprivation. “It is obviously only the obverse of this freedom
that, under certain circumstances, one never feels as lonely and as deserted as
in this metropolitan crush of persons” (1971:334).2
The freedom of the urban person cannot, however, be viewed only in this
negative sense—as the absence of social control. One’s breadth of vision and
areas of interest are both extended and objectified in the city. “The most sig-
nificant characteristic of the metropolis lies in [its] functional magnitude
beyond its actual physical boundaries” (1971:335). The overflow of metro-
politan institutions carries the spirit of the inhabitants with it into an aware-
ness of a larger world and a sense of involvement with impersonal history,
what Simmel refers to as “cosmopolitanism” (1971:334).
In effect, then, cities are inevitably providing functions that affect people
and institutions lying outside their political boundaries. We might argue here
that it is primarily this phenomenon that has heightened urban growth and
exacerbated urban problems. Since so many of our cities’ political boundaries
were based on rivers and other geographical features, the spilling over of city
functions makes the earlier physical boundaries of the city increasingly
archaic. The financial plight of the cities is thus often intensified as a result
of a structurally generated inability to raise the necessary revenue to provide
for an increasing number of additional functions. This is particularly problem-
atic when wealthier urbanites choose to dwell outside the city proper in sub-
urban municipalities. While these individuals still reap the benefits of living
near a central city, the city does not gain the benefit of their contributions
to the property tax base (Logan and Molotch 2007).
At the base of the functional expansion of the metropolis is the division of

labor. With the proliferation of occupations that Durkheim noted in the divi-
sion of labor, the inhabitants of the city are looked upon more in terms of
what they do rather than who they are. It follows that opportunities for close
social contact with others are greatly lessened. This limitation, taken together
with the imposing dimensions of the city’s objective culture, stimulates in
metropolitan people considerable anxiety about their self-importance vis-à-
vis the importance of events around them. In order for urbanites to preserve
individual personalities, Simmel writes that “extremities and peculiarities
and individualizations must be produced and they must be over-exaggerated
merely to be brought into the awareness even of the individual himself”
(1971:338).
In his characterization of urban freedom, Simmel evidences an ambiva-
lence about city life that was continued by such classical observers of the city
as Park and Wirth. In one sense Simmel portrays the city as the source of per-
sonal freedom. At the same time, however, the city is seen as the basis of a
larger kind of social disorganization. These two conflicting themes continu-
ally reappear in the writings of the sociologists who established urban sociol-
ogy as a particular area of study. It should be noted that a view of urban life as
disorganized was reinforced in the writings of American sociologists con-
cerned about social problems in the early twentieth century. As C. Wright
Mills (1943) noted in his probing essay “The Professional Ideology of Social
Pathologists,” such sociologists often traced the pathology of contemporary
life to predominantly urban causes. For Simmel, the ideological function of
the city is the provision of a setting within which the tension between quality
and freedom can be resolved.
As Simmel conceived it, then, urbanism has the cardinal effect of promot-
ing the intellectuality and individuality of those who are exposed to it. Emo-
tional reserve and the blasé attitude that distinguish the conduct of urban
people are to be understood as the principal adaptive mechanisms of individ-
ual life in the metropolis. Their importance lies in making an intellectual and
individualistic life psychologically possible. These propositions and the infer-
ences drawn from them concerning the nature of urban groups and social
structures have left an indelible stamp on the character of urban sociology in
the United States. Further, they provide a kind of connecting link between
the observations of Maine, Tönnies, and Durkheim about the character of
social organization and later observations about the social psychology of the
city dweller. Fruitful as such propositions may be, they are inadequate for a
detailed treatment of the social psychology of urban life.
28 BEING URBAN
We take issue with Simmel’s notion that urban life can be described simply
in terms of individualization. This is not to deny that the chances for individ-
ual autonomy are obviously enhanced in the urban environment. As Simmel
argues, emotional reserve psychologically sustained by a powerful charge of
negative emotion may be an efficient way of preserving individual autonomy,
once it is secured. At least two questions, though, are suggested by those
observations. First, does the increase of potential individual autonomy mean
that urban life is increasingly individualized (as most sociologists have
inferred), that is, that human beings must more and more look to their indi-
vidual selves for resources capable of facilitating their daily lives? Second, is
latent hostility a means of sustaining emotional reserve? The questions are
interrelated, and the answer seems to be negative in both instances.
People are first and foremost social animals. It is only through one’s rela-
tionships with others that one’s individuality can in any way be realized, as
Cooley, Mead, and others recognized long ago (Cooley 1998; Mead 1934).
There are essentially two reasons for this. First, the self (which includes the
idea of individuality) is a reflexive phenomenon. That is, persons come to view
themselves as they believe others view them; they look at themselves from the
point of view of others. Second—and this was also recognized by Cooley—
self-expression premises intimate social association. Simmel observed the first
point (1971) when he indicated the devaluation of the other as a means of
heightening one’s self-esteem. Although he singled out the technique of
devaluation, there is also its opposite: one can so devaluate oneself that others
will respond by bolstering one’s self-esteem. Here is the power of depression.
There is apparently a positive aspect to this as well: one can attempt to fulfill,
beyond the demands of adequacy, the expectations that others have of one in
the effort to secure one’s sense of dignity and moral worth. Indeed, some
contemporary theorists believe such affirmation is a key driver to all social
action (Fligstein and McAdam 2011).
The second point that we have raised—that self-expression presumes inti-
mate associations—constitutes a resurgent premise within the discipline of
psychology (Swann and Seyle 2005). The absence of satisfactory primary rela-
tionships with significant others has negative consequences for one’s concep-
tion of self,3 and the significance of others transcends one’s relationship to
parents and siblings. This should not be taken to mean that the identification
of the self with social groups assures the expression of individuality. When this
qualification is properly understood, it would seem that the basis of the differ-
ence between cities and towns, and between large, complex environments
and small, relatively closed, social circles becomes clearer insofar as such
differences are manifested in a social psychological way. In the small town,
one may easily lose one’s individuality in relationship with others, whereas in
the large city one establishes one’s individuality through social relationships
with others.
It is not, therefore, that life in the city has become individualized in any
usual sense of that word. One cannot depend upon oneself alone as one lives
from day to day, and this is especially true if one lives in a large city. Sociolo-
gists have recognized this in urban studies from classic Chicago School
reports on gangs (Thrasher 1926), the taxi dance hall (Cressey 1932), and
commercialized vice (Landesco 1929) to more recent investigations of street
vendors (Duneier 1999) and heat waves (Klinenberg 2003). However, one
of the points of this book is that the isolation of individuals in the city is offset
by the purposive establishment of commercial ventures such as dating serv-
ices, taverns, and the like. Other institutions, such as shopping and sports,
provide both intended and unintended settings within which fairly intimate
associations may be formed between presumable strangers. It is such relation-
ships that prevent the individual from becoming “lost” in the city and offer a
platform from which one can express one’s individuality. Instead of the indi-
vidualization of urban life, then, we might well speak of the “socialization”
of urban life in the specific meaning of that word, that is, the collectively
shared aspects of urban existence. The observation was never put this way in
any of the studies referred to earlier, and we believe that it marks an important
point on which our treatment of urban life differs from previous accounts.
Similarly, it is difficult to understand how emotional reserve can be main-
tained over any great length of time merely because it is fortified with latent
hostility. The hypothesis does not pass the test of introspection. For instance,
we have experienced neighbors who trespass upon those areas of our personal
life that we have “reserved” as our own (or better, our family’s). They have
penetrated our shell of reserve to the extent that we have become all too
aware of the antagonism beneath it. Sometimes the antagonism has been
expressed or, at best, too thinly disguised; sometimes the reserve has prevailed
and the antagonism has been suppressed. What can account for the difference?
Although we cannot be certain of all the reasons, we are sure of this much: when
we entered into an intimate social relationship with someone close to the pre-
sumptuous neighbor, let us say a husband or good friend, we suppressed the
hostility; when we were not linked closely to the social circle of the neighbor,
this hostility was not as effectively controlled. Thus, it appears that close social
relationships may be as important for the maintenance of emotional reserve as
they probably are for the assertion of individuality.
Such a line of argument is not entirely fair to Simmel, since it is directed
partly at inferences suggested by his essay and partly at the actual propositions
30 BEING URBAN
he submitted. Also, Simmel was fond of uncovering the apparently profound

opposites in social life only to demonstrate their superficiality later on (as in
his discussion of reserve and suppressed hostility), and often his enthusiasm
in discovery supplanted his power of balanced judgment.
Finally, in further defense of Simmel’s seminal contributions, we should
note that he devoted a great deal of intellectual effort to precisely the area of
investigation that we have accused him of avoiding, the function of member-
ship in small groups or closed circles.4 His essay on the metropolis, which has
been forced to withstand the burden of our attack, does not begin to
represent his sociological endeavors.
It was Simmel’s other works—those in the area of formal sociology—that
were first introduced to American sociologists largely through the efforts of
Albion W. Small.5 Later, Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (1921) made
additional essays and fragments of essays available. What is more, Robert E.
Park, a student of Simmel, shared his teacher’s interest in the problems of
modern urban society and made major contributions to sociological theories
on the city. Importantly, Park apprehended the centrality of the altered pri-
mary group in urban social organization and offered propositions to explain
its function.
ROBERT E. PARK: THE CITY—A SPATIAL PATTERN

AND A MORAL ORDER
It can probably be said that Park had Simmel’s gift of trenchant insight
without his ability to present observations systematically. Consequently, it is
difficult, if not impossible, to provide a precise and integrated résumé of
Park’s ideas about the city and, at the same time, to do justice to their scope
and depth. Nor shall we review the entire range of his contributions in this
chapter. Instead, we shall focus on those aspects of his writings that are most
relevant for the development of a social psychology of city life. Park viewed
the city as the central phenomenon of modern life; this theme recurs in all
his writings. For our purposes, we shall examine in detail two of Park’s
(1925, 1926) better-known essays in which he addressed himself exclusively
to problems of urban sociology.
Both essays proceed from the elementary observation that the city—or, for
that matter, any human community—is occupied by human beings who are
distributed over, and confined within, a territory. In this sense, the city has a
spatial aspect that the discipline of human ecology is peculiarly fitted to study.
More specifically, the subject matter of an ecological investigation of the city
is constituted by the number, position, and mobility of city dwellers.

And ecological investigation derives from the assumption that these elements
are useful indices of, for instance, the rates of crime, divorce, and mental ill-
ness. In addition, these units are quite amenable to measurement and, hence,
lend themselves to quantitative description of social phenomena that are oth-
erwise difficult to treat with statistical precision. For Park, an examination of
the modern city’s spatial features facilitates the determination of its sociology.
Since in Park’s view the city is a product of natural forces rather than of
preconceived design, its periphery never coincides with legislated boundaries.
The outer limits of the modern city, as we noted in our treatment of Simmel,
are constantly changing and are extended outward in a piecemeal fashion
along established routes of transportation as land is privately acquired and
developed. However, the bounds of the city are only the most general fea-
tures of the spatial pattern that shapes its physical organization. “Everywhere
the community tends to conform to some pattern, and this pattern invariably
turns out to be a constellation of typical urban areas, all of which can be geo-
graphically located and spatially defined” (1926:11). The area that first comes
into focus is the city center.
In contrast with the ancient city, which grew up around a fortress, the
growth of the modern city represents the elaboration of a market. It is in
the urban marketplace, the city’s business center, that the concentration and
mobility of the population are intensified. Here, each day, large masses of
people are brought by a complex transportation system to earn the money
they spend or to spend the money they earn. At night they are transported
out of the city center and are deposited in the various areas radiating outward,
toward and beyond the metropolitan periphery. The great density and mobil-
ity of the daytime population in the business center is expressed by the height
of buildings and the concentration of transportation terminals in the vicinity.
Both these factors—density and mobility—capture the essence of the modern
city. In fact, because of this, “the business center . . . is the city par excellence”
(1926:10). In emphasizing the importance of business-related activities, Park
is echoing a theme (as we noted in our treatment of the classical sociologists)
that played a central role in the view of city life taken by urban sociologists.
According to Park, the growth of the city’s business center is always viewed
by the investor with an eye to profit, and characteristically there is much
speculation in the land immediately surrounding the center. Underlying the
acquisition of this land is the expectation that its value will automatically
and inevitably increase as the business center is extended. As a result, the
investors must hold on to their land only so long as they can make the greatest
margin of profit. The maintenance and upkeep of this land does not affect the
32 BEING URBAN
speculator’s chances for realizing a profit on an investment. Consequently,

the land surrounding the city center is in a state of physical deterioration.
In brief, the business center of any modern city is always surrounded by a slum.
But the business center and the slum are only two of many distinctive areas
that make up the spatial pattern of the city. The city is organized territorially
as a constellation of diverse natural areas, and “natural areas are the habitats
of natural groups” (1926:11). These natural areas may be examined in
terms of the extent to which they approach or depart from the typical charac-
teristics of neighborhoods “where proximity and neighborly contact are the
basis for the simplest and most elementary forms of association” (1925:7).
Urban neighborhoods manage to retain their identity over time only occa-
sionally and, even then, with the greatest difficulty. The increasing prolifera-
tion of transportation and communication facilities in the city stimulates
population mobility, and thus tends “to break up the tensions, interest, and
sentiments which give neighborhoods their individual character” (1925:8).
Often, stabilizing influences strong enough to isolate neighborhoods from
the rest of the city and its disruptive forces are exerted by race, language,
and belief. Yet such culturally isolated areas as the ghetto, the black belt, or
“little Sicily” cannot maintain a perpetual hold on their inhabitants. Processes
of selection recruit the intelligent, specially skilled, and ambitious residents of
the culturally segregated areas and deposit them in less isolated places. As a
consequence of the birth, persistence, and dissolution of neighborhoods
and other natural areas, the growth of the city may be conceived as a kind of
social metabolism. Like food being incorporated and digested in the body,
persons here are assimilated to, and eliminated from, the independent organs
comprising the urban physical pattern.
For Park, the principal selective mechanism operating to maintain the
metabolism of the city is (and here he echoes Durkheim) the division of labor,
which is a function of the size of the urban population: “The larger community
will have the wider division of labor” (1925:4). With the growth of the division
of labor in the city, the population is at once differentiated and brought into
close cooperation. A heightening of the community’s intellectual life is also indi-
cated, for specialization means essentially that rational methods are increasingly
being applied to the solution of communal problems. Largely because they
work, then, individuals are caught up in the metabolism of the city. Hence, a
study of persons’ mobility in space reveals much of the character of their social
participation and of the social organization at large.
The point is that change of occupation, personal success or failure—changes of

economic and social status, in short—tend to be registered in changes of
location. The physical or ecological organization of the community, in the large

run, responds to and reflects the occupational and the cultural. Social selection
and segregation, which create the natural groups, determine at the same time
the natural areas of the city. (1926:9)
As a matter of fact, “all we ordinarily conceive as social may be eventually

construed and described in terms of space and changes of position of the indi-
viduals within the limits of a natural area” (1926:12). From this, it might
seem that the propositions of sociology will ultimately be reduced to a series
of statistical equations, since the location and mobility of a population are
eminently fitted for description in mathematical terms. This is not the case.
Park accepted the interactionist view of society as existing in and through
communication. Since communication is an interactive process that changes
its constituent units as it is carried on, the sociologist is confronted with a sub-
ject matter that is infinitely variable and heterogeneous. This alone reduces the
likelihood of a purely statistical study of urban society. The units—urban
dwellers—are constantly changed by the processes in which they are involved.
There is, therefore, a limit to the fruitful application of ecological method:
“Geographical barriers and physical distance are significant for sociology only
when and where they define the conditions under which communication and
social life are maintained” (1926:14). And these are not the only barriers that
intrude into and qualify the communicative life. Social and psychic distance are
also involved. The interrelations of physical, social, and psychic distance give
form to the society in which we live by placing limitations upon our communi-
cation with one another.
The world of communication and of “distance,” in which we all speak to main-

tain some sort of privacy, personal dignity, and poise, is a dynamic world, and
has an order and character quite its own. In this social and moral order the con-
ception which each of us has of himself is limited by the conception which every
other individual, in the same limited world of communication, has of himself,
and of every other individual. He is able to maintain them, however, only to
the extent that he can gain for himself the recognition of everyone else whose
estimate seems important; that is to say, the estimate of everyone else who is in
his set, or in his society. (1926:17)6
Such a statement implies, of course, that the crucial struggles for status are
waged in face-to-face communication with others. The arena of such a struggle
can only be the small circle, and the small circle is progressively disappearing
from urban society, according to Park: “The growth of cities has been accompa-
nied by the substitution of indirect, ‘secondary’, for direct face-to-face, ‘primary’
34 BEING URBAN
relations in the associations of individuals in the community” (1925:23).

The forces that destroy the neighborhood in the urban community also destroy
other primary groupings. Everything that increases mobility—the growth of
transportation and communication systems—has an adverse effect upon primary
group life. Increases in literacy and education make the newspaper replace con-
versation. The pursuit of interests supplants behavior motivated by sentiment.
In this respect, “money is the cardinal device by which values have become
rationalized and sentiments have been replaced by interests” (1925:16).
Actually, the entire basis of social solidarity in the economic order has been
changed: There remains “in the industrial organization as a whole a certain sort
of social solidarity, but a solidarity based, not on sentiment and habit, but on
community of interests” (1925:15–16). According to Park, as a result of this
ascendancy of secondary relations and the increased importance of interests in
modern urban conduct, the overall organization of the city is characterized by
a precarious equilibrium that can be maintained only by a process of continuous
adjustment. Urban life progresses from crisis to crisis, and the “psychological
moment” replaces the 60-second minute as a measure of time. The crisis of
the city may be seen on the front pages of the daily newspapers and in the stock
exchanges. Indeed, the stock exchange is in a perpetual state of crisis, so that the
behavior of its members is more akin to the behavior of crowds than to the
behavior of institutionalized personnel. It may be worth noting that some later
readings of Park’s work overemphasize this latter point, painting him as an
advocate of an economistic approach to the study of urban life (Gottdiener
and Hutchison 2010; Logan and Molotch 2007). While clearly Park intends
to describe a situation where people tend toward ruthless economic calculation
in cities, we find it also important to remember that much of his theory of cities
relies on an awareness that primary group relations never entirely disappear in
cities, much in the same way that Durkheim found a continued vitality of
mechanical solidarity in the age of industrial capitalism.
For Park less dramatically, but nonetheless steadily, the deterioration of
primary group life is visible in the readjustments of the family, the church,
the school, and the neighborhood: “It is probably the breaking down of local
attachments and the weakening of the restraints and inhibitions of the
primary group, under the influence of the urban environment, which are
largely responsible for the increase of vice and crime in great cities”
(1925:25). This proposition nicely exemplifies the way in which dichotomous
thinking has blinded urban sociologists to the function of the primary group
in contemporary society. Park knew full well, and made explicit in other
essays, the primary group nature of crime and delinquency. What he meant
(but did not say) was that different, and often unconventional, primary
groupings had been substituted for the conventional ones. He states this
brilliantly in his discussion of the political machine, but even there, primary
relationships are viewed (when they are perceived in the context of the city)
as rural survivals.
For Park, the entire basis of social control is altered by the rise of cities.
He notes (1925:31) that three fundamental changes are evident:
1. The substitution of positive law for custom, and the extension of munici-
pal control to activities that were formerly left to individual initiative and
discretion.
2. The disposition of judges in municipal and criminal courts to assume
administrative functions so that the administration of the criminal law
ceases to be a mere application of the social ritual and becomes an applica-
tion of rational and technical methods, requiring expert knowledge or
advice, in order to restore the individual to society and repair the injury.
3. Changes and divergencies in the mores among the isolated and segregated
groups in the city.
Perhaps no area of urban life has undergone more drastic readjustment

than that of government. The kind of government that had its origin in the
town meetings of the early American colonists has no place in the large city.
In its stead, two alternatives have emerged: the political machine and the
“good government” organizations.
The political machine is, in fact, an attempt to maintain, inside the formal
administrative organization of the city, the control of a primary group. . . .
The relations between the boss and his ward captain seem to be precisely that,
of personal loyalty on one side and personal protection on the other. . . . The vir-
tues which such an organization calls out are the old tribal ones of fidelity, loy-
alty, and devotion to the interests of the chief and the clan. The people within
the organization, their friends and supporters, continue a “we” group, while
the rest of the city is merely the outer world, which is not quite alive and not
quite human in the sense in which the members of the “we” group are. We have
here something approaching the conditions of primitive society. (1925:35–36)
In contrast with the political machine, the “good government” organiza-

tions are essentially secondary groups rationally oriented to political life
in the interests of reform. The two groups vie with one another for the vote
of the electorate.
The ecological and sociological characteristics of the city are not without
their social psychological implications. Social distance and the weakening of
36 BEING URBAN
primary restraints permit a great diversity of individual expression. Whereas

the small community is always peopled by one or two eccentrics, the city con-
sists of a world of “characters” who can always find one another and establish
themselves in their own moral regions. “Because of the opportunity it offers,
particularly to the exceptional and abnormal types of man, a great city tends
to spread out and lay bare to the public view in a massive manner all the
human characters and traits which are ordinarily obscured and suppressed in
smaller communities” (1925:45–46).
With magnificent insight, then, but without logical rigor, Park established
a number of propositions describing and explaining city life that considerably
broadened the area of theory and research in urban sociology. Implicit in his
contributions to the study of the city was a frame of reference for the study
of any sociological problem. This, however, was not made explicit until one
of his students, Louis Wirth, formulated it for application to the study of
urbanism. Park had demonstrated that the city as an empirical event could
be investigated in an ecological, social organizational, and/or social psycho-
logical perspective. Wirth (1938) clarified these perspectives, commented
upon their interdependence, and showed their relevance for the formulation
of a systematic theory of urbanism.
LOUIS WIRTH: URBANISM AS A WAY OF LIFE

Wirth’s work marks the culmination of what we have been referring to as the
classical view of urban sociology, impressed with the central significance of the
city for any interpretation of contemporary civilization. Wirth noted the inad-
equacy of existing definitions of the city for any disciplined exploration into
the nature of urbanism. In his view, the difficulties of formulating an unambigu-
ous sociological definition of the city are insurmountable, since any particular
city seen in sociological context is only more or less urban. Because the past
always overlaps with the present, there is no city without rural characteristics.
To a greater or lesser degree . . . our social life bears the imprint of an earlier
folk society, the characteristic modes of settlement of which were the farm,
the manor, and the village. This historic influence is reinforced by the circum-
stance that the population of the city itself is in large measure recruited from
the countryside, where a mode of life reminiscent of this earlier form of exis-
tence persists. Hence we should not expect to find abrupt and discontinuous
variation between urban and rural types of personality. The city and the country
may be regarded as two poles in reference to one or the other of which all
human settlements tend to arrange themselves. In viewing urban—industrial
and rural—folk society as ideal types of communities, we may obtain a perspec-

tive for the analysis of the basic models of human association as they appear in
contemporary civilization. (1938:3)
The presence or absence of rural characteristics, in what we are accustomed

to refer to as cities, is contingent upon many variables, among them the
unique history of the city, its function, the manner in which its population is
recruited, and/or the character of the surrounding region. Consequently, cen-
sus definitions of the city at the time (that is, as any community with a popula-
tion of 2,500 or greater) cannot be employed fruitfully in sociological
investigation. A census definition can never guarantee that the institutional
structure of communities whose population is less than 2,500 is predominantly
rural—folk. Nor can political boundaries define a city, since it is a sociological
truism that the legislated limits of a community never coincide with its natural
limits. Other definitions that depend upon single criteria, such as population
density, occupational distributions, physical facilities, and various institutional
features, also fail to provide the sociologist with an adequate definition of the
city: “A sociologically significant definition of the city seeks to select those ele-
ments of urbanism which mark it as a distinctive mode of human group life”
(1938:4). It is precisely this that existing definitions have not sought to do.7
Accordingly, Wirth established five criteria that a sociological definition of
the city must satisfy:8
1. Urbanism must be defined as a mode of life.

2. A serviceable definition of urbanism must be generic and not particular;
that is, the mode of life referred to must not arise out of specific locally
or historically conditioned cultural influences.
3. The definition should denote the essential characteristics that cities in our
culture have in common. Conversely, the definition should not be so
detailed as to include all the characteristics that our cities have in common.
Rather, the more significant features of cities—size, density, and differ-
ences in functional type—must be included in the definition.
4. The characteristics of cities included in the definition should be as few in
number as seems feasible for the deduction of significant sociological
propositions. (This is implicit.)
5. The definition should lend itself to the discovery of significant variations
among cities.
We may note that these five criteria suffer from at least two important
shortcomings. First, although it has been specifically stated that the definition
38 BEING URBAN
of urbanism must be generic, the extension of the desired definition has been
confined to the essential aspects of cities in Western culture (if that is what is
meant by “our” culture). This is undoubtedly a result of the fact that, at the time
of Wirth’s writing, sociological information about cities in other cultures may
have been sparse. Second, there are no criteria in Wirth’s essay for distinguishing
the essential from the nonessential characteristics of cities. Wirth perceived that
“some justification may be in order for the choice of the principal terms com-
prising our definition of the city” (1938:9), but in the brief discussion that fol-
lows in his essay, no alternative characteristics are considered.
Despite these inadequacies, Wirth advanced a definition of the city that
conforms to the criteria he had established and that is demonstrated to be
useful for extending and integrating our sociological knowledge of city life:
“For sociological purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense,
and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals” (1938:8).
If it is postulated that “the larger, the more densely populated and the
more heterogeneous a community, the more accentuated the characteristics
associated with urbanism will be” (1938:9), then a series of propositions
may be deduced about the urban mode of life as it is conditioned by the inter-
related influences of the three selected variables.9 Each of the three variables—
size, density, and social heterogeneity of the population aggregate—is treated
separately by Wirth in the effort to distinguish the consequences for social life
under circumstances characterized by the relatively high quantitative value of
the variables concerned. It at once becomes apparent, however, that the vari-
ables are so interrelated that most of the deduced consequences flow not just
from any single factor but from the combined influence of the three. There-
fore, our account of Wirth’s essay will enumerate only the major consequen-
ces discerned in his inquiry rather than discuss the relations between such
consequences and each separate variable.
Eight major effects upon human association and social life may be expected
to occur in communities that are typically large and whose population is dense
and socially heterogeneous. First, large numbers ordinarily result in an
increase in individual variation in the population aggregate. This tendency is
reinforced under conditions of great density. We may note here that Wirth’s
conception is close to that of Durkheim. Wirth writes that “an increase in
numbers when an area is held constant (i.e., an increase in density) tends to
produce differentiation and specialization” (1938:14).
Since social heterogeneity is directly stimulated by density, individual varia-
tion would be expected to increase.
Second, large numbers contribute to the segregation of population group-
ings according to various commonly held characteristics, such as color, ethnic
heritage, economic and social status, or tastes and preferences. This tendency
is even more pronounced under conditions of density where physical proxim-
ity is socially reflected as distance: “The city consequently tends to resemble a
mosaic of social worlds in which the transition from one to the other is
abrupt” (1938:15). Just as the city’s population is broken up into distinct
natural groupings, so is the personality of the urban dweller divided into
compartments.
A third effect of urban conditions is the segmentalization of personal life.
The multiplication of persons in a state of interaction under conditions which

make their contact as full personalities impossible produces that segmentaliza-
tion of human relationships which has sometimes been seized upon by students
of the mental life of cities as an explanation for the “schizoid” character of urban
personality. This is not to say that the urban inhabitants have fewer acquaint-
ances than rural inhabitants, for the reverse may actually be true; it means rather
that in relation to the number of people whom they see and with whom they rub
elbows in the course of daily life, they know a smaller proportion and of those
they have less intensive knowledge. (1938:12)
This segmentalization of personal experience is exacerbated by the hetero-

geneous character of the urban population, for the city dweller is inevitably
caught up in varied and sundry social groups.
No single group has the undivided allegiance of the individual. The groups with
which he is affiliated do not lend themselves readily to a single hierarchical
arrangement. By virtue of his different interests arising out of different aspects
of social life, the individual acquires membership in widely diverse groups, each
of which functions only with reference to a single segment of his personality.
Nor do these groups easily permit of a concentric arrangement so that the nar-
rower ones fall within the circumference of the more inclusive ones, as is more
likely to be the case in the rural community or in primitive societies. Rather
the groups with which the person typically is affiliated are tangential to each
other or intersect in a highly variable fashion. (1938:16)
The characteristic apathy of many urban dwellers is quite probably linked

to the fact that one must compartmentalize one’s role-playing to carry on an
effective urban existence. It is difficult for one whose loyalty is claimed by
diverse interest groups to decide what is in one’s own best interest, or even
to make major decisions. The imposition of diverse claims upon individuals
renders it difficult for them to see their place in a total scheme of things and
frequently results in their disinvolvement from a large segment of the social
world.
40 BEING URBAN
A fourth effect of urbanism may be termed the depersonalization of human

association. Wirth has referred to Weber to explain the way in which size and
density bring about depersonalization: “Large numbers of inhabitants and
density of settlement,” he writes, “mean that the personal mutual acquaint-
anceship between the inhabitants which ordinarily inheres in a neighborhood
is lacking” (1938:11). And this observation is valid despite the fact that every-
day contacts of city life are face-to-face contacts.
The contacts of the city may indeed be face to face, but they are nevertheless
impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental. The reserve, the indifference,
and the blasé outlook which urbanites manifest in their relationships may thus
be regarded as devices for immunizing themselves against the personal claims
and expectations of others. (1938:12)
There is a certain similarity between some of the responses of urban dwell-

ers to the depersonalization of their relationships with others and what might
be termed a fifth effect of urban conditions, sophistication and rationality.
Wirth has noted in this regard that “the superficiality, the anonymity, and
the transitory character of urban social relations make intelligible also, the
sophistication and the rationality generally ascribed to by city-dwellers”
(1938:12). Not only are sophistication and rationality associated with the
large numbers and great density of the typical urban population, but like the
depersonalization of social experience, they may be traced to the socially
heterogeneous character of the city. Life in the city is a swiftly mobile life that
persistently exposes the urbanite to sharp social contrasts and other varied
stimuli. Thus, one’s awareness of the shifting, unstable character of the world
at large is enhanced: “This fact helps to account, too, for the sophistication
and cosmopolitanism of the urbanite” (1938:16). Both the depersonalization
of social life and the enhanced rationality in the city may be interpreted as the
subjective reflection of the dominance of secondary groups over primary
groups in the urban situation.
It follows that a sixth consequence of the rise of urbanism in a community
is the substitution of formal for informal social controls. “Under . . . urban . . .
circumstances competition and formal control mechanisms furnish the substi-
tutes for the bonds of solidarity that are relied upon to hold a folk society
together” (1938:11). The large size of the urban population means that the
residents rely on representatives rather than on themselves in the political
process.
Seventh, Wirth perceived the complexity of social stratification in the city
in a manner would not be interrogated by students of stratification until the
1990s (Grusky 2008). Wirth pointed out that social stratification in the city is
not simply hierarchical but also multidimensional. Yet he did not observe the
importance of nonverbal symbolism in the stratification of urbanites, nor did
he detect the “crazy rhythm” of shifting status alignments.
Finally, Wirth noted the enhanced probability of collective behavior in the
urban environment. In cities, crowds can materialize from dense anonymity.
Results may be tragic, as in the Los Angeles riots or those in the Parisian ban-
lieues (Wacquant 2008), or merely chaotic, as in the case of crowd behavior in
the stock market.
These eight consequences of the characteristic size, density, and hetero-
geneity of urban populations do not exhaust the number set down by Wirth
in his essay. Other effects of the city were considered. Some of these have
been deliberately omitted from this exposition because they stem from condi-
tions that are found only in modern cities beset by the unique impact of
industrial capitalism. In omitting these items, Wirth’s own stipulation has
been regarded:
It is particularly important to call attention to the danger of confusing urbanism

with industrialism and modern capitalism. The rise of cities in the modern world
is undoubtedly not independent of the emergence of modern power-driven
machine technology, mass production and capitalistic enterprise. But different
as the cities of earlier epochs may have been by virtue of their development in
a preindustrial and precapitalistic order from the great cities of today, they were,
nevertheless, cities. (1938:7–8)
MARXIST IN THE CITY: HENRI LEFEBVRE

While Simmel, Park, and Wirth all made important contributions that con-
tinue to guide studies of urban life, some find their work lacking adequate
consideration of the role of macrosocial structures in the construction of
urban life (for example, Gottdiener and Hutchison 2010; Logan and
Molotch 2007). All agree that the expansion of capitalist exchange structures
engender the development of large, dense, heterogeneous cities with deper-
sonalized relations. But little is said in their work about how economic trans-
actions directly impact the spaces in which people live and interact, of how the
government and economy shape cities and ultimately give some framework to
the urban experience.
Until now, we have not discussed the contributions to an urban sociology
made by the third intellectual father (along with Weber and Durkheim) of
sociology, Karl Marx. Marx’s work has generally provided sociologists with
42 BEING URBAN
the critical theoretical link between the macrostructures of the economy and
politics with social life in general. Marx did not himself express a particularly
elaborate vision of cities, though he did note that their development was part
and parcel of the expansion of industrial capitalism that he decried in the nine-
teenth century. In his Manifesto, with Friedrich Engels, Marx noted that
[t]he bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has cre-
ated enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared
with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from
the idiocy of rural life. (Marx 1978:477)
But otherwise, Marx was comparably quiet on the effects of urbanization,

concerned as he was to show that all social phenomena were ultimately based
on the material, economic, productive relations of society. (Engels, however,
did produce a treatise on the life of the English working class in 1844, which
included a somewhat lengthy description of the living conditions for workers
in Manchester, describing a place “so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into
and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine
and excrement” (Marx 1978:580).)
It was not until Henri Lefebvre that a fully elaborated Marxist vision of
cities would be produced. Such a Marxist vision requires understanding social
developments throughout history as being engendered by developments in
the material realm, largely the realm of economic relations (Marx 1978).
Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Lefebvre traced a history of how cities, par-
ticularly in Europe and North America, had changed since the Roman era.
The move to a Gesellschaft-like society began, in Lefebvre’s estimation, in
towns that developed as long ago as the twelfth century, as “contractual
(stipulated) relationships replaced customs” (Lefebvre 1991:263). Towns of
this epoch were increasingly the center of trade networks, and Lefebvre
observes that economic exchange begins to replace more primal relationships.
Exchange also displaces the importance of religion as a shaper of towns, as
shrines and churches increasingly share pride of place with marketplaces.
From the sixteenth century onward, the capitalistic nature of urban space
accelerated, and towns and cities replace the countryside as the chief sites of
practical and economic activities (Lefebvre 1991:268). By the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, European cities were further developed alongside
the violent upheavals that accompanied the burgeoning of industrial capital-
ism. Lefebvre, like Marx, characterizes these conflicts, such as the French Rev-
olution and the Napoleonic wars, as driven by states’ pursuit of capital
accumulation. The spoils of war were then invested in cities and towns, in
the building of both architecture and infrastructure (278), but more explicitly
in commemorative gates, arches, and columns—to this day, we may observe
how these riches were put to use in Trafalgar Square, the Brandenburger
Tor, or the Arc de Triomphe (277).
To Lefebvre, the outcome of this process is generally characterized by the
triumph of what he calls “abstract space” (Lefebvre 1991:49). The space of
earlier epochs generally includes “absolute space,” “made up of fragments of
nature located at sites which were chosen for their intrinsic qualities (cave,
mountaintop, spring, river)” (48), and “historical space,” which was this same
absolute space with an additional overlay of political or religious valence (here
Lefebvre is conjuring anything from oracular spaces like Delphi to consecrated
battlefields). With capitalist accumulation, however, abstract space, discon-
nected from a place’s particularities, comes to the fore, obliterating the unique
qualities that had formerly characterized humans’ relations to their space.
Extending his analysis of the domination of abstract space, Lefebvre goes on
to describe the concomitant domination of the use value of space by its exchange
value. Using the terminology Marx used to describe commodities, Lefebvre
notes that where formerly people interacted in and with space that was uniquely
endowed with meanings (a church, one’s home, a particular park), and that such
space thus constituted use values, the progression of capitalism now dictates that
spaces are increasingly perceived as exchange values. Marx described exchange
values as the pure economic worth of a thing, its price, absent any consideration
of what it is good for. “And,” notes Lefebvre, “exchange implies interchange-
ability”—spaces lose their unique value and meaning (337).
Like Marx, Lefebvre also proposes a sort of revolution to turn back capital-
ism, and to return space to the benefit of the individuals who interact with
and within space. In The Production of Space he calls for the production of
“differential” space to overcome the domination exchange value and abstract
space. Rather than emphasizing homogeneity and interchangeability, this dif-
ferential space “accentuates differences. It will also restore unity to what
abstract space breaks up—to the functions, elements and moments of social
practice” (52). This space would allow people to lead more unified lives, to
harmonize their work, home, and play lives.
Lefebvre discusses this latter aspect of play and festivals in his other major
work on the city, “Right to the City” (1996[1968]). And he does so with
an eye to interaction, seeing the city as a mediator between the “near order”
of human and group interactions and the “far order” of macrosocial forces
such as the church, state, and economy. Lefebvre’s theory is thus a refined
Marxism, not given to the reductionist economic determinism often found
in Marxian theory. Like Wirth and Simmel, Lefebvre theorizes urbanism as
44 BEING URBAN
something that is distinct from the concrete aspects of the city. Lefebvre’s
urban is a “social reality made up of relations which are to be conceived of,
constructed or reconstructed by thought” (103). While it is inexorably tied
to practical and material conditions, as described above, Lefebvre sees urban-
ism as a force in and of itself.
Importantly for Lefebvre, this urbanism should be comprised of moments
of “play, sexuality, physical activities such as sport, creative activity, art and
knowledge” (1996[1968]:147). But generally he laments that such moments
are rare in the abstract space of the fragmented city, where life’s activities are
broken up into a mundane division of tasks all oriented toward the expansion
of exchange value. Ultimately Lefebvre holds out great hope for urbanism.
“Urban life,” he writes, “has yet to begin” (150)—meaning that the great life
of the city that is to be found in ecstatic moments has not come to fruition.
But he feels that it can and will, carried by the working class when they take
advantage of their inherent “right to the city,” interacting in groups in a space
that is once again celebrated as a use value.
Of course, Lefebvre perhaps leans a bit too much toward an overtly
revolutionary Marxism in this conclusion. But his work has been appropriated
widely, and presents an important strategy for linking macrosocial, especially
economic, forces to everyday urban life. His work is an important touchstone
for later sociologies of urban development, such as Logan and Molotch’s
“growth machine” model (2007), as well as the New Urban Sociology para-
digm trumpeted by Gottdiener and Hutchison (2010). Such authors give
numerous empirical demonstrations of how attention to government and
economic forces is important for understanding various dimensions of how
urban life is formed and transformed. For example, Logan and Molotch
(2007) show how neighborhoods and neighboring interactions act as a
powerful use value in cities, one that is often discarded by governments seek-
ing to increase municipal tax bases and developers looking to maximize their
profits on land in a blind emphasis on exchange value. Others (for example,
Harvey 2006) emphasize the concept of the right of the normally disempow-
ered to shape their city, such as when urban renewal threatens slums in places
like Mumbai and Shanghai (Weinstein and Ren 2009).
CONCLUSION
When the contributions of Park, Simmel, Wirth, and Lefebvre are assessed
to determine whether some consensus upon the common features of modern
cities may be revealed, many areas of agreement are at once forthcoming.
Each of the four writers agrees, in the first place, that the city is large. No city
may be said to exist without a large population. Moreover, the city must
occupy a relatively large space. Its functions are extended over a large territory
far exceeding than defined by its legislated limits—in fact, the exact limits of
the city are difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain. As Park put it, they are
the product of natural forces. Furthermore, they are in a perpetual state of
flux. City boundaries vary with changes in the nature and range of the city’s
functions, and these variations in function, it may be added, can occur within
relatively minute intervals of time. The functions of the city are altered fre-
quently, if only by virtue of the fact that the day-to-day activities of its popu-
lation are distributed differentially over a 24-hour period. Despite such
obstacles to the precise demarcation of the city’s spatial extent, it is clear that
the city is large in a physical sense. At least it is typically larger than its legisla-
tors have anticipated.
There is complete accord among the sociologists reviewed here that the
economic organization of the city is typified by a highly developed and perva-
sive division of labor. It is this that can explain in structural terms Wirth’s
choice of social heterogeneity as a criterion for distinguishing the city from
other population aggregates. For instance, Park observed that the specializa-
tion of occupations, signifying the development of the division of labor, is
often marked by the tendency for each occupation to take on the aspect of a
profession in the sense of developing a distinctive ethic. Ethnic differences
do not necessarily have to be introduced into the equation to justify Wirth’s
depiction of the city as a mosaic of social worlds or Park’s designation of the
city as a composite of natural areas peopled by natural groups with divergent
mores. The social heterogeneity of the city can be explained in terms of the
division of labor and its ideological ramifications. It is, of course, also mani-
fested in ethnic differences and other differences originating from the diverse
ways in which urban populations are recruited. This agreement upon the typ-
ical social differentiation of the populations of cities supports the sociologists
considered here in their further assertion that the city is a locus of contrasting
social stimuli. The number, diversity, and transitoriness of urban relationships
characteristic of life in the complex environment of the city evoke in urban
dwellers the typical responses of sophistication and the blasé attitude that dis-
tinguish their demeanor from that of individuals living in nonurban milieus.
For Park, the clash of stimuli involved in urban relationships is aggravated
by the frequent and sudden contact that the mobile urbanite has with many
socially distinct groupings. Seen from the point of view either of social organi-
zation or of the individual person, then, the city, as a consequence of the
division of labor, is complex.
46 BEING URBAN
Economic institutions are important for distinguishing urban life because

they underlie occupational specialization. In addition, money and its
exchange for goods and services, all writers agree, capture in symbolic fashion
an important aspect of urbanism. When Park, for example, submitted that
the business center is the city par excellence, he was merely demonstrating
the reversibility of Simmel’s contention that the city was the seat of the money
economy. The importance of the money economy for depicting the city as a
type-phenomenon inheres, as Wirth has said, in the fact that the use of money
introduces a new basis of relationship into human association.
The development of large cities, at least in the modern age, was largely depen-
dent upon the concentrative force of steam. The rise of the factory system made
possible mass production for an impersonal market. The fullest exploitation of
the possibilities of the division of labor and mass production, however, is pos-
sible only with standardization of processes and products. A money economy
goes hand in hand with such a system of production. Progressively as cities have
developed upon a background of this system of production, the pecuniary nexus
which implies the purchasability of services and things has displaced personal
relations as the basis of association. (1938:17)
Park and Simmel also pointed out the importance of money exchange for
stimulating abstract reasoning among the members of the urban population.
Lefebvre went on to demonstrate how the overarching power of the money
economy could have a powerful influence on space, sapping its uniqueness
or razing neighborhoods in the name of progress.
Park regarded political reform as a distinctive emergent of modern urban
life. However, Park pessimistically perceived reform and the political machine
as contending forces that had not yet become reconciled.
That the sociologists reviewed above agree upon these distinctive institu-
tional features of city life signals another (and perhaps the most important)
area of agreement. This can be found in their discussion of the altered nature
of social organization and social control that urban conditions induce. Ironi-
cally, as population density within cities increased, each writer observed that
the opportunity for close social contact is lessened in the city. Despite the fact
that social contacts increase in number with increasing urbanization, they are
devoid of intimate content. In their view, the small social circle is disappearing
from urban society as secondary relations are substituted for primary relations
in every area of life. Neighborhoods become progressively more disorganized.
The community is being replaced by associations, firms, or interest groups.
The solidarity of the family and the church is broken up by the rise of cities.
Changes such as these in the nature of social relationships call forth typical
changes in the area of social control. In general, formal controls come more
and more to replace the informal control mechanisms. According to these
writers, the decreasing significance of the primary group in urban social
organization has taken its toll in a vast weakening of moral consensus and
has necessitated a reliance upon law to succeed custom as the prime regulat-
ing agency of urban life.
It is in observations like these that the influence of Maine, Tönnies, and
Durkheim is most readily apprehended. Contract, Gesellschaft, and organic
solidarity have become identified with urbanism. In Park’s case, however,
some exceptions to the general rule that secondary relations were destroying
the opportunities for establishing primary relations in the city were noted.
Park, for instance, observed that to a certain extent immigrant groups segre-
gated themselves into particular districts in the city in order to maintain more
primary associations with those who shared a common language and culture.
One dimension of the change in the character of the primary group under
the impact of urbanization is the preponderance of unconventional over con-
ventional primary groups in certain regions of the city. Many examples of
these unconventional groupings, together with a consideration of their
importance for the larger social order, are in existing studies of gangs and
the criminal underworld. Perhaps another dimension can be found in the
implications of Park’s discussion of the political machine. Here it is suggested
that the contexts within which primary relationships are carried on have
changed. Specifically, Park’s observations indicate that whereas primary
groupings were formerly carried on in informal community organizations
and comprised an integral part of those organizations, as urbanization pro-
gresses, they come more and more to be contained in formal organizational
or associational contexts. A fruitful hypothesis to pursue in this area would
assert that every formal social structure contains informally patterned rela-
tionships of varying degrees of intimacy that permit the exercise of primary
controls to regulate the collective conduct of the larger formal organization.
But to liken such informal relationships, as Park did, to primitive tribal struc-
tures or to refer to them as clanlike residues of a bygone age seems farfetched
indeed. Or to say that a city is less a city because of this, as Wirth implied,
seems only to impede our understanding of urban life.
Park said that politicians in the city are professional neighbors—which
does not necessarily make them any less neighbors. Another dimension of
the altered nature of the primary group might be located in the exchange of
intimacy and the building of primary, or at least intimate, social relationships
48 BEING URBAN
as professional investments that characterize the politician’s and other profes-

sionals’ roles in the city.
We have tried to demonstrate in this chapter how the theoretical origins of
existing propositions that purport to describe and explain urban life have
affected the contributions of specialists in urban sociology. The conceptual
distinctions of Maine, Tönnies, and Durkheim between status and contract,
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and mechanical and organic solidarity, respec-
tively, have often been interpreted as antithetical polar dichotomies in which
one pole is representative of rural life and the other of urban life. Such an
interpretation seems to apply correctly only to the conceptual scheme of
Maine; it must be qualified when applied to the theoretical systems of Tönnies
and Durkheim, both of whom viewed the contrasting concepts that they for-
mulated as each having a place in the explanation of the other.
The contributions of Simmel, Park, Wirth, and Lefebvre were discussed as
instances of the kind of influence that was exerted on twentieth-century soci-
ology by the more generalized theories of social organization proposed by
Maine, Tönnies, Durkheim, and later Marx. Each of these specialized theo-
retical contributions to urban sociology was characterized by a view of urban
life that singled out its typical polar opposition to rural life. Consequently, the
significance of primary or close personal relations for an adequate understand-
ing of urbanism was neglected, glossed over, or obfuscated. Merely because
primary relations take on different forms in the context of the city, or because
they are apparently outnumbered by more easily identifiable secondary rela-
tions, does not necessarily mean that they have decreased in importance or
that they have lost their significance. As we shall indicate in the following
chapters, sociologists have accumulated ample evidence for the persistence
of communal ties within urban settings. This necessitates our interactionist
paradigm for the study of urban social relations.
NOTES
1. Compare here the idea of the “lonely crowd” later developed by Riesman
(1950).
2. The incompatibility of freedom and equality is discussed in another of Simmel’s
essays. See Simmel (1971:219).
3. See, for example, Anderson and Chen (2002).
4. See, for example, “Exchange” (Simmel 1971:43–69), “Conflict” (1971:70–
95), “Sociability” (1971:127–140), and “Group Expansion and the Development of
Individuality” (1971:251–293).
5. Small’s translations of Simmel’s essays in the early volumes of American

Journal of Sociology are listed in Simmel (1950a:lviii–lix).
6. Note the anticipation of the epoch of mass distribution by Max Weber (1958a).
7. For an incisive treatment of this issue, see John Gulick (1973).
8. These are paraphrased and summarized from Wirth (1938:4–8).
9. In this respect it is important to note that only three variables were extracted
from the definitions of the city as a basis for the deduction of propositions. The varia-
ble of permanence is given no further role in Wirth’s discussion. The point is raised
here for two reasons: (1) permanence is undoubtedly as much a variable as size, den-
sity, or social heterogeneity of the population aggregate and, as such, deserves some
consideration in the essay, and (2) it may be that what we have often regarded as typ-
ical urban phenomena (high crime rate, low birth rate, and so on) decline as cities
become older or more permanent.
PART II
EXPERIENCING
CITY LIFE
CHAPTER 3
The Rediscovery of Community
A major preoccupation of sociological work has been to question, to examine

critically, and often to take issue with commonly held ideologies, images,
beliefs, and stereotypes. Some, indeed, have suggested that sociology is an
inherently revolutionary discipline, given its frequent concern with testing
the validity of long-standing truisms. Peter Berger underscores this aspect of
the sociological consciousness. Regarding what he calls the “debunking”
motif of sociological analysis, he writes:
The sociological frame of reference, with its built-in procedure of looking for
levels of reality other than those given in the official interpretations of society,
carries with it a logical imperative to unmask the pretensions and the
propaganda by which men cloak their actions with one another. (Berger
1963:38)
Among other things, sociologists have questioned long-standing beliefs

about the poor, have demonstrated the faulty character of racial stereotypes,
have uncovered the informal aspects of formal organizations, and have exposed
the diverse sexual practices maintained by various groups. They have succeeded
in showing that shorthand characterizations of the social world tend to oversim-
plify its complexity. While generalizations about social life help to make our
individual and collective experiences more intelligible, such generalizations are,
by definition, based upon only selected aspects of social reality. Therefore, a
continuing task of the sociological enterprise must be to uncover those features
of social life that lie beneath the veneer of accepted knowledge about the world.
54 BEING URBAN
In some instances we shall come to see the necessity of thoroughly rejecting cer-
tain images; in other cases our data will dictate that these images be specified and
clarified.
To this general characterization of the goal of sociological research we
must add a specification that carries us into the subject matter of this chapter.
It is that scientific knowledge accepted as truth when produced may later be
found wanting. Indeed, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
Thomas Kuhn (1967) argued that scientific progress is founded on demon-
strating the inadequacy of prior explanation. Subsequently, in Chaos of Disci-
plines, Andrew Abbott (2001) discusses progress in social scientific disciplines
and traces the movement that knowledge seekers make between generally
polar divisions. So, for example, sociologists tend to move between quantita-
tive and qualitative poles. And even within the qualitative camp of ethnogra-
phers, there are some who are more given to using some quantitative data
while others are wholly devoted to qualitative descriptions of experience.
There exists, in other words, the risk that our scientific explanations may be
partial, incomplete, or wholly illusory. Still more to the point, sociologists,
as do all scientists, create images of the social world that are incorrect, mis-
leading, or in need of revision in the face of historical process. Ordinarily
these faulty images acquire, largely through continued use, an unquestioned
legitimacy as part of a discipline’s accepted body of knowledge. Scientists
may fail to question unremittingly the continuing truth value of certain of
their key ideas. In this chapter we seek to show that the sociological image
of the city described earlier in this book represented one such case of a long-
standing conceptual misunderstanding.
In Chapters 1 and 2 we traced the theoretical and empirical roots of much
urban sociology. We documented a tradition that pictures the progressive dis-
appearance of warm, sustaining, community social relations. It is a tradition
that paints an unceasingly negative picture of life in urbanized areas. From
Durkheim’s perspective, the decline in traditional communities poses the
grave problem that “without strong local communities, our wider civic exis-
tence risks becoming abstract and hollow” (Cladis 2005:404). In his book
The City, Max Weber (1958b) pointed out that the large number of inhabi-
tants and the population density (in cities) combine to increase the likelihood
of impersonal, anonymous relations. Georg Simmel (1971) saw the “psychic
life” of the urban dweller threatened by the overwhelming tempo of everyday
existence.
The theoretical images provided by these writers were given credence in
the empirical work of most early American sociologists. Following the tenor
of their European predecessors, many sociologists at the University of
THE REDISCOVERY OF COMMUNITY 55
Chicago saw the growth of cities typified by the substitution of indirect and
secondary relations for direct, face-to-face, primary relations. The observa-
tions of Robert Park and his students bolstered the belief that the sources of
social control represented by the family, the neighborhood, and the local
community were largely undermined by the demands of a rational urban exis-
tence. In all this writing, the city was on trial. The charge was to be found in
the nineteenth-century theoretical conceptions of the city and the over-
whelmingly damaging evidence in the observations of the city by Park and
others. The verdict seemed a nearly unanimous one: the city had, indeed,
killed community.
There must, of course, be some truth to this sociologically created image.
Were it glaringly incorrect and thoroughly contrary to our commonsense expe-
rience of city life, it would have been quickly rejected. We prefer to say that such
a view has a relative validity. No one can doubt that the city is different from the
small town in important respects. The city is “a relatively large, dense and
permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals” (Wirth 1938).
We maintain, however, that too rigorous a comparison of urban and small-
town life led to an incomplete picture of urban social relations.
The tendency to see the two types of social organization (small town and
city or Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft) as opposites, as examples of what the
other is not, badly obscures elements of both. Forms of social organization
are not static, but are in a continual state of change. In looking at urban life,
then, the focus ought not to be on whether various features of human rela-
tions are existent or nonexistent in some absolute sense, but instead on how
they may have been, or are in the process of being, modified and transformed.
We should not ask whether primary relations exist in cities just as they do in
small towns. The question is a comforting one in that it yields a clear, decisive
answer—certainly they do not! At the same time the question is misleading.
It does not cause us, or allow us, to understand how primary relations in cities
have assumed new forms.
Strong social bonds and a distinctively integrated group life do exist among
urbanites. They are simply not quite so obvious, not quite so easy to observe.
They must be uncovered, discovered. Our argument in the pages that follow
centers on the idea that we must reconceptualize our long-held sociological
beliefs about the nature of urban community. Even in a digital age, we shall
work to show that “a lively primary group life survives in the urban area,
and primary controls are effective over wide segments of the population.
The alleged anonymity, depersonalization, and rootlessness of city life may
be the exception rather than the rule” (Wilensky 1966:136). Even among
those sociologists who trumpet the arrival of the “network society”—vast
56 BEING URBAN
interconnected communities divorced from spatial boundaries through the

power of digital communication technologies—there is agreement that spa-
tial communities and neighborhoods remain important and vibrant (Wellman
2001). As a first step in establishing the validity of this position, we must con-
sider the use made by social scientists of the idea of community.
THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY

The concept of community has been a troublesome one in sociology. It has
come to be applied to such a wide diversity of situations, settings, and forms
of group life that it has lost much of its distinctiveness as an analytical tool
for investigation. We speak, for example, of rural communities, urban com-
munities, neighborhood communities, and communities of scholars. We have
come to use the term in its most generic form to describe any collectivity of
persons sharing values, ideas, or lifestyles. The difficulties of its usage were
already highlighted in a 1955 article by the sociologist George Hillery, who
documented 94 separate definitions offered by sociologists for the concept
of community. Since then, urban sociology has not come any closer to a con-
sensus definition of community, and we now have to contend with still more
terms that share connotations with “community,” such as “social capital”
(often drawing on Putnam’s (2000) work) or “neighborhood effects” (a liter-
ature reviewed in Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley (2002)). Scott
and Marshall (2009) suggest that “ambiguities of the term community make
any wholly coherent sociological definition of communities, and hence the
scope and limits for their empirical study, impossible to achieve.” We submit,
however, that despite this general confusion, an analysis of some of the most
widely accepted definitions of community reveals common themes.
Roland Warren (1972), for example, considers community to be “that
combination of social units and systems which perform the major social func-
tions having locality relevance” (9). He goes on to specify the social functions
that he has in mind. He suggests that a community must function to produce
and to distribute the goods and services necessary for the maintenance of a par-
ticular locality. A community must, as well, generate social control mecha-
nisms to ensure a predictable behavioral order. Third, a community must
provide institutional sources for social participation by its members (churches,
schools, businesses, recreational facilities, and the like). Finally, a community
must be a context in which individuals find the mutual support provided by a
primary social relationship.
Other writers put greatest emphasis on one or another specific criterion. Tal-
cott Parsons (1959), whose life’s work was to understand the interdependence
between the various units of a society, emphasized the nature of social systems
shared by a population of persons inhabiting a common geographical location.
Marvin Sussman (1959) puts greatest stress on the structure of community
interactions allowing persons to meet individual needs and resolve collective
group problems. There is, as well, a long history of research on largely nonurban
communities that has become part of the tradition of American sociology.
In many community case studies from the mid-twentieth century (Lynd and
Lynd 1929, 1937; Redfield 1955; Seeley, Sim, and Loosely 1956; Vidich and
Bensman 1958; Warner and Lunt 1941; West 1945), to more recent efforts
(Hyra 2008; Venkatesh 2006; Wilson and Taub 2006), greatest attention has
been paid to the shared institutional and cultural realities of a geographically
identifiable population. As symbolic interactionists we find appealing a number
of studies that have emphasized the nature of social interaction as a primary fea-
ture of community life. So, for example, we can look to Duneier’s work that
shows how a group of (largely homeless) book vendors who are perceived by
some in their neighborhood as pariahs form a cohesive community unto them-
selves (Duneier 1999). At the other end of the social spectrum, Sassen’s work
on “global cities” discusses how a global network of multinational corporations
and their highly educated representatives operate as a community within a net-
work of cities at the core of the world’s financial markets in places like New
York, Sao Paolo, and Tokyo (Sassen 2001).
We could continue to list a large number of definitions that differ slightly
from one another. At this point, however, it seems fair to say that the follow-
ing are important features of community life:
1. Community is generally seen as delineated by a geographically, territori-

ally, or spatially circumscribed area.
2. The members of a community are seen as bound together by a number of
characteristics or attributes held in common (values, attitudes, ethnicity,
social class, and so on).
3. The members of a community are engaged in some form of sustained
social interaction.
We have ordered these three general characteristics according to the fre-

quency with which they are mentioned as criteria for the existence or nonexis-
tence of community. That is, there seems to be some uniform agreement
among social scientists that, at the very least, a population of persons must
share a clear spatial or ecological structure before a community can be said
to exist.1 An examination of Hillery’s findings shows that the criterion of a
geographical area shared by some population is to be found, either explicitly
58 BEING URBAN
or implicitly, in virtually all 94 definitions. This is not unexpected, since the

tradition of sociological thought about the city finds its origin in a silent com-
parative reference to the geographically well-contained rural or peasant com-
munity. If the members of some collectivity are able to generate a degree of
communal cohesion, if persons are to share a common set of values, if there
is to exist a mutual concern for individual needs, if warm primary relations
are to develop, it is likely to happen to persons who share a common physical
space. Geographical stability, given this image of the peasant community,
appears as the sine qua non of community life. This is a central point because
we believe that a good part of our difficulty in fully comprehending the nature
of city life stems from sociologists’ past overreliance on geographic or spatial
variables. To see how this is so, we must examine a theory that has particularly
dominated sociological investigation of urban life. We must look to the work
of those who analyzed the city in primarily ecological terms.
ECOLOGICAL CONCEPTIONS OF URBAN COMMUNITY

As noted in Chapters 1 and 2, classical European writers approached the
city from the perspective of its institutional structures—its division of labor,
its economic system, and the like—and largely engaged in secondary analyses
of historical and ethnographic data gathered previously by other investiga-
tors. Georg Simmel departed somewhat from this approach through his reli-
ance on imaginative introspection. Even in his case, however, we find no
systematic observational studies of specific urban institutions, populations,
or communities. European thinkers, although residents of major urban areas
themselves, tended to view the city from a distance. Only with the emergence
of the Chicago School of Sociology did the notion of the city as a research
laboratory develop. It was largely under the influence of Robert Park, a for-
mer journalist whose previous work had sensitized him to the necessity for
firsthand observation of the human drama, that researchers began to investi-
gate various “slices” of urban life. The spirit of much of the work done during
this period is caught in Park’s methodological directive to his students:
You have been told to go grubbing in the library thereby accumulating a mass of
notes and a liberal coating of grime. You have been told to choose problems
wherever you can find musty stacks of routine records based on trivial schedules
prepared by tired bureaucrats and filled out by reluctant applicants for aid or
fussy do gooders or indifferent clerks. This is called “getting your hands dirty
in real research.” Those who counsel you are wise and honorable; the reasons
they offer are of great value. But one more thing is needful; first-hand
observation. Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps
of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit
in the orchestra hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short, gentlemen,
go get the seats of your pants dirty in real research. (McKinney 1966:71)
It was not enough, however, that these researchers share a common meth-
odological orientation. Park’s further contribution was to delineate a set of
theoretical questions that gave these separate investigations a uniform pur-
pose and direction. In 1915, Park wrote a position paper in which he raised
a set of research questions that became the focus for a generation of urban
sociologists. Among other questions, he asked: What exactly makes cities
grow? Is there a natural patterning to city growth and population distribu-
tion? What is the structure of urban neighborhoods? How do social institu-
tions change with the growth of cities?
These questions caused researchers to focus their investigations on the
ecological structure of the city. The commitment to view the city in ecological
terms provided the theoretical impetus for nearly all the research conducted at
Chicago between 1915 and 1940. Ecology became the theoretical thread that
would ultimately hold together the comprehensive image of urban life that
Chicago sociologists were working to produce. One of the most influential
of the early ecologists, R. D. McKenzie, specified the goal of ecological inves-
tigation this way:
The spatial and sustenance relations in which human beings are organized are
ever in the process of change in response to the operation of a complex of envi-
ronmental and cultural forces. It is the task of the human ecologist to study
these processes of change in order to ascertain their principles of operation and
the nature of the forces producing them. (McKenzie 1925:167)
Although a formal theory of ecology was not spelled out until 1950 with
the appearance of Amos Hawley’s Human Ecology: A Theory of Community
Structure, urban ecologists shared from the beginning the view that human
community life was essentially analogous to the structure of other biological
communities, and generations of sociologists were taught at Chicago using
Park and Burgess’s “Green Book,” the Introduction to the Science of Sociology
(1921), which made liberal use of ecological metaphors such as “succession,”
“competition,” and “adaptation” (Deegan 2001; Sampson 2012). Human
beings, like any other organism, must somehow adapt to the particular envi-
ronmental contingencies that they face daily. Community was understood
to be “the patterns of symbiotic and communalistic relations that develop in
a population; it [community] is in the nature of a collective response to the
60 BEING URBAN
habitat; it [community] constitutes the adjustment of organisms” (Hawley

1950:v).
Equipped with a common methodological and theoretical base, a number
of researchers conducted studies of subgroups or subcommunities within the
city. In each case, the concern was to discover the kinds of adaptations made
by communities of persons to their particular urban environments. It was a
time of great activity and research productivity. In characterizing these
researches, Howard Becker describes each as constituting one piece in a
mosaic of urban life: “Individual studies can be like pieces of mosaic and were
so in Park’s day. Since the picture of the mosaic was Chicago, the research had
an ethnographic, case history flavor, even though Chicago itself was seen as
somehow representative of all cities” (Becker 1970:421). These studies were
important because their collective force was to show that urbanites did not
adapt very well to the contingencies placed on them by the urban environ-
ment. Consider the tone of some of these better-known ethnographies.
Harvey Zorbaugh (1937) documented the extreme personal demoraliza-
tion and destructive impersonality of Chicago’s rooming-house district.
The largest proportion of persons in this area was transients; they were with-
out families and without personal ties. As described by Zorbaugh, it was an
area in which social controls had virtually disappeared. It was clear that here
no “normal” community life could develop. Nels Anderson (1923) docu-
mented the pathology-producing effects of city life in his analysis of homeless
men. The hobo, living in a rootless, impersonal urban “jungle,” was some-
how symbolic of what the urban world was making of many. Paul Cressey
(1932) focused his attention on immigrants to Chicago. He painted a nearly
pathetic picture of persons so starved for personal relations that the “taxi
dance hall” (a ballroom in which one purchased tickets to dance with women
for a specified time) could become a viable urban institution.
In addition, a series of studies related a variety of social problems to urban
existence. Ernest Mowrer (1927) argued that family disorganization, as
reflected in divorce statistics, could not be disassociated from the general
decline of primary group controls and increasing individualization in the city.
Frederick Thrasher (1926) seemed to provide evidence of the city as a cause
of behavioral disorder in his investigation of over 1,300 gangs in Chicago.
Faris and Dunham (1939) documented varying rates of mental illness in dif-
ferent ecological areas of the city. They showed that rates of mental illness sys-
tematically declined as one traveled from the central city to the periphery of
the city. They claimed that their study established the fact that “insanity, like
other social problems, fits into the ecological structure of the city.” In much
the same fashion, Clifford Shaw (1966) demonstrated that rates of juvenile
delinquency varied with the ecological structure of the city.
These works did, indeed, have a flavor to them. Despite their failure, by and
large, to produce comprehensive theories about the city, despite their preten-
sions to objectivity, and despite the ministerial moralisms directed at the pathol-
ogies of city life that “infected” their pages, these works succeeded in doing
something good ethnographies ought to do. They gave the reader a gut feeling
for relatively unknown aspects of urban life. We could empathize with the hobo;
we could begin to understand how immigrants coped with their new urban sta-
tus; and we were provided an intimate picture of such diverse groups as wait-
resses, juvenile thieves, gang members, ghetto dwellers, and the wealthy.
Taken together, these works contributed to the development of “social
disorganization” as an academically respectable field of inquiry during the
1930s and 1940s. These studies also seemed to provide confirmation for the
more general ecological theory of city growth proposed by the sociologist
Ernest Burgess (1925). Burgess developed a picture of urban growth and
process by focusing on the spatial distribution of population numbers and
patterns of geographical mobility in the city. The assumption underlying Bur-
gess’s work is the central tenet of urban ecological analysis generally. It is that
the typical spatial order of any city is a product of, and reflects, the moral
order. Still more explicitly, Burgess tried to show that city growth eventuated
in the development of a number of natural ecological areas. Much of his work
is devoted to describing these natural areas, which, he believed, would mark
the growth of any city. Based on his investigation of Chicago, Burgess’s argu-
ment was for a growth pattern best characterized by a series of concentric
circles or zones.
The first circle or area that clearly comes into focus is the central business
district. The modern city grows up around the market. Here we find the
greatest density and mobility of population. Mobility is especially great
because of the existence of mass transportation that easily moves persons into
and out of the central city. For the early ecologist, the central business sector,
with its continuous activity, tightly packed buildings, and emphasis on
rational pecuniary social arrangements, is the city par excellence. It is the cen-
tral business district with its banks, department stores, hotels, theaters, muse-
ums, and so on that most readily comes to mind when most of us think about
the city.
As Burgess describes it, we find around the city center a zone of transition.
It is in this ecological area (composed of warehouses and slums) that vice,
poverty, depersonalization, and social disorganization are most pronounced.
62 BEING URBAN
That Chicago sociologists had a particular fascination with this natural area
is evidenced by the number of ethnographies on life in it. Here were
Zorbaugh’s rooming houses, Cressey’s taxi dance hall, and Anderson’s
hoboes; here also were the highest rates of delinquency, mental illness, and
family disintegration. Beyond the zone of transition, there is a zone largely
populated by working-class families. This was a primary residential area com-
posed of second-generation immigrants who still found their employment
in the center of the city but had been able to escape from the zone of transi-
tion. Still further toward the periphery of the city, we find a residential zone
populated largely by middle-class persons living either in single dwellings or in
well-maintained apartment buildings. Finally, Burgess described a suburban
zone composed of economically advantaged, geographically stable, upper-
class commuters to the city.
Burgess’s hypothesis aroused tremendous controversy among his contem-
poraries. Homer Hoyt (1939), for example, suggested that cities did not take
on the ecological pattern suggested by Burgess. Rather, he thought; cities
grew in sectors along the main lines of transportation. His model of the city,
then, consisted of a series of sectors or bands that followed economic activity.
He also suggested that residences clustered along the boundaries of bands.
Rather than a concentric zone configuration, therefore, the city was pictured
more like a starfish or spoked wheel. The disagreement did not stop with
these two descriptions. Harris and Ullman (1945) argued that neither
the concentric zonal nor the sector hypothesis best fit the natural ecology of
the city. They provided yet another model that posited the existence of
“multiple nuclei,” each nucleus representing a specific concentration of spe-
cialized activities growing up around facilities in that nucleus.
It is not our purpose to indicate the full complexity of these debates.
We may see that, regardless of dissimilarities in the particular configurations,
all the descriptions remain wholly ecological in nature. The presumption is
that cities, and the specific communities contained within them, can be
understood in terms of the economic and social activities and the demo-
graphic characteristics of the population inhabiting a natural ecological area.
This was the guiding hypothesis of each of the studies reviewed earlier.
In all fairness to these ecological conceptions or characterizations of the city,
we should say a few more words about what Burgess and others hoped to
accomplish through their ecological constructions. It has, for example, been
suggested that Burgess’s hypothesis was incorrect for a number of reasons. First,
it was generated by looking at Chicago in the 1920s. Burgess’s critics question
the representativity of that city. Second, more recent urbanologists have claimed
that his ideas do not apply to today’s cities. It is increasingly the case today that
cities are carefully planned. Burgess described a city that, to that point, had
grown naturally, without any outside planning intervention. The idea of
planned cities could not, of course, have entered into Burgess’s formulations
because the implementation of urban planning, particularly in the United States,
is rather recent. To some extent, however, these criticisms misunderstand Bur-
gess’s intent.
Burgess was considerably more sophisticated than his fellow critics allow.
He did, after all, live in Chicago and was obviously aware that Lake Michigan,
for example, cut into the symmetry of his concentric zones. In other words,
Burgess knew that he was not describing a city in absolute terms.
He was, rather, creating what sociologists refer to as an ideal type. As noted
in Chapter 1, an ideal type is a tool to help social scientists ask questions about
phenomena as they engage in analysis. As social scientists construct an ideal
type, they recognize that it is an intellectual invention of sorts. They realize
that there is nothing in the real world perfectly fitting their ideal picture.
Instead, the ideal type becomes a kind of yardstick against which what does
exist in the real world can be evaluated. The ideal type, we might say, repre-
sents a series of assumptions about the organization of social life. After
we specify these assumptions, we can ask, “How may we expect things to
look given these assumptions?” For Burgess, as for other ecologists, their
explanations, their ideal types, their images of the city rested on three basic
assumptions:
• Individuals do not act alone. They act collectively, in aggregates. Such

aggregates are usually organized in social terms.
• Behavior and social organization are rational and can be described as such.
• All actors have adequate knowledge of market and economic processes and
will use space in the city on the basis of that knowledge.
Burgess was proposing that if people in fact behave rationally, have knowl-
edge of the market for social space, and behave as part of an aggregate, then
we should see cities developing in such and such a manner. Like other ecolo-
gists, he was interested in isolating the factors that would account for city
growth and, thereby, for the social organization of communities in the city.
It is our position that these ecological assumptions and emphases were inad-
equate and constrained our understanding of urban communities. Let us con-
sider how our symbolic interactionist approach leads us to critique the
ecological perspective that we have been describing.
64 BEING URBAN
ECOLOGY AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Ultimately our continued investigations of the city have demonstrated that
the ecological perspective is inadequate to understanding the full range of
sociality within cities. Ecologists seemed either to forget or to disregard the
fact that space has meaning for people. If we are to develop ideal types, we
must be careful to create as close a fit as possible between our assumptions
and empirical reality. We disagree with the ecological assumptions that we
have named because it seems clear that individuals do not behave only in
terms of the economic value of space. More frequently, we suggest, persons
relate to their social space in sentimental or emotional terms. This point has
been documented time and again by anthropologists (Cieraad 1999; Hall
1966) and social psychologists alike (Bell, Greene, Fisher, and Baum 2005;
Sommer 1969). Both show enormous cultural differences in persons’ atti-
tudes toward the uses of physical space. Theirs is a compelling argument that
the meaning of social space cannot be conceived only in economic/geographic
terms.
Ecologists concentrate so much on the physical features of city space that
they have relatively little to tell us about behavior and social organization.
We learn little from ecological theory about the social psychology of city life.
As symbolic interactionists, we see the need to assess the relationship between
space, the symbolic meaning attached to space, and human behavior itself.
The sentimental value attached to urban space, for example, has been clearly
documented by a group of sociologists led by William Julius Wilson and
Richard Taub. These researchers showed that Chicago neighborhoods are
not merely spatial areas to be fitted into concentric circles, zones, or nuclei.
If we wish to understand Chicago as a city, we must, as Wilson and Taub show,
consider the symbolic value, the history, the meaning attached to its various spa-
tial features. The Chicago communities they describe do not exist merely
because persons share a common ecological space that served a set of rational
individual and collective economic functions. The communities’ existence is
more bound up in the mutual symbolic value placed on that territorial area
and on the adherence to local behavioral norms and customs. Wilson and Taub
express the issue this way in discussing the neighborhood they call Beltway:
Neighborhood social organization over the years had been enhanced by several
factors. These included a network of dense acquaintances, the presence of
extended families, a high level of residential stability, vibrant community organiza-
tions, powerful local political ties and common ethnic, racial, and class back-
grounds. However . . . neighborhood social organization also benefited from a
common belief system, widely shared by the residents, that integrated social
conservatism, patriotism, and sentiments concerning adherence to neighborhood

standards. (Wilson and Taub 2006:45–46)
We may extrapolate from Wilson and Taub’s argument. It is the sentiment

attached to urban areas, the whole range of meanings attached to urban areas
(and here we must, of course, include economic meanings), that essentially
determines the shape and social organization of cities.
In extending this discussion, we must be very careful in our assessment of
natural ecological boundaries. Ecologists tend to see certain features of the
landscape as creating natural barriers. Surely, for example, we cannot consider
city rivers merely as barriers or boundaries. There is more involved than that.
Rivers may be related to, and thought about, as objects of beauty, as focal
points for recreation, and possibly as central to persons’ images of the city as
a whole. It is not the boundary alone that determines forms of social organi-
zations or communities. It is, rather, how we think about, interpret, and give
meaning to natural barriers. We must ask whether physical barriers are also
social barriers. The description of some features (railroad tracks, rivers, and
the like) only as a physical barrier may cause us to read the sociology of the
city incorrectly. It is true that an empty space may constitute a line of demar-
cation in a city, but it is equally possible that the same empty space might
become a playground and therefore have the effect of extending patterns of
interaction in the city. Unless we consider the use, the meaning, the symbolic
significance, and frequently the sentiments and emotions attached to various
features of the city’s topology, we shall incorrectly understand patterns of
interaction in the city, and by definition, therefore, incompletely understand
the city’s social organization.
This leads us to our second general criticism of ecological conceptions of
the city. Too great an emphasis on spatial patternings without equal attention
to the nature of social interaction between persons both within and beyond
specific geographical areas of the city may be misleading. We must recall at
all times that communities are composed of human beings actually or poten-
tially interacting with one another. The limitations of a purely ecological
approach are seen when we look to the relationship between geography and
social interaction. If we agree that one of the elements of human community
is social interaction, we must ask whether that interaction can be fully under-
stood in terms of clear spatial demarcations.
If we were to find that social relations between urbanites transcend natu-
rally occurring or arbitrarily defined ecological boundaries, this would be
good reason for rethinking or reevaluating the territorial basis for commu-
nity. We are proposing that society or, in the more limited sense, community
66 BEING URBAN
exists in and through human communication. Communication is, of course,

an interactive process. Further, we can say that any interactive process changes
its constitutive elements in every interaction. In each contact the identities of
the participants are inevitably changed somewhat. Therefore, as patterns of
communication and interaction change, the basis of community shifts as well.
Urban units (the community being a central unit) are constantly changed by
the process through which they are created—human interaction. The kind
of dialectical process that we are describing places a limit on a purely ecologi-
cal or geographical conception of community. To understand fully the nature
of urban social arrangements, we have to understand the shifting patterns of
communications that continually transform them.2 Form and his colleagues
(1954) have shown, following this line of thought, the inadequacy of purely
ecological definitions of human community.
They begin their analysis of one city by drawing a topological map showing
both natural barriers or boundaries (hills, rivers, empty spaces, and so on) and
boundaries imposed by technology (bridges, buildings). This is one approach
taken by ecologists in distinguishing various city areas. Next, they look closely
at the demographic characteristics and spatial distribution of the population
in the city. The purpose of this exercise is to see more clearly the relationship
between the purely topological boundaries earlier described and the racial,
social, ethnic, and economic composition of populations. These two elements
(topological and demographic), in combination, are traditionally used to delin-
eate the boundaries of city communities. The task, in other words, is to see if
there is any fit between the topological characteristics of the city and the distri-
bution of its population. The third possibility for demarcation (and the one that
is of greatest interest to us here) is obtained by measuring the extent to which
persons interacted or communicated with each other over the city space. In
effect, the researchers create three maps of the city—a topological map, a dem-
ographic map, and an interactional map—and then look to see how much over-
lap exists among the three. Their finding: there is practically no correspondence
among the three maps; there is virtually no overlapping.
Subsequent research on a variety of topics has shown that this lack of cor-
respondence has ramifications in diverse realms. For example, research on
the spread of sexually transmitted diseases shows that people’s sexual partner-
ing tends to spread well beyond the bounds of traditionally defined neighbor-
hoods (Youm et al. 2009). Hyra (2008) shows that community organizers
tend to be more successful when they networked with other like-minded indi-
viduals in different areas throughout the city. Fischer’s (1995) meta-analysis
of networks in the city shows that there are a number of bases for community,
from enjoying different hobbies to sharing ethnic identities.
Let us try to make clear the import of this lack of correspondence among
social interaction, demography, and the physical features of the city. It makes
plain the difficulty of drawing arbitrary lines of demarcation in cities that
will presumably alert one to the existence or nonexistence of community.
The matter is not that simple. Perhaps one of the reasons that urban sociolo-
gists came to the conclusion that there were few viable urban communities
was their failure to see the inadequacy of purely ecological conceptions of
social organizations. One cannot determine the existence of community sim-
ply by chopping up the city with arbitrary lines of demarcation.3
Other researchers, dissatisfied with assumptions about social relationships
and interaction implicit in ecological theory, sought better ways to identify
and to describe urban subcommunities. One central direction of this research
was the development of a method called social area analysis (Shevsky and Wil-
liams 1949). Social area analysis is a method for the “systematic analysis of
population differences between urban subcommunities” (Bell 1965). Using
published data on an areal unit called the census tract (each census tract con-
tains between 3,000 and 6,000 persons), researchers created indices of each
tract’s socioeconomic status (based on such indicators as rent, education, and
occupation), familism (based on such indicators as fertility ratios and women
not in the labor force), and ethnicity (based on such indicators as race and
nativity). The scores on each of these indices were standardized to range from
0 to 100. Once all of the census tracts in a particular metropolitan area were
scored according to these three characteristics, it became possible to delineate
distinct social areas within the city. One such social area, for example, would
be constituted by all those census tracts with high scores on all three indices;
another social area might be composed of tracts scoring low on all indices.
In a review essay on the subject, Wendell Bell (1965) described how 32 sepa-
rate social areas may be identified, each representing a unique configuration
of the three central indices we have described.
Once the social areas in a city were specified, researchers could consider
how they varied from one another in any of a number of respects. Studies
based on the method of social area analysis uncovered many orderly patterns
within cities. Research indicated, for example, that social areas vary widely
and systematically on such factors as persons’ social participation, their mem-
bership in formal organizations, and their sense of community identification.
Those living in different social areas, in other words, differ consistently on a
range of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Moreover, the patterns uncovered
in one city appear relatively constant when the same method is applied to a
number of cities. Though social area analysis has largely fallen out of favor in
mainstream sociology (Sampson 2012:40), with the ability of computer
68 BEING URBAN
systems to analyze vast swaths of data simultaneously, it remains important in

spheres such as marketing, where clustering individuals into groups of like-
minded others is of great import. Some are optimistic there will be a resurgence
in the type of analysis pioneered by Shevsky and Williams, as programs such as
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) allow researchers to model a huge
variety of aspects of people’s lifestyles—their activities and attitudes—and show
how they are distributed across the urban environment (Longley 2003).
There is an important idea to be drawn from our brief discussion of social
area analysis. The method and the findings derived from it are congenial to
the point of view that we have been advocating. We say this because the cen-
sus tracts composing an identified social area need not be contiguous to each
other; they may be spread throughout the city space. Work using social area
analysis stands as further empirical confirmation that urban communities need
not have a specific territorial locus.4
There is another step to be taken in achieving a better understanding of the
sense of community felt by many city persons. At this point we want to sug-
gest that there may be subjective community identifications that cannot be
accounted for through the use of objective criteria for defining community.
Sociologists have long known that actual membership in some group may
be less important than an identification with that group. We know, for exam-
ple, that if we wish to explain certain social behaviors related to a person’s
social class position, it may be less important to know the person’s objective
class position (as measured, for example, by occupation, education, and
income) than to know the social class with which the individual identifies.
Reference-group theory in sociology is based on the idea that persons’ objec-
tive social statuses, attributes, and group affiliations may be less important
than their interpretations of those elements. W. I. Thomas’s dictum that “if
men [sic] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”
(Thomas and Thomas, 1928:572) is, we think, applicable to persons’ con-
structions of their lives as urbanites. A sense of community may reside in a
person’s feelings of identification with a city. Such identification cannot be
appreciated simply by documenting urbanites’ structural positions.
SUBJECTIVE COMMUNITY IDENTIFICATION:

NONTERRITORIAL BASES OF URBAN COMMUNITY
In an article titled “Primary Groups and Cosmopolitan Ties: The Rooftop
Pigeon Flyers of New York City,” Colin Jerolmack (2009) provided evidence
for an idea we have advocated: that anonymity and disorder is certainly
enhanced in the urban environment but that, in time, some impersonal or

anonymous urban contacts tend to become personalized. The finding of
Jerolmack’s study is that even as the forces of gentrification and ethnic succes-
sion dissolve old neighborhood ties and tear apart personal ties, new bases for
community can be found in various settings. In this case, he shows how the
activity of rearing pigeons in rooftop coops, a longtime tradition of Italian-
American immigrants in New York City, has been adopted by African-
Americans and more recent Puerto Rican immigrants. Though spread among
various neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, these men form a commu-
nity based in their shared interest, and depend upon a locally owned pet shop
as a space to build that community:
One thing that the flyers who gather at the pet shop are seeking is the kind of
masculine primary groups that working-class and poor men have historically
often sought, a place where they can find sociability and build a reputation
among men with whom they share interests and experiences. Whether Italian,
African American, or Puerto Rican, these men once gathered at barbershops,
taverns, or general stores on their own—and some still do—or with their
fathers. The pet shop is a natural extension of, or replacement for, those places
that either vanished or no longer meet the needs of these men, who organize
many of their relations around pigeon flying. (Jerolmack 2009:453)
For these men, the quasi-intimate contacts created at the pet shop oper-
ated as a kind of substitute for true participation in the community; flying
pigeons was a way of identifying with a community. Jerolmack found that a
number of these men, older Italians in particular, were less and less able to
find coethnic others in the neighborhood who had once constituted their
community. In short, we can see that Jerolmack regards pigeon flying as an
opportunity for some to develop a subjective identification with a community
although they are not part of the neighborhood community by some set of
objective standards. We find a situation that provides strong ties for people
where we might not have expected such ties to exist. We begin to see that,
in the urban context, trips to the pet store serve an integrative function every
bit as important as the more overt function of buying goods. In this case, we
see that the personalization of relationships in the market makes for a subjec-
tive identification with a larger community. This is, we might add, an identi-
fication that would not be seen if we examined only places of residence. Let
us reiterate the significance of this study in somewhat more theoretical terms.
Jerolmack’s work seems to be saying, as we have been arguing, that human
beings are eminently capable of transforming their environments in important
70 BEING URBAN
ways. Although the conditions of urban life may seem conducive to imperso-
nality and rationality, persons can tolerate only so much impersonality. Per-
haps at the height of feelings of depersonalization and lack of integration,
persons will seek alternatives in the environment to provide them with the
kinds of relationships that seem to be denied them. The marketplace, and par-
ticularly the small store, becomes a source for sustained human relationships—
for community identification. Should we fail to see how new networks of
interaction are created in the urban situation, we shall too quickly leap to the
conclusion that there are none at all.
It is important, as well, to cite the policy implications of findings like Jerol-
mack’s. Once we see that the small store acquires a new symbolic meaning in
the urban context, we must be careful in our planning. We must be cognizant
that businesses in urban areas play a very important function other than the
purely economic function. Small stores, taverns, cafes, and the like are not just
places to purchase goods; they also constitute meeting places for neighbor-
hood residents and crucial communication centers for informal news about
the community. The demolition of such stores does not just eliminate a few
more buildings from the community; it may also rupture the fabric of social
life in that neighborhood (see also Hunter 1974; McQuarrie and Marwell
2009; Silver, Clark, and Yanez 2010).
This argument is of considerable importance for those engaged in rede-
signing urban places. Our attention is called to the fact that there is more to
consider than the physical shape of a building before the decision is made to
do away with it. We might, for example, put this in the context of building
shopping centers in the city. Planners too frequently create their ideas for city
change by using the suburbs as their model. The preference becomes to build
a large shopping center in place of small “Mom and Pop” stores. One argu-
ment is that small businesses are dying anyway and that it is reasonable to has-
ten the process by engaging in a kind of social euthanasia. We quarrel with the
idea that small businesses inevitably must die. It may very well be true that
there is a big turnover in small businesses. We must, however, look at the sta-
tistics showing an enormous constancy in the percentage of the labor force
involved in small businesses. There is always another “Mom and Pop” waiting
to take over a small community business. The more important point that we
wish to make is this: planners going into an area should not tamper with the
existing institutions because change would better fit their own aesthetic con-
ception of what the city should look like or because of a devotion to the idea
that all change is good and creates jobs. We have to understand the crucial
importance of some of these institutions in providing a platform on which a
substantial number of urban residents build their identities.
It is worth noting that we share this argument with others, from Jane Jacobs
(1961) to Richard Florida (2002), who amply demonstrate the role of local
small businesses in helping to maintain the fabric of urban life. What is more,
since this book was originally published, a number of urban planners have come
around to this viewpoint. While plenty of planners and developers continue to
push for big-box retailers to invade the urban environment, “New Urbanism”
in urban planning has increasingly pushed to include diverse commercial enter-
prises in urban development projects (Congress for the New Urbanism 2001;
Katz 1994). Research indicates that such planning, emphasizing locating small
retail businesses within walkable neighborhoods, has a positive effect on the fre-
quency with which community members interact with each other (Lund 2003).
As Robert Putnam (2000), in his sweeping review of the decline of community
ties in the United States put it, “The new urbanism is an ongoing experiment to
see whether our thirst for great community life outweighs our hunger for pri-
vate backyards, discount megamalls, and easy parking” (48).
The establishment of shopping relations is certainly not the only basis for
subjective urban community identification. As a matter of fact, such findings
about interactions of urbanites at small business places are important only if
they sensitize us to other sources of community identification that transcend
spatial boundaries. As another example, we shall examine the function of
institutions such as sports in the modern urban center:
On the basis of a quota sample investigation of 515 persons, Gregory
Stone (1968) offers some evidence that “involvement with spectator sports
makes for subjective identification with the larger community under objec-
tively improbable conditions” (8). By “objectively improbable conditions”
Stone meant that subjective identification with the urban community
through sports would be highest for those who were, according to purely
objective criteria, least integrated into the urban community (those who had
been residents in the city for the shortest time, those who had the fewest
friends in the community). Once more, the theoretical point that we made
earlier seems to be sustained by the data: that persons produce symbolic trans-
formations of urban institutions so as to provide a source of identification that
is not available to them through routine sources of community involvement.
“Sports teams should be thought of as collective representations of the
larger urban world. Teams represent that world. Significant then are the names
of teams. Such names have in the past designated urban areas. . . . Identification
with such representations may be transferred to identification with the larger
communities or areas they represent” (Stone 1968:10). We have offered two
examples of urban institutions that serve the unintended function of providing
urbanites a source of identification with urban community. Sports and the
72 BEING URBAN
marketplace may be identified as two sectors of the urban world that must be
studied in order to understand how urbanites produce an involvement in the
urban world that maintains their separate identities, that injects a personal quality
into a situation where it would otherwise not seem to exist. There is an important
point that comes out of the brief analysis we have made here: the urban world is
organized. There is a clear social organization produced by urbanites through
their transformation and usages of urban institutions. Such organization is not
so easily seen because its source is found in unsuspected settings. We will examine
the role of sports and urban life in much greater detail in Chapter 8.
Institutions such as sports and the marketplace are just two among many
bases for subjective community identification. Richard Florida reminds us that
particular objects in cities become symbolic representations of the whole city
for its inhabitants. City dwellers build up a sentiment and emotion for these
meaningful city objects. Urbanites come to feel a fondness for trees, buildings,
particular street corners, rivers, and parks. Some of these objects become, in fact,
synonymous with the city itself. We need only show persons New York’s skyline,
or San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, or New Orleans’ French Quarter, and
the city will be quickly identified by most. For those who live in these respective
cities, such objects and places do not merely identify the city; they are also sour-
ces for personal identification with the city. In a world increasingly dominated
by cookie-cutter subdivisions and big box retailers, Florida notes, “[p]laces are
also valued for authenticity and uniqueness. . . . Authenticity comes from several
aspects of a community—historic buildings, established neighborhoods, a
unique music scene or specific cultural attributes” (Florida 2002:228).
As we speak, then, of subjective identification with the urban community,
meaning to indicate that (just as Robert Park maintained) the city is a “state
of mind,” so also must we consider community to be a social psychological
production. Communities do not exist unless they are collectively identified
as such. Nothing has any meaning until we invest it with meaning. It is not
enough to offer simple objective criteria for community. To say that subjec-
tive community identification is possible is to reiterate a previously made
point: we do not live in communities as much as we live in our interpretations
of community. Our continuing assertion that community identification does
not depend solely upon residence in a well-defined ecological area of the city
flows from this theoretical position.
URBAN NETWORKS
The value of thinking about communities as bounded by interactional
rather than spatial variables is nicely illustrated in a now-classic experiment
conducted by Stanley Milgram (1972). Milgram tried to show that social

structures are composed of a number of overlapping circles of friends and
acquaintances. In order to see how these overlapping networks of interaction
operated, he worked out an experimental method to determine the line of
acquaintance linking any two persons chosen at random.
The method he adopted worked as follows: Milgram picked a person on the
East Coast who became the “target” for a number of other persons some dis-
tance away (in Kansas and Nebraska). Each person participating in the study
was given the name and certain selected demographic information about the tar-
get person. They were given a folder and told that the object of the experiment
was to get that folder to the target person as quickly as possible. The most
important rule that each of these persons had to obey was the following: “If
you do not know the target person on a personal basis, do not try to contact
him directly. Instead, mail this folder . . . to a personal acquaintance who is more
likely than you to know the target person. . . . It must be someone you know on
a first name basis” (Milgram 1972:294). Milgram’s intent was to find out how
many links it would take to reach the target person, if he could be reached at all.
The somewhat startling finding of this experimental procedure was that
the median number of linkages necessary to reach the target person was only
five. Milgram’s experiment suggests that we are all embedded “in a small
world structure.” In terms of the arguments that we have made in this chap-
ter, we agree with Milgram’s assessment of the potential importance of his
study.
[The study] reveals a potential communication structure whose sociological

characteristics have yet to be exposed. When we understand the structure of this
potential communications net, we shall understand a good deal more about the
integration of society in general. While many studies in social science show how
the individual is alienated and cut off from the rest of society, this study demon-
strates that, in some sense, we are all bound together in a tightly knit social
fabric. (Milgram 1972:299)
Milgram’s study has stood up to replication in the digital age—indeed on a

global scale. In 2003, researchers at Columbia University sought to find if
people across the globe could be connected via email in the manner that
Milgram had connected people through the post. Using targets in such far-
flung locations as Norway, Estonia, and Australia, the researchers found that
“social searches can reach their targets in a median of five to seven steps,
depending on the separation of source and target” (Dodds, Muhamad, and
Watts 2003:827).
74 BEING URBAN
The phenomenon of networking is, then, an important feature of how the

world at large is organized. It can, however, also be seen in more local set-
tings. In fact, the well-known urban sociologist Barry Wellman (1973) has
proposed that the city itself be viewed as a “network of networks.” Insofar
as urbanites’ relations with one another transcend particular spatial bounda-
ries, such a notion is well put and certainly is confirmed in the studies of other
urban sociologists (Fischer 1982, 1984; Giuffre 2013; Olson 1982; Sampson
2012). Indeed, in his wide-ranging review of urban neighborhood research,
Phillip Olson notes that urban network theorists see the urban community as
“no longer a territorial unit, but . . . [rather] a variety of linkages among persons
sharing common interests and activities” (1982:502). One of the most critical
linkages among persons in urban settings is kinship ties. Through the mainte-
nance of kinship, urban households are able to maintain sustained contact with
other households in both the immediate neighborhood and the larger metro-
politan area. Urban sociologists studying kinship have been particularly inter-
ested in how place of residence affects kin relations.
Data indicate that the social networks of persons vary by community size.
Respondents living in more urban settings tend to name fewer kin than those
residing in small towns (Fischer 1982). In terms of the kinds of kin relations,
place of residence made little difference in persons’ responses to questions
about their involvement with siblings. Urban residents, were however, less
likely to socialize with their parents (Fischer 1982:81–84). Fischer interprets
his findings by arguing that urban life, as we have been suggesting through-
out this book, makes possible a wide range of living choices and lifestyles.
Urbanites are freer than small-town residents to choose what kinds of rela-
tionships they wish to form and maintain. In the urban context, then, kin
are only one of many kinds of contacts that persons may sustain. Small-town
residents, by contrast, have many fewer alternatives to choose from and may
lack the institutional alternatives provided by urban life—professional sport-
ing events, art museums, symphonies, and art fairs, for example. Such activ-
ities provide numerous arenas within which strangers may meet one another.
It would be a mistake, however, for us as students of urban life to conclude
that because urbanites have fewer kin ties than small-town residents, kinship is
therefore unimportant in their lives. Empirical studies (Espinoza 1999; Hoyt
and Babchuk 1983; Wellman 1985; Wellman and Gulia 1999) show clearly
that kinship still plays a vital role in urban life. When 800 residents of two
midwestern urban areas were asked about factors influencing the probability
of kin being viewed as intimates or confidants, gender emerged as a critical
factor. Women were “both more likely to be cited as a confidant and to have
confidant ties with kin” (Hoyt and Babchuk 1983:84), a finding corrobo-
rated in Wellman and Gulia’s (1999) research on social support networks.
Barry Wellman’s studies of urban networks (Wellman 1973, 1979, 1985;
Wellman and Gulia 1999) yield some important findings on the lives of resi-
dents in East York, a residential area of Toronto. He first surveyed 845 East
Yorkers in 1968, and the results of that effort indicated that “the most intimate
ties (and the very closest) were with either kin or friends. Intimate ties with co-
workers and neighbors were less common and usually less close” (1985:163).
During 1977–1980 Wellman interviewed 33 of the respondents who had
been surveyed in 1968. Through in-depth interviewing and open-ended
questioning he was able to get persons talking in their own terms about issues
important to them regarding their personal networks. Wellman’s work also
documents the extent to which it is women who do the bulk of the work
involved in maintaining relationships with both neighbors and kin:
In those households with both a husband and a wife, there are specialized divi-
sions of network labor. The men contribute their skills as well as a good deal
of social companionship. Yet it is the women who maintain the East Yorkers’
networks—contributing much sociability and emotional aid, as well as a good
deal of companionship—because it is the women who do the great majority of
the households’ domestic work, even if they also do large amounts of paid work.
(Wellman 1985:182)
Wellman’s work clearly indicates how gender and its accompanying social
assumptions lead to a situation where it is almost automatically expected that
women’s “natural” role is to provide emotional aid and social support for others.
Such an assumption, however, blinds us to the tremendous amount of effort and
labor that go into these activities. In perhaps the first study to propose the con-
cept of “kin work,” Micaela Di Leonardo (1984, 1987) beautifully illustrates
the considerable number of activities and tasks comprising the category called
kin work. Her study of northern California Italian-American families of varying
social classes documents how “it is kinship contact across households, as much
as women’s work within them, that fulfills our cultural expectations of satisfying
family life” (1987:43). Her definition of kin work is particularly illuminating:
By kin work I refer to the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of

cross-household kin ties, including visits, letters, telephone calls, presents, and
cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings; the creation and mainte-
nance of quasi-kin relations; decisions to neglect or intensify particular ties; the
mental work of reflection about all these activities. (1987:42–43)
76 BEING URBAN
You might test Di Leonardo’s notion of kin work against your personal
experiences. Who mails the birthday and holiday cards in your home? Who
cooks the holiday dinners and telephones invitations to the relatives? Though
gender norms are evolving toward egalitarianism in American society, women
still typically are the ones who do these kinds of activities.
Di Leonardo’s study also documents an event occurring throughout the
metropolitan centers of the United States: the care of the elderly is primarily
assigned to women by virtue of their kin work. Often hospitals will not release
patients early unless there is someone available to care for them at home—and
that someone is usually an adult daughter (Glazer 1988). Were this unpaid,
invisible labor by women withdrawn, urban hospitals would face even more
pressing financial problems, and many municipal budgets would have to be
increased drastically to pay for the support services now provided free by
women in their homes, especially the care given by adult daughters to their
elderly parents and other kin (Olesen 1989; Stoller 1983). As Olesen notes
in this regard, the amount of “hidden care” provided by women is enormous:
The Older Women’s League (OWL) estimates that the value of women’s unpaid
work in American society is $515 billion annually, more than twice that of men.
OWL’s figures do not specify how much time spent in the case of the sick contrib-
utes to that figure, but it is reasonable to surmise that it must be substantial.
(1989:5)
Data from a recent panel study of older women show that women continue
to disproportionately bear the burden of caring for their elderly parents.
Richard Johnson and Anthony Lo Sasso (2006) reported that “[a]bout 28%
of women ages 57-67 with surviving parents spent at least 200 hours in the
24 months between 1996 and 1998 assisting their parents with personal care
activities or with chores or errands” (201). They go on to note that these
women, who are approaching retirement themselves, spend enough time
helping out their parents to significantly negatively impact their earnings
power. Further, they demonstrate that the responsibility of parental care is
unequally distributed by gender among adult children, finding that “[t]he
probability that women help their elderly parents falls significantly as the
number of sisters increases, but the effect of brothers is insignificant” (205).
SEEING COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION

We have tried to show why a purely ecological theoretical perspective may
be an obstacle to capturing the full range of meanings, identification, and
social relations possible in urban areas. In taking this position, we do not

mean to imply that viable geographical communities are nonexistent in the
city space. Such an implication would be contrary to the evidence provided
by a number of urban community studies. These studies show that there is
frequently a clear social organization in situations first appearing wholly disor-
ganized. It is somewhat ironic that the very factors taken by Chicago ecolo-
gists as indices of disorder are used in these studies to demonstrate the
existence of an ordered community social life. As mentioned earlier, Frederick
Thrasher studied over 1,000 gangs in Chicago. In this work, and in sociologi-
cal work generally, the gang has always been viewed as a most visible and dis-
tressing symbol of urban disorganization. The documenting of Chicago
gangs further worked to validate the developing image of the city as the pro-
genitor of social pathology. It was not until the publication of William F.
Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society that the gang could be seen as reflecting
a community’s organization rather than its dissolution.
In still later studies, the ecological area presumably representing the very
epitome of disorder—the urban slum—is shown to possess a distinctive moral
order. To see this order, however, we must sometimes be willing to question
what first appears obvious. It seems obvious, for example, that the more
organized crime there is in an area, the more disorganized that area must
be. In order to illustrate the necessity of questioning such seemingly unassail-
able ideas, we ask you to consider the following examples.
In his 1931 autobiography, Lincoln Steffens tells of the following incident.
His billfold having been stolen in a New York subway, Steffens complained to
city officials. Imagine the difficulty of ever finding it in a city of several million
people. That very evening, however, his wallet was returned to him intact.
In this case, organized criminals were responsible for the quick retrieval of
an important individual’s stolen property. The quick retrieval obviously
demanded a high level of social organization that typically is not visible to
us. The organized criminals did not want too much free-floating crime taking
place because it potentially put too much pressure on them. In other words,
we frequently find organized criminals becoming one of the major organs of
social control because they cannot tolerate unorganized crime, which causes
a public clamor and makes things difficult for them. A second example illus-
trates the same point.
In the summer of 1966, New York was experiencing the threat of a strug-
gle in Brooklyn between Italian and black gangs. The situation was further
complicated by the development in the affected areas of a Jewish vigilante
group—the Maccabees—who began to patrol the area at night in order to
prevent or reduce muggings, robberies, and “rumbles.” Despite their efforts,
78 BEING URBAN
the situation threatened to get out of hand. A solution was provided to the
problem. How was the difficulty stopped? The local rabbi in charge of the
vigilante group, together with a city officer, approached a leader of a criminal
organization—one of the top racketeers in the city. They explained that the
juvenile warfare was threatening the community and had to be stopped. The
very next day the Italian juveniles left the area and went back to their own
communities, ceasing their attacks on the black gangs. The result of this solu-
tion was an enormous outcry in the newspapers as people asked what kind of
city had to rely on organized criminals to produce and maintain community
order. We would simply answer that such a city is a highly organized one.
In short, once we are willing to look at certain social forms from unfamiliar
angles, we may come to perceive those forms differently and more clearly.
A number of urban community studies written since 1943 look at the com-
munity from such unfamiliar angles. The accumulated evidence from these
researches further causes us to question the image of the urban center as the
source of unremitting anomie.
In 1943 William F. Whyte published his now classic study of Boston’s
North End. We can use Whyte’s own words to describe how his study began:
I began with the vague idea that I wanted to study a slum district. Eastern City
provided several possible choices. In the early weeks of my Harvard Fellowship
I spent some of my time walking up and down the streets of various slum dis-
tricts of Eastern City and talking with people in social agencies about these
districts. . . . I made my choice on very unscientific grounds: Cornerville best fit-
ted my picture of what a slum district should look like. Somehow I had devel-
oped a picture of rundown three to five story buildings crowded together.
(Whyte 1943:283)
The fact that from a very early point Whyte saw the need to investigate this
slum community through direct participation observation was not, we think,
merely incidental in allowing him to make certain discoveries about its structure.
He became a member of the community for more than two years. So much did
he see the need to integrate himself into the community that he worked during
that time to learn Italian. We call attention to the method employed by Whyte
because it has implications for some of the arguments that we have been making
in this chapter and will continue to make throughout the book. We have been
advocating the necessity of coming to understand how persons experience and
give meaning to their lives as city dwellers. Unless we grasp how persons define
their own behaviors and the environment in which they produce those behav-
iors, we shall comprehend their lives incompletely. If the goal of symbolic
interaction is to uncover these meaning structures, then we must be careful as

researchers not to impose our meanings on those we study. We advocate direct
participation observation as the method best allowing the researcher to remain
true to this task of seeing the world from the perspective of those studied,
providing the investigator does not lose sight of history.
Primarily through chance, Whyte made friends with several members of a
street-corner gang that “hung around” the area. His entry to this group was
provided, in particular, through Doc, who was the leader of the gang and
whose confidence Whyte gained. This gang became the central focus of
Whyte’s research over the two-year period that he studied Cornerville. While
the study of a single gang of 10 to 12 persons seems a very limited focus for
two years’ work, it became apparent to Whyte, after a short time, that he
could see many facets of the community reflected in the gang. The gang
became a kind of lens through which Whyte would come to see the highly
organized nature of this urban community. In terms of some of the points
that we have already made in this chapter, Whyte realized that the gang was
only one part of a highly elaborated system of social networks in the commu-
nity and itself an important source of personal identity for its members.
It soon became obvious to Whyte (a point not easily accessible to the outsider
who views the community from a distance) that the gang was tightly linked to
other institutional sectors of the community—especially the political struc-
ture and organized crime.
Whyte eventually came to see that the community was rather tightly
held together through a system of developed obligations and reciprocities.
These findings, which hold true today, have important implications for the
way that we look at urban community life. Whyte’s findings led to a complete
reorganization of our usual conceptions of slum areas. He recognized that
one cannot define an area of the city as a slum only in terms of its physical
characteristics. Rather, we have to consider whether there is an order, a social
organization, a pattern of interactions that holds the area together regardless
of its physical appearance. We must realize that “slum” means much more
than physical deterioration. The essence of community lies in the kinds of
social bondings described and documented by Whyte. We reiterate that the
social organization discovered by Whyte is not readily obvious without inves-
tigation. Once we look carefully at certain areas of the city, we shall find viable
communities that might otherwise escape us.
Gerald Suttles (1968), in his aptly titled book The Social Order of the Slum,
an observational study of the Addams area of the Near West Side of Chicago,
further supports our contention that intense and careful observation is abso-
lutely necessary for discovering the less visible components of community
80 BEING URBAN
social arrangements. Suttles’s own close observations allowed him to make

the convincingly strong case that there exists a clear moral order in this slum
area. It is a moral order rooted in the personalized relationships that members
of the community have with one another. It is a moral order derived from
persons’ needs to come to grips with a “dangerous and uncontrollable outer
world” (1968:ix).
It is particularly useful that Suttles shows the possibility of combining an
ecological approach to the study of community with a sensitive attention to
the internal, cultural, and symbolic meaning structures established by the res-
idents. He offers further certification for our earlier assertion that various
urban institutions importantly foster channels of communication and, hence,
community solidarity. The Addams area was a particularly interesting context
for investigation because it is an ethnically segmented community. The area is
ecologically separated into a number of neighborhoods, each of which is eth-
nically homogeneous. The four major groups living in the area were a black
group, an Italian group, a Mexican group, and a Puerto Rican group.
Suttles’s argument is that although these groups are segmented by a num-
ber of ecological, institutional, and cultural factors, this segmentation can be
described as ordered segmentation. He means that discontinuities and con-
flicts between groups do not necessarily preclude consensually held needs,
goals, and interests. It would be contrary to common sense to disregard cul-
tural, political, and racial conflict in the city; such differences obviously exist.
Suttles asks us, however, not to leap from our observations of these overt
differences to the conclusion that there is no underlying social organization
or order in the community. The well-worn metaphor that warns us against
looking only at the tip of the iceberg applies most directly to community life.
We have too frequently assumed that a community existed only in what could
be readily seen—in Suttles’s case it was conflict and cultural differences that
stood out on first inspection. More detailed observation alerts us to question
the faulty assumption that conflict immediately signals social disorganization.
The anthropologist Eliot Liebow offers further evidence to support our
earlier contention that certain urban institutions (taverns, poolrooms, laun-
dromats) come to have a function as “informal communications centers,
forums, places to display and assess talents, and staging areas for a wide range
of activities, legal and illegal, and extralegal” (Liebow 1967:viii). Tally’s Cor-
ner is an especially revealing study because it documents the wide-ranging
patterns of communication between persons in an urban black ghetto, an area
of the city generally considered wholly lacking in any social organization.
In some ways we must construe Liebow’s work as a kind of replication of
William Whyte’s study done 30 years earlier. Like Whyte, Liebow studied a
rather small group of men in depth. And, like Whyte, Liebow documented a
tightly and elaborately established network of primary, face-to-face relation-
ships. It is, further, through an examination of these relationships that
broader features of the community are revealed. The underlying relations
between fathers and their children, husbands and wives, and patterns of
friendship give an order to what often appears from the outside as a disorgan-
ized, chaotic situation. The necessity of creating and sustaining personal,
identity-fostering relationships is especially great for the persons described
by Liebow—black persons facing a continually hostile world that helps to sus-
tain a cycle of economic failure in their lives. Under these conditions the pro-
duction of a strong network of primary social relations becomes all the more
imperative. Liebow expresses well the sense of community that we have been
proposing in this chapter:
More than most social worlds, perhaps, the streetcorner world takes its shape
and color from the structure and character of the face-to-face relationships of
the people in it. Unlike other areas of our society, where a large proportion of
the individual’s energies, concerns and time are invested in self-improvement,
career and job development, family and community activities, religious and cul-
tural pursuits, or even in broad, impersonal social and political issues, these re-
sources in the street-corner world are almost entirely given over to the
construction and maintenance of personal relationships. On the streetcorner,
each man has his own network of these personal relationships and each man’s
network defines for him the members of his personal community. His personal
community, then, is not a bounded area but rather a web-like arrangement of
man–man and man–woman relationships in which he is selectively attached in
a particular way to a definite number of discrete persons. In like fashion, each
of these persons has his own personal network. (1967:162)
Like Liebow’s treatment of community discussed above, a more recent

examination of neighborhood life by Sudhir Venkatesh demonstrates the
degree to which an apparently crime-riddled, disorganized neighborhood in
fact forms a rather well-organized, even functional community. Though the
residents of the Chicago neighborhood he pseudonymously dubs Maquis
Park have been left largely unemployed by the United States’ transition to a
postindustrial economy, he shows that
the seemingly random collection of men and women in the community—young

and old, professional and destitute—were nearly all linked together in a vast,
often invisible web that girded their neighborhood. This web was the under-
ground economy. Through it the local doctors received home-cooked meals
from a stay-at-home down the block; a prostitute got free groceries by offering
82 BEING URBAN
her services to the local grocer; a willing police officer overlooked minor trans-
gressions in exchange for information from a gang member; and a store owner
might hire a local homeless person to sleep in his store at night, in part because
a security guard was too costly. (2006: xiii)
And again, as Whyte had found more than a half century earlier in Boston,
a key part of the informal economy and the community more generally was a
street gang. In Venkatesh’s Maquis Park, in the place of Doc and his boys, we
find the Black Kings. Venkatesh notes that residents have a conflicted rela-
tionship with the street gang. Though on one hand they deplore the violence
that the gang engages in with some frequency, as poor African-Americans on
the South Side of Chicago, they know they cannot regularly depend on the
police to provide public safety. Further, the gang forms a crucial part of the
underground economy in which most residents participate. Thus, community
leaders, including the local pastor, work with the gang to come to agreement
on standards of behavior. The gang’s leader, Big Cat, willingly and openly
negotiates to work for the communities’ best interests, while still maintaining
his gang’s profitable, illegal business in prostitution and narcotics sales.
“Such,” Venkatesh writes, “was Big Cat’s involvement in the well-being of
his community; an unapologetic criminal, he nevertheless knew that he
couldn’t afford to be insensitive to his neighbors” (293).
To reiterate, what we see in situations such as that described by Venkatesh
is the way in which the fabric of city life is crafted in small-scale interactions.
As interactionists, we must recognize that even apparently monolithic, anony-
mous institutions such as “the economy” are crafted at a basic level in interac-
tion; but not simply minimax calculations of costs and benefits by individuals
exchanging goods, cash, or services. Big Cat and his fellow community mem-
bers recognize that economic activities are meaningful—selling drugs in the
park is not the same as selling ice cream. And so they must negotiate how
these different activities will be carried out in such a way that leaves commu-
nity members feeling some degree of comfort, at the same time they convey
profits to the Black Kings.
Mitchell Duneier (1999) nicely focuses our attention on how outsiders’
views of homeless street vendors in New York’s Greenwich Village contrast
dramatically with the meanings of daily life created by the men themselves.
For outsiders the community structure is invisible—How can these people
be part of a community if they don’t even have an address there?
Outsiders, and even many residents of the Village, tend to see the men’s
lives in basically stereotypical terms, that is to say, as homeless men, as black
men, as potential criminals. The end result of such outsiders’ views is to create
a vicious circle of sorts in which the key institutions in the city do little actually
to improve life in the community. Duneier notes that police and some busi-
nesses regard the men as “broken windows”—signs of blight in the commu-
nity that can lead to crime and disorder. This follows the notion popularized
by Kelling and Wilson (1982) that broken windows on cars or buildings act
as a sign to criminals that a neighborhood is lacking in order and is a good
place to commit further crimes. Policing strategies in the 1980s onward have
concentrated on removing such signs of disorder from neighborhoods. But
Duneier points out that
[t]he men working on Sixth Avenue may be viewed as broken windows, but this
[Duneier’s] research shows that most of them have actually become public char-
acters who create a set of expectations, for one another and strangers (including
those of the criminal element—as, indeed, many of them once were), that
“someone cares” and that they should strive to live better lives.
Indeed, Duneier found that among these vendors, there is relatively little
criminality beyond a certain degree of recreational drug use and public urina-
tion. More significant, Duneier finds, is their contribution to life in the
Greenwich Village community. As eyes on the street, these men may actually
make the sidewalks a safer place for residents to walk. Some even have ties to
local businesses, providing services like feeding customers’ parking meters.
But perhaps even more important is the community that the vendors build
among themselves. Duneier demonstrates that many of these men are ex-
convicts or current and former drug addicts. Some have no family ties. Most
have been unable to find gainful employment in the formal sector of the
economy. Street vending is a sort of last resort, and Duneier describes it as a
sort of salvation for many men. Though they compete with each other for
customers and for space on the street, more notable is the degree of co-
operation between the vendors. They teach each other the ins and outs of
the business. They police each other’s behavior, making sure they put a good
face forward to the community. And ultimately, more than one of these
homeless vendors “begins to feel the self-respect that also comes from know-
ing that he is earning ‘an honest living’. After a time . . . he makes his way off
the streets to an apartment” (Duneier 1999:315).
While the vendors’ values and lived experiences tend to contrast sharply
with outsiders’ views of their lives, and while many do find vending to be a
path away from living on the streets, this is not to say that they are placed
on a very long upward trajectory. They will not rise very high on the socioeco-
nomic ladder. This community, like numerous other low-income minority
84 BEING URBAN
ones, is faced with a number of structural barriers in terms of education and

employment that are historical legacies of the social location of minorities in
American society. We will return to this point in more detail in Chapter 7,
in the section “Thinking About Urban Problems.”
CONCLUSION
Our review of community in this chapter suggests that people in cities are
far from solitary, isolated malcontents. We have shown that sociologists find
community in the most unlikely places. We also must, however, note that
the degree of social support found by people in cities is variable. As Eric
Klinenberg explains in his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in
Chicago, in Chicago’s 1995 heat wave, certain neighborhoods were dispro-
portionately affected. Among the over 700 heat-related fatalities, a great pro-
portion were elderly African-Americans who lived in neighborhoods with low
levels of social networking and neighborliness. Other residents, even among
those living in great poverty, were more likely to survive to the extent that
they lived in neighborhoods with stronger social ties like some of those we
have described above (Klinenberg 2003). More generally, Sampson and other
urban researchers have worked to describe collective efficacy—“social cohe-
sion combined with shared expectations for social control” (Sampson 2012)—
as highly variable between neighborhoods. While some neighborhoods exhibit
a great deal of neighborliness and are able to accomplish goals like getting
streets paved and keeping the streets safe, there do exist neighborhoods with
low levels of trust or community as we have described above. There are places
in the city where it is essentially “every man for himself.”
Despite that caveat, our review of the literature leads to the recognition
that we miss much in our analysis of city life by evaluating its quality in terms
of the existence or nonexistence of clear ecological communities. While there
is evidence that such community forms exist, they do not fully encompass the
lives of the majority of urban persons. The relative disappearance of the
“village” community type should not make us leap to the immediate conclu-
sion that urbanites live “nonsocial” existences. On the contrary, it has been
our position that community still exists; it has simply taken a different form.
If the essence of any community lies in patterns of warm, intimate interac-
tions, then communities are to be found in cities.
We find it reasonable to characterize urban life in terms of a number of
individual, personal, or intimate communities. Persons, we think, owe alle-
giance less to a particular territory than to a network of social relationships
that is without boundaries. This idea leads us to see that there are as many
urban communities as there are urban persons. Some have more extensive
interactional networks than others, and some obviously have overlapping
networks, but we are unlikely to find two personal communities that will be
identical.
Once we put greatest emphasis on urbanites’ interactional social circles, we
find that we are no longer bounded or restricted in our view of what human
community is or can be in the city. The view of community as a complex net-
work of interpersonal relations allows us to see other features of the urban
social world. We must consider that urban social relations are, like any other
set of human interactions, in a continual state of change, transition, or pro-
cess. We have seen that the rediscovery of community depends on the ana-
lyst’s ability to look at the world in a new way. Community is alive; it is our
old conceptions of community that are no longer viable.
We also have detailed why this transformation in the nature of community
became necessary. As the city becomes progressively more impersonal, per-
sons must create new sources of sentiment, meaning, and identification.
As persons’ needs demand it, they will assign new meanings to objects and
make different usages of existing institutions. We have seen how the market-
place is used by some as a source for identity-fostering relationships. We have
briefly discussed the possibility that institutions, such as sports, may become
the basis for subjective community identification. Our analysis is based
on the presumption that persons are active participants in the construction
of their worlds.
We may also see how technological developments facilitate the kinds of
interactional arrangements that we are describing. As technology develops,
it is possible to create interactional networks that are literally boundless geo-
graphically—for example, the use of the social media like Facebook and Link-
edIn in maintaining interactional circles of primary relations among
geographically dispersed persons. With the advent of smartphones, people
can literally carry their social network with them wherever they go, instantly
send messages to friends or colleagues on the other side of the globe, and
share the details of their day-to-day lives with everyone they know.
As our analysis of several community studies indicated, the lives of resi-
dents are often characterized by a high degree of regularity and social organi-
zation that is usually invisible to outsiders lacking firsthand familiarity with
community life. In Chapter 4 we turn our attention to the seemingly random,
chaotic, “unstructured” world of everyday public life in cities. Our task, to
borrow a phrase from Freud, is to make conscious that which is presently
unconscious.
86 BEING URBAN
NOTES
1. Some recent work, however, disputes this criterion, regarding virtual commun-
ities constructed in cyberspace as communities, though their members do not share
any physical proximity (for example, Gottschalk 2010). Griswold usefully distin-
guishes such communities as “relational” communities, as opposed to the more tradi-
tional “spatial” communities we discuss in this book (Griswold 2012).
2. It may not be entirely fair to Park to criticize human ecology for ignoring social
interaction. In fact, Park’s studies did include consideration of social interaction, and
he did define society as involving social interaction. Although ecologists talked about
“community” as being in some sense subsocial (a view that derives from the intellec-
tual origins of the human ecological studies), much of what in fact was done did
include the societal or interactional aspects. See Chapter 1.
3. While making this general criticism, we do not wish to imply that there is never
any linkage between the city’s ecology and patterns of behavior. Sociologists at
Chicago documented a correlation between distance from the city center and the
occurrence of such behaviors as mental disorders and juvenile delinquency. This is
not to say, however, that the correspondence is perfect or that “subsocial” explana-
tions are valid.
4. For some examples of empirical studies of the “factorial ecology of cities,” see
the collection of studies edited by Schwirian (1974).
CHAPTER 4
The Social Organization of

Everyday City Life
O ur task of specifying or amending long-standing images of city life is not

yet completed. In Chapter 3 we chiefly considered how certain sociological
images of community life have limited our understanding of urbanites’ rela-
tions with one another. We discussed at some length the necessity of viewing
“community” in terms of the range of meanings, sentiments, and feelings
constituting persons’ own images of their lives in cities. To this point, you
should have achieved a better understanding of how sustaining patterns of
interaction develop in cities—networks of social interaction that are not
bounded spatially. You should better appreciate, by now, the subtle ways in
which urban community life is organized. You should recognize, as well,
how urbanites use city institutions to achieve a source of identification with
each other and with the city itself.
There is, however, a conspicuous aspect of urban life that our presentation
thus far does not fully prepare us to understand. We have not yet thought
about how city persons deal with, make sense of, or manage anonymous pub-
lic encounters. If, as social psychologists, we see it as a major goal of sociologi-
cal inquiry to capture those whom we study “in their own terms,” then we
must ask how urban persons perceive and interact with fellow urbanites on a
day-to-day basis in public places. Urbanites do, after all, come into contact
with vast numbers of persons daily on city streets, on public conveyances,
waiting in lines, and so forth. Simmel (1971) saw the everyday tempo of city
life as importantly affecting the social psychology of urban persons.
88 BEING URBAN
There are, then, a number of questions that a focus on public city encoun-
ters leads us to ask: In what ways do urbanites see themselves constrained by
the urban scene? In what ways might the anonymity of daily life provide urban
persons with a greater freedom than might be found in the relative intimacy of
nonurban settings? What are the perceived risks in establishing relations with
strangers in the urban milieu? How do urbanites deal with the potential over-
load of stimuli that they are forced to confront daily? How do spatial configura-
tions unique to the urban context shape our view of ourselves and our relations
with others? Is there a clear normative structure to anonymous encounters?
In general, the guiding question for this chapter is, in what ways are urban per-
sons relating or failing to relate to one another in anonymous public settings?
An abiding image of the city stresses the failure of urbanites in public places
to treat each other with any degree of civility. The litany of complaints about
the insensitivity that they show toward one another is long. Adjectives like
uncivilized, uncaring, indifferent, reserved, uncommunicative, and blasé are
frequently used to describe urbanites’ attitudes toward one another. Visitors
to large cities claim that it is frequently difficult to find someone willing to
give simple directions. Urbanites seem to treat each other as adversaries, fre-
quently competing for scarce resources—seats on subways, parking spaces,
cabs, or places in line. Persons bump into one another on crowded streets,
barely acknowledging the unwelcome contact. In the extreme this uncaring
attitude is seemingly proved by the failure of urbanites to intervene even in
cases where persons are in desperate trouble. Instances of persons being
robbed, or even murdered, while many others watch without intervening,
are often taken as exemplifying the total lack of responsibility for each other
that persons feel in urban public places. This image is shared by some social
scientists. Sociologists Catherine E. Ross, John Mirowsky, and Shana Pribesh
(2002) found that, even after controlling for personal disadvantages and the
effects of living in or near crumbling inner city neighborhoods, city dwellers
are more distrustful of other people than nonurban residents. They note that
[t]he density and scale of big cities means that residents experience frequent prox-
imity to many people they do not know personally. One learns which of one’s
acquaintances can be trusted, but strangers are unknowns. The diversity of urban
cultures and subcultures may compound the ambiguity, making individuals less
confident that they can accurately interpret the behavior of strangers. People may
be more cautious when they are less able to distinguish true threat. (78)
We do not contest that there is an important degree of truth in this image

of cities. Rather, it is often overstated. It needs specification. It does not
THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF EVERYDAY CITY LIFE 89
adequately explain how city life is possible in any form. We must come to
understand how, in the face of this presumably chaotic urban place, persons
manage to get along at all. To this end we must get beyond loose description
of everyday urban life. We must analyze the daily situations faced by urban
persons, the way those situations are defined, and how they are ultimately
dealt with.
EVERYDAY INTERACTION: A NEGLECTED

ASPECT OF CITY LIFE
Since the 1970s sociologists have systematically studied everyday public
behavior. Especially before the 1990s, relatively few social scientists viewed
the urban public realm as a theoretically and practically important area of
inquiry. One notable exception was Erving Goffman, whose books (Goffman
1959, 1961, 1963, 1971, 1974) have been influential in showing the utility
of frameworks for ordering a variety of everyday encounters. Goffman is not
generally considered an urban sociologist, but his work has increasingly been
adapted to considerations of life in urban public spaces (see, for example,
Anderson 1990, 2000; Duneier 1999; Grazian 2008; Jerolmack 2009).
To the extent that many of the examples in his writing on everyday public inter-
actions are drawn from urban contexts, Goffman’s work provides an invaluable
framework for our understandings of urban sociability. With regard to the
sociological importance of studying everyday behaviors, Goffman says,
Although this area [the study of behavior in public and semipublic places] has
not been recognized as a special domain for sociological inquiry, it perhaps
should be, for the rules of conduct in streets, parks, restaurants, shops, dance
floors, meeting halls, and other gathering places of any community tell us a great
deal about its most diffuse forms of social organization. (1963:4)
Attention to everyday social interaction as a major area of sociological

inquiry generally—and of urban sociology more particularly—is vitally impor-
tant to the discipline. We say this because even those theorists who analyze
large institutional arrangements in a society must have some guiding model
of the nature of microsocial interaction. One writer has made this point by
stating that “the process of interaction is . . . at the logical core of sociological
interest, even though for some purposes, particularly of a macrosociological
sort, this is often left implicit” (Wilson 1970:697).
It is a major premise of this book, and a major underlying theme of sym-
bolic interaction, that one cannot fully understand the operation of any large
90 BEING URBAN
institutional complex (a school, a business organization, an army, a city) with-

out paying attention to the ways in which the individuals who make up that
institution are defining and making sense of it. Sociologists may lose sight of
the fact that institutions are composed of acting, thinking, defining, interact-
ing human beings. The study of face-to-face interaction is not, therefore, sim-
ply an exercise motivated by idle curiosity. “Any understanding of human
behavior at whatever level of ordering or generality must begin with and be
built upon an understanding of everyday life of the members performing
those actions” (Douglas 1970a:11).
Those unacquainted with the growing sociological literature on interac-
tion in urban public spaces may overlook this vital aspect of city life. One rea-
son may be that in most public urban situations, individuals do not appear to
be interacting. In anonymous urban situations they seem to avoid one
another, closing themselves off from direct communication. Urbanites fre-
quently hide behind newspapers. They normally avoid excessive eye contact
as an invitation to interaction. They maximize their “personal space”
(Sommer 1969). Any interactions that may occur seem to be of a transitory,
ephemeral sort. They are encounters constructed around a question asked
and an answer given, an accidental bump and an “I’m sorry.” These are inter-
actions without a career. They have no past and hold little possibility of a
future. Urbanites seem to shun involvement with others at nearly all cost.
They watch passively as a person is beaten up on the street. They pass by der-
elicts lying in the gutter. They seem to look upon any direct encounters with
others as fraught with danger. City dwellers, in sum, appear distrustful, if not
fearful, of contact with others. Hence, the logical question: “How can one
study public urban interactions when no such interactions are occurring?”
One of the things we shall try to show here is that those who hold to this
view have too narrow an idea of social interaction. Interaction encompasses
more than direct verbal communication. We advocate a view that interaction
is occurring in any social situation in which persons are acting in awareness
of others and are continually adjusting their behaviors to the expectations
and possible responses of others. Our definition, for example, would cause
us to see avoidance as a form of social interaction. As we shall see, there are
occasions, particularly in urban settings, when persons must communicate
to others that they wish to avoid communication. In the typical urban street
situation it appears that persons have nothing to do with each other, that per-
sons on subway cars bear no relation to one another, and so on. By looking
closely at the behavior of persons in such contexts, we see that the operation
of our everyday behavior as urbanites demands a high degree of cooperation.
We must question the assumption that urban interactions are haphazard,
unordered, or altogether nonexistent. Immediately we assert that persons in

public places cooperate with one another, if for no other reason than to pre-
serve and sustain their social identities. The “moral” task of preserving both
one’s own and others’ public images is most detailed in Goffman’s writings.
IDENTITY AND INTERACTION

Goffman is primarily responsible for what has come to be known as the
“dramaturgical” view of interaction. In our previous discussions we argued
that people are not merely passive agents abiding by fixed meaning structures.
Persons, rather, are always in the process of defining and redefining one
another’s acts, and they are continually interpreting and assigning meanings
to the situations in which they are behaving. The dramaturgical view of inter-
action developed by Goffman clearly falls within a symbolic interactionist
frame of reference. Goffman is sympathetic to the idea that persons must
interpret the interactions in which they find themselves, that they must forge
out meanings in the encounters in which they participate. In Goffman’s work,
and central to the dramaturgical model, certain aspects of this process are
emphasized. Beyond being role-players and meaning interpreters, Goffman
sees persons as continually manipulating meanings in interaction.
Goffman sees persons as continually fostering impressions of themselves
(the model is sometimes referred to as an “impression-management” model).
Persons often systematically exclude information about themselves that might
be damaging in any particular social encounter. For Goffman, human beings
are frequently “on” in the theatrical sense. He views persons as primarily
concerned with their appearances. It matters little what one actually is.
What really matters is what one appears to be, because it is on the basis of
appearances that persons will formulate their definitions of the situation.
In other words, individuals always have some motive for trying to control
the definition of the situation that others will come to have. In the analogy
suggested by a dramaturgical view of interaction, the essential reality of life
becomes a series of fostered roles, and society becomes a theater in which all
are actors engaged in a perpetual play. Goffman’s view results from his taking
seriously Shakespeare’s claim that “All the world’s a stage. And all the men
and women merely players.”
There are a number of major assumptions underlying such a view of
human relations. Because of space limitations we shall not attempt to discuss
all of them. We must, however, note what is clearly the major assumption
underlying this model. Basic to the dramaturgical model is the view that peo-
ple are guided in their behavior by the need for approval. Goffman sees us as
92 BEING URBAN
anxious to receive social approval for our behaviors. The approving agreement
of others helps to confirm the images that we have of ourselves. We want to be
seen as social, as proper, as worthwhile persons. People coming together are
always trying to present their best “faces” in an attempt to win recognition
and approval from others. Goffman does not see us as having only one identity.
We have, rather, a repertoire of identities, and we choose from among these the
identity that will make us appear most proper in front of a particular audience.
Given this characterization of human life, we can begin to see the tentative-
ness, fragility, and risks that may be involved in any social interaction. In the
beginning of his first major work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(1959), Goffman argues that if we are always managing impressions in order
to appear proper, then there is a major risk to be run in any social interaction.
There is the ever-present possibility that the images and identities presented
to others are subject to disruption. Any interaction is likely suddenly to be
punctured by events that cast new and unfavorable light on us. There is always
the possibility that our presented self-image will be disconfirmed by public
events. Given such a model, it is no mystery why the dramaturgic analyst’s
work frequently focuses on the commission of improprieties. The study of
public deviance is a necessary research concern. It is by studying those situa-
tions in which something goes awry that we are informed about the processes
through which order is normally maintained.
For Goffman (and this is a theme that runs through a good deal of his
work), individuals in public places work to ensure their “properness” by care-
fully monitoring the nature of their involvement with others. To the extent
that those in public places wish to be seen as proper by those around them,
they are clearly taking one another into account in producing their own
behaviors. The silent, internal question that persons must continually raise
for themselves is: “What is sufficient presence or involvement in various social
contexts?” More directly of interest for us is an assessment of what constitutes
appropriate situational involvement in urban, anonymous public situations.
The decisions made by persons in public regarding the proper extent of their
involvement with others hinge on an important feature of urban public life—
persons in anonymous urban settings have little or no biographical informa-
tion about one another; they are strangers.
CITY LIFE AS A WORLD OF STRANGERS1

In seeking to discover the hidden dimensions of urban public life, one fact
seems of unique importance. Anonymous public sectors are composed of per-
sons who are strangers to one another. “Far from being constantly surrounded
by persons who share his culture and have a stake in preserving his system of
meaning and interactional rituals, the urbanite, whenever he ventures forth into
the public sector of the city, is instead, plunged into a world peopled by many
strange and alien others” (Lofland 1971a:97). The fact of urbanites’ strangeness
to one another would seem, on the face of it, to have profound implications for
the way that public life is managed. Clearly, the way that we conduct ourselves
in interaction is a function of the degree of intimacy that exists between
ourselves and others.
We have already asserted, following our description of Goffman’s drama-
turgical model of interaction, that it is our ongoing task to appear proper in
the eyes of others. Persons are concerned with presenting a “correct” self in
any social encounter. In urban settings, the strategies employed by actors,
the definitions of the situation they construct, the impressions of themselves
offered to others, and the extent to which their activity is calculated are all
inescapably related to their mutual status as strangers.
The status of stranger has long intrigued sociological theorists (Berger
1970; McLemore 1970; Schutz 1960; Simmel 1950b). In Simmel’s discus-
sion (1950b), the relationship of the stranger to organized group life
is stressed. Simmel is not so much concerned with one-to-one relations
between persons as he is with the relationship between an individual and a
larger social system (a group, a community, or an institution). The special
quality of the stranger’s status is the fact that while he or she may hold mem-
bership in a group, he or she nevertheless remains a peripheral or marginal
member of the group. In Simmel’s words, the stranger is near and distant at
the same time. “It is that synthesis of nearness and distance which constitutes
the formal position of the stranger” (1950b:404).
In “The Stranger,” the philosopher Alfred Schutz (1960) also speaks of
the status of the stranger in terms of the individual’s relationship to some
organized group life. In Schutz’s case, greatest stress is placed on the fact that
the stranger is not knowledgeable about the “taken-for-granted” cultural
pattern of the everyday life of the group to which he or she seeks admission.
The stranger does not share the same relevancies of everyday life as the group
members do. He or she is not sure exactly how to interpret social situations,
social events, and social behaviors. The stranger, typified by the immigrant,
is, at least initially, puzzled by the incoherence, lack of clarity, and seeming
inconsistency of the group’s cultural pattern. The stranger is forced to call
into question those elements of group life which full-fledged members take
for granted. In Schutz’s words, “the cultural pattern of the approached group
is to the stranger not a shelter but a field of adventure, not a matter of course
but a questionable topic of investigation, not an instrument for disentangling
94 BEING URBAN
problematic situations but a problematic situation itself and one hard to

master” (1960:104).
As insightful as they are, these conceptions of the stranger do not fully
serve our purposes. In urban public settings, individuals are rarely trying to
relate to any specific group. More congenial to our purposes is Peter Berger’s
conception of “strangeness.” Berger thinks about strangeness this way:
“The strangeness lies in the fact that [persons] come from different face-to-
face contexts . . . they come from different areas of conversation. They do
not have a shared past, although their pasts have a similar structure” (Berger
1970:54). By “different areas of conversation,” Berger means that persons
possess different biographies, discrete experiences, and possibly, therefore,
dissimilar definitions of the situation. In this regard we might suggest that it
is the merging of separate biographies and the production of some kind of
joint reality that transforms an anonymous, unanchored relationship between
strangers into a relationship that has a career, a relationship that now has a
past and the likelihood of a future.
A key, then, to understanding the relationship between strangers in public
places lies in the fact that, by definition, they have little or no biographical
information about one another. “The public realm may be defined rather
broadly as those non-private sectors or areas of urban settlement in which
individuals in co-presence tend to be personally . . . unknown to one another”
(Lofland 1989:454). This lack of social information increases persons’ con-
ceptions of the potential risks that may be involved in public encounters.
INFORMATION AND RISK IN STRANGER

INTERACTION
All social interactions, even those between intimates, involve a degree of
risk. The risk originates in the possibility that an information deficit will cause
an actual or potential interaction to go awry. Risk is an inherent feature of
interactions, since we can never be sure of the motives and intentions of those
with whom we interact. We can never fully suspend doubt about the “true”
motives of others. Our inability ever to suspend doubt fully is a constant fea-
ture of interaction and poses for us a problem that is never fully solvable. One
paradox of interaction is that we must simultaneously doubt and trust others.
While ordered interaction must proceed on the normative assumption that
others’ spoken words and actions reflect the actual nature of their interests,
motives, and goals, we can never be sure that such an assumption is a safe
one. We must, in short, run a course between complete trust and paranoia.
Encounters between strangers pose special problems. Strangers have little

or no information about one another except the information that can be
ascertained through immediate observation (dress, demeanor, and facial
expression). Such readily accessible, although partial, information can be
referred to as “face” information. In some instances the potential risks are so
clear that strangers will assiduously avoid even the slightest encounter. Here
we refer to the case in which, on the basis of face information alone, it is easily
apparent that either no meaningful interaction could take place or an interac-
tion might be interpreted as improper. For example, an older man approach-
ing a little girl on the street might, rightly or wrongly, be suspected of being a
“dirty old man.” Those who unwarily attempt to begin interactions in anony-
mous public settings, even when these “face discrepancies” exist, do so at
potentially great risk.
In short, we depend heavily on face information in determining which
potential interactions are permissible and which are impermissible because
they involve too great a risk. We carry around with us fairly clear background
expectancies concerning the appropriateness of social interactions. We know,
for example, that when lost we ask only certain persons for directions. Cab
drivers will sometimes pass by certain persons (those obviously drunk, those
persons in particular areas of the city). And so on.
As in other places throughout this volume (see Chapter 6), it is important
to consider how the urban experiences of men and women differ. One useful
way to think about variation in urban experience is in terms of the question,
“Who can be where, when, and doing what?” We propose that urban places
and times are not equally accessible to men and women. Any well-socialized
urbanite knows that it is dangerous for women to be in certain city areas,
especially at night (Melbin 1987). To the extent that men and women have
different access to activities, places, and times, they have different subjective
experiences of urban life. Moreover, while everyone is constrained to abide
by norms of noninvolvement in public places, women are especially vulner-
able to unwanted attentions by men and so must be more vigilant about pro-
tecting their privacy. A number of studies (Duneier and Molotch 1999;
Gardner 1980, 1995; Martin 1989; Wise and Stanley 1987) focus on the par-
ticular strategies women must adopt in public places to minimize being sexu-
ally harassed by men. It is, for example, reflective of power differences
between men and women (Henley 1986) that men feel the right to stare
(and often to make comments) at women passing on the street while women
must carefully avert their eyes lest they be mistakenly seen as inviting the
attentions of men. In her interviews with New York City residents, Karen
Snedker found that perceptions of vulnerability to crime were powerfully
96 BEING URBAN
conditioned by gender and how people, women especially, conduct them-

selves on the street:
Lack of [perceived] vulnerability was linked to lifestyles. Susan, a 22-year-old

White woman, commented that “if I’m dressed up to go out and I’m running
around in a little skirt, I wouldn’t really feel comfortable.” She later said that
she does not feel vulnerable anymore because she is neither dressed in a provoca-
tive way nor engaged in risky activities, “I’m not running around in tiny little
dresses, anymore, for one. My lifestyle has changed.” . . . [C]onforming girls—
those who do not dress provocatively or go out late alone—imagine that they
will be safe or at least be perceived as nonculpable victims. Nonconformists if
sexually assaulted are perceived as culpable victims as they made themselves
easier targets. (Snedker 2012:86)
The general point we wish to make is that there are always risks to be run in
engaging a stranger in interaction. There is the possibility of generating a set
of obligations that one is not prepared for or is unwilling to pay off, the pos-
sibility of damage to one’s presented self-image, attacks on one’s identity,
boredom, loss of time, and even physical danger. Just as the knowledgeable
gambler understands that the one sure thing is that there is no such thing as
a sure thing, and works systematically to reduce the possibility of unforeseen
contingencies in placing a bet, so should we expect all persons to attempt to
minimize the odds of an unpleasant, risky interaction.
Beyond the fact that urbanites in anonymous situations are biographical
strangers to one another, we must consider the sheer volume of potential inter-
action faced by persons in the midst of the large city. Around New York, for
example, the number of people encountered in a 10-minute walking distance
varies from 11,000 in Nassau County; to 20,000 in Newark, New Jersey; to
220,000 in midtown Manhattan (Palen 1975). In midtown Manhattan you
probably would not intimately know any of the thousands of people who would
pass you. In 1970, the psychologist Stanley Milgram considered the effect of
this density and the nature of potential encounters in the city. He has stressed
the need for adaptive mechanisms to deal with what he terms urban “overload.”
A THEORY OF URBAN OVERLOAD

Like many urban social psychologists, Milgram (1970) begins his inquiry by
making reference to Louis Wirth’s (1938) essay on the city. He agrees at the
outset that the criteria offered by Wirth adequately define the city. The city is
large, dense, and heterogeneous. Milgram goes on to argue, however, that these
demographic characteristics have not been used in producing an adequate social
psychology of the city. As a psychologist he argues that we need an idea that

links the individual’s experience to these demographic circumstances of urban
life. The theoretical link proposed by Milgram stresses the idea of “stimulus
overload.” His argument, very simply, is that urbanites in their daily lives are
bombarded with far more stimuli than they can handle successfully. The human
organism cannot process and act upon all the stimuli that it necessarily confronts
daily. “City life, as we experience it, constitutes a continuous set of encounters
with overload, and of resultant adaptations” (1970:1462). In this article
Milgram tries to outline some of the adaptations that urban persons are forced
to make in the face of this stimulus overload.
It should be noted that the theory that Milgram seeks to make explicit is
found in rudimentary form in earlier works. Georg Simmel indicated that
urbanites must somehow come to grips with the multiple experiences of city
life. Simmel suggested that city persons must maintain ever more superficial
and anonymous relations with their fellow urbanites in order to maintain their
“psychic life.” The link between density, heterogeneity, and the psychology
of the individual is made in the following statement:
With every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic,
occupational and social life—[the city] creates in the sensory foundations of
mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as
creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more
habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small
town and rural existence. Thereby the essentially intellectualistic character
of the mental life of the metropolis becomes intelligible as over against that
of the small town which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships.
(Simmel 1971:325)
The first effect that Milgram notes is the need for the urbanites to set pri-
orities regarding the phenomena in their everyday lives that they are willing
to take into account. Principles of selectivity must be established in order to
evaluate how much time and energy will be devoted to various inputs. In this
regard, for example, the failure of urbanites to help the homeless or alcoholics
on the city streets becomes understandable. Such daily events must be given
low priority because, were we to attend to every such occurrence, we would
soon find ourselves doing nothing but helping people on the street. The fre-
quency of that situation is simply too great for us to deal with it in any kind
of continuous fashion. The anonymity of the city and the relative indifference
to others in public places becomes meaningful as a necessary response to the
overstimulation of the city. It is in this regard that the lessening of social
responsibility can be made sense of.
98 BEING URBAN
Milgram argues that urbanites must generate quite specific norms of “non-
involvement.” The failure of city dwellers to help others in trouble can be
understood in terms of a norm of noninvolvement. Urbanites are less willing
to assist strangers than their rural counterparts are. Milgram’s students dem-
onstrated this by comparing the number of persons in urban and town areas
who were willing to allow strangers into their homes. Investigators claimed
to have lost the address of a friend living nearby and asked if it was possible
to use the phone of the persons approached. The question that Milgram
sought to answer was whether researchers would gain more entries in towns
than in cities. He reports that “in all cases there was a sharp increase in the
proportion of entries achieved by an experimenter when he moved from the
city to the small town” (1970:1463).
Part of this general norm of noninvolvement is that the traditional courte-
sies or civilities of social life are less apparent in the city. Persons bumping into
one another seldom stop to offer their apologies. Indeed, the norms of non-
involvement are so strong in the city that “men are actually embarrassed to
give up a seat on a subway to an old woman” (Milgram 1970:1464). All these
instances of noninvolvement, in their totality, constitute for Milgram the
essence of urban anonymity. He is quick to point out that the kind of ano-
nymity he describes is not all bad. It is because of this anonymity that persons
with various eccentricities are tolerated in the city. Because of norms of non-
involvement, stigmatized persons generally find greater acceptance within
urban contexts. The general idea raised by Milgram is that the city offers
many “protective benefits” not offered in the small town.
In a general sense, city persons learn to protect themselves from unwanted
intrusions while in public places. To do this we sometimes use props such as
newspapers to shield ourselves from others and to indicate our inaccessibility
for interaction. In effect, we learn to “tune others out.” In this regard, we
might see the smartphone as the quintessential urban prop in that it allows
us to be tuned in and tuned out at the same time. It is a device that allows
us to enter our own private world and thereby effectively to close off encoun-
ters with others. DeNora (2000:58) has similarly observed that urban dwell-
ers could make use of their Walkman (now replaced by iPods and music
apps on smartphones) to insulate themselves from the noisy world around
them. The use of such devices to protect our “personal space,” along with
our body demeanor and facial expression (the passive “mask” or even scowl
that persons adopt on subways), ensures that others will not bother us. One
of the chief claims or rights that urban persons maintain in public places is
the right to be left alone. In most instances people respect that right and
behave mutually in a fashion to sustain it.
It is also interesting to observe that one feature of city life is that mecha-
nisms are established that filter out stimuli before they have a chance to reach
individuals. Doormen and receptionists serve the function of screening those
who wish to gain access to people living in urban buildings (Bearman 2005).
And in most cities one must have a transit card or exact change to ride on
public buses. While this requirement has the practical value of cutting down
on crime because the drivers do not carry money to make change, it has the
additional consequence of dramatically reducing the number of interactions
drivers must deal with, and thereby insulates them from stimulus overload.
We have been speaking primarily about the ways in which persons mini-
mize the interactional claims that others may make on them. In a series of
experiments, Bibb Latane and John Darley (1970) investigated one dramatic
instance of urbanites’ noninvolvement, those cases where persons fail to inter-
vene when others appear to be in trouble. In a book titled The Unresponsive
Bystander, these investigators provide evidence that the failure of urbanites
to intervene in “trouble” situations is not a function of gross alienation, indif-
ference, or apathy singularly produced by cities and city life. In a number of
ingeniously conceived studies, Latane and Darley offer strong support for
the nonobvious hypothesis that the more bystanders to an emergency, the less
likely, or more slowly, any one bystander will intervene to provide aid. Their
argument is that the failure of persons to intervene derives from what they call
a “diffusion of responsibility.” Each person, aware that others are witnessing
the event, assumes that one or more of these others will take the responsibility
to intervene. The result of this “pluralistic ignorance” is that no one steps for-
ward to intervene. Their work amply illustrates that we must not stop our
analysis of the city with the simple description of events. To do that is to make
us susceptible to the beliefs about city life that it is our task to question.
Both Milgram’s and Latane and Darley’s analyses raise another important
point. It seems clear from these writings that theories postulating a distinctive
urban personality type may be substantially in error. Rather, we must see that
the behavior of urbanites is situationally defined. In Milgram’s words, “con-
trasts between city and rural behavior probably reflect the responses of similar
people to very different situations, rather than intrinsic differences in the per-
sonalities of rural and city dwellers. The city is a situation to which individuals
respond adaptively” (1970:1465). We would hypothesize, for example, that
people from small towns who find themselves in cities would begin to adopt,
perhaps within a matter of hours, the mechanisms urbanites use to protect
themselves. Conversely, people who have lived their whole lives within cities
and then move to small towns would quickly adopt behaviors consistent with
small-town living.
100 BEING URBAN
While the studies we have cited are intriguing, they do not adequately
explain how the norm of noninvolvement is maintained. It is to that issue that
we now turn.
A MINIMAX HYPOTHESIS OF URBAN LIFE

To this point our characterization of urbanites’ public encounters still
seems somewhat hazy and elusive. Urbanites seem to shun encounters with
one another, minimizing their involvement whenever possible. They are con-
strained to generate a norm of noninvolvement because of the social risks that
are tied to stranger interaction and because of the inability to cope with the
sheer volume and complexity of potential encounters in the city. At the same
time we have asserted, following Goffman, that persons have an investment in
appearing “correct” in front of others—even strangers—so as to preserve
their self-images. Persons seek to pick up information about others; this infor-
mation may facilitate interaction and may be used to avoid interaction. There
seems to be a dialectical relationship between indifference and involvement.
A paradox of public urban interaction is that persons must systematically take
one another into account in order to avoid unwanted encounters.
The sociologist Lyn Lofland (1971b) has suggested that public ordered
life between strangers is possible because urbanites have successfully created
a workable social contract, a kind of public social bargain. Indeed, she says
that “all social life may be viewed as a kind of social bargain, a whispered
enjoinder to let us all protect each other so that we can carry on the business
of living” (1971b:226). Persons in public settings are expected to exert some
effort to preserve both their own and others’ public identities. The effort
expended in this type of mutual protection is evident in one of Lofland’s
examples. She cites the case of an older man, sitting in a restaurant booth, car-
rying on an active conversation with an imaginary other. The conversation
was quite complete as the man animatedly made a statement and then listened
intently as the “other” made his or her reply. As the waitress approached to
take the order, the man happened to be in the midst of a rather lengthy reply
to a point made by the other. The waitress waited patiently until a break in the
conversation and only then asked if he was ready to order. During this whole
time she showed no evidence that anything extraordinary was occurring.
Unless persons pose some type of direct threat, urbanites are willing to toler-
ate, and to treat as normal, quite eccentric public behaviors.
In urban contexts this social bargain seems to demand that persons co-
operate with one another enough to ensure some intelligibility and order in
their everyday lives while seeking to keep at a minimum their involvement
with one another. We are offering, then, a kind of minimax description of

urban encounters. Urbanites seek to minimize involvement and to maximize
social order. Persons must act in concert. Persons must take one another into
account. At the same time, persons must protect their personal privacy, a
commodity hard to come by in urban settings. Urbanites must, in other
words, create a kind of “public privacy.” They are required to strike a balance
between involvement, indifference, and cooperation with one another.
These descriptions of city interaction may seem strange, if not contradictory—
intimate anonymity, public privacy, involved indifference—yet these subtle
combinations of apparently opposite ideas do capture the quality of a good
deal of city life. They suggest that while urban persons may spend relatively
little time engaged in direct verbal interactions with one another, they are
nevertheless deliberately acting in awareness of, and adjusting their own
behaviors to, the possible response of others.
It is easy enough to say that city persons must consistently take one
another into account in order to create the proper balance of indifference
and involvement as they move through urban public places. If public encoun-
ters are to be carried off successfully, however, persons must have an enor-
mous amount of social knowledge in common—must share a large number
of meanings about city life. There must be some degree of consensus among
persons relative to the meanings that they attribute to both their own and
others’ behaviors. Persons must share some notion of what constitutes appro-
priate involvement with others in public settings. As a continuing step in our
analysis, we must specify the knowledge that persons acquire and use in
anonymous situations.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF PUBLIC LIFE: A LOOK AT

SOME LITERATURE
To this point our discussion has been on a fairly abstract level. The time has
come to be more concrete, and in this section we shall review some studies
illustrating the categories of norms within which everyday life is carried out.
Our question is this: What are the types of normative conventions followed
by city persons that maximize intelligibility and predictability in their relations
with others while simultaneously maximizing their own sense of privacy in
public? With the aid of research done by others, it is possible to describe some
of the constraints typically imposed on persons as they encounter others
within the city. Data in the following section of the chapter illustrate that
urban contexts vary in terms of persons’ felt need for privacy and anonymity.
Some encounters are very fleeting and require little attention, while others are
102 BEING URBAN
of longer duration. Contexts also differ in terms of the nature of the behaviors
going on in them, with some demanding rigorous rules to maintain anonym-
ity while others allowing for the suspension of the usual norms of noninvolve-
ment. We shall try to provide examples from the literature indicating some of
the complexity and variability inherent in creating and maintaining urban
social order.
Cooperating to Produce and Sustain Social Order

Some of the most influential and far-ranging work on city life has been
accomplished by researchers utilizing experimental and quasi-experimental
methods. Very frequently in this kind of work the strategy is somehow to dis-
rupt the normal, natural processes of everyday life. If researchers are correct in
understanding how everyday urban life is normally conducted, they should,
then, be able to predict how persons will behave once these “normal” rou-
tines have been disrupted. Put more directly, if the researcher believes that
certain norms are important in guiding some aspect of social life, the best
way to establish the norms’ existence is to transgress the alleged norms and
to note the reaction of persons to the transgression. A combination of close,
careful, naturalistic observation and the purposive manipulation of social set-
tings can reveal a great deal about how everyday urban life is constructed,
ordered, and typically carried out. This is nicely demonstrated, for example,
in work on pedestrian behavior.
Since the 1970s, a number of studies have described the myriad ways in
which individual pedestrians are involved in a constant process of delicate
(and sometimes not-so-delicate) interactions. In reviewing this literature for
the National Academy of Sciences, Daamen and Hoogendoorn (2003)
described a number of such findings. Foremost, they note that “a high degree
of cooperation between pedestrians is an intrinsic part of pedestrian behavior,
without which walking would be impossible” (2; emphasis in original). That
cooperation comes in several forms. Pedestrians must scan the sidewalks that
they walk for obstructions, be those other pedestrians or objects that could
get in their way. Individuals do this scanning in a relatively narrow ellipse,
such that they pay more attention to that which is in front of them or which will
be directly to their sides in the course of their progress. They pay hardly any
attention to anything more than a body’s width away from their current path.
Upon encountering another individual within her ellipse, the pedestrian
engages in an encounter that evolves the emission of a critical sign. This sign
is generally something quite subtle, such as the turn of a shoulder. When
the other pedestrian reciprocates with her own critical sign, they arrive at an
establishing moment. From that point, they can take the necessary steps to
adjust their paths and avoid collision (though sometimes, of course, signals
are confused, leading to a bit of a “dance” before the pedestrians can get
around each other).
Often, the steps taken to avoid collision involve a move described as a
“step-and-slide” (3). Rather than making a wide detour around the other
pedestrian, one will often barely turn his shoulder and effect a sort of side
step. In so doing, a collision is narrowly averted. Some researchers even
describe brushes as part and parcel of the process. Given an unwillingness to
unilaterally cede sidewalk space, pedestrians appear to sanction others who
do not cooperatively make the slight adjustments conventional to pedestrian
interaction by more rubbing shoulders with them as they pass.
Finally, Daamen and Hoogendoorn note that basic social variables play an
important role in pedestrian interactions as well:
Pedestrians grant more space to approaching male than to female

pedestrians . . . Beautiful women were given more space than unattractive
women . . . persons or groups moved for larger groups; younger groups tended
to move for older groups; women do not tend to move for men, nor do blacks
tend to move for whites. (3)
These observations demonstrate that a set of behaviors that we wholly take

for granted as urbanites is really well organized and dependent upon a distinc-
tive normative cooperation among actors.
Practicing Civil Inattention

Our discussion throughout this chapter is premised on the idea that urban-
ites acknowledge others’ presence in public places while generally avoiding
overt interaction with them. This double-edged task of acknowledgment
and avoidance is captured in Erving Goffman’s notion of “civil inattention.”
Practicing civil inattention in public places means “that one gives to another
enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is
present, while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so
as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design”
(Goffman 1963:84). In her wide-ranging review of literature on social life in
the public realm, Lyn Lofland argues that civil inattention may be the sine
qua non of city life, in that it “makes possible co-presence without co-
mingling, awareness without engrossment, courtesy without conversation”
(Lofland 1989:462).
104 BEING URBAN
As might be expected, one urban setting in which civil inattention is easily

seen is the subway. Systematic observations in subways (Levine, Vinson, and
Wood 1973) have shown how persons indicate that they do not wish to be
communicated with. Persons in this face-to-face situation place a high pre-
mium on avoiding unnecessary encounters. As in many other public contexts,
persons are forced to recognize each other’s presence while trying to mini-
mize the possibility of having a “focused” interaction. Persons, in other
words, try to minimize the interactional claims that others might make on
them. This interactional work is, of course, reciprocal, as all the actors in the
setting are doing the same. Subway riders will always choose a seat that max-
imizes their distance from fellow travelers; they will limit their visual attention
to props that they may have with them (books, magazines, newspapers) or to
advertising cards over the windows. They will take great pains to avoid physi-
cal contact, will keep their hands very visible to defeat any possible charge of a
sexual impropriety once the subway car begins to get crowded, and the like.
These regulations, shared and known by all participants in the setting, are
designed to “protect unacquainted individuals from accessibility to one
another” (216).
In some contexts, however, individuals feel the need to move beyond civil
inattention by treating others in a setting as “nonpersons.” Another well-
known distinction made by Erving Goffman is that between what he terms
“back” and “front” regions. Front regions are those social areas where per-
sons feel the need to construct performances and manage impressions in front
of an audience. Back regions, on the other hand, are those places where per-
sons can more easily relax, be themselves, and suspend contrived perfor-
mances. The next time you go into a restaurant, take note of the changes in
the demeanor and facial expressions of servers as they move between the
kitchen area (the back region) and the dining area (the front region). As they
move into the dining area, their bodies become more erect and they smile as
they approach customers. As they move through the swinging door into the
kitchen, the smile may be replaced by a scowl indicating their “true” feelings
about their customers and their job. Places such as bathrooms might be
termed “institutionalized back regions” because they are contexts where we
normally require clear privacy.
In his study of homeless book vendors, Duneier (1999) provides several
fascinating insights into the construction of civil inattention. Particularly
interesting are his observations of how these book vendors ignore the normal
rules of civil inattention by paying focused attention to pedestrians (especially
women). While normally pedestrians ignore others on the street, and are
ignored in turn, Duneier observed many instances where vendors went out
of their way to try to engage in conversations with passersby. Using Conver-

sation Analysis, a technique for parsing the structure of verbal exchanges that
grew out of symbolic interactionism, Duneier shows that the conversations
started by certain vendors with women are in violation of implicit norms of
interaction. For example, one vendor asks a series of questions of a passing
woman—“You all right?” “You married?” “Can I get your name?” Her
responses are all terse—she either replies “Yeah,” or she doesn’t reply at all
(196–198). But beyond the content of the responses, Duneier is able to show
through Conversation Analysis that their delivery is a signal that the woman is
trying to end the interaction. Through their terseness, the responses do not
invite further conversation. And they are delivered after a significant pause,
while normal responses in conversation follow close on the heels of what the
previous speaker has said. All this points to the exceptional nature of these
street exchanges. In addition to the somewhat off-putting nature of the unso-
licited flirtations, the exchanges clearly counter norms that people on the
street normally expect not to interact with each other. When that expectation
is challenged, pedestrians do their best to reestablish their noninteractive
bubble so they may proceed to their destination unencumbered.
In a study by Spencer Cahill and his colleagues (1985), behaviors of per-
sons in public bathrooms were examined. The concern was to learn the mech-
anisms people employ to carry off backstage behaviors in a public context.
This research found that individuals engage in a number of rituals that go
beyond civil inattention. Persons go to great lengths to ignore the behaviors
and even the presence of other people. Order is sustained in this context
because everyone in the situation cooperates in the construction of the fiction
that they are alone. As an example, men standing near each other at urinals
will studiously avert their gaze from each other. Cahill notes that “[w]hat
men typically give one another when using adjacent urinals is not, therefore,
civil inattention but ‘non person treatment’; that is, they treat one another
as if they were part of the setting’s physical equipment, as ‘objects not worthy
of a glance’ ” (1985:41).
As many of the examples in this book illustrate, sociologists studying urban
life find interesting the behaviors of persons in contexts that others might find
trivial or even embarrassing to study. Cahill’s study, like others we shall report
on momentarily, is premised on the idea that one can learn a great deal about
the organization of social life by investigating such contexts. He argues per-
suasively that “the systematic study of bathroom behavior [yields] valuable
insights into the character and the requirements of our routine public perfor-
mances” (1985:34). Consistent with the aim of this chapter, the study illus-
trates that maintaining order in everyday life requires that all of us know the
106 BEING URBAN
norms and rituals demanded of us in different contexts and that we feel a

strong obligation to cooperate in their maintenance. In this respect we might
say that there is an underlying morality to everyday performances in that we
all feel the obligation to do our part in maintaining social order and preserv-
ing the integrity of social situations. Consistent with the underlying point of
this chapter, Cahill states:
The systematic study of routine bathroom behavior reveals just how loyal mem-
bers of this society are to the central values and behavioral standards that hold
our collective lives together. Whatever else they may do, users of public bath-
rooms continue to bear the “cross of personal character” . . . and, as long as they
continue to carry this burden, remain self regulating participants in the “interac-
tion order.” (1985:56)
Protecting Personal Identities

Frequently the order of public life is best seen in those situations in which
persons’ moral identities are most potentially called into question. Karp
(1973) studied the behaviors of persons in Times Square pornographic book-
stores and movie theaters. Times Square was a useful context for investigation
because it epitomizes the anonymous inner city. As such, it was a good testing
ground for a number of assumptions found in the urban literature about urban
interpersonal relations. Karp’s Times Square data show that persons engaging in
unconventional behaviors in a typically anonymous sector of the city are con-
cerned with being defined as “social” or “proper,” even by total strangers.
Despite the fact that persons were not engaged in direct verbal interaction, they
were very much taking one another into account in this setting. Karp describes a
number of maneuvers engaged in by persons involved in these settings.
He reports that persons frequenting bookstores have available and use a
number of devices for hiding, shielding, or obscuring the nature of their
“deviant” involvement from outsiders (nonparticipants in bookstore pornog-
raphy) as well as from persons similarly involved in buying or using porno-
graphic materials. In order to ensure that the nature of their dominant
involvement (that is, buying or using pornographic materials) will be hidden
from those around them, persons utilize a kind of “waiting” behavior. Before
entering a store, persons spend a long time looking in the window or hanging
around outside the store. In doing so, they hope to communicate to those
around them that they are “merely curious” or “idly curious” about the con-
tents of the store. Such behavior also serves the purpose of checking out the
environment before entering the store.
Once in the store, persons maintain a strict impersonality toward one

another. There is a conscious avoidance of any overt, focused interaction.
Under no circumstances do customers in these stores make physical or verbal
contact with one another. The normative structure appears to demand silence
and a careful avoidance of either eye or physical contact. The workers in the
store complement these behaviors by quickly ejecting any individual who
interferes with the privacy of other customers.
There are, as well, regular behaviors engaged in by persons purchasing por-
nographic materials. Persons adopt techniques that allow them to complete
purchases as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. That customers are best
left alone in terms of buying potential is illustrated by a datum from Karp’s
work. A store manager told him the following:
“You couldn’t have noticed this because you haven’t spent enough time in the store.
There are guys who come into the store who just look at the highline but don’t touch
anything.”
“The highline?”
“The highline is the long table in the middle of the room that has the most current,
most expensive items. These guys make a circle around the table, never touching any-
thing. Then they go to the back of the store and spend a little time there. They aren’t
really interested in what’s in the back. On their way out they make their
selections . . . 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You can’t say a word to these guys or you will lose a sale.”
(1973:442)
The attempt clearly is to minimize the amount of time that one must spend
in making the purchase and thereby to appear as disinterested as possible.
The import of the data suggests that persons in this semipublic urban
setting are involved in a highly structured social situation in which privacy
norms are highly standardized and readily understood. The system works
so that each person’s bid for privacy is complemented by the behavior of
other persons in the store. We must, then, see that even in highly anony-
mous public places such as Times Square, persons are very much con-
strained in the production of their behavior. Despite the ability of cities to
support a diversity of simultaneous activities that, in the flow of daily life,
are likely to go generally unnoticed; despite the impersonality and anonym-
ity of city life; and despite the fact that the overwhelming bulk of our
actions in the public domain is performed in front of strangers, it is still
our task to be perpetually engaged in the business of impression manage-
ment. In short, when it comes to maintaining a proper image of ourselves,
everyone counts.
108 BEING URBAN
In another study of a similar context, Peter Donnelly (1981) has docu-

mented the behaviors of persons attending X-rated movies in small-town set-
tings. One central difference between his study and Karp’s is that participation
in the Times Square scene is virtually a solitary one, while those attending the
cinemas in the college towns often do so in groups. Notwithstanding this differ-
ence, many of the behaviors designed to maximize privacy and minimize social
risk are similar in the two contexts. The authors do, however, differ somewhat
in their interpretations of the behaviors of individuals. Karp stresses the idea that
participants in such settings are concerned with being seen as social or proper,
while Donnelly suggests that the main task of participants is not to be seen at
all. Such subtle differences in interpretation should not mask the deeper agree-
ment suggested by the data in both studies. Both studies illustrate that partici-
pants are deeply concerned with the protection of personal identities in a
situation that potentially compromises their claim to respectability.
Another way to speak about the processes illustrated by the studies we have
cited is to say that in some contexts people have a need to produce and manage
a kind of social invisibility. Once again, the means through which potentially
compromised identities are protected is illustrated by a study of a somewhat off-
beat, but interesting, setting. Robert Lilly and Richard Ball (1981) studied the
operation of a “no-tell motel,” a facility that specializes in renting rooms by the
hour to people who wish to engage in illicit heterosexual trysts. Just as in porno-
graphic bookstores, the staff of the motel cooperates with customers by going to
great lengths to ensure the absolute privacy of those using the facility. Everything
from the way that potential customers are screened to the placement of garages
that allows easy and inconspicuous entrance to rooms is designed to facilitate
engagement in “deviant” behaviors requiring identity protection. The issue here
is not to make a moral judgment about those who use such establishments or
those who run them. Rather, the point is that the context once again illustrates
how institutions can be set up and norms created to maintain a kind of public fic-
tion “where each set of participants knows what is going on but pretends that
something different is occurring, where each has access to much knowledge but
strives to remain ignorant so as to maintain a certain uninvolved posture” (Lilly
and Ball 1981:195). None of us need ever have visited a “no-tell motel” to recog-
nize the variety of situations in which we, too, pretend ignorance in order to
facilitate the smooth management of our own and others’ behaviors in public.
Self-Management in Public Settings

We suggest that the mechanisms used by persons in these “unique” urban
social settings designed to protect personal identities, to minimize social risk,
and to let participants appear “proper” are not unlike the procedures used by
urban strangers in more usual settings. That the same or similar kinds of “self-
management” mechanisms are used by strangers in routine public encounters
is demonstrated in the work of Lyn Lofland. In an article appropriately titled
“Self-Management in Public Settings,” Lofland (1971a) describes the various
mechanisms and devices used by persons to protect their self-esteem when in
the presence of strangers in public places. She agrees with one of our earlier
assertions when she states: “If a person is to exist as a social being, as an
organism with a self, there must be some minimal guarantees that in interac-
tion with others he will receive the affirmation and confirmation of himself
as ‘right’ ” (1971a:95). The danger in confronting strangers in public places
may be the inability of certain persons to provide this needed confirmation.
At the extreme there is the ever-present possibility that persons may provide
disconfirmation of one’s “rightness.” Remember that the problem of strang-
ers’ interacting in public stems from their relative lack of knowledge about
one another. Lofland is concerned with the way that public actors compensate
for this uncertainty and inherent risk imposed by the urban public place.
Her observations are, we think, confirmed by our own everyday experiences.
Although suggesting that there are many strategies used by strangers in
public to insure their self-images under the scrutiny of others, Lofland names
the following major techniques or maneuvers:
Checking for readiness: Actors prepared themselves before entering a
potential encounter situation by checking their appearance, making sure that
hair is in place, that zippers are zipped, and so on.
Taking a reading. Here the person essentially stops to take stock of the social
setting. Persons may briefly delay entering a room until they have had a chance
to scan it with their eyes, noting the placement of furniture, and the like.
Reaching a position. The final step in this sequence is to reach a stopping
point. Persons seek to enter the situation as inconspicuously as possible—to
minimize the time during which they are under the social spotlight. Once
having decided on the spot or territory they wish to occupy, persons may
make a no-nonsense, direct beeline to the spot, or approach the chosen posi-
tion slowly and by degrees, stopping briefly at various points until the destina-
tion is reached.
It is worth noting that the tactics described by Lofland in routine settings
are not unlike the waiting or stalling behaviors described by Karp and by
Donnelly in the relatively unusual situations of the pornographic bookstore
and pornographic movies. Again, we see that there are clear uniformities,
crosscutting a number of urban settings, in the ways that persons present
themselves to others.
110 BEING URBAN
PRACTICING SOCIABILITY
So far in this chapter, we have stressed the ways in which urbanites protect
themselves in public places from the intrusions of others. Among other things
we discussed the importance of maintaining a distinctive “public privacy,”
and we suggested that there is an “anonymous intimacy” of sorts in public pla-
ces. We agreed with Goffman that persons maintain a social distance through
the operation of what he calls “civil inattention.” We characterized urban social
relations as constituting a combination of involvement and indifference.
Overall, we have argued that while urban persons spend relatively little
time engaged in direct verbal interactions with one another, they are never-
theless quite deliberately and consistently taking one another into account
in public settings. We have tried to outline the methods through which actors
cooperatively and consensually maintain a social/moral “public bargain.”
There is an unwritten social contract that governs a good deal of everyday
urban life. While thus far we have stressed the mechanisms through which
urbanites maintain this fine balance between indifference, silent cooperation,
and involvement, we must not overlook the vibrant, active, public life in
cities. There are many public contexts in which urban strangers can suspend
the normal rules of disengagement and participate in at least quasi-intimate
relationships. Studies of such diverse settings as bars (Cavan 1966; Katovich
and Reese 1987), laundromats (Kenen 1982), and racetracks (Scott 1968;
Rosencrance 1986) suggest the wide range of public settings conducive to
the suspension of the normal requirements of urban anonymity.
In a more general sense, cities seem to vary in their capacity to support direct
interactions among strangers. Part of this undoubtedly has to do with differ-
ences in city tone, tempo, and mood (for example, walking rates vary from city
to city); differences in architectural layouts of cities (the shape of cities, the pat-
terning of streets, the placement of public parks); and differences in the histori-
cally developed images that residents of various cities hold. Goffman makes this
observation in comparing the “tightness” of city street life in different settings:
The same kind of social setting in different communities will be differently

defined as regards tightness. Thus, public streets in Paris seem to be more
loosely defined than those in Britain or America. On many Parisian streets one
can eat from a loaf of bread while walking to and from work, become heatedly
involved in a peripatetic conversation . . . etc. (1963:200)
As an extension of Goffman’s observations, we may note not only that

cities appear to vary in the degree to which persons feel the need to maintain
a norm of noninvolvement but also that there are differences within cities.
In any city there seem to be areas known by all city residents (and frequently
known to outsiders as well) as places teeming with a diversity of activities—
Chicago’s Wicker Park, Greenwich Village in New York, or North Beach in
San Francisco. It is precisely the street life in such areas that draws persons to
them. Observations of such city areas confirms Jane Jacobs’s statement that “a
good city street achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination
to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of
contact, enjoyment or help from people around” (Jacobs 1961:59).
Much the same view on these issues is expressed about New York in a book
by William H. Whyte (1988). Whyte reports on many years of study of street
life in that city. Rather than concentrating his efforts on selected areas of the
city that traditionally have a good deal of street action, such as Greenwich
Village and Brooklyn Heights, Whyte concentrated his observations specifi-
cally on the downtown and midtown areas. Despite the dominant image that
such downtown areas of large cities support little in the way of sociability,
careful and detailed observation indicates an extraordinary ordering of activ-
ities and a tremendous amount of sociable activity. Whyte’s study calls into
question the image of the city as a center of insensate crowding, a place of
squeezed-up masses of anonymous individuals who are unable to take pleas-
ure in each other’s presence. His data show that people enjoy the city’s open
spaces, converse in parks, spontaneously engage in impromptu street confer-
ences, and have fun eating outdoors. There is, in other words, a viable and
intensely pleasurable street life in New York.
Beyond making the observation, like that made by Jacobs, that one key to
an active, interesting street life is the creation of diversity, Whyte goes on to
make practical suggestions for the use of city space. Like Jacobs, he argues
that simply providing space will not create greater interaction among strang-
ers in the city. It is the use of space, the way that space is laid out, and how
it is managed that are most important. He notes that in New York some pla-
zas and parks seem to generate a good deal of activity, whereas others do
not. Such a comparison is useful to the extent that it calls attention to how
space is used differently to create more or less activity. He notes that the
widely used plazas are those which have considerable seating (in some instan-
ces movable seats)—places where the seats are strategically placed so that
those using them can easily view any activity occurring. Widely used plazas
or parks allow food vendors to ply their trade, and they are places with pleas-
ing greenery. In general, Whyte advocates widening sidewalks to create more
pedestrian space, putting more street benches in areas of highest activity, and
the like. We also have much to learn from the layout of such cities as Paris,
Florence, and Venice. These are cities that stimulate the pedestrian and thus
112 BEING URBAN
stimulate interaction between persons. These are cities made for people.
Spaces are designed in such a way that persons are not insulated from human
contact. Paris, for example,
is known as a city in which the outdoors has been made attractive to people and
where it is not only possible but pleasurable to stretch one’s legs, breathe, sniff
the air, and take in the people and the city. The sidewalks along the Champs-
Elysees engender a wonderful expansive feeling associated with a hundred foot
separation of one’s self from the traffic. It is noteworthy that the little streets
and alleys too narrow to accept most vehicles not only provide variety but are a
constant reminder that Paris is for people. (Hall 1966:175)
As we noted in the previous chapter, the New Urbanist school of planning

and architecture has taken these lessons about urban sociability to heart. Many
designers have worked to make urban spaces more inviting to casual interac-
tions, and a number of American cities have explicitly taken cues from European
cities to enhance their public spaces. In Chicago, for example, under the reign of
Mayor Richard M. Daley in the 1990s and 2000s, the city worked to be more
like Paris. Examples of this emulation include ample plantings of trees and flow-
ers, extensive use of wrought iron, more benches, and enhanced bus shelters, all
with an eye to making streets more inviting to people as places to spend time
and interact (Cawthon 1999). Daley also took steps to establish rooftop
gardens and make Chicago a more bike-friendly city, with an eye to reducing
pollution and further making the city an enticing place to be—not just a place
to work between trips to and from the suburbs (Kass 2009).
Statistics on biking suggest that this latter scheme for the better use of city
streets has captured the collective imagination of many American commuters.
For example, in New York City, the Department of Transportation states that
[i]n 2009, DOT’s strategic plan laid out the accelerated goal of doubling bicycle
commuting between 2007 and 2012 and tripling it by 2017. The City reached
the goal of doubling bicycle commuting in 2011, a year early. (New York City
DOT, n.d.)
In real numbers, this means that at the half dozen sites the DOT sampled
from (places like the Williamsburg Bridge and Staten Island Ferry), ridership
rose from roughly 10,100 cyclists in 2008 to over 16,000 in 2012 (New York
City DOT, 2013). We mention these increases in biking as significant to
street interaction as it shows that municipalities are actively working to build
bike ridership in large part to make city streets better, safer, less polluted sites
for human activities, including interaction.
ESTABLISHING RELATIONSHIPS WITH STRANGERS2

While the city provides a setting in which strangers can protect themselves
from the intrusions of others, too much emphasis can be placed on the lack of
direct interaction with others. As Whyte (1988) observes, there are occasions
when strangers come together and interact freely. There are situations in
which people can begin to dissolve the strangeness between them. The usual
conception of risk and uncertainty in interactions with strangers can be
reduced in certain circumstances. In this last section of the chapter, we shall
speculate, on the basis of casual observation of everyday city life, on the con-
ditions most likely to give rise to stranger encounters.
Plainly, strangers are more likely to meet and begin relationships in some
settings or situations than in others. In some settings, such as cocktail parties,
such meetings are very likely, and in others, such as bus stops, they are very
unlikely. Between these extremes there is a range of contexts where the likeli-
hood of strangers meeting is greater or lesser (classrooms, sports events,
plays, laundromats, and so forth). Why is it easier for strangers at a baseball
game to strike up conversations than those in, say, an elevator? To answer this
question we will briefly consider the effects of settings, contexts, or situations
on interactions with strangers.
Settings cannot be defined only in physical terms. A bookstore is a place
with lots of books, salespersons, a cash register, and so forth, but such a
description would not capture the distinction between a college bookstore
and a pornographic bookstore. Even if someone were to describe the contents
of the books, we would not fully appreciate how the two places differ. A more
accurate way to define these places would be in terms of the social conven-
tions governing the nature of the interactions that occur in them.
We cannot understand the meaning of another’s behaviors without con-
sidering the setting in which they occur. For example, in order to assign
meaning to the behavior of one person striking another with a fist, we would
have to know whether it happens in a neighborhood bar, the middle of Times
Square, or a ring in Las Vegas. The very same behavior can assume quite dif-
ferent meanings in different places.
Extraordinary events can change the character of settings. When the nor-
mal character of a setting becomes abnormal, or an ordinary setting becomes
somehow extraordinary, and all involved recognize that fact, definitions of
behavior change. It may be perfectly appropriate to begin conversations when
ordinarily this would be considered improper. Conversations between strang-
ers become allowable in stalled subway trains or elevators or when motorists
are stuck in traffic, for example. Goffman notes that
114 BEING URBAN
[d]uring occasions of recognized natural disaster, when individuals suddenly

find themselves in a clearly similar predicament and suddenly become mutually
dependent for information and help, ordinary communication constraints can
break down. . . . What is occurring in the situation guarantees that encounters
aren’t being initiated for what can be improperly gained by them. And to the
extent that this is assured, contact prohibitions can break down. (1963:36)
The context of a situation provides information that helps define the

meaning of behavior. It may also indicate certain aspects of individuals’ iden-
tities or details of their biographies that can make it easier to initiate interac-
tions. Sometimes a person’s mere presence in a setting gives a good deal of
information about that person. When you encounter a group of strangers in
a university classroom, you can safely assume a good deal about them, such
as their social class, occupational aspirations, and values. Seeing a crowd of
people standing on a street corner waiting for a red light to change, however,
would tell you very little about such strangers.
The difference that the social setting or context makes in an interaction is
related to the amount of information it provides about the individuals taking
part. Some contexts provide more information about those in them than others
do. In fact, an anonymous place can be thought of as one that provides little or
no information about the people in it. We propose, as a theoretical proposition,
that the likelihood of strangers meeting and beginning interactions is greatest in
those settings that provide the most information. The more information we pos-
sess about others, the more easily and correctly can we assess whether those with
whom we begin a transaction will reciprocate in an acceptable fashion. Some set-
tings give enough information about the persons in them to reduce substantially
the uncertainties normally accompanying interactions with strangers.
Once people decide to begin an interaction, they must find some way to ini-
tiate it. In the usual case, talk is preceded by a series of nonverbal gestures indi-
cating the individuals’ openness to interaction. This preparatory stage preceding
verbal interaction is in effect a risk-reducing mechanism. Without directly com-
mitting themselves to an interaction, people use nonverbal communications to
obtain a reading of others’ willingness to respond. At this stage the level of their
involvement is very slight, and if their own gestures are not positively responded
to, they may gracefully discontinue their invitational efforts.
People who want to engage in interaction can let this be known with vari-
ous types of nonverbal gestures. In full view of those around them and in a
quite deliberate fashion, they may make a point of removing territorial mark-
ers (clothes, books, and so forth) from areas close to them. Thus, they indi-
cate that their personal space will not be violated should someone choose to
approach them. They may engage others in eye contact and smile, or make a
show of not being involved in any activity that demands all of their attention.
On occasion, people go beyond these purely nonverbal gestures by making
statements aloud, ostensibly to themselves but clearly directed to those
around them. The following occurrence in a laundromat, reported in a stu-
dent term paper, is a typical example:
One girl sat down next to me and started biting her nails. A few minutes later
she opened a textbook of New Testament something or other and flipped
through it. She put the book down, as if really bored with it, and she got up
and read the notices on the wall. Then she blurted out to no one in particular,
“They (the machines) take forever.”
Another laundromat conversation began this way:
I sat down next to a guy who was reading something and I began reading an
essay in Time magazine. Every once in a while this fellow would start to laugh
out loud to himself. At one point he started to laugh very hard. And so I said,
“All right now, what’s so funny? What are you reading?” He replied, “Finnegans
Wake. It’s so full of puns.”
According to the norm of noninvolvement, the usual procedure for strang-

ers in public places is to communicate systematically that they do not wish to
become involved in an interaction (Henderson 1975). The kinds of nonver-
bal and verbal initiatives just discussed here, which are based on the com-
monly understood rules of noninvolvement, are designed to communicate
just the opposite. They communicate to others an openness to interaction.
When these moves for opening interaction succeed, they do so precisely
because the procedures for closing oneself off from interaction are so widely
used and understood.
When conversations are begun, very ordinary issues such as weather, work,
traffic, and the price of food are typical topics. No one can pretend ignorance
of such things. People are normally constrained to respond when such issues
have been raised, and just mentioning them is taken as an indication of open-
ness to interaction. These openings are specifically used and understood as
ritualized throwaway lines whose only purpose is to initiate conversation.
Such topics also serve as vehicles for probing the willingness of others to
engage in conversation. Should they decline, their reluctance can be commu-
nicated without personally discrediting or embarrassing those who make the
probe.
116 BEING URBAN
One strategy for those who wish to begin an encounter is to make things
go wrong purposely. People may pretend to be lost when they are not; they
may show puzzlement about what is happening around them; or they may
purposely bump into another person, so that some kind of remedial interac-
tion is necessary. These strategies are used to create a situation where the
ordinary becomes extraordinary and interaction is more acceptable.
Of course, on the other hand, there are contexts that people seek out pre-
cisely because they are given to interactions with strangers. One of the great
attractions of urban living is that it provides people with myriad opportunities
for new experiences and for meeting new and interesting people. The jam ses-
sions observed by Dempsey (2008) provide an example of such a context.
Here, musicians and fans of jazz would congregate to listen to and play jazz.
Many were aware that different sessions would be populated by people who
were more or less like themselves in terms of their musical tastes. As they all
shared a great interest in the music, they had a ready-made topic for conversa-
tion. But conversation could quickly stray to other topics, from relationships
to religion or politics. And friends are often made at these sessions, as
returning musicians and audience members go from being occasional attend-
ees to being “regulars.” And those regulars could become people who saw
each other in contexts outside the sessions, either playing music on each
other’s gigs or seeing different musical performances together or engaging
in non-music-related activities, from birthday parties to romances.
Romance itself can be a goal for focused interactions in particular contexts
between strangers. David Grazian (2008) asked his undergraduate students at
the University of Pennsylvania to write about their experiences going to bars
and nightclubs for his study On the Make. Grazian characterizes young men’s
trips to night clubs as “the girl hunt, in which heterosexual males aggressively
seek out female sexual partners in nightclubs, bars, and other public arenas of
commercialized entertainment” (134). Both young men and women under-
stand that these locations provide a context for these sexualized activities, in
which attendees start the night in a group of friends and go on to interact
with strangers. The institutions themselves work to lubricate sociability
through dark lighting, loud music, and copious alcohol. Though in actuality,
Grazian finds that relatively few quick sexual partnerships are initiated in these
contexts, it is clear that they do provide an important site for urban strangers
to interact with one another. Importantly, Grazian goes on to argue that this
activity is also important to these young men and women as late adolescent
efforts at refining their gender identities and establishing cohesion with their
peer groups, the people with whom they go out on the town.
CONCLUSION
The data discussed throughout this chapter show that although persons in
cities are typically operating in highly anonymous situations, their behaviors
are not without social character; that is, anonymity does not preclude the exis-
tence of patterned, highly structured, predictable social relationships. Quite
the contrary, the studies reviewed allow us to argue, somewhat paradoxically,
that anonymity demands social relationships. Persons must work to maintain
anonymity, and that work is of a highly social nature.
Anonymity cannot be considered a given, existing spontaneously and
wholly independently of social action. Anonymity is, rather, produced by
actors. Instead of defining a situation in which there are no interpersonal rela-
tions, as it would seem to do, anonymity can obtain only because there are
interacting agents. Contrary to some images of urban life, anonymity does
not define a situation of enormously decreased social control. Although ano-
nymity does increase the potential for personal freedom of action, we must at
the same time recognize that in those situations characterized as anonymous,
anonymity itself constitutes a norm to be maintained. There are rules for pre-
serving anonymity, which, like all other rules, if broken, cause the transgressor
to be subject to negative sanctions. Breaking the rules of anonymity, where
they apply, constitutes the basis for being defined as improper or nonsocial.
This leads us to say that the urban sociologists who stressed the relation-
ship between anonymity and the absence of social controls, as well as the
absence of social relations, erred in their too simple equation of anonymity
and normlessness. These writers were misled in their view of urban life by
their failure to look behind the concrete signs of anonymity. One can never
see the social character of relations in an anonymous situation simply by
describing what an anonymous situation “looks like.” In other words, it is
the very special characteristic of anonymity that it is the result of a normatively
guided social production giving the appearance of normlessness and the absence
of social character. To see the social character of anonymity, therefore, one
must see how anonymity is produced.
Our intent here is not to suggest that the city is a highly personal place.
We do, however, believe that the equation of anonymity and normlessness
found in a good deal of the urban literature misses an important point.
An important quality of the city has been missed by the failure of the social
scientist to view interaction in the urban setting on a microsociological level.
Such an analysis reveals that anonymity is socially produced in accordance
with a system of rules that constrain individuals. An examination of face-to-
face behavior in the midst of large cities indicates that urban persons are not
118 BEING URBAN
in a state of detached normlessness. That actors will strive to preserve their

image as proper persons in front of total strangers is a strong statement of
urbanites’ relations with one another.
We have also tried to suggest that too much emphasis can be placed on
strangers’ lack of direct interaction with one another in urban settings. Urban
life is a well-controlled blend of indifference and involvement. While we still
subscribe to the idea that most urban relations are characterized by a need
for privacy and an attempt to preserve and maintain the protection of urban
anonymity, it is still possible for urban persons to have much to do with one
another in a direct way. There are occasions when persons come together
and begin to construct ongoing interactions in public places. There are situa-
tions wherein persons can begin to dissolve the strangeness that exists
between them. In some situations the normal considerations of public risk
become minimized, and interaction between urbanites assumes a much more
intimate tone. There are conditions where urbanites need not engage in their
usual practice of extensive civil inattention. There are conditions where needs
for privacy and anonymity seem to diminish somewhat. There are situations
where urban strangers are able to become more familiar with one another.
There are conditions where anonymity seems to become more intimate.
The city can be a humane, personal place. If we agree upon the value of
creating even more humane cities, we must understand the normative
demands of public interaction. We must understand the limits and potentialities
of public city life. To do that, we must not casually take at face value the readily
accessible and commonly expressed images of city life promoted by the mass
media and frequently sustained by our most distinguished literary and philo-
sophical figures. If our conceptualizations of the urban environment become
too rigid, we severely restrict the range of possible experiences that urban resi-
dents may undergo. We have sought to show in this chapter and in Chapter 3
that one function of an urban social psychology is to call to our attention how
some of our images of the city may too severely restrict our conception of the
ways in which urbanites can and do relate to one another.
NOTES
1. Our thinking in this section has been heavily influenced by Lyn Lofland’s (1985)
penetrating study of the historical transformation of urban life. She argues that the basis
for public order in preindustrial cities was persons’ appearances. With the emergence of
industrial cities, public order was determined by persons’ geographical location.
2. The following section has been adapted from Karp and Yoels (1986:116–119).
CHAPTER 5
Lifestyle Diversity and

Urban Tolerance
O ne of the hallmarks of a great city is that it fosters a tolerance for

differences in behavior and group lifestyle. Urbanites learn to cope with,
adapt to, and often enjoy lifestyle differences; they seem to have developed a
sophistication about lifestyle diversity. As we have noted several times
throughout this book, whatever else a city may be, it is a place that brings
together people representing an extraordinary array of cultural differences.
While, as we shall see, serious conflicts do sometimes erupt among these
groups, a central fact of city life is that urbanites learn to live with and to
appreciate human diversity. The very notions of urbanity and cosmopolitan-
ism are caught up with the ideas of sophistication about and tolerance for a
wide range of differences in behavior, attitude, and beliefs. In an essay cel-
ebrating New York as the symbol of modern urban life because it embodies
the potentialities for personal freedom, Peter Berger playfully defines a true
metropolis as “a place where an individual can march down the street wearing
a purple robe and a hat with bells on, beating a drum and leading an elephant
by the leash—and only get casual glances from passers-by” (Berger 1978:30).
To be sure, every large city has its own characters who may put on
impromptu song and dance acts, helpfully direct traffic, preach religious or
political “truths,” warn us about the imminent end of the world, or stop us
on the street asking for change so that “I might get my Rolls Royce out of
hock.” In some areas of the city we are likely to be stopped by those who will
“give us a great deal on a genuine diamond-studded watch.” If we choose, we
120 BEING URBAN
can watch hipsters play cycle polo on their fixed-speed bikes. There are also
those who want us to read their handbills, those who solicit customers for
massage parlors, or those who bellow gospel tunes for themselves and for any-
one who stops to listen.
In this chapter we want to explore the basis for this sophistication and tol-
erance. To disregard the varieties of culture that flourish within cities would
be to miss one of the important essences of the city. The city is large, dense,
and composed of groups with heterogeneous lifestyles. Each of these diverse
groups undoubtedly interprets the nature of the city differently; for each,
the city, in its various aspects, is likely to carry a different meaning. The city,
to use Anselm Strauss’s (1975) term, is made up of a series of distinctive yet
interdependent “social worlds.” Another sociologist, Everett Hughes, put it
nicely:
The city is a place of crises for many persons. There may be enough people who
share one peculiarity to allow them to join together to make a cult of it. Esoteric
cults burgeon. But so do organization of alcoholics, of parents of retarded chil-
dren, of fatties who plan on getting thin. Older people form Golden Years clubs,
which become matrimonial bureaus. The reorganization of life in the city pro-
ceeds in part by the rise of peculiar institutions which resolve personal crises.
(Hughes 1969:246)
Hughes’s description immediately indicates one feature of urban life that

allows the formation of diverse, special-interest groups. Such groups can arise
because the population size of cities ensures a “critical mass” of persons with a
particular interest or need. In the small town, someone interested in ballet,
for example, may be hard-pressed to find another person with the same inter-
est. In cities, however, even those with relatively rare needs and concerns can
find each other. Art lovers, stamp collectors, photography buffs, and baseball
card collectors easily find each other. And so do transvestites, witches, and
dwarfs. During a visit to New York, one of the authors came across an adver-
tisement in one of the city’s alternative newspapers for a group of people who
share two characteristics: they are insomniacs and bicycling enthusiasts.
In New York, if you can’t sleep and like riding a bike, you can regularly join
others who meet in downtown Manhattan in the early hours of the morning
to tour the city.
The point is that one can scarcely think of a human activity that cannot be
indulged in large cities. The city fosters the development of subcultures that
provide social support and a context in which nearly every imaginable human
behavior can be enacted. The result in cities is an enormous increase in the
number and visibility of what might be termed “moral deviances,” that is,
LIFESTYLE DIVERSITY AND URBAN TOLERANCE 121
deviances that contravene conventional standards but do not break the law.
To some, the freedom cities provide individuals to practice their often idio-
syncratic lifestyles is evidence of the humane influences of urban life.
To others, it is evidence of the moral decay fostered by an urban way of life.
As we move along in this chapter, we will, through a review of salient litera-
ture, try to parse out the factors that fashion people’s views of lifestyle diver-
sity as something to be either applauded or, if not eliminated, at least avoided.
In trying to account for the extent of tolerance and freedom provided to
subcultures in the city, we pick up on a theme consistently found in some of
the writing reviewed in earlier chapters. Classical thinkers and early observers
of city life recognized the greater potential for freedom of action in cities than
in small towns. Simmel, despite his distaste for what he saw as the rational-
ized, intellectualized, anonymous character of metropolitan relations, cer-
tainly did allow that the city, precisely because of these characteristics, made
possible a degree of freedom that could not be found in the small town.
The indifference, anonymity, intellectualization, and cosmopolitanism of
urban life provided an independence of action and thought that the “petti-
ness and prejudices” of small-town life precluded.
In Chapter 3 we reviewed the theoretical and empirical writings of Robert
Park and his students and colleagues at the University of Chicago. They, too,
were concerned with documenting and understanding the tolerance for
diversity in large cities. At base, they tried to understand the connection
between the ecological characteristics of the city and the social psychology
of urban persons. A consistent argument in the writings of Park and Louis
Wirth claimed that the growth of secondary, and the weakening of primary, rela-
tions in cities permitted a greater diversity of individual expression than could be
found in the small town. Park (1925) commented: “The small community often
tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it. Neither the criminal,
the defective, nor the genius has the same opportunity to develop his innate dis-
position in a small town that he invariably finds in a great city” (41). The city
was seen as supporting a variety of groups, each with its distinctive behaviors,
attitudes, and lifestyles; groups that ecologically segregated themselves into their
own “moral region.” Persons with characteristics in common—color, ethnicity,
social status, and lifestyle preferences—find each other in cities, are drawn
together, and create their own living space together.
Evidence that the city is composed of a number of distinctive social
worlds—a mosaic of separate cultures that stand in sharp contrast with each
other—was provided in the ethnographies of Park’s students. Studies of
“hobohemia,” the rooming-house districts, the inhabitants of both the
“Gold Coast” and the slum, the world of the immigrant, and various ethnic
122 BEING URBAN
enclaves substantiated the existence of distinctive urban worlds. Each of these

worlds generated its own distinctive values and lifestyles in response to the
particular contingencies confronting persons in the urban environment.
More recent research has followed the tradition of documenting the inner
life of distinctive urban subcultures. Sociologists have, for example, produced
ethnographies describing in detail such diverse urban worlds as those of cops
(Moskos 2008), drug dealers (Venkatesh 2008), graffiti artists (Snyder 2009),
boxers (Wacquant 2004), and Goths and evangelical Christians (Wilkins
2008). In addition, we documented in earlier chapters the research of those
who analyzed the internal dynamics of the homogeneous ethnic communities
found in all large cities (Gans 1962a; Liebow 1967; Suttles 1968; Venkatesh
2006; Whyte 1943). All this research contains, if only implicitly, the same mes-
sage as the ethnographies of Park’s students do. It is, again, that cities
provide persons—whatever their idiosyncratic tastes, needs, values, or lifestyles—
the opportunity to find others who share the same tastes, needs, values, or life-
styles. Moreover, the city provides individuals a degree of freedom and tolerance
to engage in their preferred lifestyles that would not exist in a small community.
Before continuing, it is important to say a few words about terms used in
this chapter. The reader should note that we have chosen to speak of toler-
ance for “subcultures” rather than for “deviant” groups. This choice is dic-
tated by the belief that the term “deviance” has been much abused. Despite
sociologists’ efforts to make clear that theirs is a morally neutral position,
when they speak of deviance, the term has come to have a distinctly pejora-
tive, negative connotation. While a simple change of labels will not fully solve
the problem, we shall use the term “subculture” to signal our interest in any
group with a “different” or “distinctive” lifestyles (cf. Fischer 1975; Hebdige
1979; Williams 2011). We will deviate somewhat from others’ use of the term
inasmuch as subcultural theorists often emphasize groups that are youthful
and explicitly oppositional to broader cultural values. Certainly we are inter-
ested in how groups that transgress laws are dealt with in cities. We are, how-
ever, also interested in the treatment of groups whose behaviors may be
questionably moral rather than illegal. Finally, we intend the term “subcul-
ture” to encompass groups expressing values and ideologies that may be con-
trary to dominant values or ideologies. Any explanation of city tolerance must
extend to all these groups, regardless of whether the term “deviance” can
appropriately be attached to their behaviors. Our interest must go beyond
tolerance for deviance to tolerance for diversity more generally.
Having made this point, we now present the questions that will guide our
analysis in this chapter. Among other questions, we want to ask: What is it
about the structure of the city that makes tolerance for subcultures possible?
What is it about urbanites’ social psychology that leads to greater tolerance than
would likely exist in less citified, more homogeneous areas? Are there degrees of
tolerance? Does the nature of tolerance vary for different types of groups? How
is tolerance related to political processes in cities? And, very important, what are
the conditions under which tolerance for subcultures breaks down? Our focus,
then, will be on the processes through which tolerance is gained and lost.
IS THE CITY A CULTURE OF CIVILITY?

The general tone of our discussion has been that there is a direct relation-
ship between urbanism and tolerance; that, as a generalization, the level of
tolerance for subcultures is greater in highly urbanized areas than in noncity
places. Such a position can, of course, be overstated. It is clear that there are
many instances of intolerance in cities. Political groups are harassed, prosti-
tutes are routinely arrested for soliciting, and racial conflicts are not uncom-
mon. On particular issues, whether in rural or urban areas, it is difficult for
groups to sustain a temperate attitude toward other groups defined as adver-
saries. This is especially so if groups’ direct economic interests are involved.
Economic inequities are so basic to persons’ daily life conditions that a degree
of hostility between certain city groups becomes nearly inevitable. This is
most obviously a frequently dominant factor in the animosity between
city ethnic and racial groups. Working-class whites may become fearful when
they see blacks climbing the social/economic ladder. They become afraid that
they will be deprived of jobs and other scarce resources. The history of school
busing in cities such as Boston (Lukas 1986) reveals just how tenuous and
fragile the relationships are between racial groups in cities. A degree of toler-
ance, or at least nonintervention, is maintained as long as minority groups do
not “invade” particular, homogeneous ethnic communities. There are, to use
Suttles’s (1972) term, “defended neighborhoods” within cities whose boun-
daries are not to be trespassed by alien groups. Suttles notes:
Cities inevitably bring together populations that are too large and composed of
too many conflicting elements for their residents to find cultural solutions to the
problems of social control. The result seems to be a partitioning of the city into
several village-like areas where the actual groupings of people are of more man-
ageable proportions. (1972:21)
A study of a community’s response to racial minorities’ presence in “their”

area illustrates how easily tolerance disappears when people perceive that their
sense of territoriality and economic interests are threatened. In their study
124 BEING URBAN
mentioned in Chapter 3, Wilson and Taub (2006) found that neighborhood

communities were not only sources of pleasant communitarian Gemeinschaft.
In particular, in the older, majority white Chicago neighborhood they
dubbed Beltway, Wilson and Taub noted profound, racially tinged resistance
to any influx of newcomers. The neighborhood lies toward the southwest
edge of the city, and is seen by many residents as a sort of last stand against
the takeover of Chicago neighborhoods by immigrant groups and African-
Americans. Indeed, they write, “[W]hite residents perceived such neighbor-
hoods as an endangered species” (18).
Many residents of the neighborhood must live within the city, because
they are employed by the city. In order to maintain their white (and to a cer-
tain extent, native-born Latino) majority in the neighborhood, many resi-
dents work through institutions like a neighborhood organization and with
the police, advocating for policies that will contribute to residential stability,
or make black youths feel unwelcome in their neighborhood. Residents par-
ticularly remain embittered by school integration—“Community leaders
often publicly proclaimed that busing and ‘the blacks’ had caused the decline
of the neighborhood school” (22). Many, particularly in the older genera-
tion, wistfully look back to a time when the boundaries of neighborhoods
were racial as well as spatial, and when institutional racism was an explicit
norm. One, expressing displeasure with the status of the parks, refers back
to the regime of Richard J. Daley (1955–1976):
Old man Daley, he was for the blue-collar worker. Used to be that when you
had those jobs you had ‘em for life and you could raise a family. It’s all different
now, taxes and all that shit is killing the workingman. We’re paying to support
all the fucking niggers and minorities. . . . I mean niggers don’t pay taxes, spics
don’t pay taxes. If we leave there’ll be nothing in this goddamn city. (23–24)
Though they note that such explicit racism is attenuated in the younger
generation, Wilson and Taub’s study of Beltway clearly demonstrates how
intolerance can characterize a group of urban dwellers. Faced with a changing
demographic and political reality in their community, residents trumpeted
their distaste for people different than themselves and did what they could
to defend the neighborhood from “those people.”
Community Size and Tolerance

While studies such as Wilson and Taub’s point out the types of urban situa-
tions in which contact among groups dramatically increases hostile feelings,
the bulk of the research on tolerance strongly shows that as the size of com-
munity increases, the degree of tolerance toward a variety of unconventional
behaviors increases. As is often the case in social science writing, one path-
breaking study sets the course for future research. In the case of tolerance
such a landmark study was Samuel Stouffer’s (1955) research on attitudes
toward civil liberties in the United States. In his book Communism, Conform-
ity and Civil Liberties, Stouffer reported on national survey data collected
from several thousand persons. The data clearly show that urbanites are far
more likely to grant civil liberties to groups expressing politically and socially
unconventional attitudes (for example, communists, socialists, atheists) than
those living in smaller communities. Stouffer’s central explanation of the find-
ings is that the heterogeneity of the city dramatically increases the likelihood
that persons will have contact with social or cultural diversity and that such con-
tact will persuade them that such differences are neither harmful nor dangerous.
In effect, Stouffer argued that the culture shock induced by contact with groups
different from one’s own was a factor in increasing tolerance. The place of con-
tact in maximizing tolerance is reflected in his explanation that
[t]he citizen of a metropolitan community is more likely to rub shoulders with a

variety of people whose values are different from his own and even repugnant to
him than a man or woman in a village. The city man has to learn to live and let
live in his heterogeneous community to an extent not necessary for the villager.
(1955:127)
Since Stouffer’s study, numerous pieces of research (Carter, Steelman,

Mulkey, and Borch 2005; Fischer 1971, 1984; Fischer and Hout 2006;
Smith and Peterson 1980; Stephan and McMullin 1982; Tuch 1987; Wil-
liams, Nunn, and Peter 1976; Wilson 1985, 1986) have replicated the general
finding that tolerance for different ethnic groups and for such behaviors as pre-
marital sex, abortion, and drug use is greatest in urban contexts. However, the
complexity of the relationship between urbanism and tolerance is not captured
with the simple observation that they are correlated. Many of the more recent
studies on tolerance are concerned with specifying how, why, and under what
conditions urban places generate greater levels of tolerance for nonconformity.
A number of these studies have explicitly tested Stouffer’s culture shock hypoth-
esis, have tried to specify how city size is connected to tolerance, and have
explored whether region of the country is a more powerful predictor of toler-
ance than city size. While we are not interested in getting caught up in all of
the methodological debates and theoretical intricacies raised by the literature
on urbanism and tolerance, we should at least consider some of the complexities
126 BEING URBAN
involved in interpreting the consistent community size/tolerance relationship.

Anyone who has studied statistics knows that simple findings of correlation do
not prove causation. At issue, then, is understanding more fully the relationship
between community size and tolerance, specifying the mechanism(s) through
which this relationship is sustained.
There are three competing interpretations (Fischer 1984) of the relation-
ship between urbanism and a range of behaviors, of which tolerance is only
one. First are those who advocate a kind of “urban determinism” that posits
a direct relationship between urbanism and a range of behaviors. The deter-
minist position is best expressed in the writings of Louis Wirth described in
Chapter 2. In his essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), Wirth proposed
that there was a direct, causal relationship between the ecological characteris-
tics of urban life and such features of urban life as depersonalization and the
weakening of social bonds. This position has it that urbanism (as measured
by size, density, and heterogeneity) itself causes a particular constellation of
attitudes, values, and lifestyles. Some critics (Gans 1962a) of the Wirthian
position argue that more important than urbanism per se is the demographic
composition of urban dwellers. That is, such factors as the age, race, ethnicity,
religion, and social class of urbanites are most consequential in explaining var-
iations in urban and nonurban behaviors. It is these attributes, compositional
theorists argue, that determine regularities of behavior often mistaken as
being caused by the city itself. A third position that represents a synthesis of
deterministic and compositional theories (Fischer 1975, 1984) has it that in
the large, dense, and heterogeneous urban environment a variety of subcul-
tures flourish, each of which provides social support for particular beliefs
and behaviors. This third argument coincides with our earlier observation
that because of their sheer population density, cities provide a “critical mass”
of individuals who can come together and form a subculture. As Fischer
notes, such subcultures often center on unconventional behavior:
Among the subcultures spawned or intensified by urbanism are those usually

considered to be either downright “deviant” by the larger society—such as
delinquents, professional criminals, and homosexuals; or to be at least
“odd”—such as artists, missionaries of new religious sects, and intellectuals; or
to be breakers of tradition—such as life-style experimenters, radicals, and scien-
tists. (1984:38)
In an early study, Claude Fischer (1971) examined the extent of racial

and ethnic tolerance in cities. Through his research Fischer wanted to deter-
mine whether there is, in fact, a direct relationship between urbanism and
tolerance, as suggested in the writings of Louis Wirth and others, or whether

the extent of city tolerance is more a function of the particular demographic
characteristics of persons living in large urban areas. Would he find, as claimed
by Wirth, that the extent to which a place is urban is related to the degree of
freedom and tolerance experienced by ethnic and racial minorities? Following
Wirth, Fischer set out two hypotheses he wished to test:
1. The more urban a person’s place of residence, the more likely that person
is to be tolerant of racial and ethnic differences.
2. Community size will be directly related to tolerance of racial and ethnic
groups.
To test these hypotheses, Fischer made use of data from five Gallup polls
conducted between September 1958 and July 1965. These polls contained
data on 7,714 persons who responded to the question, “Would you vote for
a Negro, Jew, or Catholic for President?” His data indicate that while there
is a general increase of tolerance as areas become larger and more urban, this
relationship may have less to do with the city itself and more to do with the
social characteristics of persons who inhabit larger, more urban communities.
Once Fischer takes into account the demographic population variables of
class and ethnicity, he is able to report that tolerance tends to increase as the
percentage of non-Southerners, non-Protestants, and higher economic-
status persons in an area increases. Fischer goes on to explain that the rela-
tively greater tolerance in cities for racial and ethnic groups is a function of
the fact that cities draw persons with certain social characteristics. There is,
moreover, a kind of contextual effect. If persons are surrounded by others
who are tolerant, they are themselves likely to become more tolerant. Fischer
claims, therefore—contrary to the theorizing of Wirth and others—that we
cannot impute a direct relationship between urbanism and tolerance. He con-
cludes that “while urbanites are less likely to be prejudiced than rural resi-
dents, the implications of Wirth’s theory that urban life directly leads to
‘universalistic’ attitudes is not supported” (Fischer 1971:855). In other
words, Fischer argues that if noncity areas were inhabited predominantly by
high-status, non-Protestant, and non-Southern persons, they would be just
as tolerant of ethnic and racial minorities as city areas with similar populations.
Fischer’s study did not, however, resolve the matter. One line of criticism
of his work is that racial tolerance may be a unique issue and that the relation-
ship between urbanism and tolerance needs to be tested concerning a range of
diverse behaviors and attitudes. In a subsequent study, Thomas Wilson
(1985) set out explicitly to test hypotheses suggested by the writings of Wirth
128 BEING URBAN
and Stouffer. This study focused on tolerance for a wide range of target
groups and provided support for the argument claiming a direct connection
between urbanism and tolerance. Wilson found that when he took into con-
sideration the social characteristics of the persons in his sample (social status,
life cycle stage, and race), the pure relationship between urbanism and toler-
ance remained undiminished.
More recent work by Carter et al. (2005) suggests that urbanism remains a
salient predictor of tolerance. Specifically considering racial tolerance using
variables from the General Social Survey (GSS) from 1972 to 1996, the
authors hypothesized that the effects of urbanism would dwindle as the
United States has become a more tolerant nation as a whole. But their find-
ings did not support their hypothesis: On a battery of questions regarding
aspects of tolerance such as whether interracial marriage should be permitted
or housing segregation should remain intact, urban dwellers displayed signifi-
cantly greater tolerance than their rural counterparts even when holding con-
stant various other aspects of people’s demographic characteristics. Such a
finding runs directly opposite Fischer’s and suggests that urbanism per se
increases tolerance.
Wilson’s study, along with several others, was also concerned with explic-
itly testing features of Stouffer’s “culture shock” explanation of urban toler-
ance. One of Stouffer’s central ideas was that migrants to new areas
inevitably experience contact with new cultures and that such contact
increases tolerance for diversity. It is important to note that while most migra-
tion has been from rural to urban areas, Stouffer’s theory predicts that urban-
ites who migrate to rural areas will also display an increase in tolerant
attitudes. That is, Stouffer’s social psychological perspective leads to the pre-
diction that those who migrate, whether from rural to urban areas or vice
versa, will be more tolerant than those who stay put. In terms of this hypoth-
esis, Wilson’s data concur with those collected by Leslie Smith and Karen
Peterson (1980), who found that those who move to cities become more tol-
erant of a range of subcultures, while urbanites who move to rural areas do
not become any more tolerant than their urban counterparts who do not
move. It appears from these data that movement to an urban area does have
a significant effect on attitudes, while urbanites maintain existing belief sys-
tems wherever they migrate. These studies sustain the general finding that
urbanism increases tolerance while undercutting the validity of Stouffer’s
contention that culture shock is the medium through which tolerance is
increased. While the question is still an open one, the failure of studies to sup-
port Stouffer’s hypotheses suggests that the shock of contact with different
groups may be less consequential in fostering urban tolerance than the
ecological features of the city itself, along with the increased opportunity in
cities to form insulating subcultures.
Before ending our review of the literature on the community size/toler-
ance connection, we should mention one additional direction of studies of
tolerance. These studies (Abrahamson and Carter 1986; Tuch 1987) have
tested the idea that regional differences may be a more critical dimension than
community size in explaining tolerance. Such a notion is founded on the well-
documented idea that different regions of the country are in large measure
distinguished from each other in terms of the distinctive subcultural values
they generate (Reed 1983). Social scientists are always looking for the most
powerful explanation of a phenomenon, and the suggestion here is that living
in the South compared, say, with the West Coast may be more consequential
in shaping attitudes than city living itself. Here, too, the data are not thor-
oughly clear-cut. In their study focusing on issues of civil liberties, the right
to die, and people’s willingness to accommodate disabled individuals in the
workplace, Abrahamson and Carter (1986) found that between 1947 and
1982 the effects of city size on tolerance have declined, whereas those con-
nected to region have not declined and appear to exceed the impact of city
size. In contrast, Steven Tuch’s (1987) study, which focused on racial preju-
dice, showed that the effects of urbanism on racial tolerance had increased
between 1972 and 1985 while regional effects decreased. Similarly, research-
ing the effects of region through 1996, Carter et al. (2005) found that
though people from all regions of the United States are more tolerant of dif-
ferent ethnic groups, Southerners remain less tolerant than Americans from
other regions of the country. Such contradictory findings suggest that the
impact of community size and region on tolerance is a complicated matter
and that the effects are not uniform across all behaviors, attitudes, and life-
styles. In the future, additional analyses will be required to specify the areas
of social life where city life increases tolerance and those that seem more
resistant to the development of tolerant attitudes. While Fischer and Hout’s
(2006) most recent findings seem to suggest that the differences between
urbanites and others are attenuating or leveling off, we need more time to
see if that trend will continue.
San Francisco: A Case Study

The studies reviewed in the previous section largely report on statistical
data and document broad trends. As important as these studies are, it is often
theoretically enlightening to pursue a more in-depth study of a particular city
to learn about the dynamics of certain urban processes. One strategy in
130 BEING URBAN
pursuing such case studies is to choose a city that is distinguished by the pres-
ence or absence of the characteristics under investigation. In terms of toler-
ance, one city in the United States has established the reputation of having
enormously expanded limits of tolerance. In their book on the “culture of
civility” in San Francisco, Howard Becker and Irving Louis Horowitz
(1972) attempt to account for the unusual tolerance shown for “deviance”
in San Francisco. They begin their article with some examples of the expanded
limits of toleration in San Francisco:
Walking in the Tenderloin on a summer evening, a block from the Hilton, you
hear a black prostitute cursing at a policeman: “I wasn’t either blocking the side-
walk! Why don’t you motherfucking fuzz mind your own goddamn business!”
The visiting New Yorker expects to see her arrested, if not shot, but the cop
smiles good naturedly and moves on, having got her back in the doorway where
she is supposed to be. . . .
You enter one of the famous rock ballrooms and, as you stand getting used to
the noise and lights, someone puts a lit joint of marijuana in your hand. The
tourist looks for someplace to hide, not wishing to be caught in the mass arrests
he expects to follow. No need to worry. The police will not come in, knowing
that if they do they will have to arrest people and create disorder. . . .
The media report (tongue in cheek) the annual Halloween Drag Ball, for
which hundreds of homosexuals turn out at one of the city’s major hotels in full
regalia, unharrassed by police. (Becker and Horowitz 1972:4)
Becker and Horowitz argue that city tolerance in San Francisco is based on
a specific type of interaction between members of conventional groups and
members of the larger community. Members of quite diverse groups, they
suggest, strike a silent, unwritten bargain, a kind of social contract. The
essence of this bargain is that members of the minority lifestyle group moder-
ate their behaviors in certain ways so as to be acceptable to the groups around
them. There are, in other words, implicitly agreed-upon boundaries—social
behavior boundaries—beyond which the several groups “promise” not to
go. In effect, Becker and Horowitz present a modified exchange theory (Blau
1967; Homans 1961). They speak of a reciprocity between various city
groups.
Each group, they suggest, seeks to maximize its opportunities for a peace-
ful, free, ordered life. In order to accomplish this end, members of different
groups learn to keep their moral and value judgments to themselves; they
learn not to impose their own behavior standards and values on each other.
It is a true reciprocity, since each group is willing to give up something to
maximize order. The police will not break up groups congregated on street
corners, as might be the normal practice elsewhere. In turn, members of the

congregated group will police themselves so as not to engage in behaviors
that may be interpreted as troublesome. In short, an accommodation has
been developed between the police and community “straights,” on the one
hand, and members of marginal groups, on the other. All concerned benefit.
“Straights” do not become outraged by “freaks,” and the latter are provided a
greater freedom to engage in their preferred lifestyle than would otherwise be
possible in the absence of the “live and let live” bargain.
There is a quality of the self-fulfilling prophecy to the social bargain
described. As different groups abide by the social bargain, they simultane-
ously begin to recognize that the stereotypes and images they may previously
have held of each other are incorrect. In this socialization process, members
of the conventional community come, for example, to understand that gay
persons are not necessarily child molesters or that punk rockers are not neces-
sarily drug addicts. This further increases their civility toward such groups.
The city consequently becomes known for its civility—as a desirable place to
live if one wishes to maximize freedom for a subcultural existence. It follows
that such persons gravitate to the city to live and settle down. Finally, once
these persons find a place where they can live relatively unharassed, they
become less likely to engage in erratic or undesirable behaviors. The result
of this process is an upward spiraling of tolerance.
The natural question to ask is, “Why San Francisco?” Here the authors are
required to speculate about the demographic and historical factors in this
city’s growth that may have contributed to the development of a culture of
civility. They indicate three historical antecedents that might have been
instrumental. First, San Francisco has always been a major seaport, catering
from the beginning to the vices traditionally engaged in by sailors. Second, a
history of trade unionism has left the city with a “left wing, honest base which
gives the city a working-class democracy and even eccentricity, rather than the
customary pattern of authoritarianism” (Becker and Horowitz 1972:10).
Finally, San Francisco has an unusually high proportion of single persons,
who need not worry about what effects the activities of subcultures may have
on their children.
This last point leads us to suggest a hypothesis about urban tolerance wor-
thy of further empirical investigation. We might argue that in addition to the
kinds of socioeconomic variables (for example, education, occupation, and
income) traditionally studied, it is equally important to take into account
the age and family life cycle characteristics of urbanites. It appears that those
urban areas with high percentages of young, single persons and young mar-
ried couples without children are the most likely places for high degrees of
132 BEING URBAN
tolerance to be sustained (cf. Florida 2002). Indeed, Eric Klinenberg (2012)

notes that as the single population has grown to be greater than 50 percent
of the adult population, and they are disproportionately concentrated in
cities, they are driven to build communities to support one another.
Despite their generally optimistic image of this one city, Becker and Horo-
witz are careful to point out that there are situations in which the parties
involved are unable to create a set of negotiated accommodations. As men-
tioned earlier, these most likely involve economic inequities. Moreover, in
some situations it is extremely difficult to work out a bargain whereby both
sides give up equal amounts and gain equal amounts. In some conflict situa-
tions between city groups, in other words, it is difficult to create a fully recip-
rocal arrangement of costs and rewards. Often these situations—in which
equitable arrangements are difficult to create—involve the relationship
between minority racial groups and majority groups. Becker and Horowitz
offer examples:
It may be possible to improve the education of poor black children, for instance,
only by taking away some of the privileges of white teachers. It may be possible
to give black youths a chance at apprenticeships in skilled trades only by remov-
ing the privileged access to those positions of the sons of present white union
members. When whites lose these privileges, they may feel strongly enough to
fracture the consensus of civility. (1972:15)
Although San Francisco presents a somewhat unusual case, we can learn

several things from Becker and Horowitz’s discussion that will facilitate our
own analysis. We may presume that in all cities, members of different groups
have some notions about acceptable boundaries of subcultural behaviors.
If we learn the general dimensions of those boundaries of regulative norms,
we may better understand the conditions under which tolerance is most likely
to exist. If only implicitly, Becker and Horowitz indicate the necessity for ana-
lyzing the role of political processes in the development or hindrance of toler-
ant attitudes. Finally, although it is beyond the province of this chapter, their
study indicates the need to investigate the distinctive histories of cities to
understand why they support higher or lower levels of tolerance.
Despite the insight provided in the analysis we have described, there are a
number of points in Becker and Horowitz’s discussion that we believe may
be misleading. Becker and Horowitz have implied too rigid a notion of toler-
ance. They have only, it appears, a positive notion. They imply that tolerance
exists only because the different groups involved consciously value it. While
this is undeniably often so, it may equally be the case that tolerance in cities
is a by-product of avoidance. This is to say (as we noted in Chapter 4) that

persons develop social procedures to minimize the probability of their com-
ing into intimate contact with those whom they do not find particularly con-
genial. In still other cases, tolerance may be the unintended consequence of
persons not even knowing of the presence of subcultures. These authors also
fail to describe the situation when the relationship between groups is an
obligatory one.
More important still, Becker and Horowitz appear to have a rather static
view of the bargains created between groups. One gets the impression that
once the bargain is understood by all parties, it remains indefinitely the basis
for interaction between groups. What happens, we might ask, when groups
come to feel that the bargain is no longer equitable; when subcultures
develop the collective idea that others’ definition of them and their behaviors
is inappropriate? What are the processes, in other words, through which
accommodations are renegotiated? What happens when subcultures begin
to test the limits of a community’s tolerance? Becker and Horowitz do not
extend their analysis to the elements responsible for the disintegration of tol-
erance. In fact, as San Francisco real estate became increasingly desirable
through the 1990s, the city’s famous tolerance was tested—and arguably
failed, at least with respect to the homeless. As Bourgois and Schonberg
(2009) and Teresa Gowan (2010) argue in separate ethnographic reports,
neighborhoods have become increasingly antagonistic to the homeless, and
police have stepped up actions against the homeless. Bourgois and Schonberg
observe that
[o]ur fieldnotes include dozens of accounts of police sweeps that sent the
Edgewater homeless into survival crisis mode. . . . Repeatedly all the blankets,
sleeping bags, clothing, and tarps were ground up in garbage trucks as if they
were useless trash. Only the moral economy of sharing kept the Edgewater
homeless from total mayhem on these occasions when they suddenly lost every-
thing. (112)
In addition to the work of Becker and Horowitz we should mention the

research of two historians who provide a specification of the evolution of
San Francisco’s tolerance. Looking at the city’s history since the Civil War
indicates that it would be a mistake to believe tolerance in San Francisco has
been equally extended to all city groups. Data gathered by Robert Cherney
(1986) and William Issel (1986) indicate that San Francisco’s tolerance for
different religious groups, for eccentric individuals, and for vice-related activ-
ities has been historically striking. However, the city’s history also reveals a
134 BEING URBAN
virulent hostility toward the Chinese in the nineteenth century and toward
political radicals during the early part of the twentieth century. Both Cherney’s
and Issel’s studies illustrate that tolerance is often a product of the demographic
composition of cities. Because of their relatively large numbers in San Francisco,
Catholics and Jews were able to gain entry to political, economic, and cultural
spheres of city life that were denied them in cities with a much larger Protestant
majority. Further, sociologists Armstrong and Crage’s (2006) study of the
origins of the gay rights movement in the United States suggests that San
Francisco, now famous particularly for its tolerance of homosexuality, was not
always so. Indeed, police were violently disrupting gatherings of gays there well
into the 1960s. These different studies remind us that particular patterns of tol-
eration and discrimination are city specific and must be understood in terms of
each city’s unique history.
CREATING AND MAINTAINING TOLERANCE

In previous pages we have described two apparently contradictory interpreta-
tions of the basis of city tolerance. We remarked that social ecologists provide a
picture of the city in which different groups are segregated and isolated from
each other, and consequently have little contact with one another. There are,
according to this view, clear territorial groupings composed of persons with sim-
ilar characteristics who largely restrict their activities to well-defined territories.
Suttles (1972) describes the “defended neighborhood” as a “residential group
which seals itself off through the efforts of delinquent gangs, by restrictive cov-
enants, by sharp boundaries, or by a forbidding reputation” (21). The defended
neighborhood, by providing rules governing spatial movement, helps to pre-
serve order by segregating groups that might otherwise come into conflict.
And Louis Wirth made explicit the relationship between ecological segregation
and the production of tolerance for the quite diverse groups drawn to cities:
The voluntary segregation of Jews in ghettoes had much in common with the
segregation of Negroes and immigrants in modern cities, and was identical in
many respects with the development of Bohemian and Hobohemian quarters
in the urban community of today. The tolerance that strange ways of living find
in immigrant colonies, in Latin Quarters, in vice districts and in other localities
is a powerful factor in the shifting of the population and its allocation in separate
cultural areas where one obtains freedom from hostile criticism and the backing
of a group of kindred spirits. (Wirth 1969:20)
The literature stressing ecological segregation of groups seems to imply

that tolerance is possible in cities because groups are isolated from one
another, because groups have little or no contact with one another. Yet we
have seen that Stouffer, and Becker and Horowitz, offer a quite different
explanation for tolerance. They have suggested that tolerance is produced
and maintained through a special type of interaction; that different lifestyle
groups do indeed come into contact with each other but must learn to mod-
erate their behaviors in each other’s presence. Is this an insoluble theoretical
dilemma? Must we choose between the alternative explanation—one stressing
isolation and the other stressing interaction? We shall argue that ecological
segregation of subcultures does exist and operates to produce a controlled
contact between these different city groups.
Spatial Segregation and Controlled Contact

Appropriate to our present interest is Lyn Lofland’s book A World of
Strangers (1985). In that book Lofland tries to answer these questions: What
is the basis for public social order in cities? How is the potentially chaotic
world of strangers transformed into a system of predictable social relation-
ships? The central thesis of her historical research is that the way urban order
is achieved in modern cities is different from that in preindustrial and early
industrial cities. The transition has been from an order based primarily on
appearance in the latter cities to an order based on space in present-day cities:
“In the pre-industrial city, space was chaotic, appearances were ordered.
In the pre-industrial city a man was what he wore. In the modern city a man
is where he stands” (Lofland 1985:82).
Before we think about the nature of this spatial ordering and how it func-
tions, we might briefly raise a methodological question. Why did Lofland
choose to frame her analysis of modern cities in historical terms? Why not
simply present data on modern cities and leave it at that? Lofland does not
answer that question directly in her book, but were this question put to her,
she would probably respond that the historical comparison helps us better
to see how our own lives are unique. Because we tend to take for granted
how our lives are organized, we need the “shock” provided by history to rec-
ognize this uniqueness. We have continually argued in this book that persons
are capable of transforming the social world—the urban world—as their
changing needs dictate. Lofland’s book is about the value that persons place
on order and intelligibility in their lives. It is through the historical compari-
son given by Lofland that we most clearly see how urban persons have trans-
formed the urban place to produce this order.
There is, then, a spatial ordering to city activities. If we are properly social-
ized urbanites, we know that certain types of persons—persons engaging in
136 BEING URBAN
certain behaviors and practicing distinctive lifestyles—will be found in certain

areas of the city. Lofland defines what she calls locational socialization as the
process by which the urbanite continually “learns about the meaning of loca-
tions, about what is expected to go on where and who is expected to be doing
it” (1985:69). The ecological segregation and concomitant locational sociali-
zation are important because they give urbanites knowledge. They may
choose to be in areas of the city that put them in contact with different life-
style groups, or they can choose to avoid such contact. Urbanites have, in
other words, a certain autonomy over the contact that they will have with
various lifestyle or marginal groups. Such contact is a controlled contact.
If, for example, one wants to avoid contact with homosexuals or prosti-
tutes or those selling pornography, one simply avoids those areas of the city
that such persons are likely to frequent. Tolerance is contingent on this con-
trolled contact. Spatial segregation is a primary requisite for tolerance, for
we must be able to choose how, when, and where groups different from our
own will touch our lives. Spatial segregation of groups and activities, then,
provides a comforting predictability relative to the encounters we have with
cultural strangers. In this regard, it follows that tolerance will likely begin to
break down when the conditions for controlled contact are not met. It fre-
quently happens that a public clamor is raised when members of subcultures
begin to appear in city areas where they “don’t belong.” In several cities, for
example, a certain section of the downtown area is informally designated a
sort of “grownup playground” replete with bass-thumping nightclubs, young
men loudly cruising in “candy painted whips,” plenty of alcohol, and more-
or-less open narcotics use. For example in Atlanta’s Bucktown neighborhood,
the noise and occasional violence that accompany these activities periodically
spur residents to call for, and receive, additional policing in the form of
“crackdowns” (see, for example, Mayeux 2011; Shalhoup 2010).
We noted earlier than urbanites do not always wish to avoid contact with
those whom they perceive as having unusual lifestyles. The opportunity to
observe, and even on occasion to participate in, the behaviors of such persons
is part of the life and character of a city. Every city has its areas to which per-
sons may go for their observations: their urban sightseeing. Certain public
parks normally come to serve this function. In such places persons may stroll
and watch the “antics” of those with whom they would otherwise have no
contact. In these places persons representing a fairly large range of lifestyles
may come into moderate contact. Like the anthropologist who ventures into
different societies to observe the “strange” cultural patterns of the natives,
urban persons know where they may learn about culturally diverse city dwell-
ers. Unlike the anthropologist, however, urban observers do not have to gain
the acceptance of the “natives” by meeting, as far as possible, their cultural

standards.
In one study, Richard Lloyd (2010) described the rising popularity of
Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, which he dubbed a “neo-Bohemia.”
Though it was once a solidly working-class neighborhood, by the late
1980s, Wicker Park had become a mostly low-income, crime-ridden neigh-
borhood, ravaged by the effects deindustrialization had upon Chicago.
The low rents and large spaces of the area attracted artists and other bohe-
mians. Soon the bars and galleries opened by these vanguard bohemians
attracted more affluent, mainstream patrons. These mainstream, upper-class
employees of downtown firms came to Wicker Park to experience some of
the “edginess” of this urban space, replete with the “hipster” subculture,
prostitutes, and drug dealers. Some of those patrons eventually became resi-
dents of the neighborhood, driving up real estate prices, and driving the
“grit” further from the center of the neighborhood, toward the edges. Lloyd
finds that the true neo-Bohemians of Wicker Park are thus caught in a balanc-
ing act, trying to stay on the edge:
For to be on “the edge,” with all the valences that attach to this term, is crucial
to neo-bohemian identification. As one West Side gallery owner put it, echoing
a familiar bon mot, “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much
space.” This space of the edge is narrow, resists crowds, and entails a precarious
balancing act. . . . Historically emergent themes of bohemia inflect the experi-
ence of the local street, in which a range of normative associations take shape:
hipness, intensity, diversity, authenticity. (100)
In sum, it is the spatial ordering of activities in cities that allows persons to

distance or align themselves to certain levels of intimacy with subcultures.
“The distinctive feature of distancing as against territoriality seems to be that
it does not simply divide individuals or groups into mutually exclusive affilia-
tions, but defines their associations at discrete points along a continuum”
(Suttles 1972:176). Another way to speak of controlled contact, then, is as
contact that allows persons to determine carefully the degree of the intimacy
of that contact—which allows them a degree of autonomy over the depth of
their involvement with others. By being able to control the place and timing
of contact with subcultures and by knowing what kinds of behaviors to expect
of persons in different city spaces, urbanites can monitor the extent of their
involvement with persons from culturally different groups.
The idea that tolerance is contingent upon a subtly negotiated set of interac-
tions is nicely illustrated in Ruth Horowitz’s (1987) study of a community’s tol-
erance for gang violence. Her observational study centered on the organization
138 BEING URBAN
and place of youth gangs within a largely Hispanic community. The central
question of the study asked how parents and other community members expe-
rienced their community as ordered and why they tolerated gang violence that
accounted for several murders each year. Her argument is that continued toler-
ance for gang violence is contingent upon a precarious negotiated order
through which gang members clearly separate their gang-related activity from
more conventional community contexts. For example, within the context of
their families, the young men displayed a great deal of respect for parents and
were defined by them as “good boys.” The boys operated in terms of a set of
norms requiring them rigidly to compartmentalize their gang-related behaviors
to places and times that would allow parents to maintain that their children are
uninvolved with gang violence. In effect, parents are able to create and to sustain
the fiction that their sons are uninvolved with gangs as long as the boys rigidly
restrict their gang-related behaviors to contexts inaccessible to their parents.
Of course, there were occasions in which gang-related violence spilled over into
family or community events in ways that threatened the community’s negoti-
ated order and made it impossible for parents to sustain the definition of their
children as unaligned with gangs. Consistent with our general argument is the
finding that tolerance for “deviant” behavior is maintained as long as it remains
effectively invisible to parents, an invisibility constructed through the concerted
efforts of both gang members and the rest of the community.
When there is little that they feel they can do to deter violence and the perpetrators
are people whom they love, parents have little choice but to cooperate with gang
members in negotiating a sense of order. As long as violence is ecologically segre-
gated from “parental space,” parents can do their part to maintain a pretense of
unawareness of the gang identity of their children. . . . This cannot be achieved
without the cooperation of the gang members who respect the need to segregate
their violent actions by time and place and who offer reasonable accounts for their
conduct that can be accepted by their parents. (Horowitz 1987:449)
So far in our discussion of ecological ordering of city activities, we have dis-

cussed city spaces in rather objective terms. The reader has likely pictured the
city as broken up into clearly delineated and bounded spaces, each of which
supports a different set of persons and activities. To view city space as made
up of a number of neat, self-contained areal packages somewhat simplifies
urbanites’ sense of space, however. We want to carry our analysis of the rela-
tionship between the spatial ordering of behavior and the maintenance of life-
style freedom one additional step. We propose, following the writing
particularly of Kevin Lynch (1960, 1972), that for many urban persons, the
areas of the city inhabited by different groups are, in fact, not even considered
part of what they define as the “real city.” Lynch and others have suggested
that the city environment is conceived differently by different groups, that
persons carry in their heads images of what the city is. For some, the areas of
the city inhabited by subcultures may not appear on these cognitive maps of
the city. One cannot feel particularly threatened by down-and-outers on skid
row, for example, if that area of the city is not part of one’s consciousness.
To expand on this idea, we must consider how urbanites conceive of city
space. Here we shall argue that tolerance is maintained not because of specific
forms of contact with subcultures but through what we might term a “spatial
myopia” that may, for some, make subcultures essentially invisible, or at least
blur their existence.
Tolerance and Urbanites’ Sense of Place

In his book The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch created what he
called a cognitive map of Boston by interviewing a sample of that city’s resi-
dents. While nearly all persons interviewed mentioned certain landmarks
(such as Paul Revere’s house and Boston Common), the most salient finding
of his effort was that the individual city images of each person interviewed
were quite different. He also found that their sense of their own location in
city space was quite different, and (most closely related to our interests here)
that, for each person interviewed, vast areas of the city were simply unknown.
Subsequent research has continued to substantiate Lynch’s findings, noting,
among other things, that there is significant cross-cultural variation in the
way that people map their locales. For example, while people in some cultures
make more note of the physical aspects of urban geography, others pay more
attention to the functional role places play in their lives (Caswell and Kennison
2013).
In one study (Hurst 1975) the urban images of two distinct class groups
living in Vancouver, British Columbia, were compared. The groups com-
pared were, on the one hand, professionals and businessmen living in the
city’s exclusive areas and welfare recipients living in the nonexclusive East Side
of the city, on the other hand. Again, while both groups mentioned a number
of city landmarks in common, their overall images of the city were quite dif-
ferent. The professional group’s image was bounded by the central business
district, certain clubs, and the immediate area of residence. The welfare group
had an even more localized image of the city, centering on the rooming-
house district and a few local bars, stores, and community facilities.
140 BEING URBAN
The research recently cited indicates that urban persons in communication

with others define their own unique sense of city space. Resonating with the
LeFebvre’s theory of “differential space” as discussed in Chapter 2, empirical
findings show how certain locations come to be invested with particular
meanings. The city is defined psychologically by the symbolically meaningful,
familiar, and comfortable spaces within which one’s daily round of activities is
carried out. In addition, certain groups of persons are likely to share the same
general cognitive map of the city. As Edward Hall (1966) puts it, different
persons and different groups “inhabit different sensory worlds” (2).
There are a number of ways that urban sociologists might construct per-
sons’ and groups’ mental maps of the city. One could, for example, sample a
number of geographical points in any city and then ask persons to try identi-
fying photos of these points. It would then be possible to create an index
for each geographical area simply by counting the proportion of persons
interviewed who correctly identified the point, object, or area. As an alterna-
tive method, one could stop persons on the street and ask directions to a par-
ticular point or area. What percentage will know how to get there? What
consistencies will there be in the landmarks mentioned? How frequently was
each landmark mentioned?
Toward the end of his article on the experience of city life, Stanley Milgram
(1970) comments on the potential importance that such constructed maps
could have in gaining insight into the very different conceptions held of the
city by its various groups. Cognitive maps may be used to determine how per-
sons’ image of the city and sense of city space may be affected by age, ethnic-
ity, social class, sex, and the like. Could it be, for example, as Milgram
speculates, that ghettoization may hamper the expansion of black teenagers’
sense of the city? While such research remains to be done, we can safely agree
with the urban geographer Michael Hurst, who writes:
Since there is a variety of life experiences in the city, there will be varieties of
urban experiences that arise from the ways people sense different places in the
urban environment. The Afro-American, Chinese or Indian’s knowledge of
the city, life experiences and sense of place will differ from those of the Anglo-
American; the fortunate elite will differ from the working poor; teenagers will
differ from adults. . . . Each will have highly individualized conceptions of what
we commonly think of as the same urban world. (Hurst 1975:44)
We can further specify the nature of persons’ cognitive maps—the way that
they are constructed and how they will vary for different persons and different
groups—by looking at the elements involved in the creation of a sense of
place. Researchers interested in the social organization and perception of

space have distinguished among personal space, home or territorial space, and
lived space. A person’s total sense of space is a function of these three ele-
ments, which we can briefly discuss in turn.
Edward Hall (1966) and Robert Sommer (1969) have paid special atten-
tion in their research to the protective bubble of personal space that surrounds
our immediate bodies. They suggest that in our daily encounters with others
we carefully regulate the distances between ourselves and others. In American
society, for example, normal conversational distance is about two feet. If per-
sons come any closer than that, we feel that our personal space has been vio-
lated. Personal space does not remain constant but will vary in different
social situations and different contexts. Sommer distinguishes personal space
from “territory,” in that personal space has no geographic reference points;
it moves with the individual and, unlike territory, expands and contracts
under varying circumstances.
In addition to one’s sense of personal space, we may speak of a person’s
immediate territorial space. In cities this territorial space is made up of the
person’s home and immediate neighborhood. This is, of course, the space
where the urban person spends most of his or her time and is the most famil-
iar, comfortable space for the individual. The collective home bases (or
territorial space) of groups may take the form of the small ethnic community
or a gang’s “turf.” Relatively fixed and clearly delineated, the person’s or
group’s territorial space does not expand and contract in different situations.
Third, there is the urban person’s lived space. Lived space is fairly elastic,
created by paths of interaction between home territories and the various city
places where urbanites spend their time—workplace, movie theaters, schools,
parks, local stores, friends’ homes, and the like. Urbanites’ activities and inter-
actional networks will dictate which city objects, areas, and elements will be
invested with special symbolic significance. Depending upon activities and
interactional networks, “parts of city reality are excluded, distorted, crushed,
converged, elongated, and stretched out” (Hurst 1975:145).
To say that urbanites have their own distinctive lived space is not to sug-
gest that they are unaware of, ignorant of, or not knowledgeable about city
areas outside of this lived space. Typically, however, these outside areas are
known only at second hand and are invested with slight symbolic significance.
Middle-class whites certainly know about the predominantly black areas that
likely exist in their cities. These areas are not, however, part of their cognitive
maps of the city; they do not constitute part of what they know as the real city.
“Unable to experience first-hand most of the built environment, we tend to
rely on other people and the media to inform us about the large portion of
142 BEING URBAN
the city that may not be directly accessible [to us]” (Hurst 1975:161). Our
restricted mental images of the city are, in addition, reinforced by other fea-
tures of the modern city, such as the automobile that wraps its occupants in
a “cocoon of privacy” as they move through the city. Persons may pass
through certain areas and come to perceive those spaces “only in terms of city
streets which are traversed by automobile and which provide access to the
various little private and semiprivate spaces that make up their world” (Hurst
1975:164).
In many cases persons who have lived in cities all their lives have never
passed through certain areas. While teaching for a time in New York, one of
the authors was somewhat surprised to learn that many of his students had
never been to areas other than those in which they were brought up and pres-
ently lived. Many students who lived in Queens, for example, had never been
to Brooklyn, and still others had spent little time in Manhattan. These areas
were not part of their conception of the city. Their lives were contained within
a living space that did not extend beyond Queens. This pattern of spatial pro-
vincialism, we maintain, describes most urbanites’ experience and perception
of the city.
The point of our description of a city person’s sense of place is that mar-
ginal groups restricting their activities to specific city areas are effectively invis-
ible in a psychological sense to large numbers of persons—to all those
urbanites whose conception of the city does not include the areas where these
groups are found. Urban persons, we suggest, normally become concerned
only about those subcultures operating within the boundaries of their lived
space. This has important consequences for tolerance. Only in rare instances
will a large number of persons mobilize to restrict the activities of any one
group. Because of the wide variation in cognitive images of the city, relatively
few persons will be moved to action against some group commonly defined as
undesirable. Persons living in a particular city area may feel a distant antipathy
toward homosexuals, prostitutes, or certain political groups, but they are
unlikely to translate that dislike into action against these groups as long as
they remain immediately unaffected by them.
Mark Grannis (1998) provides an important specification of how such a
cognitive map of a neighborhood is produced. Grannis notes that U.S. urban
design is generally limited to a few different kinds of streets, from highways
down to pedestrian-friendly residential or “tertiary” streets, “streets that have
one lane on each side with no divider” (1533). He finds that
[i]f one represents tertiary streets as lines on a graph and connects their end-
points if and only if they meet at a tertiary intersection, then one can define a
tertiary street community, (hereafter referred to as a t-community) to be the

maximal subgraph of lines and points that are mutually reachable. Thus, every
household within a t-community is reachable from every other household by
only using tertiary streets. By this definition, therefore, a t-community is a place
designed by cities primarily for pedestrian, rather than automobile, traffic and
where “close-knit communities” with permeable “boundaries between house
and street space” can emerge. (1533)
And indeed, Grannis finds that it is these contiguous sets of walkable streets
that form people’s notion of what “their” neighborhood is. He goes on to
demonstrate how this conjunction of cognitive and spatial ordering of the city
aligns very closely with patterns of racial and ethnic segregation.
To this point we have discussed the relationship between persons’ sense of
spatial or ecological reality in cities and the maintenance of tolerance for sub-
cultures. We may extend the idea of urbanites’ sense of reality in yet another
direction. Before groups of persons will take action against other groups,
these latter groups must somehow be seen as a threat to the first groups’ col-
lective, shared version of reality—a threat to a view of the world that they
share in common. We want to use the idea of “reality construction” to
account more fully for the differences between urban and nonurban areas in
the extent of freedom allowed subcultures.
Tolerance and the Diffusion of Social Reality

Discussions of deviance in sociological literature have emphasized the idea
that conceptions of morality, respectability, and deviance are social construc-
tions and that no behaviors are intrinsically immoral or deviant (Becker
1963; Douglas 1970b; Erikson 1962; Kitsuse 1962). Morality is, according
to this view, a relative notion. An individual’s or group’s behaviors are identi-
fied as wrong, evil, immoral, or threateningly different only in terms of the
current, commonly held construction of reality of some dominant group in
a given setting. Immoral behavior is immoral only because it has been so
defined in terms of some prevailing notion of social reality. Moreover, as
pointed out by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman in their book The Social
Construction of Reality (1967), persons develop an investment, a commit-
ment to their own idea of morality, propriety, or reality in general, and may
in some cases take action against those individuals or groups representing an
alternative or contrary version of reality. This is, of course, most likely to hap-
pen if the different or alternative reality is conceived as threatening to one’s
own. Berger and Luckman (1967) comment that “the appearance of an alter-
native symbolic universe (version of reality) poses a threat because its very
144 BEING URBAN
existence demonstrates empirically that one’s own universe is less than inevi-
table” (108).
We must now consider that subcultures are composed of persons whose
behaviors are motivated by beliefs, attitudes, ideologies, or values different
from those of some majority group in a setting. Subcultures are those groups,
in other words, whose members hold to a version of social reality that departs
identifiably from some existing, more widely accepted definition of reality.
In the case of homosexuals it is primarily a sexual reality that is different.
In other cases, subcultures advocate political, economic, religious, or moral
realities that depart significantly from prevailing standards.
The likelihood that persons in some setting will become intolerant of those
practicing unconventional lifestyles is a function of a number of factors. First,
it would seem, is the sheer number of such persons. A few persons engaging in
unusual behaviors may not pose much of a threat. Should the number
increase substantially, however, they might possibly be seen as “taking over.”
Second is the visibility of such groups. If they maintain a low enough profile,
their activities are less likely to be called into question. We have already dis-
cussed the relationship between urbanites’ sense of space and the visibility of
certain “different” groups.
We now ask, Under what conditions is a high degree of consensus about
proper values, beliefs, and lifestyles likely to develop? Or, still more closely
related to the direction of our analysis here, Is there a difference between city
and noncity areas in the consistency, clarity, and rigidity of persons’ ideas
about what is right, proper, and moral, and therefore agreement about boun-
daries of acceptable behavior?
As Durkheim pointed out in his Division of Labor in Society (1984), the
basis for social solidarity and integration in small, relatively well-contained
communities is persons’ similarities. He referred to the social solidarity based
on persons’ similarity or likeness as mechanical solidarity. In a homogeneous,
undifferentiated society, individuality is at a minimum. Here a single, coher-
ent, well-defined collective consciousness guides, motivates, constrains, and
controls persons’ behaviors. Persons are guided by a rigid set of traditional
criteria relative to proper behavior. In such a society of similarly socialized
persons—and, therefore, one of uniformity of moral beliefs and practices—
deviation is easily observed, clearly visible to all, and stands in naked contrast
to the otherwise profoundly regular standards of conformity. Because those
whose behaviors mark them as different are so easily seen, repressive measures
are swiftly taken against them. Views about the values, beliefs, and attitudes that
one ought to have will be clearly delineated in the small, homogeneous society or
community. There will be a most obvious dominant, official version of reality
that sets the mark all must toe. One’s behaviors in the well-contained, homo-
geneous community are subject to rigid, traditional controls.
The city, as we have so frequently noted, is characterized by the hetero-
geneity of its population. One of its defining characteristics is that it is made
up of a diversity of ethnic, racial, age, class, and religious groups. While there
is little to differentiate persons in the small community, the populations of
cities are highly differentiated. Again, as noted by Durkheim, this demo-
graphic, structural, or morphological difference in the social organization of
cities versus small towns had significant implications for changing bases of
social control. He noted that, in contrast with the peasant community, the
type of solidarity in urbanized areas—organic solidarity—was based on differ-
ences between persons: on the meshing of individual specializations that char-
acterizes a complex division of labor.
Durkheim argued that as individuals moved away from their place of origin
to larger urbanized areas, the hold on them of traditional, rigid community
values was weakened. In addition, the anonymity of large population aggre-
gates in urbanized areas allowed for greater individual variation, with the
effect that persons experienced a greater freedom from the traditional con-
trols that had previously bounded their lives and dictated their behaviors.
“Implicit throughout the Division of Labor is the notion that the performance
of complex differentiated functions in a society with an advanced division of
labor both requires and creates individual variation, initiative and innovation,
whereas undifferentiated segmental societies do not” (Nisbet 1965:165).
The very same behaviors constituting an outrage in the small town may be
seen as only slightly unusual in cities. In cities, groups must be more “way
out” before they draw singular attention to themselves and become recog-
nized as a threat to the collective consciousness of city dwellers. The same
behaviors perceived as an affront to “our way of life” in small towns may be
dismissed by sophisticated urbanites as merely one among the many sets of
behaviors vaguely seen as “slightly different.”
CONCLUSION
Consistent with a central motif of this book—to consider positive aspects
of city life often missed in other treatments of urbanism—we have examined
the expanded limits of tolerance in cities for groups practicing unconventional
lifestyles. Our analysis began with the observation that one of the hallmarks of
the great metropolis, in contrast with the small town, is that it provides indi-
viduals a greater opportunity to “do their own thing.” Because of the size,
density, and heterogeneity defining urban life, individuals can, more easily
146 BEING URBAN
than in the small town, find subcultures supporting an extraordinary range of

behaviors, beliefs, and lifestyles. The relatively greater freedom of urbanites to
pursue idiosyncratic lifestyles, moreover, is affirmed in a range of studies
focused on the relationship between community size and tolerance. While
the findings and the interpretations in these studies are not entirely uniform,
taken together they support the notion that the city does produce a distinc-
tive culture of civility.
Theoretically, the central question of the chapter asks about the basis for
tolerance as well as the conditions under which tolerance sometimes breaks
down. A review of the literature reveals two apparently contradictory explan-
ations for tolerance. One line of thought has it that tolerance is sustained only
because diverse lifestyle groups are spatially segregated from one another and
assiduously avoid contact. A second view is that tolerance is the product of a
distinctive kind of interaction between various city groups, an interaction
through which groups create a negotiated social contract of sorts. As is often
the case in social science writing, competing explanations of a phenomenon
are articulated in an either/or format. Our position is that we need not
choose between these two apparently competing explanations because there
is an element of truth to both. We propose that the issue is not contact or lack
of it, but what we term “controlled contact.” We maintain that the spatial
ordering of group activities provides individuals the choice of whether to have
contact with culturally diverse groups. By being able to control the place and
timing of contact with subcultures and by knowing what kinds of behaviors to
expect of persons in different city spaces, urbanites can monitor the extent of
their involvement with persons from culturally different groups. In addition,
we explored how urbanites’ subjective sense of urban space, as well as the
extraordinary heterogeneity of cities, contributes to increased tolerance.
At the same time that we have stressed the possibilities for individual free-
dom in cities, it is important not to overstate the case. We acknowledge that
in certain instances, tolerance utterly breaks down. In all instances in which
tolerance has broken down, however, it would be shortsighted to assign the
cause of such breakdown to any one set of factors. There is likely an intertwining
of several factors in setting the stage for eventual action against some group.
Some group of persons must come to perceive another group’s behaviors and
continued presence as troublesome—as a social problem. Perhaps the members
of a subculture have ventured into areas of the city where they are defined as
“not belonging.” Groups may behave in ways that contravene the implicit social
bargain that had previously existed between themselves and members of the
conventional community. It could be that just a few members of some group
engage in behaviors that constitute an outrage to a community’s collective
consciousness. And so on. The breakdown of tolerance may then be hastened

once selected persons recognize how it might be to their advantage to pursue
the case further: to mobilize against the group; to see that “justice” is done; to
see that threats to morality, real or imagined, are done away with.
Implicit in our discussion of tolerance is the idea that one cannot separate
how well a group fares in the urban context from questions of power and its
place in the system of urban stratification. In Chapter 6 we turn our attention
to the different urban experiences of men and women. Despite the extraordi-
nary volume of writing on gender roles since the 1970s, sociologists have paid
relatively little attention to the distinctive contingencies that shape the experien-
ces of urban women. In Chapter 6 we explore some of the historical and struc-
tural factors that have dictated the life chances of women in cities. We are also
interested in bringing to the foreground the important, but often invisible, role
played by women in building and sustaining viable urban communities.
CHAPTER 6
Women in Cities
I n Chapter 5 we focused on how various groups strive to achieve control

over definitions of what may be thought of as conventional or unconventional
modes of behavior. Not all groups in the city, of course, are in equally stra-
tegic locations to have their definitions of morality translated into actuality.
While, as interactionists, we argue that reality is socially and symbolically
constructed, we must also note that not all persons play an equal role in the
construction of social worlds. As Patricia Hill Collins, former president of
the American Sociological Association, has pointed out, we all exist at the
intersection of various dimensions of race, class, sexuality, citizenship, and
gender (Collins 1999). Our status along those various dimensions in part
determines the roles we can play within the city. In this chapter, we consider
in particular the latter dimension, gender, in an exploration of the ways
women experience the city.
In 1975, Lyn Lofland noted a pronounced neglect of women in the works
of urban sociologists. She saw this neglect as rooted in a conceptualization of
community as a spatially bounded entity. Traditional ethnographies of urban
life tended to focus on settings in which women are found in limited, tradi-
tional roles occurring in the private spheres of home and family, whereas
males occupied the center stage in the more visible, more easily entered
worlds of public activity. In such ethnographies women were simply “there,”
much like the paintings on a living room wall.
Similarly, through the 1980s, urban historians evidenced a taken-for-
granted view of women’s “thereness.” A 1982 examination of 23 popular
American urban history books revealed little mention of women’s roles in
150 BEING URBAN
building American cities (Richter 1982). Here again, the issue of how cities
are conceptualized is critical.
Central to the inclusion of women, it seems, is whether the definition of urban

the author wishes to explore is centered about the process of urbanization
or . . . the activities of the city. Women seem to be generally overlooked where
physical growth is a chief interest. Land speculation, bridge-building, competi-
tion for the railroads, control of municipal franchises and mining—where these
topics are important the authors, by their omission, suggest that women are
not, except as prostitutes and entertainers. (Richter 1982:319)
As an alternative, Richter proposed a definition of urban as “being the activ-

ities and events of American history that had their locus in the city”
(1982:323).
Though much work remains to fully capture the scope of activities and
events within urban life, over the last 35 years, a great deal of progress has
been made toward achieving Richter’s goal. Social scientists have made con-
siderable strides in representing women’s roles in and contributions to urban
life. In this chapter, we will chronicle several of those findings, crucial to
understanding urban life as a whole. We will also discuss the remarkable
progress toward gender equality that American urban women have made over
that period, progress that parallels women’s ascendance in society in general.
DOING WHAT GETS NOTICED: WOMEN IN THE PAID

LABOR FORCE
In his fascinating book Why Nothing Works, Marvin Harris (1987) makes
the provocative argument that the feminist movement resulted from the
changing nature of women’s involvement in the paid labor force. He argues
that inflationary pressures in the 1960s forced working-class and lower-
middle-class families to seek ways of generating additional income in order
to maintain the lifestyle previously afforded on one income. Critical here is one
of the “invisible” causes of inflation—“the deteriorating quality of goods and
services produced by inefficient bureaucracies and oligopolies” (Harris
1987:169). With a decrease in the real value of the goods and services that were
being produced in the 1960s, married mothers were confronted with the prob-
lem of being looked to as the main source for solving the family’s financial
squeeze. In response to tremendous advertising and mass-media emphasis on
the possession of consumer goods as the key to a happy, meaningful, and suc-
cessful life, married mothers entered the labor force with a willingness to accept
“part-time, temporary, and dead-end jobs” (Harris 1987:90). While we might
WOMEN IN CITIES 151
question Harris’s argument concerning women’s willingness to accept such

jobs, the fact remains that, willing or not, these were the kinds of jobs to which
they were likely to be steered. These wives and mothers found themselves work-
ing in the “pink collar” ghettoes of the rapidly expanding service and informa-
tion sectors of the urban economy so aptly described by Florence Howe
(1977). Most employed mothers ended up as file clerks, secretaries, similar cleri-
cal workers, dental assistants, elementary school teachers, social workers, and
counselors, to name just a few—all low-prestige, low-paying jobs in female-
dominated occupations.
Over time, this occupational segregation has changed somewhat. Women
now are much better represented in almost all sectors of work—from the con-
struction industry to manufacturing, business services, retail, etc.; data from
the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission show dramatic increases
in the proportion of women participating in the paid workforce, especially in
various jobs in the service sector, with 78 percent of industries demonstrating
a decline in employment segregation between (white) men and women from
1990 to 2005 (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012:242). Stainback and
Tomaskovic-Devey note, however, that there remain significant horizontal
and vertical aspects of segregation within all sectors. Vertical in the sense that
men tend to be “above” women—“Men dominate the best jobs” (213).
Horizontal in the sense that women within industries are sorted into different
kinds of jobs than men—jobs that emphasize nonmanual work and service
provision. That is to say, they tend to be placed in jobs that resonate with tra-
ditional cultural notions of women’s work as oriented to the domestic sphere
(Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012:213). Clearly, while women have
made significant progress, occupational segregation remains an important
topic. Let us now examine this issue as a way of exploring the broad contours
of urban life for contemporary American women.
In thinking about the relationship between American women and work, it
is important to note at the outset that American homemakers have always
worked either in the home or outside, and frequently they have done both
simultaneously. The problem is that housework is not considered work
because it does not command wages, and therefore has not evoked the same
kind of respect and appreciation as work in the paid labor force. In fact, for
poor, and especially immigrant, women, the juggling of two jobs—home-
maker and paid employee outside the home—has always been part of their life
situation. Currently, large numbers of urban middle- and working-class mar-
ried, divorced, and single mothers shoulder the main responsibilities for child
care and supervision. Even today, most men do very little of the actual physi-
cal or emotional labor involved in running a home. Time diary studies show
152 BEING URBAN
that even in families where both mothers and fathers are employed outside
the home, mothers do one and a half times as much housework as men—a dif-
ference of about eight hours each week (Lee 2005).1 Thus, working mothers
especially are confronted with a double dilemma—occupational discrimination
in the paid labor force and societal expectations about housework in the home.
Such expectations are a historical legacy of an ideology of domestication in
which the “private sphere” of the home and hearth was viewed as a woman’s
“natural place” (Rothman 1978). This double dilemma of work obligations
both at home and on the paid job led, according to Harris (1987), to the initial
dissatisfactions that helped usher in the full-fledged postwar feminist
movement.
The uniqueness of the contemporary situation can be seen in the following
finding:
A fundamental change over the last century has been the vast increase in female
labor force participation. In particular, married women’s participation in the
formal labor market increased dramatically—from around 2% in 1880 to over
70% in 2000. (Fernandez 2007:1)
Data on female participation rates also indicate that 65 percent of all mothers
with children under 18 worked in 2011, compared with only 28 percent in
1940—a 300 percent increase (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013:16;
Weiner 1985:6). These data, of course, tell us nothing about the situation
faced by single women or female-headed families, who now make up about
28 percent of all American families and 60 percent of all African-American
households in the United States (Lofquist, Lugaila, O’Connell, and Feliz
2012). We will discuss this issue in more detail in Chapter 7.
In their exhaustive study analyzing the changing lives of American women,
McLaughlin et al. note:
When the United States was primarily an agricultural society, the family served
as the locus of both production and consumption. As such, it enabled women
to be major participants in the productive process. With industrialization and
urbanization, the production role shifted outside the family and was assumed
by the male, while the family became the unit of consumption. The return of
women to the labor force and the recent trend toward being employed over
the life course represents women’s regaining a central role in the productive pro-
cess, which they lost during the Industrial Revolution. (McLaughlin 1988:7)
While women’s wages are still only about 80 percent of their male counter-
parts’, the wage gap is narrowing considerably for younger women compared
WOMEN IN CITIES 153
with older women, reflecting the impact that higher education and increasing
work opportunities have on women’s lives. The wage gap difference by female
age groups is particularly striking: in 2012 the ratio of weekly earnings for
full-time women workers relative to men in the same age group was 89 percent
for ages 20–24, 90 percent for ages 25–34, 78 percent for ages 35–44, and
75 percent for ages 45–54 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013). While the
wage gap has consistently narrowed over the last 30 years, that narrowing
slowed in the 1990s and 2000s compared to the 1980s (Blau 2014).
The lesser educational credentials for older women compared with their
younger counterparts is largely a result of the restricted educational opportu-
nities available to women in earlier periods. As a result, earlier generations of
women were steered or “tracked” into job routes that landed them in occupa-
tionally segregated lines of employment. Social scientists have expended a
considerable amount of energy trying to ascertain what percent of the wage
gap between men and women can be attributed to the changing structure of
the workforce, skill, experience, and credentials and what portion to discrimi-
nation. Considering the slowing in gains against the gender wage gap, Blau
contends that it may be due to rapid deunionization that occurred in the
1980s, which disproportionately benefitted women, and to women slowing
their movement into new job sectors after the 1980s. But she also notes that
a good deal of the wage gap’s persistence is likely rooted in discrimination.
Taking account of various human capital variables—aspects of personal back-
ground like education, job type, and work experience—fails to account for all
the differences between men’s and women’s wages. This leads Blau to the fol-
lowing conclusion: the contribution of the unexplained gap to the gender dif-
ferential was far more important than the human capital variables, suggesting
at least the possibility that discrimination was a more important factor than
differences in human capital in accounting for the gender wage gap (Blau
2014:936)
Occupational Segregation in the Urban Context

In studying the relationships between labor supply/demand characteristics
and women’s relative equality to men’s labor force participation in the United
States’ largest local labor markets, scholars have found that some features of the
local labor force improve the overall workforce share for women (Baunach and
Barnes 2003). Women stand a better chance where there are (1) fewer women
with young children; (2) more women with college degrees; (3) fewer poor
people; (4) lower average wages; (5) more industries where women dominate
the workforce; and (6) in the Northeast or Midwest (2003:426–427).
154 BEING URBAN
An important conclusion of Baunach and Barnes’s study is that “[w]omen’s and

men’s work are not independent, but interdependent; that is, they are in compe-
tition with each other, not segregated from each other” (2003:435). This find-
ing supports our broader conclusion that women have, by all measures,
increased their degree of equality with men. We should bear in mind, however,
that many employed urban women, whether married, divorced, or single, still
work in low-prestige, low-paying, occupationally segregated labor markets.
Another study focused on this issue of occupational segregation, to test for
its broader effects on the social dynamics of metropolitan areas. Cotter et al.
(1998) investigated the effects of the demand specifically for female labor,
that is, for labor in jobs that are overwhelmingly held by women, in 261 met-
ropolitan areas in the United States. Interestingly, they noted those areas with
a greater demand for female jobs also demonstrate a greater level of occupa-
tional integration overall. “Thus,” the authors note, “labor markets with
more female occupations are, paradoxically, more integrated, not more segre-
gated as we would expect from the high concentration of (segregated) female
occupations” (1693). Women in those metros also have greater levels of labor
participation and smaller wage gaps. Further investigation reveals that there
appears to be a positive causal relation between greater numbers of female
jobs and women’s educational attainment: in cities where there are more
female jobs, young women are more likely to complete high school; they are
also more likely to get some or complete college education. Overall, the find-
ings of Cotter et al. seem to suggest that broader economic transitions, to the
extent that they favor the creation of female jobs like clerical, medical, or ser-
vice work, tend to benefit women.
Some scholars argue that overall those are the kind of transitions our soci-
ety is increasingly experiencing. Some went so far as to argue that the recent
Great Recession of 2007–2009 could aptly be called a “Man-cession.” Appa-
rently popularized by the University of Michigan-Flint economics professor
Mark J. Perry, the term refers to the fact that during the past recession, men
lost jobs at considerably greater rates than women. This prompted Perry to
write the following in December 2009:
It’s not a recession, it’s a man-cession. And the lipstick economy may have only
just begun. The U.S. recession has been a catastrophe for men, but merely a
downturn for women. According to Friday’s payrolls report, eight out of every
10 pink slips in the past year have gone to men. (Perry 2008)
The key to women faring better than men in this downturn, again, is that
the kinds of jobs that continue to be disproportionately male are often jobs
WOMEN IN CITIES 155
of the “old economy,” in industries like manufacturing and construction.

Women’s greatest gains in employment have been in growth industries such
as education, health care, and government (Peterson 2012).
Though significant progress has been made in jobs recovery for both men
and women in the several years since the recession’s heights, men’s larger
gains have not been large enough to counter the fact that over 49 percent of
the workforce is now composed of women. Researchers at the St. Louis
Federal Reserve Bank point out the following:
Interestingly, as with job loss during the recession, the lion’s share of job
growth during the recovery has gone to men, but the gap between the employ-
ment growth rates for men and women is shrinking . . . . The recovery initially
created more jobs for men than for women as manufacturing and—to a lesser
extent—construction, bounced back. More recently, however, job growth for
women is approaching that for men, though at a slow pace. One important fac-
tor is that post-recession state and local government budgets are limiting job
growth in certain public sectors—for example, education—in which women re-
present the majority of the workforce. As the recovery continues, the slow job
growth in the public sector is somewhat compensated by disproportionate job
growth in brain-intensive industries that employ a large number of new college
graduates, the majority of whom are women. (Contessi and Li 2013)
Though, of course, this does not speak to the continuing gender wage gap
described above, it is striking evidence of an economy transformed. To con-
tinue to ascertain the chances for equal work opportunities for American
urban women, we must conduct studies synthesizing the approaches of Bau-
nach and Barnes (2003), Contessi and Li (2013), and Cotter et al. (1998).
That is, we should survey a broad range of organizations and the occupational
categories within them, across the various metropolitan locales of the United
States. Such studies will clarify the linkages between the organizational and
metropolitan contexts of occupational segregation, and document our
ongoing transition toward a more egalitarian job structure.
Metropolitan regions differ, as we have seen, in their degree of occupa-
tional segregation. But they also differ in terms of the kinds of jobs women
and men do, as well as how supportive they are to working women. Thus, for
some time, various sources have sought to produce lists of the “best” cities for
working women. One such recent list, produced by Forbes magazine (Goudreau
2013), shows the best-paying cities for American women (Table 6.1).
It is interesting to note from this list that all the best-paying cities are either
in the megalopolis stretching from Washington, D.C. to Boston or in the west.
Notable too is that many of these cities are home to concentrations for the
156 BEING URBAN
Table 6.1
Forbes list of the United States’ best-paying cities for women, 2013
Women’s Women’s Income as a

Rank Metro Area Median Salary Percentage of Men’s
1 Washington, D.C. $57,128 81%

2 San Jose, CA $56,499 75%
3 Bridgeport, CT $54,844 73%
4 San Francisco, CA $54,376 84%
5 Trenton, NJ $52,319 81%
6 Torrington, CT $50,200 82%
7 Boston, MA $50,020 77%
8 Hartford, CT $49,891 81%
9 Boulder, CO $49,691 75%
10 Napa, CA $48,985 94%
11 Ocean City, NJ $48,893 95%
12 Oxnard, CA $48,303 86%
13 Vallejo, CA $47,873 88%
14 New York, NY $47,834 84%
15 Olympia, WA $47,747 84%
16 Baltimore, MD $47,635 80%
17 Santa Rosa, CA $47,313 90%
18 Santa Cruz, CA $47,256 83%
19 New Haven, CT $47,110 82%
20 Barnstable Town, MA $46,876 87%
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/02/01/the-best-paying
-cities-for-women-2013/
information technology industry, government work, and medical research.

These are all industries that we have mentioned as being relatively feminized.
Finally, it is interesting to note that although some cities demonstrate a relatively
great degree of wage equality between men and women, many do not. Still, in
none of these cities do women make, on average, as much as men.
BEING THERE: INVISIBLE WORK AND

COMMUNITY LIFE
As our discussion of occupational segregation indicated, women still face
considerable obstacles in the paid labor force. Some metropolitan areas, how-
ever, offer better conditions for employment than do others. In focusing on
the paid labor force we must not lose sight of the very significant fact that
WOMEN IN CITIES 157
many of women’s contributions to the quality of life in general, and of urban

life in particular, entail what might be termed “invisible work” (Daniels 1987,
1988). Activities such as the upkeep of the home, caring for children and the
elderly, maintaining family ties, and community volunteering, to name just a
few, often pass unnoticed in the larger order of things because of their seem-
ingly “natural” and “unplanned” nature. Since these activities are not
rewarded financially, they are devalued vis-à-vis the “real” work of holding a
job and producing something tangible and visible.
We might also add, as testimony to our blinders on definitions of what
constitutes work, that a glance through any current textbook on the sociol-
ogy of work and occupations will reveal no listing for activities relating to
the maintenance of kinship ties, caregiving, or community volunteer work.
Occasionally one will see a treatment of housework as a form of work discussed
in such texts, but even that recognition is a relatively recent one.
This section of the chapter will focus on the critical importance of women’s
underappreciated activities. To borrow a metaphor from Erving Goffman,
if society may be conceived of as comparable to a building with its bricks
and mortar, then we intend to investigate the mortar holding those bricks
together. Indeed, while the bricks may constitute the most obvious and vis-
ible features of the structure, without the mortar, that substance between
the bricks, the structure would instantly collapse. Similarly, while male-
dominated activities, such as highly paid executive work, attract our most
immediate attention in terms of obvious importance, the entire structure of
society, if you will, would erode if women did not do the genuine work of
maintaining the house, rearing the children, keeping families intact through
caregiving and kinship work, and participating in community organizations.
In short, without the “mortar” supplied by female labor in the invisible
spheres of life, the social structures constituting our taken-for-granted world
would be thrown into dramatic upheaval.
The Early History of Women’s Voluntary Associations

In viewing the problem of women’s invisibility historically, perhaps the
best place to begin is a provocative essay by Ann Firor Scott (1987), delivered
as the Presidential Address to the Organization of American Historians and
published in the prestigious Journal of American History. We mention these
details for a specific reason—as an illustration of how scholarly concerns with
women’s activities are now, after many decades of neglect, beginning to merit
the attention of scholars in all social science fields. We can thank the preced-
ing generations of feminist scholars, both men and women, for their efforts
158 BEING URBAN
to make it possible for women to achieve the presidencies of major scholarly

associations.
Scott begins her essay by asking, “What are the characteristics of the things
we are able to perceive? What makes other things invisible to scholars?
And what must happen to bring some hitherto unseen part of past reality into
visibility?” (1987:8). She then proceeds to focus on the significant role volun-
tary associations have played in American history. These are organizations
that people freely form to achieve a wide range of goals. They constitute
everything from a local stamp collector’s club to the Girl Scouts and the
League of Women Voters. Data on these kinds of associations have been
available to scholars for a considerable amount of time, yet only recently has
women’s participation been scrutinized. For a society often viewed as a nation
of joiners this is indeed a puzzling phenomenon.
In the nineteenth century, women were banned from entering the most
prestigious fields of endeavor, such as the professions, the upper management
echelon of business and industry, and the higher levels of educational and reli-
gious institutions. As industrialization gained momentum in the mid- to late
1800s, women increasingly found themselves relegated to the “private”
sphere of home and hearth (Lasch 1977; Lopata, Miller, and Barnewolt
1986). In response to such restrictive environments, “women who wanted
to do more than float with the tide created among themselves organizations
through which they formed social values and created social institutions, all
the while developing their own skills and self-confidence. What business and
public life were to aspiring nineteenth-century men, the voluntary association
was to aspiring women” (Scott 1987:9).
The post-Civil War period in American history witnessed the large-scale
urbanization of the country and the emergence of a metropolitan nation. In
the developing urban centers, women were deeply involved in numerous
associations formed to deal with the changes brought about by urbanization.
These associations did not simply respond to such changes but instead pro-
posed imaginative solutions for the emerging problems of an urban nation.
“By the early 1900s women’s societies formed a dense web in many commun-
ities and—linked in federations—formed also a national network through
which ideas spread with astonishing speed” (Scott 1987:15). The problem-
solving efforts of urban women in the early 1900s encompassed an amazingly
impressive range of public issues. They were involved in the establishment of
public health programs for clean water and pure milk, housing reform, trade
union organizing, and trying to get legislation passed that banned child labor.
They could also be seen
WOMEN IN CITIES 159
engaging in factory inspection and intensive fact-finding with respect to women

and children workers; inventing the school lunch program, the juvenile court,
and the bookmobile; creating parks and playgrounds; investigating tenement
houses and employment agencies—the list seems endless. Of course, men took
part in some of those efforts, but the kinds of things . . . listed were most often
the result of women’s initiatives. That part of the Progressive Movement that
focused on practical improvement of community life, was by and large, women’s
work. (Scott 1987:15)
Scott ends her probing essay by drawing on her personal experiences with
the issue of women’s invisibility. Her work as a young woman with the
National League of Women Voters in Washington, D.C., in 1944 led her
many years later to study American political history. Failing to encounter
any material about women’s political associations in her graduate school
classes, she wrote a seminar paper on the League of Women Voters. Her
male professor, a leading figure in American political history, awarded her
a “B” on the grounds that what she “was arguing about—the importance
of a woman’s organization in community life—was improbable”
(1987:20). She delayed writing about this topic until years later, when she
“found overwhelming evidence in the primary sources that women had used
their voluntary associations to create a beleaguered Progressive movement
in the South” (1987:20). We might also note here that Scott was able to
find a more receptive audience for her work in the scholarly community,
not only when the evidence became “overwhelming” but also, when deca-
des of activity by post-World War II feminist organizations and scholars
had achieved some success in influencing the larger institutional structures
of American society.
Before focusing on women’s contemporary urban activities, let us briefly
highlight the considerable success achieved by one particularly noteworthy
women’s voluntary association—Hull House in Chicago during the late
1890s and early 1900s. Hull House has been termed “one of the most politi-
cally effective groups of women reformers in U.S. history” (Sklar 1985:658).
In establishing one of the first American social settlement houses in 1889,
Hull House’s founders, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, along with Flor-
ence Kelley, played key roles in the writing and passage of legislation outlaw-
ing urban sweatshops and mandating an eight-hour day for women and
children working in manufacturing plants in Illinois. All of us working today,
both men and women, who take an eight-hour day as a given, much like a fact
of nature, owe an enormous debt to these female activists and their male allies
who jointly fought for what are now our current working conditions.
160 BEING URBAN
The leaders of Hull House were highly educated daughters of male politi-
cal figures who encouraged them to take an active interest in politics. When
they graduated from college in the early 1880s—being among the relatively
few women allowed to achieve that distinction in those times—they encoun-
tered numerous barriers to entering fields such as law, politics, and university
teaching. Seeking an outlet for their talents, they created the 1890s urban
settlement movement, where they found
a perfect structure for women seeking secular means of influencing society

because it collectivized their talents; it placed and protected them among the
working-class immigrants whose lives demanded amelioration, and it provided
them with access to the male political arena while preserving their independence
from male-dominated institutions. (Sklar 1985:664)
We should also note that these women were not only important in crafting
the social life of the city but also played key roles in developing urban sociology
(Deegan 2001). Hull House had a particularly close relationship with the
urban sociologists at the University of Chicago. In addition to its myriad
community-building activities, the settlement kept careful records on the
people it helped, records that proved useful for the research of those Chicago
school sociologists. As Mary Jo Deegan notes,
Mary McDowell, a former Hull-House resident, sponsored [Nels] Anderson’s

initial work. Organizations founded and maintained by Hull-House residents
provided data for many authors ([Louis] Wirth, [Clifford] Shaw, Anderson
and [Harvey] Zorbaugh, among others) . . . . Hull-House and its residents con-
tributed directly to the Chicago ethnographies sponsored by [Robert] Park—
albeit recognition of this fact is muted in most scholarship on the Chicago
School. (Deegan 2001:18)
Thus, even within our own discipline, we have too often been guilty of
allowing women’s vital work to remain “invisible.”
Participation in Voluntary Associations

In the contemporary United States, while women are moving into the paid
labor force in increasing numbers, urban women are also active in voluntary
associations. As in earlier periods, however, women still face sex segregation
in associational memberships. The structure of the larger society can be seen
in the community memberships of persons at the local level. In a study of
10 Nebraska communities ranging in size from 1,300 to 312,000 persons,
WOMEN IN CITIES 161
sociologists found an extremely high level of sex segregation, with member-

ships in “one-half of the organizations . . . exclusively female, while one-fifth
are exclusively male” (McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1986:65). In view of
our earlier discussion of occupational segregation, it is most disheartening
to note that “in fact, the level of sex segregation in voluntary association
organizations is greater than the level of occupational sex segregation in the
workplace” (McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1986:65). Though over time this
segregation is declining, research shows that it persists, and is in large part tied
to women’s exclusion from some social networks due to occupational segre-
gation: people tend to volunteer with people they know from work. To the
extent that occupations are segregated by gender, this contributes to segrega-
tion in voluntary organizations as well (Rotolo and Wharton 2003).
Are women in larger cities more likely to participate in less-sex-segregated
associations than their small-town counterparts? Here the data give the nod
to large city residents, with city size having an inverse relationship to segrega-
tion; that is, the larger the city, the less the sex segregation in associations.
The cosmopolitanism and, we might add, the urbanity of larger locales con-
tribute to greater opportunities for gender integration. This finding recalls
our earlier discussion about the more attractive workplace opportunities for
women in larger cities.
What kinds of voluntary associations are men and women most likely to
join? McPherson and Smith-Lovin’s data indicate that business and profes-
sional groups are the most likely to be gender integrated, while organizations
such as veterans’ club and lodges and social associations such as hobby clubs
are the most likely to be sex segregated. Even in the gender-integrated associ-
ations, however, female respondents are likely to belong to business/
professional groups having only about one-third male members. For male
respondents, their business/professional groups have only about one-fifth
female members. In the largest sense, male respondents tend to have both
more numerous contacts than females and more heterogeneous ones. These
“weak ties” of men are important in providing them with the kinds of infor-
mation needed for getting jobs, pursuing business opportunities, and further-
ing career advancement. Women, by contrast, through their organizational
memberships are largely relegated to informational networks that pertain to
the “domestic sphere” and the local community.
The larger implications of sex segregation in the voluntary association can
be seen in the fact that
the voluntary sector tends to reflect the sex segregation in other domains in our
society. It divides men and women into separate domains even more effectively
162 BEING URBAN
than does the occupational structure. Furthermore, it acts to maintain the status
differences that such segregation implies, by creating networks of weak ties that
restrict men’s and women’s information and resources to the domains that are
traditional for each. In this arena, as in so many others, separate is probably
not equal. The few members of either sex who belong to sex-integrated volun-
tary associations may have key positions, which may provide bridges between
the male and female domains. Only presently unavailable dynamic evidence will
reveal whether these bridges will become beachheads for the future mingling of
the sexes or remain lonely outposts for token members. (McPherson and Lovin-
Smith 1986:77)
A particularly intriguing finding concerning the significance of member-

ships in voluntary associations is presented in a study of the types of work
engaged in by men and women in voluntary organizations. Rotolo and Wilson
(2007) used data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to assess the differ-
ent kinds of work done by men and women within organizations. While noting
that the findings of McPherson and Smith-Lovin still ring true, that men and
women tend to be more or less concentrated in some types of volunteer organ-
izations, their findings go on to show that gender segregation is further prac-
ticed within voluntary organizations. Their research suggests that
[a]long the vertical dimension, sorting jobs by their authority and status, men
are indeed more likely to serve on boards and committees, the single exception
being in areas (culture and education) that have become closely associated with
women’s work of caring for children and for the more expressive activities in the
community. Along the horizontal dimension, sorting equal-status jobs by their
gender associations in other forms of productive labor, we uncovered a clear
pattern of men doing maintenance work and women doing food and clothing
preparation and delivery, an almost exact parallel to that found in the household
and, to a lesser extent, in paid employment. (Rotolo and Wilson 2007:578)
We might go on to suggest that this further perpetuates a tendency to keep

women in invisible work—for example, making snacks at home for the little
league team or affixing patches on girl and boy scouts’ sashes—while men in
leadership positions put the visible, public face on organizations. Another
study of women community leaders (Daniels 1988) further illustrates that
such women face a considerable dilemma in doing unpaid work that is not
seen as work by the larger society.
Women like those interviewed by Daniels in her study of a large Pacific
Coast city provide the labor power that makes for the smooth and efficient
operation of many community-based organizations. Such organizations cre-
ate the conditions for what we call the quality of life. While their husbands
WOMEN IN CITIES 163
are usually in charge of the key financial decisions connected with organiza-
tions like the United Way, city zoos, symphonies, and art museums, it is the
women who raise the funds and keep the organizations functioning on a
daily basis.
Since the community leaders studied by Daniels donate their labor, and
since a good deal of what they do falls into the area of managing inter-
personal relations—keeping relationships pleasant, creating an atmosphere
of sociability—what they do is not seen by others as involving work and skill.
Indeed, these women themselves express great ambivalence over the value of
their efforts and whether it really is or is not work. Their interpersonal efforts
are, of course, in addition to considerable involvements in more instrumental
tasks such as organization-building and fund-raising. When we brag to out-
of-town friends, for example, about our city’s zoo or its wonderful symphony
orchestra and art museums, we are paying our usually unacknowledged
respect to the work done by community leaders like the women interviewed
in Pacific City. In fact, the sense of belonging to an entity called “our city”
perhaps is at root possible only because some citizens are willing to devote
their unpaid efforts to volunteer work in the public, not-for-profit sector.
In the final analysis,
the civic leaders provide opportunities for others to be creative, make contribu-
tions that benefit their respective communities as well as the city at large. Finally,
these women, like their colleagues in other classes and other communities, pro-
vide the ambience, as well as channels for actions, that affect the quality of life in
the cities and towns of our society. When they divert their energies elsewhere,
much of what has been termed “municipal housekeeping” . . . doesn’t get done.
That our society is willing to accept this work as volunteer effort or else live
without it reflects the ultimate value of this contribution to the quality of life
around us: the members of society would like to have it, but there is no system-
atic provision for it and the governing bodies won’t pay for it. In the future, per-
haps, we shall all have to take responsibility for the quality of life in our cities.
(Daniels 1988:277)
Daniels’s study calls attention to how social class operates to knit upper-
class women into their class niche while performing services for the commu-
nity at large. Their philanthropic and cultural activities are part of a noblesse
oblige ideology that deflects attention away from the class interest served by
such volunteer activity. As representatives of an established upper class, they
are quite cognizant of the need to steer clear of confrontations with the busi-
ness community. They are also hesitant to propose programs that might dra-
matically alter the distribution of economic resources in urban communities.
164 BEING URBAN
Class and its related privileges is an important issue creating difficulties for
activist women throughout the urban United States. The national leadership
of the Women’s Movement in the 1970s and 1980s tended to have middle-
and upper-middle-class origins, while the leaders of many community-based
organizations came from low-income, working-class, or minority backgrounds.
In this regard a study of women activists and community organizers in several
large metropolitan centers found real divergences between local-level leaders
and those active in national women’s organizations (Naples 1998).
Leaders of community organizations defined problems in terms of the
entire community and had a view of community life that cut across gender
lines while focusing on the class- and ethnicity-based needs of low-income
residents. They were interested in the problems faced by men and women as
well as children. Issues such as education, employment, housing, and health
care were uppermost on their agendas. Leaders of the national women’s
movements, by contrast, focused their attention almost exclusively on
women-based issues. They placed less emphasis on problems that were class
based and a result of the lack of economic resources.
This study demonstrates the extent to which women leaders of different
kinds of organizations viewed the world through different prisms. For exam-
ple, a group of Latina Community workers in New York
who were active in struggles to protect and improve the lives of family and
neighbors in the Lower East Side in the early 1970s were aware of the gender
inequalities within their community. They developed a feminist consciousness
through their organizing work. Yet, because of the saliency of race and class in
their analyses, their feminism differed from that defined by those who were
identified with the dominant Women’s Movement. (Naples 1998:333–334)
However, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Naples points out that con-
siderable changes were afoot. So by the turn of the twenty-first century, Naples
could write that “Women’s Movement activists have developed deeper sensitiv-
ity to the multiplicity of women’s lives” (Naples 1998:334). And indeed,
women from a number of different class, race, and ethnic positions had become
leaders in grassroots organizations, advocating for everything from fair and
adequate housing for poor children and mothers, to the eradication of homo-
phobia, to better treatment of immigrant communities by the INS (Immigration
and Naturalization Service) (Naples 1998).
Efforts by women political activists of diverse backgrounds have yielded
considerable gains in the formal political power held by women in the United
States. Recent data indicate, for example, that women now comprise
WOMEN IN CITIES 165
24.2 percent of the nation’s state legislators, compared with 5 percent in

1971. The news at the local political level is also somewhat heartening, with
women mayors now comprising 18.4 percent of all the mayors of cities with
populations of more than 30,000, compared with less than 1 percent in
1971. Even at the federal level, women have made considerable inroads, with
women comprising 18.5 percent of the total members of the House and
Senate (including Nancy Pelosi, who has served as both the first female
Speaker of the House and the House Minority Leader). This compares with
women comprising only about 3 percent of the total in 1971 (Center for
American Women and Politics 2014; Dionne 1989:A6). At the highest levels
of political power, then, women have made considerable inroads, to the
extent that it is now well within the realm of imagination that we will witness
the first female American president within our lifetimes.
GENDERED SPACES: WOMEN IN PUBLIC SETTINGS

In the previous section we discussed issues relating to community organi-
zations. We illustrated how the often unnoticed activities of urban women
play a critical role in providing and maintaining the quality of life. In the final
section of this chapter we turn our attention to a unique feature of urban life,
the nature of the relations between strangers in the public arena. Indeed, one
noted urban sociologist, Lyn Lofland (1989), sees the “public realm” as the
sine qua non of urban life, as the basic characteristic differentiating it most
dramatically from rural and small-town life.
In Chapters 4 and 5 we discussed the fact that the city is a place where
strangers are likely to meet, thereby making possible a stimulating, exciting,
and diverse cosmopolitanism. In the large urban centers of the country,
one encounters a truly fascinating assortment of “characters” and lifestyles.
The downside, however, to the urbane life in cities lies in this same phenome-
non; that is, a world in which one frequently encounters strangers on public
streets, in restaurants, and in shops is a world that poses questions about pos-
sible dangers and personal harm. In this regard, women are particularly disad-
vantaged by both the larger cultural traditions of Western societies and the
structural features of urban life. Women’s greater physical vulnerability vis-
à-vis men in such situations is also a factor of great import.
In many large cities throughout North America, women are heavily depen-
dent upon public transportation, and this reliance creates serious limits on
where and when women can travel. In many urban areas, sizable numbers of
persons comprise what has been called the “transportation disadvantaged”
166 BEING URBAN
because they have few transportation options and possess minimal personal
resources (Schlossberg 2004). It is a category made up of the poor, the eld-
erly, racial minorities, and the physically disabled. Though noting that wom-
en’s transportation habits have begun to look more like men’s as they have
taken advantage of increased opportunities in realms like work and education,
Rosenbloom writes:
First, societal trends such as increasing employment among women do not

always close the travel gap between men and women, although they may super-
ficially appear to do so. Second, household roles are not changing that much or
that rapidly; although the direction is clear, neither the speed nor the magnitude
of change is as dramatic as one might assume given the talk of growing equality
between the sexes. Third, the growing number of new household structures
often significantly involves, and more likely disadvantages, women than men.
(Rosenbloom 2006:12)
Including gender as a variable in transportation studies is critical because

the literature clearly reveals that men and women use public transportation
in significantly different ways. Particularly crucial is the study of how family
and income dynamics intersect with gender and transportation needs. For
example, Evelyn Blumenberg considered the problem of “spatial mismatch”
between the residences of low-income women and places where they may find
jobs. While Blumenberg’s work challenges the assumption that jobs have
almost entirely disappeared from the United States’ central city areas, she
does show that many poor urban women live in neighborhoods at a great
remove from potential jobs. For instance, in Los Angeles
data reveal that in central-city neighborhoods adjacent to the central business

district, such as the Pico-Union neighborhood, welfare recipients are able to
reach many jobs within a reasonable commute by either car or public transit.
In contrast, other welfare recipients, such as those living in Watts, reside in
job-poor, central-city neighborhoods where, if they are transit-dependent, they
likely face long and difficult commutes that limit their likelihood of finding and
sustaining employment, even if traveling to destinations within the central city.
(Blumenberg 2004:272)
What is especially problematic are the difficulties of automobile ownership

for women in poverty—only 7 percent of welfare recipients (85 percent of
whom are women) own a car (Blumenberg 2004; U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services 2012). Many states further limit the options of welfare
recipients by stipulating that their cars be worth less than about $5,000—a
WOMEN IN CITIES 167
prescription for unreliable or even dangerous transportation (Blumenberg

2004).
Blumenberg goes on to note that the transportation needs of poor single
mothers are more diverse than those of the general population. While getting
to a job is certainly as important for these women as for other adults,
low-income women have other reasons for preferring jobs closer to home. For
single mothers who typically have sole responsibility for the functioning of their
households, the ability to sustain employment rests on access to a variety of
household-supporting destinations, only one of which is work. Long commutes
are especially difficult for welfare participants who must balance the costs of trav-
eling to and from low-wage jobs with the need to make trips that serve their
children and other household needs.
Thus, to the extent that a single mom is isolated in a neighborhood like

Watts, far from work, her use of public transportation, like all uses of public
space, exposes her to the possibility of harassment by men. In a culture such
as ours, which, until fairly recently, placed severe restrictions on women’s
opportunities in the occupational world, women have had to endure being
portrayed as sexual objects. Certainly, our mass media constantly emphasizes
that domestic work is a woman’s “natural” work and that a woman’s worth
is intimately connected to physical attractiveness and seductiveness. Many
commercials appeal to men by suggesting that if they purchase the product
being advertised, not only will their lives be made better and more comfort-
able, but they will also have the commodities needed to attract beautiful,
exciting women. Such gender advertisements (Goffman 1976) start very
early in life. The message is that “[l]ittle girls must be prepared for a life of
buying clothes and cosmetics and all those other wonderful things that will
make them irresistibly alluring objects. Life, it seems is a look” (O’Connor
1989:A5).
A trip through any city in the country will also reveal to the traveler bill-
boards portraying the “good life” via material accumulation and beautiful
appearances—especially those of women. Women in this society are raised,
then, in an environment that urges them to appear physically attractive and
desirable in the eyes of men. Such appeals are also part of a cultural infrastruc-
ture that makes women “fair game” for the suggestive and disturbing remarks
made by male strangers in the urban setting.
Given the pervasiveness of street hassling and sexual harassment in the lives
of women (see Sullivan, Lord, and McHugh 2000), it is surprising that few
empirically based observational studies of this phenomenon have been
168 BEING URBAN
conducted. The most important and detailed treatment remains Carol Brooks
Gardner’s (1995) study of men and women’s interactions in public settings.
Gardner spent five years observing interactions in a wide range of public set-
tings such as bars, restaurants, stores, and residential streets in Indianapolis,
Indiana. She and her research assistants also interviewed 293 women and
213 men about public harassment. This included discussion of the issue of
what she terms “access information,” that is, “information given that would
lead to discovery of an individual’s immediate or ultimate destination or a
place where the individual can later reliably be found” (1995:122). The
notion of future time is especially salient here because urban women are par-
ticularly conscious of the fact that casual, unwanted interaction with males
may result in the possibility of being tracked down later, perhaps harassed
on the phone, or, even more frightening, may result in rape. We will discuss
the issue of rape and its significance for women later in this chapter.
In Chapter 4 we highlighted the strategies used by strangers in public set-
tings to cooperate and produce what we called “public privacy.” We remarked
on the paradox of urban interaction whereby persons must systematically take
one another into account in order to avoid unwanted encounters. Gardner’s
studies, it is interesting to note, suggest that similar dynamics of a controlled
blend of indifference and involvement are at play in women’s encounters with
male strangers. Women face conflicting pressures in that they may sometimes
want to communicate an openness toward meeting men they find interesting,
but simultaneously they have to be very concerned about how such chance
encounters can go dangerously awry if not handled adroitly. As a result of this
dilemma, female respondents created a number of “reaction strategies.” They
made calculated distinctions, for example, about the degree of riskiness asso-
ciated with flirting with strangers in public. For example, they might react
to entice a man following on the street by “switching their butts” (220), or
might alternately dump a beer over the head of a man they felt was being rude
to them in public (216). Women also made distinctions about the level of
danger involved in going alone in public in different settings. While down-
town might be perfectly safe for a woman during daylight hours, some
women felt they could legitimately be mistaken for a “whore” if they were
walking the streets along past 11 pm (203).
The men interviewed by Gardner saw the issue of public encounters in
ways fundamentally different from women. Males indicated that public spaces
were a safe domain over which they enjoyed a great degree of mastery. And in
public encounters with anonymous women, men generally framed their cat-
calls or unsolicited compliments as “romantic.” Gardner writes:
WOMEN IN CITIES 169
Action—public harassment—on the romantic frontier was interpreted [by men]

as playful or sportive competition. One man, when asked how he judged inci-
dents of public harassment, noted that they made public places lively and enjoy-
able: “Are those incidents acceptable? Let me just put it this way: If they
weren’t, the world would be a very dull place.”
For women, however, the fact is that these incidents of harassment can make
the world of public places into a very scary place. To some degree, their fear is
bolstered by the reality of crime: in Gardner’s sample, over 20 percent of the
women had some experience with violence at the hands of men, or near-
misses: “12 had been stranger-raped; 22 had been in a situation that they
thought was likely to turn into stranger-rape but had not; and 32 had experi-
enced serious physical harassment from a stranger . . . . [W]omen were simply
and casually punched by passing strangers” (1995:7). The male respondents
seemed to be insensitive to, and unaware of, the dilemmas faced by women in
public settings. She found that “90 percent of the men interviewed . . . began
by denying that they committed public harassment, even when quite innocuous
examples were discussed. . . . However by the end of the interview, each of those
men had given a ‘justified’ (or unjustified) example that identified him as the
author of public harassment” (1995:110). We see here two very different defini-
tions of reality and ways of experiencing urban life.
How reasonable is it, we might ask, for women to be trusting in public?
The social science literature on fear of crime indicates that women and the
elderly are likely to have both the greatest fears and the lowest victimization
rates (Warr 2000). While some point to fear among those groups as thus
“irrational,” Warr notes that the disproportionate fear of crime among
women is largely a factor of their fear of rape: “What for men is the perceived
risk of robbery would for many women be the perceived risk of robbery, plus
rape, plus additional injury” (Warr 2000:478). Figures from a survey by the
U.S. Department of Justice indicate that 17.6 percent of American women
over 18 have been the victims of rape or an attempted rape (U.S. Department
of Justice 2000).
Data cited earlier in reference to Gardner’s work reveal the way in which
remarks from male strangers can escalate into far more frightening and dan-
gerous consequences for women—including an incident of rape in her own
sample. If we think about street hassling as comparable with an “invasion of
intimacy,” we can see how the “ritual of harassment” operates:
By its seeming harmlessness, it blurs the borders of women’s right to personal

integrity, and encourages men who would never commit a violent crime against
170 BEING URBAN
a strange woman to engage in minor transgressions against her right to move

freely, to choose which interaction to participate in and which people to com-
municate with. By making the average “man in the street” a minor sex offender,
it also makes him an accomplice in the more massive forms of violence against
women. (Bernard and Schlaffer 1981:19)
Women’s fear of crime, of rape in particular, has very important conse-

quences in terms of their mobility in urban areas. In examining how women’s
worries about crime affect their actual behaviors, some dramatic findings have
been presented by social scientists (for example, MacMillan, Nierobisz, and
Welsh 2000; Reid and Konrad 2004). These are findings, we might add, that
are revealing of the gendered nature of urban space when seen in comparison
with the responses and behaviors of men.
Reid and Konrad’s (2004) analysis of survey data collected from residents
of New Orleans revealed the very gendered structure of crime fears. While
they did not find a significant difference between men and women’s fears of
burglary, women reported being significantly more afraid of both being
robbed (outside the home) and of being the victim of sexual assault. These
findings are especially notable from an urbanist’s perspective, because they
show that while women and men tend to feel about the same level of safety
from crime within their home, women are considerably less at ease about
crime that may occur when out and about in the city.
Reid and Konrad emphasize that this perception is influenced both by
women’s and men’s experiences of the city, and by our culture’s broader
norms with respect to gender socialization,
women are socialized to expect to be victims of crime at some time in their lives.
Hence while women’s fear of crime is greater than their actual risk of public versus
private victimization, it is commensurate with their perceived risk of public victimi-
zation as informed by society, schools, and the media. When women feel them-
selves to be at a high risk of victimization their fear is not necessarily inflated; the
role of the victim is one that they are used to occupying. By contrast men are social-
ized not to expect to be victims of crime and not to be fearful of crime. Masculinity
entails being the protector, the one in control. Experiencing a high perception of
possible victimization is likely an unexpected role for men. (2004:421)
What kinds of locations are more likely to be “user-friendly” for women, so

to speak, in terms of the likelihood of crimes? A study of the 40 largest Met-
ropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) in the United States finds that the younger
cities—those with larger populations in the 15–29 age range—have higher
rates of violence toward women (Xie, Heimer, and Lauritsen 2012). So do
WOMEN IN CITIES 171
cities where there is a marked degree of income inequality. Fascinatingly, the

study also finds evidence that women’s labor force participation is not only
empowering in a social and economic sense but actually is associated with
lower rates of violent crime among intimate partners. In cities where greater
proportions of women are in the labor force and have higher levels of educa-
tion, fewer experience violence at the hands of known others. Unfortunately,
they also find that women in those cities are more likely to experience violence
at the hands of a stranger—yielding a sort of statistical zero-sum game for wom-
en’s safety. The authors theorize that this increased risk of violence is due at least
in part to an increase in women’s presence in public places, outside the home
(Xie, Heimer, and Lauritsen 2012). Perhaps their most optimistic finding is that
the more women participate in the political sphere, as measured by the propor-
tion of a city’s voting age women who actually vote, the less likely they are to be
victims of violent crime. This suggests that women exercising their voting rights
may put public safety more solidly on cities’ public policy agenda (Xie, Heimer,
and Lauritsen, 2012). Other studies of urban places remind us, however, that
such big-picture analyses of cities may be somewhat misleading. As urban sociol-
ogists are increasingly emphasizing the mediating role that neighborhoods have
on all kinds of human behaviors (Sampson 2012), we must look at how neigh-
borhoods affect crime. Raphael and Sills point out that “within large metropoli-
tan areas, the residents of poor, largely minority neighborhoods suffer
disproportionately” from crime, including rape and sexual assault (Raphael
and Sills 2003:2).
Before ending this section, we should introduce some important modifiers
to the picture of urban unease we have just sketched. In that regard, we must
call attention to the fact that while crime and rape in particular rank high
among fears of women in public—fears that lead women to restrict their
movements—it is critical to note that a sizable amount of violent crime in this
country, including rape, involves persons known to one another. In the study
by Xie, Heimer, and Lauritsen (2012) cited above, for example, it was over
one-and-a-half times more likely that a woman’s attacker was known to her
than it was that the attacker was a stranger. In addition, studies indicate that
almost three quarters of rapists are individuals previously known by the
women they attack (Catalano 2006).
The problems of rape and crimes against women, then, are much larger
than the issue of relations between unacquainted men and women in public
spaces. They are part of a much broader constellation of beliefs, attitudes,
and values that lay the foundation for what scholars have called “the rape cul-
ture” of the United States (Williams 2011). While urban women have been vic-
timized by violent crimes, they have also taken important steps to remedy the
172 BEING URBAN
situation and achieve some autonomy in their lives along with a greater freedom
of movement in the city. In a number of cities around the world, women have
taken to the streets in “slut walks” to counter negative stereotyping of women’s
presence in public places. Large groups dress in “suggestive” outfits in an effort
to help people question the pervasive rape culture and the idea that a woman
may deserve unwanted attention based simply on her dress or her presence in a
public place (Borah and Nandi 2012). Numerous rape crisis hotlines and rape
crisis centers have been established throughout the country, and the efforts of
social scientists and feminist activists have played critical roles in raising the con-
sciousness of the police, the courts, and medical personnel about the devastating
effects of rape and the need for humane responses to its victims and swift arrests
of its perpetrators (Matthews 1994).
CONCLUSION
Our focus in this chapter has been rather selective in that we have not
attempted to encompass the entire spectrum of things that urban women are
now doing. Instead, we have let the ideas of women’s “thereness” and overcom-
ing of “invisibility” guide our inquiry. We called attention to women’s gains in
the paid labor force and how the central issue of occupational segregation con-
tinues to set real, although certainly changing, limits on women’s job attain-
ments. Our discussion of women’s participation in community voluntary
organizations highlighted the important historical and contemporary contribu-
tions that women’s organizations make to the quality of urban life.
Finally, we examined the notion of gendered spaces and women’s place in
public settings. As we noted, while urban life, through encounters with strang-
ers, makes for a stimulating and exciting existence, it also poses a serious
dilemma for women in terms of safety and sexual harassment. Here, as elsewhere
in their urban activities, women are playing a critical role in developing organiza-
tions that have influenced how institutions such as the courts, the police, and
urban hospitals have responded to women’s needs.
In the final section of this book we want to move to a somewhat more
macro, structural analysis of urban life by focusing on some selected institu-
tional spheres, such as politics and sports, that have important consequences
for being urban.
NOTE
1. We should, however, note that this is a considerable improvement over the sit-
uation in the 1980s, when working wives did five times as much housework as their
husbands (Steil 1989:142).
PART III
URBAN INSTITUTIONS
AND SOCIAL CHANGE
CHAPTER 7
Power, Politics, and Problems
I n a classic statement on power, Robert Michels, a German political sociolo-

gist, noted the operation of what he termed the “iron law of oligarchy.”
Michels (1962) argued that no matter how democratic an organization or a
social movement may be in its initial stages, it ultimately tends toward an
organizational structure in which a great deal of power becomes increasingly
concentrated in the hands of a few high-ranking persons. The debate over
community power that has long occupied social scientists (see, for example,
Dahl 1961; Hunter 1953; Hyra 2008; Mills 1959; Stone 1989; Wilson and
Taub 2006) may be seen as testimony to the enduring significance of
Michels’s argument. On one side of the issue are those who see community
power in pluralist terms, wherein local groups compete with each other on
various issues, and no one group has dominance on every issue. On the other
side are those who see community power in terms of elites, wherein small,
strategically located groups exercise major say on issues deemed important
to their interests. The elitist conception of community power tends toward
a view of power as essentially hierarchical and exclusionary, while the pluralist
conception is more conducive to a participatory, multidimensional concep-
tion of power. Our aim in the following discussion is to specify the commu-
nity processes contributing to either hierarchical or pluralist power
arrangements.
176 BEING URBAN
PLAYING WITH A STACKED DECK: PROCESSES

PROMOTING HIERARCHICAL POWER
ARRANGEMENTS
Our previous discussions in this book should have sensitized you to the
notion that the social arrangements characterizing any locale are products of
a negotiated symbolic order. The conditions under which such symbolic
negotiations take place, however, are functions of the power at the disposal
of the groups involved. In short, the participants in various social worlds have
differential access to the production and distribution of scarce and highly val-
ued resources. The definition of what constitutes such highly valued resources
is itself an outcome of a negotiated process, with the winners laying claim to a
monopoly on “legitimate” definitions of reality. In contemporary American
society, access to institutions influential in the production and distribution
of property is a crucial factor in persons’ ability to establish dominant con-
structions of reality (see especially Logan and Molotch (2007)). Let us now
examine this issue.
The distribution of wealth in the United States has generated a sizable
body of literature. Writers such as C. Wright Mills (1956, 1959), Gwen
Moore (Moore et al. 2002), Anthony Giddens (2014), and William Domhoff
(2014) have made significant contributions to the analysis of this problem
insofar as they theorize about the political implications of the concentration
of wealth in the hands of a relative few. Table 7.1 nicely summarizes some
of the relevant data.
As Table 7.1 indicates, in the period from 1962 to 2009, relatively
little change occurred in the concentration of wealth in the United States.
The highest 20 percent of earners in the United States took in somewhere
between 40 and 60 percent of the nation’s income, with a certain degree of
fluctuation. Over the same period, the lowest 40 percent of earners took in
roughly 10 percent of the income in the United States. The most recent num-
bers, however, indicate that the situation may have worsened for this group of
Americans since the Great Recession, as they now earn less than 8 percent of
the annual income in our country (Wolff 2012). Data also indicate that over
the same period the top fifth of American families have owned between 80
and 90 percent of all the wealth in the United States (more than four times
their proportion in the population), while the bottom 40 percent own less
than 1 percent of the wealth. In fact, 2010 data indicate the net wealth of
the bottom two-fifths of Americans is negative: on average, they owe more
than they own (Wolff 2012:58). “Wealth” here refers to the ownership of
consumer goods and financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.
POWER, POLITICS, AND PROBLEMS 177
Table 7.1
Distribution of Income, 1962–2009
Bottom
Year Top 1% Top 20% 4th 20% 3rd 20% 40% All
1962 8.4 46.0 24.0 16.6 13.4 100.0

1969 18.3 54.0 21.7 15.2 9.1 100.0
1982 12.8 51.9 21.6 14.2 12.3 100.0
1988 16.6 55.6 20.6 13.2 10.7 100.0
1991 15.7 56.4 20.4 12.8 10.5 100.0
1994 14.4 55.1 20.6 13.6 10.7 100.0
1997 16.6 56.2 20.5 12.8 10.5 100.0
2000 20.0 58.6 19.0 12.3 10.1 100.0
2003 17.0 57.9 19.9 12.1 10.2 100.0
2006 21.3 61.4 17.8 11.1 9.6 100.0
2009 17.2 59.1 18.7 14.9 7.3 100.0
Source: Wolff (2012).
If we break these data down even further, we discover that an incredible

concentration of wealth is in the hands of a much smaller percentage of the
population. Wolff notes, for example, that less than 1 percent of the popula-
tion owns over 35 percent of all wealth. If we take housing out of the equa-
tion, that top 1 percent owns over 40 percent of all the wealth in the United
States (Wolff 2012:58)!
Such data describe the nature of the wealth distribution for the nation as a
whole. How do such figures relate to the nature of the urban United States?
In his classic work The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills (1959) called attention
to the existence in major metropolitan areas of a compact and recognizable
upper social class. The members of such an upper class achieved their “certif-
ication” through inclusion in a book known as the Social Register, which pub-
lishes listings for the following cities: Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago,
Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco,
St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Mills noted:
In each of the 12 chosen metropolitan areas of the nation, there is an upper

social class whose members were born into families which have been registered
since the Social Register began. This registered social class, as well as newly reg-
istered and unregistered classes in other big cities is composed of groups of
ancient families who for two or three or four generations have been prominent
and wealthy. They are set apart from the rest of the community by their manner
of origin, appearance and conduct. (1959:57)
178 BEING URBAN
The members of this metropolitan upper class maintain their exclusivity by

participating in social clubs and associations that rigorously exclude nonclass
members. These clubs provide an important vehicle for the symbolic affirma-
tion of upper-class consciousness, beginning in the exclusive prep schools the
children attend, in day schools that cost more than $20,000 annually, and
boarding schools that average over $40,000 (National Association of Inde-
pendent Schools 2011). Such clubs continue to exist at the college and
post-college levels, thereby providing an important source of continuity in
class consciousness. Mills observes that the members of the metropolitan
upper class
belong to the same associations at the same set of Ivy League colleges, and they
remain in social and business touch by means of the big-city network of metro-
politan clubs. In each of the nation’s leading cities, they recognize one another,
if not strictly as peers, as people with much in common. (Mills 1959:68)
The work of Gwen Moore and her colleagues (2002) provides more con-
temporary evidence of the strong ties between leaders in the upper echelons
of business and government. For their study, the authors constructed the
Elite Directors Database, an invaluable collection of data on almost 4,000
directorship and trustee positions in organizations in the for-profit, nonprofit,
and government sectors. These data allowed the researchers to trace the links
between different organizations involved in interlocking directorates—
situations in which the same individuals serve on the boards of multiple
organizations. Sociologists are particularly interested in such interlocking
directorates because they provide evidence of a certain “we-feeling” among
elites. To the extent that individuals are interacting with each other in multi-
ple settings, we have good reason to believe that they share various interests in
common. In particular, we expect that business leaders favor a good “business
climate,” which may include such things as a low minimum wage, low corpo-
rate taxes, and significant government subsidies of business activities. And to
the extent that these same people serve on panels that formally advise the
government on policy issues, we expect that they make recommendations
that further the interests of the businesses they help direct. One oft-noted
example of this involvement of industry leaders in the crafting of legislation
is the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The task force that laid the blueprint for this
legislation included a number of leaders in the petroleum, coal, nuclear, natu-
ral gas, and electricity industries (and not of environmental groups, urban
planners, or other such stakeholders). Unsurprisingly, their policy recom-
mendations led to an act that favors those industries with lax regulations
and tax breaks, while failing to provide for innovative policies such as
improved electrical production that could help prevent urban blackouts
(Milligan and Staff 2004; Sherman 2006).
Moore and her colleagues found strong evidence of the pervasive nature of
these kinds of interlocks. Among their other findings, they note that
over 80 percent of the nongovernmental organizations (i.e., businesses and

nonprofit organizations) are connected to at least one other nongovernmental
organization via their boards of directors or trustees. Policy-planning organiza-
tions and businesses are especially well networked. (2002:106)
What is more, while noting that there are more than 37,000 positions on
federal advisory committees, the authors find that a very select group of indi-
viduals form links between key advisory bodies and other elite organizations.
For example, they identify eight individuals who “hold a total of 20 seats on
the boards of businesses, 20 positions on federal advisory boards, eight seats
in charities, seven seats in policy-planning organizations, and one position
on a foundation board. Five of the top linking directors are current or former
chief executive officers of large corporations,” including GTE, Lockheed
Martin, Sprint, and AT&T (Moore et al. 2002:737–739).
Overall, Moore and her colleagues summarize their findings thusly:
Substantial linkages exist between organizations and elites within and across the
business, nonprofit, and government advisory sectors. The 100 largest corpora-
tions and their boards of directors are the best integrated in these interorganiza-
tional networks. The governing boards of virtually all of the largest corporations
share one or more directors with other organizations in the business or non-
profit sectors, and most also have a director who sits on a federal advisory
committee. . . . This study confirms earlier findings of dense linkages among
business, government, and policy-planning groups, and what appears to be the
overwhelming structural dominance of corporations and corporate directors in
the network as a whole. . . . [T]he crowds and cliques identified by Mills remain
resilient and relatively closed. (2002:740–741)
While the studies referred to in this section are certainly not conclusive on
the subject of the upper class, they do provide empirical evidence concerning
the possible power and influence of this class in both urban and national
affairs. At this point in our analysis we simply want to emphasize the importance
of this class’s access to, and involvement in, the major institutional bulwarks of
property arrangements in the United States—the worlds of finance and corpo-
rate law. Their relationship to these institutions provides upper-class members
180 BEING URBAN
with important organizational resources for influencing the political process

in the urban areas of the United States. Whether they utilize such resources is,
of course, an empirical question and one to be answered only by data from
specific cities.
Having briefly sketched some of the broader contours of upper-class life in
the United States, we now want to analyze a number of studies relating to
political participation. In what follows we will examine the interconnections
between the following factors: (1) voting patterns; (2) electoral reforms; (3)
the socioeconomic correlates of political involvement; (4) campaign financ-
ing; and (5) the reelection of incumbents. We will argue that these factors
operate so as to produce a mutually reinforcing pattern of political activity
by the “higher ups” that seriously disadvantages the “lower downs,” and
makes the election of reformers difficult.
Voting Patterns
As we have just seen, despite an ideology that tends to negate the signifi-
cance of class differences, American society is in fact characterized by a very
high degree of wealth concentration. As Americans we adhere to a set of
beliefs about political affairs that emphasizes the importance of citizen partici-
pation as well as the easy access to such participation for all Americans. On a
commonsense level, for example, we tend to think of foreign political systems
as much less open than our own. It comes as quite a surprise, then, when we
are confronted with figures such as those presented by political scientists con-
cerning voting rates of eligible voters. When compared with 168 other democ-
racies in the world, for example, the United States ranks 138th in voter
turnout percentages in national elections over the last half-century. Countries
such as Belgium, Austria, and Australia have percentages in the 80-plus range,
while the corresponding figure for the United States is 47.7 percent (Pintor
and Gratschew 2002).
The picture improves somewhat if we consider that there have been his-
torical barriers to voter registration. If we consider the ratio of actual to regis-
tered voters, the United States creeps up to 120th place, as an average of
66.5 percent of registered voters have voted in U.S. national elections since
1945. Regardless, these statistics belie notions that the United States pos-
sesses a democratically engaged electorate.
The issue of voting, then, is one of great significance for understanding
American political life. This is true not only at the national level, where, as
we have seen, little more than half the eligible population votes, but also at
the local level, where only about 25 to 30 percent of eligible voters turn out
(Hajnal and Lewis 2003:655; Henry 1987:52). How did this situation
develop? A historical analysis of voter registration policies reveals, we believe,
a set of practices initiated by middle-class reformers, with upper-class business
support, aimed at promoting good government and eliminating the seeming
corruption of the urban machines that dominated American big-city politics
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly the motivation
of the reformers was well intended and idealistic, but, as scholars have indi-
cated, political elites involved in the reform process sought to disenfranchise
low-income whites and racial and ethnic minorities (see Piven and Cloward
2000; Schattschneider 1960). A major sectional realignment occurred in
American politics after the election of 1896 that had the effect of lessening
party competition and “made possible the near total domination of the
Republican party by business in the North and of the Democratic party by
planter interests in the South” (Piven and Cloward 2000:65). In addition,
legal and institutional changes were introduced in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries that diminished the power of the worker-based
urban parties to distribute patronage resources such as jobs and social
services.
One important set of changes involved the implementation of voter regis-
tration requirements. While at first glance it may be difficult to argue with the
view that requiring voters to register is a sound and reasonable policy, the way
the policy has been applied is another matter. The ethnic, immigrant
working-class mass base of the big-city political parties was the first target of
urban political reformers. Urbanites experienced a process of
ever more onerous procedural requirements: from nonpersonal registration lists

compiled by local officials to personal registration lists that required citizens to
appear before those officials at given times and places; from permanent registra-
tion to periodic and even annual registration; to earlier closing dates for registra-
tion, so that campaigns no longer served to stimulate voters to register, and
toward more centralized administration of voter registration that not only
removed registration to less accessible and less familiar sites, but also was more
likely to remove it from the control of local politicians with an interest in main-
taining existing patterns of voter participation. (Piven and Cloward 2000:90)
These laws often targeted cities specifically. For example, registration

requirements in New Jersey were originally limited to residents in cities with
over 20,000 population; in New York state, the bar was set at 5,000 (Piven
and Cloward 2000:91–92). It is probably safe to assume that most of the dis-
enfranchised were poor and of ethnic minorities—including both African-
Americans but certainly Southern and Eastern Europeans and Irish (Keyssar
182 BEING URBAN
2009). Women, we should note, were disenfranchised nationally until the

passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
The situation in reference to voter registration did not undergo any really
major changes until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. But while
that Act clearly broadened racial minorities’ opportunities for political partici-
pation, the obstacles posed by cumbersome registration procedures still made
registration difficult for low-income persons (Clement 1989; Keyssar 2009;
Piven and Cloward 2000). In response, efforts were successfully made in the
1980s and 1990s to ease the path to voter registration.
Those efforts, spearheaded in part by sociologists Frances Fox Piven and
Richard A. Cloward, involved several proposals to use extant federal agencies,
such as the U.S. Postal Service, to help people register to vote. Ultimately, the
movement focused on Departments of Motor Vehicles, and the ensuing legis-
lation became known as the “Motor Voter” law. Initially vetoed by President
George H. Bush in 1992, it was passed by his successor, Bill Clinton, the next
year (Keyssar 2009; Piven and Cloward 2000). As passed, the law ensures that
[s]tates provide three procedures for registration (in addition to any the state
already possessed) in federal elections; the simultaneous application for a driv-
er’s license and voter registration; registration by mail; and registration by desig-
nated public agencies, including those offering public assistance and services to
the disabled. (Keyssar 2009:344)
The success of this legislation, however, has been mixed. Keyssar notes that
after an initial significant bump in registration, many groups remain underre-
presented in the electoral process. In particular, “among the less-educated
and less-affluent, both registration and turnout figures remained well below
average” (344). Piven and Cloward, assessing this law that they themselves
worked for, concluded that “registration rose but turnout did not” (Piven
and Cloward 2000:265).
Obstacles to Americans’ voting rights—particularly those of urban
minorities—remain significant. Keyssar points to a number of efforts, particu-
larly by Republicans, to constrain the people’s eligibility to cast a ballot. Such
efforts include broad “voter purges” that aim to take felons or immigrants off
the rolls of eligible voters, but catch many legitimate voters in their dragnets,
as well as legislation in a number of states that require voters to produce
government-issued identification (Keyssar 2009). On the other hand, some
degree of progress clearly has been made by minority voters, as evidenced by
the 2008 election of Barack Obama (and his reelection in 2012). As Keyssar
notes, “a half century earlier, not only would the elevation of an African
American to the nation’s highest office have been unimaginable, but millions
of the men and women who ardently supported Obama would not have been
permitted to cast ballots” (391).
Electoral Reforms
In addition to the historical effects of voter registration procedures dis-
cussed above, changes in the structural form of urban elections and
government have had significant consequences for local political life. Three
changes are noteworthy here: nonpartisan elections, the council-manager
form of government, and at-large elections. Each of these has had the effect,
as revealed by empirical studies, of reducing the likelihood of political partici-
pation for large numbers of citizens, especially the poor and racial minorities.
Let us then examine their consequences.
Neal Caren studied 328 municipal elections held in 38 cities between 1978
and 2003 (Caren 2007). Overall, he found that on average, only 27 percent
of voters turned out to vote in these elections. But importantly, he noted pro-
nounced variability between the turnouts in different cities. In particular,
Caren considered two of the key reforms that were introduced in Progressive
Era efforts to reduce corruption in urban politics and kill political machines.
On the one hand, many cities removed political parties from the process of
electing municipal officials, so competition between candidates is officially
nonpartisan. On the other, by professionalizing city politics through the
appointment of a professional administrator as manager rather than election
of a mayor, the council-manager system also works to depoliticize municipal
governments. Overall, Caren’s data show that on average a city with both of
the reform features will have a turnout that is between 13 and 17 percentage
points less than a city that does not display either feature. Holbrook and
Weinschenk argue that such low turnouts are unsurprising in elections with-
out partisanship: “The lack of partisan cues makes it more difficult for voters
to gather information about candidates and . . . makes local governments less
responsive to electoral forces and reduces the range of activities that could be
considered political” (Holbrook and Weinschenk 2014:43).
At-large elections also have important consequences for local politics.
An at-large system elects persons from the city as a whole rather than from
geographically designated subareas known as wards or districts. Thus, the
power of residentially concentrated racial minorities (a common result of seg-
regated housing patterns) is seriously diminished. While they may be a
numerical majority in their own ward, they are a numerical minority in the
184 BEING URBAN
locality as a whole and are unable to gain representatives in municipal

government. In a study of voting patterns in over 7,000 cities, Jessica Trouns-
tine and Melody Valdini (2008) confirmed that the use of at-large elections
has this deleterious effect. In particular, they note that representation of both
Latinos and African-Americans is more likely when council members are
elected by districts rather than at-large. And this finding is significantly tied
to the segregation of minorities into particular neighborhoods in the city:
Only when a group is concentrated will districts promote increased descriptive

representation on the council. For African Americans, the effect of districts goes
from being negative at very low levels of concentration to significantly positive
at high levels. Districts have the largest effect for cities in the third quartile,
where moving from an at-large system to a district system increases the esti-
mated probability of electing an African American council member by about
10 percentage points, from 14% to 24%. (Trounstine and Valdini 2008:563)
The critical importance of the factors we have discussed for local political
life is perhaps best shown by asking what difference they make in terms of
how urban governments actually operate. Are there, in fact, any important
contrasts between reformed and unreformed municipalities? Empirical work
in this area suggests that the results of reforming municipal governments are
mixed. On the one hand, reformed governments are less likely to bet on flashy
actions that can yield short-term political points but burden a city with long-
term financial obligations, including high-risk development projects like sta-
dium construction (Feiock, Jeong, and Kim 2003). On the other hand, many
commentators are concerned that reformed governance structures are less
responsive to the needs of citizens. Anirudh Ruhil (2003) used data on 220
cities over 20 years to investigate the effect of changing a city’s governance
structure from mayor-council to council-manager. As a measure of the cities’
responsiveness to their citizens, Ruhil took per-capita spending as his depen-
dent variable: presumably those governments that are more concerned with
the wants and needs of their citizens will spend more on services and infra-
structure to keep those citizens happy. Indeed, Ruhil discovered that the
move to council-manager governance significantly reduced per-capita spend-
ing, and took an average of 14 years to return to pre-transition levels. In a dif-
ferent study, Lubell et al. (2009) found that cities with mayors are more likely
than cities run by professional managers to respond to the demands of envi-
ronmentalists to preserve land. Though these findings are mixed, on the
whole they seem to point to a reality in which those cities that rely on regular
elections, where politicians must interact more frequently with their
constituents to curry their votes, are also cities that are more likely to act in
residents’ interests.
Socioeconomic Correlates of Political Involvement

The municipal electoral arrangements on which we have elaborated estab-
lish the structural parameters, so to speak, within which local political activity
takes place. Of particular relevance here is the role played by socioeconomic
factors such as income, education, and occupation. In addition, the organiza-
tional positions that upper-class groups command allow them access to valued
and scarce resources of a corporate, organizational kind that have important
political consequences. We have seen that a crucial issue concerning voting
in the United States is the contrast between the percentage of eligible voters
who vote and the percentage of registered voters who vote. Here is where
SES (socioeconomic status), race, level of education, and other dimensions
of stratification take on greater significance. Once people are registered to
vote, a relatively high percentage of them do vote, regardless of social class.
The requirement that individuals register themselves ahead of elections, how-
ever, keeps voter rolls meager in the United States, compared to countries
where registration is automatically handled by the government, as in Europe
(Lowi, Ginsberg, and Shepsle, 2006:432). And despite the gains made
through Motor Voter registration, described above, different social groups
are more or less likely to register and vote. In particular, those with higher
incomes, more education, and older voters are more likely to vote. For exam-
ple, while over 82 percent of people who earn more than $150,000 per year
are registered to vote, fewer than 50 percent of those who earn less than
$15,000 per year are registered (Lowi et al. 2006:430).
A very extensive literature in the social sciences documents the greater like-
lihood of participation in voluntary associations of all kinds by upper SES
groups, especially males (see McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1982, 1986;
McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). Summarizing several decades of
work on such homophily in organizations, McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and
Cook (2001) note that “higher SES people join more groups and leave them
less frequently, they experience more voluntary organizations over their life
course and have more co-memberships,” and that “the extreme gender
segregation of the voluntary system leads most co-membership ties to be
sex-homogeneous” (432). One particular gender division of note is that
men tend to be more likely to volunteer with political organizations (Bussell
and Forbes 2002). It has also been demonstrated that better educated people
186 BEING URBAN
and older people are more likely members of voluntary organizations (Bussell
and Forbes 2002). Further research on specific dimensions of volunteerism
has demonstrated that organizations may be more or less isolated from other
organizations. In other words, while members of some kinds of organizations
join a variety of organizations, others tend to join just one. In an important
example, union participation tends to be negatively associated with member-
ship in other organizations (Cornwell and Harrison 2004). This is of socio-
logical concern, because, as Paxton (2002) notes,
[A]ssociations should traverse social boundaries, increase members’ tolerance

through contact with diverse others . . . , and prevent the creation of pockets
of isolated trust and networks. In contrast, isolated associations could intensify
inward-focused behavior, reduce exposure to new ideas, and exacerbate existing
social cleavages. For these reasons, associations that are connected to the larger
community should be more beneficial to democracy than associations that
remain isolated. (259)
It is important to note that as poverty tends to be concentrated in certain

neighborhoods, those neighborhoods that are most in need of the capacities
of voluntary organizations tend to have the lowest participation in such
organizations, a finding confirmed by Wilson and Taub (2006) in Chicago,
and by Stoll (2001) in Los Angeles. Stoll further demonstrates that this hits
African-American neighborhoods particularly hard. Though African-
Americans are considerably more likely to participate in voluntary organiza-
tions than individuals of other ethnic backgrounds after controlling for
income, the fact that many African-Americans in Los Angeles are concentrated
in poor neighborhoods means that those neighborhoods experience overall
low rates of participation. Stoll notes that this is particularly concerning because
“engagement in voluntary associations is likely to expand the social resources
available to individuals, which in turn can help facilitate social and economic
mobility and, perhaps, neighborhood improvement” (551). The lack of such
engagement does not bode well for worse-off neighborhoods.
Campaign Financing
The studies reviewed in the previous section certainly seem to suggest that
upper-class persons participate in a much more “organizationally dense” envi-
ronment than their lower-class counterparts. Upper-class political activity has
consequences beyond campaigning for candidates and belonging to public
interest/policy groups. In addition to their personal wealth, high-status per-
sons command resources of a special kind, particularly the organizational
resources that corporate managers can draw upon to finance political cam-
paigns. Domhoff (2014) has noted that upper-class wealth makes it possible
for such persons to play an important role in screening particular candidates
through the primary process and to make large campaign contributions, “to
raise name recognition and craft a winning image” (147). Though wealthy
donors tend not to make quid pro quo demands for policy making from suc-
cessful candidates, Domhoff posits that large contributions are experienced
as a sort of “gift,” which social norms suggest deserve some degree of
reciprocity (147).
Ties between corporate elites and politicians are further cemented through
broader social associations: they tend to go to the same schools and partici-
pate in the same social activities. And corporations may provide their favorite
politicians with various indirect benefits. Domhoff (2014) notes that such
benefits may include lucrative speaking engagements, where politicians give
something like a pep-talk to employees of a corporation. They may also
include the lending of corporate lobbyists, “to serve as political strategists,
campaign managers, and fundraisers” (156).
Running for political office is a very expensive proposition. In the 2012
elections, for example, the Federal Elections Commission estimated that the
average winning campaign for the U.S. Senate spent roughly $10.3 million.
Obama’s bid for a second term cost a whopping $738.5 million (“Price of
Admission”). The real import of a figure like this can best be seen in terms
of a six-year term in office. Imagine that you are a senator planning on run-
ning for reelection in six years. You would have to have more than $33,000
coming in every week for each of the 312 weeks covering that six-year period!
One must be well connected indeed to have access to such campaign
contributions.
The metrics of campaigning are further distorted by the wide array
of PACs (political action committees) and contributions by corporations.
In a study examining campaign contributions to candidates by Fortune 500
companies in 1976 and 1980, John Boies (1989) found that “[f]irms with
the richest history of interaction with the state, top defense contractors, major
acquirers of other businesses, and corporations prosecuted for criminal acts
are the most politically active of large firms” (1989:830). In 2002, the
McCain-Feingold Act sought to curtail the most egregious of corporate influ-
ences on the electoral process, limiting the amount of “soft money” corpora-
tions could wield in support of candidates (Drew 2012). Though the Act
failed to do much to curtail corporate influence, its effectiveness was entirely
derailed in 2010 by the Supreme Court, in the case Citizens United v. FEC.
In that decision, Ronald Dworkin writes, “[t]he five conservative justices,
188 BEING URBAN
on their own initiative, at the request of no party to the suit, declared that cor-
porations and unions have a constitutional right to spend as much as they wish
on television election commercials specifically supporting or targeting particular
candidates” (Dworkin 2010:n.p.). The effects of this decision were clearly on
display in the 2012 elections, when huge amounts of money from wealthy indi-
viduals poured into the presidential elections. As early as the New Hampshire
primaries, and right up to the election night, Americans were bombarded with
attack ads on TV, radio, and the Internet, tearing down certain candidates in
the effort of boosting another (Drew 2012). Until and unless significant cam-
paign finance legislation or court decisions are handed down, this mega-
money politics is the new status quo, at least for statewide and national elections.
Still, the question remains—does campaign financing affect elections? Evi-
dence suggests that the answer is definitely “Yes . . . but it’s complicated.”
Gary C. Jacobson (2006) reviewed past research on congressional elections
spending, as well as detailed, multi-wave surveys of voters in the 1996
congressional elections. That research indicated that there are important
differences in the way that incumbents and challengers spend money. Gener-
ally speaking, strong challengers attract more money, and force their incum-
bent opponents to spend even more money—to the extent that losing
incumbents tend to spend more money than winning incumbents. Overall
money, as it is spent on campaigning, has the effect of enhancing candidates’
name recognition and persuading voters to vote one way or another. But it
takes a lot of money to make a seemingly small difference. Based on some rel-
atively sophisticated statistical modeling, Jacobson (2006) was able to make
the following statements about the effects of money on electoral success:
If . . . other variables made the estimated probability of voting for the incumbent
.75 with the challenger spending $5,000, it would fall to .65 if the challenger spent
$100,000, to .60 if the challenger spent $400,000 and to .57 if the challenger
spent $800,000. Money spent by the incumbent would be projected to have a
smaller effect; for example, if the other variables made the estimated probability
of voting for the incumbent .50 if the incumbent spent $100,000, it would
increase to .53 at $400,000 and to .55 at $1 million. (Jacobson 2006:215)
Though Jacobson cautions that we take these particular numbers with a

grain of salt, the takeaway is clear: if you want to win an election, be prepared
to spend a lot of money.
New techniques of campaigning have altered the nature of local party
support. At one time, Democratic machines could count on their num-
erical superiority among the urban masses to get the vote out, through
neighborhood-based canvassers and other labor-intensive tactics. Such strate-

gies could be used to offset the organizational resources and wealth
commanded by the generally better-off supporters of the Republican Party.
In today’s political climate, however, new kinds of techniques have com-
pletely altered the nature of traditional campaigning and financing, resulting
in important shifts in the balance of party power in the United States:
In recent years, the role of parties in political campaigns has been partially sup-
planted by the use of new political technologies. These include polling, the
broadcast media, phone banks, direct-mail fund-raising and advertising, profes-
sional public relations, and the Internet. These techniques are enormously
expensive and have led to a shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive
politics. This shift works to the advantage of political forces representing the
well-to-do. (Lowi et al. 2006:519)
The Effects of Incumbency

In our previous discussion of voter participation rates, we noted that only
about a quarter of those eligible to vote actually do vote in local elections.
The critical significance of such figures lies in their impact on candidates’
chances for being elected.
As Kenneth Prewitt’s (1970) study of cities in the San Francisco Bay area
during 1955–1965 indicated, the minimum number of votes required to
win a city council seat was astonishingly small. In a city of 71,000 people, less
than 10 percent of the total population was needed to elect a councilman. In
discussing his findings, Prewitt noted:
In a city of more than 13,000 residents, on the average, as few as 810 voters
elected a man to office. Such figures sharply question the validity of thinking
that “mass electorates” hold elected officials accountable. For these councilmen,
even if serving in relatively sizeable cities, there is no “mass electorate;” rather,
there are the councilman’s business associates, his friends at church, his
acquaintances in the Rotary Club and so forth, which provide him the electoral
support he needs to gain office. (1970:9)
Prewitt also calls attention to the issue of reelection. In 65 percent of these

cities, more than 50 percent of the councilmen who left office did so volun-
tarily rather than through election losses. Moreover,
[o]ver the ten-year period, four out of five incumbent councilmen who stood
for reelection were successful. This figure, though high, is even somewhat lower
190 BEING URBAN
than one reported for members of the House of Representatives. During the
years 1924–1956, 90 percent of the congressmen who sought reelection were
returned by the voters. (1970:9)
More recent data confirm that Prewitt’s findings still obtain, and are
notable at the level of local elections. Jessica Trounstine (2011) considered
70 years’ worth of election outcomes in the cities of Austin, Dallas, San Anto-
nio, and San Jose—“All classic ‘reform’ cities that had city manager charters,
nonpartisan, at-large city council elections for most of the time series” (262).
She investigated how much more likely city council incumbents are to run than
to stick to a single term, and how much more likely they are to win elections
when compared to challengers. Her findings clearly support the idea that
incumbency positively influences candidates to run again, and positively influen-
ces their likelihood of winning—“Incumbents are about 39 percentage points
more likely to run and about 32 points more likely to run and win” (Trounstine
2011:272). Trounstine also notes that these findings seem most significant for
those running in close elections—the positive effect of incumbency seems most
pronounced for those candidates who run in an election with a margin of victory
of 10 percent or less (Trounstine 2011:273).
Nationwide data reinforce the notion that political officeholders gain an
iron grip on their positions. In the congressional elections of 2002, for exam-
ple, 98 percent of incumbent representatives were reelected. This is the out-
come of a long-term trend—while in the first half of the twentieth century,
about 55 seats would switch between parties in any given congressional elec-
tion, by the turn of the twenty-first century, that number had dropped to an
average of 23 seats (Campbell 2003). James Campbell (2003) points out that
a certain portion of the stagnation in these elections is tied to the qualitative
advantages enjoyed by the incumbent. That is, incumbents are relatively well
known in their home district compared to challengers, their message has
already been proven to be popular with constituents, and while in office they
have had the opportunity to take political actions that may please voters back
home, including bringing home federal “pork barrel” spending on such
things as highways, schools, or military installations. But Campbell also shows
that incumbents enjoy huge monetary advantages that translate into electoral
victories. Considering the elections between 1990 and 2000, he finds that
[t]he typical incumbent in every year examined spent more than five times what
the challenger spent. In 1998, the typical incumbent spent more than eight
times what the challenger spent, and in 2000, almost thirteen times more.
(Campbell 2003:147–148)
The data presented to this point, then, illustrate the cumulative process by
which the better-off, more advantaged sectors of American society, including
powerful business organizations, contribute to the production of a self-
affirming set of social arrangements. This should not be interpreted to mean,
however, that such processes dominate each and every community in the
United States. Rather, we mean to suggest that they function as strong tend-
encies that require great effort to mobilize offsetting, countervailing ones.
Our task now is to specify the particular characteristics of urban communities
that may be associated with a set of more inclusionary, participatory power
arrangements.
RESHUFFLING THE DECK: PROCESSES PROMOTING

PLURALIST POWER ARRANGEMENTS
We have discussed the role played by upper-class persons in the general
political process. In large urban areas, however, a number of competing inter-
ests may vie with one another—all of them may be highly organized. In such
milieus, then, the question of upper-class dominance must be viewed within
the context of competing interests. What are the conditions that seem to pro-
mote the concentration or diffusion of power in a city? In a comparative study
that contrasted the inclusive politics of Pittsburgh and of Harold
Washington-era Chicago with the politics of Chicago under less-inclusive,
machine-driven regimes, Barbara Ferman (1996) found that the degree of
pluralism found in a city—and especially the amount of involvement on the
part of neighborhood-based organizations—depends on several factors.
First, different municipalities may have different governing regimes. In con-
trast to the view of solidarity among elites as described above, Ferman finds
that in municipalities, economic elites and political elites may have different
goals. In Pittsburgh, strong business interests maintained some power along-
side political elites, and opened a space for various interest groups from the
public to have some say in the crafting of public policy. On the other hand,
“[i]n Chicago, the early accommodation process catapulted political elites to
a position of dominance. The overriding objective of the regime was the
accumulation of political and electoral power, which often translated into a
perceived need to eliminate and/or preempt potential rivals” (Ferman
1996:137).
Second, cities possess different institutional frameworks. Whereas in some
cities, like Pittsburgh, decision-making processes are open to a variety of play-
ers and public comment is welcomed, in Chicago and the other handful of
192 BEING URBAN
machine-led cities remaining in the United States, decisions tend to come

from on high, generally from the mayor’s office. Resources may be distrib-
uted through open, competitive processes, as with something like neighbor-
hood grants, or may be distributed more or less based on the will of
individual council members or the mayor. Ferman also notes that city institu-
tions may tend toward “social production”—nurturing an open civic sphere
in which to debate matters that affect residents—or they may tend toward
institutional closure and “social control.” In Chicago, this social control is
manifested to make sure that power does not devolve to groups outside the
political elite (Ferman 1996:139).
Finally, different cities manifest different political cultures. To some extent,
this is both a cause and an outcome of the first two variables. Citizens of a city
may work across neighborhoods, building social capital, or they may remain
parochial and perceive the political arena as one of permanent competition.
In the latter situation, Ferman observes that the polity tends toward cynicism
about the potential of positive change in a community. Ultimately, such
cynicism results in a low level of what Ferman calls “civic attachment”: “feel-
ings of attachment to the larger civic community” (Ferman 1996:140). In a
situation such as Chicago’s,
[r]eform is often interpreted as rewarding a new set of friends and punishing a

new set of enemies. In such an environment it is enormously difficult to mobi-
lize the requisite political support to alter the system. (Ferman 1996:141)
Ferman is thus suggesting that true systemic change, change that would
incorporate diverse voices from across the citizenship of a municipality, may
be difficult to come by. That is particularly true to the extent that the three
dimensions of municipal politics that she identified—governing regimes,
institutional frameworks, and political cultures—reinforce one another.
The outcomes she found in Pittsburgh and Chicago were quite clear:
Regimes responded quite differently when confronted with neighborhood

demands for resources and inclusion in policy-making activities. In Pittsburgh,
the response was quite favorable, resulting in neighborhood incorporation that
ultimately changed the nature of the regime. In Chicago, the response was resis-
tance as political elites tried desperately, and usually successfully, to protect the
status quo. (Ferman 1996:16)
Writing more than a decade after Ferman, Derek Hyra (2008) found that
little indeed had changed in Chicago. But in comparing neighborhood poli-
tics in Chicago to those in New York City, Hyra took the additional
important step to investigate not only how municipal politics influence neigh-
borhood dynamics but also how national politics and global economics influ-
ence neighborhoods.
In particular, Hyra was interested in considering how neighborhoods
reacted differently to gentrification. He considered the predominately poor,
black neighborhoods of Bronzeville in Chicago and Harlem in New York City.
In the 2000s, both neighborhoods were undergoing major redevelopment
and seeing influxes of upper-middle class African-Americans. Thus, a number
of poorer residents were being displaced to further-flung locales, often in their
cities’ respective suburbs. But neighborhood responses to gentrification were
different in the two locations. For example, while high-rise public housing
developments in Chicago were razed, in Harlem they remained vital nodes
within the community. While Chicago tended to pursue a development-at-all-
costs strategy (neighborhood residents be damned), in New York residents
had the opportunity to make public comments on development proposals and
alter plans to better suit the community.
Hyra finds that the different experiences of these two neighborhoods are
tied to how municipal power structures differently mediate between neigh-
borhoods and the national and global context. First, he notes how each city
plays an important part in the global economy, and each is responding to
forces predicated on global economic developments:
High-wage global economy workers are coming back to the central city from
the suburbs. This dynamic puts new market forces in play in areas surrounding
the central business district (CBD). The population influx to the city center
raises real estate values in once economically abandoned African-American com-
munities. (Hyra 2008:30)
Without such global forces, gentrification would be a non-issue in Bronze-

ville or Harlem.
Hyra next considers the different ways in which municipal governments
can mediate national urban policies. One may consider in particular the way
the different municipalities directed funds from the national department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In New York City, which has
had contentious, multiparty city politics for most of a century, federal housing
funds were used to maintain high-rise apartment complexes to a reasonable
degree of integrity. Oversight by members of competing parties helped
ensure that funds were allocated more or less in the manner intended by the
federal government, and genuinely contentious politics meant that citizens,
even poor residents of public housing, could hold politicians accountable
194 BEING URBAN
for their decisions. However, in Chicago, one-party politics allowed the

mayor to allocate HUD funding to political cronies within the Chicago
Housing Authority (CHA). Hyra writes:
In the 1980s and 1990s the CHA was marked by political corruption. In one
year, although the CHA owed $33 million to contractors, it increased adminis-
trative positions and salaries of mid-level professionals. . . . Machine-appointed
Chairman Vince Lane . . . allegedly channeled security contracts to his former
business partners. Under Lane the CHA neglected to perform essential manage-
ment procedures, failing at “even basic tasks like collecting rents” . . . . [W]ith-
out appropriate management, the CHA suffered severe budget shortfalls, and
buildings deteriorated. (Hyra 2008:99)
Though all taxpayers suffer to some extent from this mismanagement of

public monies, it is of course the residents of public housing who bore the
brunt of the CHA’s misdeeds. The repercussions were not only in the short
term, as residents were stuck living in dilapidated housing. Hyra shows that
the longer term effect was that when both Harlem and Bronzeville were
undergoing rapid gentrification in the 2000s, in Chicago,
[t]he only fiscally sound plan was to raze its high-rise public housing.
This action has led to the displacement of nearly 17,000 low-income residents
in Bronzeville. . . . In New York City, superior management and tenant activism,
associated with the city’s open political system, ensured that standards were con-
sistently maintained in NYCHA buildings. As a result, the public housing in
Harlem has remained viable, and current redevelopment persists without exten-
sive public housing tenant displacement. (Hyra 2008:109)
Finally, we should consider the political implications of “growth

machines” (Logan and Molotch 2007) or “growth coalitions” (Gendron
and Domhoff 2009) with respect to pluralist politics. Richard Gendron and
William Domhoff took a close look at the political history of Santa Cruz,
California, focusing in particular on the progressive coalition that took politi-
cal control of the city from the 1980s onward. Toward the end of the twenti-
eth century, Santa Cruz was poised for explosive growth and development,
located as it is in a physically beautiful setting on the Pacific Ocean, and in
an economically propitious one, close to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Traditional growth machine models of urban politics (for example, that of
Logan and Molotch (2007)) would have predicted that growth interests—
real estate developers, rentiers, and financiers—would have dominated the
city’s politics, leading to massive development of high rises, luxury housing,
and shopping centers at the expense of neighborhoods and green spaces.

But Gendron and Domhoff show that this did not happen.
Instead, liberal neighborhood activists, along with students and members
of the community of the University of California, Santa Cruz, elected officials
who supported their vision of a less-built-up Santa Cruz and themselves stood
for elections. While the council did support new building projects after a
major earthquake in 1989, after elections in 1992, the council established a
solid record of supporting only “community based development, meaning
projects that are compatible with neighborhood use values and create jobs
with at least living wages and good health benefits” (Gendron and Domhoff
2009:176). Thus, Santa Cruz’s city council supported development of things
like green spaces, dog parks, and a Costco (touted as helping families to make
affordable grocery purchases). On the other hand, they have successfully
opposed the development of a large hotel and conference center, as well as
the expansion of UC Santa Cruz.
To Gendron and Domhoff, this all points to the power of pluralist coali-
tions to enact policies that are in the expressed interests of neighborhood res-
idents, often to the chagrin of developer interests. They further note,
however, that such coalitions are unusual, and difficult to maintain. Their
book’s title possesses a double meaning—The Leftmost City refers both to
Santa Cruz’s geographic location near the western extreme of the continental
United States and also to the fact that it is a town populated by very commit-
ted political liberals. “Generally speaking,” they write, “few activists are able
to make [the] transition to politics because their temperament and experience
have led them to believe that their effectiveness is based on taking principled
stands against the established political order” (Gendron and Domhoff
2009:212). The density of such activists in Santa Cruz helped enable them
to make this transition. But Gendron and Domhoff further observe that in
the context of the United States as a whole, such activist coalition building
is limited to the local level. At the national level, with lower densities of activ-
ists, greater control by political parties, and greater demands for campaign
finances, electoral politics tend to dictate that such candidates will be unable
to compete (Gendron and Domhoff 2009:213).
Overall, we learn from studies like those of Gendron and Domhoff, Hyra,
Ferman, and numerous others (for example, Aiken 1970; Clavel 1986; Henig
1982) that where pluralist politics obtain, the interests of a city’s residents will
be represented. But to the extent that machines enforce one-party rule, or
growth coalitions dominate a city’s electoral politics with clout and campaign
financing, citizens may find themselves displaced or displeased by growth-at-
all-costs strategies.
196 BEING URBAN
THINKING ABOUT URBAN PROBLEMS: RACE, JOBS,

FAMILIES, AND SCHOOLS
Previously we described the processes promoting or inhibiting grassroots
participation in urban affairs. The data gathered by social scientists seem to
suggest that the tendencies toward exclusionary, hierarchical arrangements
are quite pronounced and pervasive. In the final section of this chapter we
want to illustrate how the problems of our cities are linked to the plight of
an urban ghetto underclass that commands few resources at either the local
or, more important, the national level. Lacking a voice locally and having no
strong organized collective constituency in the highest reaches of power—
Congress and the state legislatures—the seriously disadvantaged are by and
large left to fend for themselves, with disastrous consequences for the rest of
the urban United States in terms of crime, safety, and industrial productivity
vis-à-vis our economic competitors in places like Western Europe, China, or
Japan. In what follows we will focus on a few major issues that relate to and
mutually reinforce one another, resulting in a vicious cycle of recurring urban
problems. We believe that the theoretical argument we develop here is useful
in understanding a broad range of other issues, such as drug-related prob-
lems, homelessness, and crime, although they are not the prime focus of our
discussion.
At the root of contemporary urban problems, we will argue, is a pattern of
intertwined, self-perpetuating processed rooted in our history (see Lieberson
1980; Wilson 2009) that links race with economic inequality, thereby creat-
ing high levels of minority joblessness. This latter factor contributes to pro-
ducing a family structure—female-headed families with children—that poses
serious problems for urban schools, thereby contributing to the dropout
problem. Dropping out of high school condemns another generation of
inner-city youths to reproducing the life experiences of their poorly educated
parents. The consequences of this pattern for society as a whole are incredibly
costly in terms of dollars spent for prisons, welfare, and crime protection as
well as tax revenues lost at the local, state, and federal levels (Catterall
1987). We have here, then, the classic workings of a vicious cycle that prob-
ably can be broken only by a commitment at the national level to the kinds
of proven, workable programs that we will discuss in the concluding section
of this chapter.
One further point is worth emphasizing before we turn to an examination
of each of the specific elements producing this cycle: the major economic and
industrial shifts that have occurred in the United States since the early 1970s.
Prior to the 1970s, as numerous scholars such as Wilson (1987, 1989, 2009),
Anderson (1990), Kasarda (1989), and Wacquant (2008) have demonstrated,

even minority high school dropouts were able to get steady, fairly well-paying
jobs in the auto, steel, and rubber industries that dominated the midwestern
and northeastern “Rust Belt” cities. Such jobs are now scarce, and their elimina-
tion has left in its wake a penumbra of human tragedies and social problems.
Racial Economic Inequality

It certainly does not come as news that there are serious differences in
one’s life chances depending on one’s race. As mentioned earlier in reference
to social class, there is a marked concentration of wealth in the United States.
The same pattern holds for racial differences. As Table 7.2 indicates, in com-
paring median income for whites and blacks between 1970 and 2012, there
was virtually no change in the relative standing of blacks. During this 42-year
period, black median family income went from 61.3 percent of white median
family income in 1970 to 61.4 percent in 2012. For Hispanics, their income rel-
ative to whites declined significantly over the same period, from 67.1 percent of
white income in 1980 to 61.9 percent in 2012. (We should be somewhat cau-
tious in interpreting this finding, however, as an increasing proportion of His-
panic households since the 1970s are first-generation immigrants with
generally poorer job prospects than native-born Hispanics.)
If we examine the percentages of various age groups below the poverty line
for different races in 2012 (Table 7.3), we can see that almost 38 percent of
black youths under 18 live in poverty, compared with 18.5 percent of white
Table 7.2
Median Family Incomes (in Constant [2012] Dollars) by Race of Householder,
1970–2012
All Races White Black Hispanic Asian
1970 52,068 54,015 33,134 n/a1 n/a2

1980 55,775 58,112 33,624 39,042 n/a2
1990 60,207 62,867 36,484 39,904 n/a2
2000 67,643 70,705 44,901 45,923 n/a2
2010 63,434 66,254 40,643 41,387 79,210
2012 62,241 65,880 40,517 40,764 77,864
1
Data on Hispanic ethnicity not collected before 1974.
2
Data on Asian ethnicity not collected before 2002.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Sup-
plements (2012).
198 BEING URBAN
Table 7.3
Persons below Poverty Level, by Race and Age, 2012
Percent below Poverty Level
Age All Races White Black1 Hispanic2 Asian1
Under 18 21.8 18.5 37.9 33.8 13.8

18–64 years old 13.7 11.9 23.9 21.6 10.9
Over 65 9.1 7.8 18.2 20.6 12.3
1
Individuals identifying themselves as black or Asian and no other race.
2
Hispanic of any race.
Source: Current Population Survey (2013). Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supple-
ment [machine-readable data file]/conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau
of Labor Statistics. Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2013.
youths—a ratio of roughly 2 to 1. The percentages are somewhat similar for

Hispanic youths compared with whites, while Asians display lower propor-
tions of poverty for all groups but the elderly.
At the root of such disparities is a historical process of racial discrimination
against nonwhite populations that has created social problems in our society,
especially in terms of crime and incarceration rates. In recent years social sci-
entists have begun to explore the social consequences of racial economic
inequality, that is, the process whereby racial discrimination is accompanied by
the kinds of disparities in wealth and income between racial groups that we have
just noted. This condition results from a set of exclusionary procedures insti-
tuted by dominant groups whereby nongroup members (that is, minority races)
face structural obstacles to full participation. Through a combination of overt
racial discrimination and structural legacies of ghetto isolation, disadvantaged
minorities living in cities, blacks and Hispanics in particular, are cast as what Loı̈c
Wacquant has called “urban outcasts.” He writes:
Cumulation of social ills and the narrowing of the economic horizon explain the
atmosphere of drabness, ennui and despair that pervades communities in large
Western cities and the oppressive climate of insecurity and fear that poisons daily
life in the black American ghetto. . . . Residents of these derelict districts feel that
they and their children have little chance of knowing a future other than the pov-
erty and exclusion to which they are consigned at present. Added to this sense of
social closure is the rage felt by unemployed urban youths due to the taint befalling
residents of decaying urban areas as their neighbourhoods become denigrated as
hellish breeding grounds of ‘social pathologies’. . . . They must also bear the
weight of the public scorn that is now everywhere attached to living in locales
widely labelled as ‘no-go-areas’, fearsome redoubts rife with crime, lawlessness
and moral degeneracy where only the rejects of society could bear to dwell. (Wac-
quant 2008:29)
Numerous studies have confirmed a link between such racial and economic
isolation and higher rates of violent crime. Peter Blau and his colleagues (Blau
and Blau 1982; Blau and Schwartz 1984) found in a study of the 125 largest
Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States that violent crime
in a metropolitan community is a direct function of the levels of racial
inequality found there. Building on Blau’s work, Steven Messner conducted
an examination of homicide rates in 52 countries, including the United
States. His findings support the argument that “the structuring of economic
inequality on the basis of ascribed characteristics [such as race] is a particularly
important source of lethal violence in contemporary society” (Messner
1989:597; emphasis added). More recently, Krivo and Peterson (2000)
attempted to disaggregate the effect of race from other determinants of vio-
lent crime in urban settings, such as the level of homeownership in a neigh-
borhood or the concentrations of persons living below the poverty line.
Though they had data on 124 cities, their attempt to argue that causes of
crime for whites and blacks operate in much the same way and at comparable
rates was complicated by the fact that
blacks and whites seldom have comparable levels of disadvantage. Indeed, racial
differences in disadvantage are so great that it is impossible to assess what the
effects for whites would be if they were as disadvantaged as the average African
American in most urban areas. (Krivo and Peterson 2000:557)
Thus, overall their findings continue to support the notion that race matters
in the United States and, in particular, that the continued isolation and disad-
vantage experienced by blacks means that many are stuck in high-crime
neighborhoods.
When thinking about emotionally charged issues such as crime, it is quite
easy to focus on the individual personality characteristics of the offenders
and dismiss their actions as the outcomes of bad or immoral characters. While
we certainly do not mean to excuse the actions of criminals, sociology has an
important contribution to make here, we believe, by directing our attention to
the kinds of social conditions that provide the breeding grounds for such acts.
The forms of frustrated rage that widespread economic inequalities create have
been amply demonstrated in the writings of black scholars (Carter 2005; Clark
1965; Cobb and Grier 1968; Harris-Perry 2011; Pattillo 2008). Despite some
claims that we may live in a “post-racial” society, signaled by the election of a
200 BEING URBAN
black president, news stories frequently remind us of the continued significance

of race in the United States—from the police harassment of distinguished Har-
vard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Goodnough 2009) to L. A.
Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s much publicized racist tirades (Lopez
2014). On a much more profound level, consider the following findings from
a study of residential housing segregation in 20 major metropolitan areas by
Denton and Massey (1988). They found that blacks making more than
$50,000 per year had less chance of living in an integrated neighborhood than
Hispanics making less than $2,500 per year and Asians making less than
$10,000 per year! Numerous subsequent studies have shown that this finding
is robust, and that “affluent African Americans live in neighborhoods with
higher poverty rates, higher crime rates, fewer college graduates, higher unem-
ployment rates, and more vacant housing than poor whites” (Pattillo 2008).
This is one of the most astounding findings in all social science, since it runs
completely counter to the well-established general pattern whereby increases
in socioeconomic status tend to increase one’s life chances in a wide range of
areas—physical health, mental well-being, and longevity, for example.
Imagine how someone in a situation like that must feel. At a salary
of $50,000 per year you have certainly “made it” in terms of middle-class
American ideas of achievement, and yet someone making 5 percent of your
salary—$2,500—has a better chance than you of living in an integrated neigh-
borhood. How does one account for such a finding? Denton and Massey argue
that
[t]he fundamental cleavage appears to be between blacks and nonblacks. The

accumulated evidence on patterns and processes of segregation suggest that
progressive residential integration is possible, even likely, for all ethnic and racial
groups except blacks. It is being black, not being nonwhite or non-European
that makes the difference. . . . No matter what their educational or occupational
achievements, and whatever their incomes, blacks are exposed to higher crime
rates, less effective educational systems, higher mortality risks, more dilapidated
surroundings, and a poorer socioeconomic environment than whites, simply
because of the persistence of strong barriers to residential integration.
(1988:814)
Works by scholars such as Blau, Messner, Krivo and Peterson, and Denton
and Massey are important in calling attention to the consequences for us as a
nation of the kinds of consolidated racial and income disparities currently
existing in the United States. Since access to income-producing opportunities
is such an important dimension of racial discrimination, let us examine job-
lessness in inner-city communities.
The Great Industrial Shift: The Changing Nature of Inner-City

Employment
As suburbanites commuting to work pass through the inner city on the
way to jobs in the central business district, they are likely to see young blacks
hanging out on street corners. These youths certainly appear physically
healthy and robust, so why are they standing around doing nothing while
others are on their way to eight hours of work? Such glimpses of social reality
can be very misleading, however, when based on such seemingly common-
sensical factors as individual personality and moral characteristics. What these
fleeting glances miss is the kind of history that goes on behind one’s back—
out of one’s consciousness, so to speak. We refer here to the profound
changes in the nature of industrial employment that have occurred in the
United States since the 1970s.
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff has been chronicling the
radical decline in industrial jobs in Detroit, and of the city’s well-being along
with them. In that once-great city, most of the auto plants, and the plants that
made related materials like tires and sheet metal, are now shuttered. Bustling
residential neighborhoods are now mostly vacant lots. LeDuff’s Detroit:
An American Autopsy (2013) offers a series of vignettes of how far the city
and its surroundings have declined since peaking in the United States’ post-
World War II industrial boom times:
South Warren—the part that directly touched Detroit—used to be about

the . . . Dodge factory and the General Motors plant and the cinder-block
mom-and-pop tool-and-die shops that supplied those factories and also sup-
plied the groceries and the fishing trips and the new car every other year. By
the time I arrived in Detroit, perhaps 75 percent of those shops had died. The
industries replacing them were increasingly drug sales and prostitution. (LeDuff
2013:40)
Detroit reached a peak population of nearly 1.9 million people in the 1950s
and was 83 percent white. Now Detroit has fewer than 700,000 people, is
83 percent black, and is the only American city that has surpassed a million
people only to contract below that threshold. (LeDuff 2013:45)
Back in the early nineties—Detroit was still the nation’s seventh-largest city,
with a population of over 1.2 million. Back then, Detroit was dark and broken
and violent. . . . Studying the city through the windshield new, it wasn’t fright-
ening anymore. It was empty and forlorn and pathetic. On some blocks not a
single home was occupied, the structures having fallen victim to desertion and
the arsonist’s match. I drove blocks without seeing a single living soul. (LeDuff
2013:71)
202 BEING URBAN
Since American Axle was spun off from General Motors and reconstituted in
1994, the UAW negotiated with American Axle, not General Motors. When I
had arrived back home the previous winter, Local 235 here was on strike. It
was a cold, bitter dispute, complete with old-school fires in the oil drums. The
unionized workers, numbering nearly two thousand at the time, lost. They gave
in to deep wage cuts, in some cases from $28 an hour to $14, in exchange for
keeping their jobs. Apparently it was not enough. (LeDuff 2013:172)
Not enough, because, as LeDuff goes on to explain, American Axle shut-

tered its plant in 2009. Repeating a story from countless companies in the
American Rust Belt, it sent the machines and jobs from its Detroit plant to
Mexico.
One way to get a quick sense of what has been happening in the employ-
ment area during the shift experienced by Detroit and other Rust Belt cities
over the last several decades is to examine the patterns for the six major met-
ropolitan areas listed in Table 7.4. Each of these cities has a very sizable black
population.
As can easily be seen, the decline in the size of the manufacturing sector is
remarkable. Though manufacturing is still on top in Detroit and Cleveland,
the proportion of jobs in manufacturing has dropped from 55 percent and
44 percent to 20 percent and 16 percent. If we recall that the population of
Detroit has shrunk considerably over that time, the total losses in manufactur-
ing jobs are staggering. Losses are similar in the solidly working-class sectors
of retail and “transportation and other public utilities.”
Table 7.4 also tells us which jobs are becoming more important. In all six
cities, we can observe that jobs in “professional, scientific and technical serv-
ices” as well as “health care and social assistance” are ascendant. Finance and
insurance have also made significant gains. For the most parts, these are jobs
for those with at least some college education. Many of the jobs in profes-
sional, scientific, and technical services call for significant postgraduate educa-
tion. These are precisely the kinds of jobs for which inner-city residents are
the least qualified. As Kasarda observed, “[M]uch of the job increase in the
college-graduate category for each city was absorbed by suburban commuters
while many job losses in the less-than-high school-completed category were
absorbed by city residents” (1989:31). In the central cities, then, where
low-income blacks, by virtue of their residential proximity, face the fewest
spatial obstacles toward securing work, they are the least likely, because of
educational backgrounds, to qualify for the jobs that are now expanding.
An important consequence of this industrial employment process has been
to create an inner-city neighborhood phenomenon that is characterized by
Table 7.4
Main Industry Groups by Share of Total City Payroll, 1977 and 2002 (by County)
1977 2002
% Total % Total
Annual Annual
Top Industries Payroll Top Industries Payroll
Chicago Manufacturing 36.03% Finance & insurance 14.00%

(Cook County) Retail Trade 10.62% Professional, scientific & technical 12.72%
services
Wholesale Trade 10.35% Health care and social assistance 11.03%
Finance, Insurance, and Real 9.37% Manufacturing 11.01%
Estate
Transportation and Other 8.41% Wholesale trade 6.77%
Public Utilities
Cleveland Manufacturing 44.07% Manufacturing 15.94%
(Cuyahoga Wholesale Trade 9.92% Health care and social assistance 15.01%
County)
Retail Trade 9.52% Finance & insurance 10.44%
Transportation and Other 8.77% Professional, scientific & technical 9.40%
Public Utilities services
Health and Social Services 6.70% Wholesale trade 8.27%
Boston Manufacturing 39.26% Professional, scientific & technical 18.85%
services
(Middlesex Retail Trade 10.89% Manufacturing 12.92%
County)
(continued)
Table 7.4 (Continued)
1977 2002
% Total % Total
Annual Annual
Top Industries Payroll Top Industries Payroll
Wholesale Trade 9.31% Information 8.91%

Educational Services 7.24% Wholesale trade 8.30%
Health and Social Services 6.77% Health care and social assistance 8.23%
New York Finance, Insurance, and Real 22.96% Finance & insurance 39.50%
Estate
(New York Manufacturing 19.85% Professional, scientific & technical 14.25%
County) services
Wholesale Trade 11.18% Information 7.91%
204
Business Services Incl. Legal 10.68% Management of companies & enter- 6.70%
Services and Computer Services prises
Transportation and Other 9.77% Health care and social assistance 5.91%
Public Utilities
San Francisco Transportation and Other 23.37% Finance & insurance 23.07%
Public Utilities
(San Francisco Finance, Insurance, and Real 17.14% Professional, scientific & technical 21.26%
County) Estate services
Manufacturing 11.85% Information 8.40%
Construction 10.16% Health care and social assistance 7.89%
Retail Trade 8.27% Management of companies & enter- 4.86%
prises
Detroit Manufacturing 55.22% Manufacturing 20.46%
(Wayne County) Retail Trade 8.83% Health care and social assistance 11.66%
Transportation and Other 7.17% Management of companies & 8.56%
Public Utilities enterprises
Health and Social Services 6.86% Professional, scientific & technical 6.17%
services
Wholesale Trade 6.61% Transportation & warehousing 6.01%
Sources: Glaeser and Ponzetto (2007). From U.S. Census County Business Patterns.
205
206 BEING URBAN
a high concentration of poverty-level and unemployed persons living in close

proximity. The other side of this situation, as William Wilson (1987, 1989,
2009; Wilson and Taub 2006) has so powerfully articulated, is an increase in
the social isolation of inner-city residents from metropolitan residents repre-
senting the mainstream. We have witnessed a process of “hyperghettoization”
in our cities due to the social structural “growth in joblessness and economic
exclusion associated with the ongoing spatial and industrial restructuring of
American capitalism” (Wacquant and Wilson 1989:8).
By 1980, an examination of the 10 largest American cities showed that
almost 40 percent of the poor blacks in those cities were living in extreme-
poverty census tracts. In the prior decade this figure was 22 percent—almost
half the 1980 figure. In 1980, only 6 percent of poor non-Hispanic whites,
one-seventh the percentage for blacks, were living in extreme-poverty tracts
(Wacquant and Wilson 1989:10).
The social isolation of inner-city residents resulting from both this indus-
trial employment process and segregated housing practices is reinforced by
the absence of car ownership. Less than 20 percent of those who reside in
extreme-poverty tracts have access to a car (Wacquant and Wilson 1989:21).
The mutually reinforcing effect of living in a socially isolated, hyperghettoized
situation can be seen in the following statement:
In neighborhoods in which nearly every family has at least one person who is
steadily employed, the norms and behavior patterns that emanate from a life of
regularized employment become part of the community gestalt. On the other
hand, in neighborhoods in which most families do not have a steadily employed
breadwinner, the norms and behavior patterns associated with steady work com-
pete with those associated with casual or infrequent work. Accordingly, the less
frequent the regular contact with those who have steady and full-time employ-
ment (that is, the greater the degree of social isolation), the more likely that ini-
tial job performance will be characterized by tardiness, absenteeism, and,
thereby, low retention. In other words, a person’s patterns and norms of behav-
ior tend to be shaped by those with which he or she has had the most frequent
or sustained contact and interaction. (Wilson, 1987:60–61)
Research has continued to show that this pattern remains in the most
socially isolated of neighborhoods. In fact, we need only add a few significant
revisions to the findings Wilson enumerated over 25 years ago.
First, ghettoization is increasingly suburbanized. This pattern has long
been observed in some European cities, like Paris, where the allure of the cen-
tral city drives rents up, pushing the poor, especially immigrants, to the sub-
urban banlieues (Wacquant 2008). The trend has been increasing over the
206
last 20 years in the United States, as those aforementioned jobs in the high-
end services sector (like finance, insurance, and scientific and technical serv-
ices) have grown in cities that act as the command-and-control centers for a
globalized economy (Sassen 2012). Hyra (2008) keenly observed this when
under- and unemployed residents of Chicago and Manhattan were displaced
by an influx of well-to-do workers who desired housing close to their down-
town jobs. Those residents often relocate to older suburbs located just out-
side the city limits, places like Yonkers, New York, or Harvey, Illinois.
Second, in addition to arguments about the problematic work habits, lack
of access to good jobs, and poor educational opportunities afforded to ghetto
residents, literature on the worst-off neighborhoods has increasingly empha-
sized the dearth of social connections available to residents. Under the rubric
of “social capital” (for example, Putnam 2000) or “collective efficacy”
(Sampson 2012; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002), this litera-
ture emphasizes both the distrust that neighborhood residents have for one
another as well as the lack of connections they have to individuals who might
help them with information or recommendations to educational or work
opportunities outside the ghetto. To the extent that neighbors distrust each
other or fail to work cooperatively, they will be generally less able to combat
ills like crime in their neighborhoods, to monitor the behavior of each other’s
children, or to obtain political concessions from their city’s politicos
(Sampson Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Wilson and Taub 2006).
Finally, sociologists are paying increased attention to the hypersegregation
of minorities beside African-Americans in very poor neighborhoods. In par-
ticular, a number of Latinos live in such neighborhoods. In some cities, such
as Chicago, these Latinos are largely recent immigrants from Mexico and
Central America. They concentrate in low-income neighborhoods like the
one dubbed “Archer Park” by Wilson and Taub (2006), where rents are
cheap and they find others who speak Spanish and maintain similar cultural
traditions. Often planning to return to their homes, neighborhood organiz-
ers find such residents to be generally uncommitted to improving the condi-
tions in the neighborhood or developing long-term ties to the municipal
and social structure (Wilson and Taub 2006:104).
In other cities, notably Los Angeles and several other cities in southern
California, there are neighborhoods comprised of mostly U.S.-born Latinos
that experience many of the same problems of poverty, crime, distrust, and
joblessness described in African-American ghetto neighborhoods (see, for
example, Bourgois 2003; Phillips 2012). Portes and Zhou describe such
enclaves as the outcome of “segmented assimilation”—while some immi-
grants are able to come to the United States and build lives for themselves
208 BEING URBAN
that somewhat resemble the American dream, such that their children may be
upwardly mobile and more or less assimilated to American culture, other
immigrant groups have much different experiences. Groups like Haitians and
Central Americans are more likely to be discriminated against because of their
phenotypic appearances, and often come to the United States with less than a
high school education. In the American context, second- and third-generation
immigrants do not have nearly as good a chance as groups with better education
(like many Asian immigrants), or the phenotypic characteristics of white
America (such as European immigrants) (Portes and Zhou 2014).
One problematic outcome of the phenomena we have been discussing is an
increasing shortage of steadily employed fathers available to raise children in
hypersegregated neighborhoods. This problem has been particularly noted
in the black community. Let us now examine this issue.
The Rise of Female-Headed Families

In the United States today, about 22 percent of white children under 18
live in single-parent families; the corresponding figures for Hispanic and black
children are 31 percent and 55 percent (Author’s calculations, from Current
Population Survey, March 2013). More important, almost one third of all
children who live in households without both mom and dad live in poverty.
This is about four and a half times the percentage for married-couple families
with children (Danziger and Gottschalk 2005:62).
In viewing such figures historically, it is important to realize that there has
been a remarkable increase in single-parent families. Ellwood and Jencks
(2004) note that “from 1900 until around 1970 about a quarter of American
sixteen year olds did not live with both of their own parents. By the 1990s the
proportion had risen to almost half” (8). That rise has occurred despite the
decreased chances that a parent becomes widowed, and is based on divorce
and, more importantly, since the 1980s, out-of-wedlock births (Ellwood
and Jencks 2004). Data further suggest that for whites, becoming a single
parent usually results from a divorce, while blacks are more likely to have chil-
dren before and outside of marriage. According to Ellwood and Jencks,
Black women show far greater declines in marriage than white women. Only
about 68% of black women in the most recent cohort will have married by age
40, compared to 87% of those born two decades earlier and 89 percent of whites
in the more recent cohort. But while more black than white women are eschew-
ing marriage, fewer blacks than whites are either delaying or eschewing mother-
hood. (Ellwood and Jencks 2004:13)
An understanding of the impact of the economy on marriage patterns is criti-

cal for interpreting these racial differences. Wilson’s (1987, 2009; Wacquant
and Wilson 1989; Wilson and Taub 2006) studies of extreme poverty tracts
in Chicago, mentioned earlier, clearly demonstrated that male joblessness is
an important determinant of female-headed households.
To get a sense of the magnitude of changes in black male unemployment
patterns, consider the following: between 1973 and 2003, the employment
rate among working-age black men dropped from 73.7 percent to 64.1 per-
cent. (White men experienced a drop over the same period, though smaller:
from 78.6 percent to 71.7 percent.) Black women’s employment rose over
the same period—even outpacing that of other races. Black women’s employ-
ment rose from 47.2 percent in 1973 to 58.6 percent in 2003. Young black
women, then, are clearly faced with a serious problem in terms of finding
steadily employed marriage candidates of similar age. Since they, too, face a
good deal of racial and gender employment discrimination, young black
women are additionally disadvantaged in terms of both their own financial
achievements and the likelihood of improving their economic situation
through marriage to a steadily employed black male. Continued research by
Wacquant has confirmed what his earlier work with William Wilson sug-
gested. In studying friendship and kin relationships in Chicago’s ghettos, he
noted that 38 percent of women on the edge of ghetto neighborhoods had
no partner, and 43 percent in the core had none. Corresponding rates for
marriage were at 31 percent and 15 percent, respectively (Wacquant
2008:115). Wacquant found that this seems largely to be a function of
employment—these few male partners were largely the few men who were
employed. He writes:
The remarkable fact that most male companions have jobs even in neighbourhoods
where the vast majority of men are jobless confirms that being unemployed radi-
cally devalues men on the partnership market in the eyes of lower-class women.
(Wacquant 2008:116)
These problems of joblessness are seriously compounded by the high rates

of incarceration for black men in the United States, especially those who live
in urban areas. Not only does incarceration remove a significant portion of
marriage-age men from urban marriage markets—about one in eight black
men in their twenties (Banks 2011:31)—it decreases their chances of ever
being marriageable (Charles and Luoh 2010). On the one hand, the status
of marrying an ex-con carries a stigma that many women do not wish to bring
unto themselves (Banks 2011:32). It also has a seriously damaging effect on
210 BEING URBAN
their chances for employment. In a study auditing which job candidates get
interviews, Devah Pager found that in addition to a high level of racial discrimi-
nation by employers, there is incredibly high discrimination against blacks with
criminal records in particular: “Among blacks without criminal records, only
14% received callbacks, relative to 34% of white noncriminals (P < .01). In fact,
even whites with criminal records received more favorable treatment (17%) than
blacks without criminal records (14%).” Blacks with criminal records received
callbacks only in 5 percent of her cases (Pager 2003:955–956).
While the absence of a male role model may be a contributing factor to the
problems faced by children, especially boys, in female-headed families, schol-
ars argue that economic deprivation is the most critical issue facing these fam-
ilies. In reviewing over 20 years’ worth of studies on the effects of living in a
single-parent home, Wendy Sigle-Rushton and Sara McLanahan (2004) came
to several stark conclusions.
1. Academic success: Children in single-parent families perform lower on aca-

demic tests than those in two-parent homes, and are less likely to gradu-
ate. In one study, “high school graduation rates were 90 percent for
those in two-parent families, 75 for those in divorced-mother families,
and 69 for those in never-married-mother families” (Sigle-Rushton and
McLanahan 2004:121).
2. Behavioral and psychological problems: Children in single-parent families
are more likely to act out in school, and exhibit depression and anxiety.
Some of these effects appear to carry through to adulthood, with children
of divorced parents reporting lower self-esteem and higher rates of seeing
mental health professionals.
3. Substance abuse and contact with the police: Children in single-parent fam-
ilies are more likely to use drugs (besides alcohol), and are about 70 per-
cent more likely to have a criminal conviction than those in two-parent
families.
4. Relationship problems: Evidence suggests that children from single-parent
families are more likely to divorce their own partners as adults.
5. Economic well-being: As adults, people who grew up with just one parent
tend to have lower-paying occupations, experience unemployment, and
rely on public assistance. A 2001 study suggested a wage gap of about
$5,000 between those who grew up with only one parent and those who
grew up with two.
What seems especially important, then, about the absence of a father is not
just the loss of role-modeling opportunities for the children, but the serious
decline in a family’s economic situation as a result of the employed male’s

departure. In the face of such a phenomenon, Sigle-Rushton and McLanahan
(2004) argue that it is important for policymakers to think about the eco-
nomic implications of female-headed families living in poverty in addition to
seeing these negative outcomes as functions of family structure or personal
deficiencies per se. Since a critical part of the inter generational transmission
of poverty in such families lies in the greater likelihood of children dropping
out of school, let us now examine this issue.
Dropping Out of School

Perhaps the best way to think about the consequences for the entire society
of dropping out of school is to pose the issue in terms of “bottom line” dol-
lars and cents. In short, what does it cost our society? In an appeal to the
nation’s leaders to do something about the staggering numbers of dropouts
in the United States, researchers from Northeastern University and the Chi-
cago Alternative Schools Network (Center for Labor Market Studies 2009)
highlighted several points:
1. In 2007, 16.0 percent of persons between 16 and 24 years of age (nearly

6.2 million people) were high school dropouts.
2. Blacks and Hispanics have much higher dropout rates than whites—in the
population of 16–24-year-olds, 21.0 percent of blacks are dropouts,
27.5 percent of Hispanics, and 12.2 percent of whites.
3. Low-income youth are more likely than their better-off peers to drop out.
4. Though many dropouts eventually earn a GED, it does not carry the same
positive implications as a diploma: less than 10 percent of those who
earned a GED in 1992 obtained a postsecondary degree by 2000.
5. There are substantial fiscal implications of these high dropout rates: “Over
a working lifetime from ages 18–64, high school dropouts are estimated
to earn $400,000 less than those that graduated from high school. For
males, the lifetime earnings loss is nearly $485,000 and exceeds
$500,000 in many large states. Due to their lower lifetime earnings and
other sources of market incomes, dropouts will contribute far less in
federal, state, and local taxes than they will receive in cash benefits, in-
kind transfers, and correctional costs.” (Center for Labor Market Studies
2009:3)
Given such a wide range of social problems engendered by dropping out,

how much is the United States spending on education? “Pitifully little” is
212 BEING URBAN
the unfortunate answer. At the national level, 19 cents of every federal tax
dollar goes for military- and defense-related matters, 24 cents goes to Social
Security, 22 cents to Medicare and other health care programs, while only
about one cent is devoted to education (Center on Budget and Policy Prior-
ities 2014). Of course, within the country, states and local school districts
vary dramatically in the degree of economic support given to education. For
the 2011–2012 academic year, for example, education expenditures ranged
from a low of $6,683 per pupil in Arizona to $18,616 per pupil in New York
(U.S. National Education Association 2013). In general, wealthier states and
local school districts tend to spend more per pupil. As a result, low-income
communities, especially the kinds of hyperghettoized inner-city ones
described earlier, face serious problems in attracting financial resources to
improve the schools.
A study of the effects of a wide range of variables on dropping out was con-
ducted using data from 1980 for all 50 states (Fitzpatrick and Yoels 1992).
State expenditures per pupil were found to be an important predictor of class-
room size—the more money spent per pupil, the fewer pupils per teacher.
The pupil/teacher ratio, in turn, was found to be a significant predictor of
state-level dropout rates. States with smaller classes tended to have lower
dropout rates. This finding resonates with work by other scholars who argue
that the more individualized attention made possible by smaller classes con-
tributes to lower dropout rates (see, for example, Fine 1986; Rumberger
and Thomas 2000; Toles, Schultz, and Rice 1986).
The most powerful direct predictor of dropout rates found by Fitzpatrick
and Yoels (1992) is the variable dealing with female-headed families. (More
recent research by Rumberger and Thomas (2000) finds that living in a “non-
traditional family” is the most important individual characteristic predicting
dropout after Native American ethnicity.) States with a high percentage of
such families are considerably more likely to have high dropout rates. In addi-
tion, such states are likely to have larger classes, which also raises the dropout
rates. Female-headed families may represent just one of several at-risk groups
within a state with considerable socioeconomic needs, thereby competing
with schools for available fiscal resources. States may be forced, then, to allo-
cate disproportionately more resources to public assistance and welfare, thus
constituting a drain on state monies for education.
Like Sigle-Rushton and McLanahan’s (2004) work mentioned earlier,
Fitzpatrick and Yoels’s study calls attention to the critical factor linking the
lives of one generation with the next—dropping out of school. Such dropouts
are quite likely to experience in their own lives the kinds of blocked opportu-
nities and vanishing job situations faced by their parents. In the wake of such a
process, the rage and frustration culminating in violent crime are likely to
continue in succeeding generations. Are we as a nation locked, then, into a
frightening deterministic scenario beyond human action? Is there nothing
we can do besides condemn the “bad” people who seem destined to carry
out these seemingly assigned roles, like figures in a Greek tragedy?
We want to conclude this chapter by arguing strongly against such a posi-
tion. As sociologists we believe that persons’ behaviors are a result of their
interpretations and assessments of the social conditions in which they find
themselves. If they see those conditions as promising hope and improvement,
their behaviors will follow along those lines. If the kinds of conditions charac-
terizing the social isolation and hyperghettoization of our inner cities con-
tinue unabated, we will all pay the costs. Let us examine some documented
successful programs that hold out the promise, given a commitment at the
national level, for breaking the vicious circle we have just described.
PROGRAMS THAT WORK

It is now a commonplace position within American political discourse to
rail against federally funded social programs. Academics like Charles Murray
(1984, 2008), libertarians, and Tea Party politicians argue that such programs
may exacerbate rather than remedy the nation’s social problems. Certainly,
such arguments have found a ready audience in the more conservative sec-
tions of society. Lisbeth Schorr (1989) eloquently argues, however, in her
book Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage that there is
much evidence to counter the claims of critics like Murray. She documents a
wide range of programs in areas such as prenatal care for low-income moth-
ers, child health services, family support, and the strengthening of schools
that have made appreciable differences in the lives of the less fortunate. Sub-
sequent studies have shown the value of government interventions in various
domains, such as enhancing cognitive and physical health (Anderson et al.
2003), alleviating poverty (Smeeding 2014), and enhancing early childhood
education (Heckman 2000). Rather than focus on all of these programs, let
us turn to some noteworthy successes in inner-city school programs since, as
we have just argued, education and dropping out are the critical transmission
belts for the reproduction of poverty from one generation to the next.
Dr. James Comer, a child psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center, has
achieved some remarkable success in turning around schools in New Haven’s
inner city that ranked among the lowest in the city in terms of academic
achievement, attendance, and behavior problems. Between 1968 and 1983
214 BEING URBAN
the two inner-city schools in which his demonstration project unfolded—one

of which was in the Brookside Public Housing Project—moved from 32nd
and 33rd in reading and math achievement out of 33 New Haven elementary
schools to third and fifth in composite fourth-grade scores (Schorr
1989:231).
Dr. Comer espouses a philosophy of education that stresses caring and
involvement on the part of the school and all its staff, coupled with participa-
tion of the parents in school processes. The schools become a kind of substi-
tute parent, so to speak, and as such provide an important system of
advocacy and support for the children. On an organizational level, Dr. Corner
created two key units that continually interact with and supplement one
another. He established a school planning and management team, directed
by the principal, that includes teachers, teachers’ aides, and, most important,
parents. This team’s goal is to “establish an orderly, effective process of edu-
cation in the building” (Schorr 1989:233).
A second key unit involves the school’s support staff, such as counselors,
social workers, and psychologists. This unit is available to offer individualized
direct help to students and teachers while also making their child develop-
ment skills available to the planning and management team. Corner’s model
stresses the interdependence between the home environment and the school
atmosphere. The involvement of parents provides an important source of
educational continuity for the children as they move back and forth between
home and school. As Schorr notes in this regard, such a program benefits
both the children and the parents. In fact, as a result of this program “it
turned out that some parents, their own confidence bolstered by their school
activity, went back to school themselves and some took jobs they previously
thought they couldn’t handle” (1989:233–234).
Another success story may be found in the Harlem Children’s Zone. Brain-
child of educator Geoffrey Canada, the children’s zone includes various inter-
ventions in the neighborhood and children’s families in addition to a rigorous
charter school to ensure that children from disadvantaged urban backgrounds
have chances at success (Tough 2008). The primary focus of the Children’s
Zone is its charter school, the Promise Academy, which runs from kindergar-
ten through the tenth grade. The school’s “promise” is that its students, who
attend for free as they would any public school, would find success after
graduation, which generally means college attendance. To fulfill that promise,
the school has an extra-long day (8 am to 4 pm), after-school programs until
6 pm, and runs well into July, when most New York schoolchildren are on
summer vacation. Additionally, the Children’s Zone includes “Baby College”
to instruct young parents and parents-to-be on parenting skills, from basics of

nutrition and discipline to the importance of reading to infants and toddlers.
There is a “Harlem Gems” prekindergarten that also runs an unusually long
day from 8 am to 5:45 pm, and puts a strong emphasis on language skills.
All these programs are to mesh into a “conveyor belt” that carries children
from pre-infancy to high school graduation. Canada’s idea is that this seam-
less education will allow poor children in Harlem to avoid the crime and
bad habits identified by Wilson and others, and to gain the skills needed to
compete at the highest levels of our knowledge economy. But does it work?
Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer, Jr. (2011) compared the test results of chil-
dren who graduated from the middle and elementary schools in the Harlem
Children’s Zone to the over 1 million other children who attend schools in
New York City. They found that indeed, Canada’s promise is not an empty
one: “The effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the
black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school
are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and
ELA (English Language Acts)” (Dobbie and Fryer 2011:158). Extrapolating
from those findings, they reach the following conclusions about the chances at
long-term success afforded to students in the Promise Academy: “[A]ttending
the Promise Academy for middle school is associated with a 4.8 to 7.5 percent
increase in earnings . . . a 1.65 to 2.25 percent decrease in the probability of
committing a property or violent crime . . . and a 7.5 to 11.25 decrease in the
probability of having a health disability” (Dobbie and Fryer 2011:180).
In reviewing a wide range of successful programs running the gamut from
income support to health to education, Schorr (1989:257–260) argues that
several key elements seem to be common to all:
1. Traditional professional and bureaucratic boundaries are transcended.

2. Staff and programs are flexible.
3. The child is seen in terms of the family, which in turn is seen in terms of
the social environment.
4. Students and parents in the programs view the professionals as persons
who care about and respect them; mutual trust is established.
5. The services are coherent and easy to use.
6. In all of these programs the needs of those being served are paramount,
and protecting traditional professional and bureaucratic “turfs” is secon-
dary.
7. Professionals in the programs respond creatively by redefining their roles
so as to better serve persons’ needs.
216 BEING URBAN
In terms of dollars and cents, many of these programs are quite cost-
effective. In Homebuilders, a program providing outside support for families,
the social policy interventions resulted in “savings [that] were calculated to
amount to three to three and a half times the expenditures” (Schorr
1989:271). The Yale Child Study Center’s day care family support program in
New Haven led to savings in welfare costs that came to more than $60,000 at
the time of a 10-year follow-up study (Schorr 1989:272). Canada’s programs
for students in the Promise Academy cost about $19,272 per student annually,
while the median expenditure in New York State school districts is $16,171, and
schools at the 95th percentile spend $33,521 (Dobbie and Fryer 2011:180).
When one compares the fact that the yearly costs for incarceration run
about $31,000 per inmate (and over $167,000 in New York City!) (Santora
2013:A16), it certainly seems sensible to consider the kinds of successful
program interventions described by Schorr.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has explored a broad range of political issues affecting urban
life. We elaborated on the rather pervasive and pronounced effects of hierar-
chical, exclusionary processes that seem to promote a self-sustaining pattern
of political dominance by better-off sectors of the population. Through their
superior socioeconomic and corporate, organizational resources higher-class
persons are able to set the agendas for political debate in American cities.
We also noted, however, that even in the face of such tendencies, counter-
vailing ones promoting grassroots participation may also be found. Local
organizations in numerous cities have been able to achieve some successes in
areas such as employment opportunities and rent control.
The exclusion of the “lower downs,” especially low-income racial minor-
ities, from the political process relegates them to a situation of powerlessness
vis-à-vis the problems they are experiencing in our cities. The process of
hyperghettoization continues to isolate large numbers of inner-city residents
spatially and socially from the mainstream. As a result of their poor educa-
tional backgrounds and meager job skills, these people are certainly the last
hired and first fired. We also delineated the great industrial shift that is pro-
ducing such a job–skill mismatch in major urban centers.
Finally, we called attention to the ways in which committed professionals,
along with community residents, can overcome formidable barriers with the
backing of key institutional players such as local school districts. All is not lost
in our cities, and there are workable models for us to emulate in dealing with
these issues.
While political institutions are certainly major determinants of the quality
of urban life, as students of the urban experience we want to cast a broad
net in our approach to this subject. Such a goal leads us to explore other insti-
tutional arenas that are important in the lives of urbanites. Certainly, perusal
of any daily newspaper or viewing of any local television news broadcast will
remind us that urbanites are vitally interested in sports. Let us, then, turn to
an examination of sports’ role in urban life.
CHAPTER 8
Sports and Urban Life
I n 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers left New York for Los Angeles, and there
are still Brooklynites who have never forgiven Walter O’Malley for taking
away “their” team. In 1977, New York Mayor Abraham Beame went to court
to prevent the football Jets from playing their first two home games in New
Jersey. In 1987 the New York Giants won the Super Bowl but were not, as
custom normally demands, given a public parade because the team, although
retaining the New York label, operated out of East Rutherford, New Jersey.
In 1984, when the Baltimore Colts surreptitiously left that city in the middle
of the night to resettle in Indianapolis, it created an outpouring of outrage
and dismay. The move itself, however, did not come as a surprise, since it
was common knowledge that the team was looking to relocate, a fact not lost
on the residents of cities without a professional football team. During one
exhibition game in Jacksonville, Florida, some 50,000 fans chanted in unison,
“We want the Colts.” In 2002 the Charlotte Hornets were moved to New
Orleans. But fan ardor and a stadium finance deal brought an NBA franchise
back to Charlotte in 2004 as the Bobcats—who eventually became the
Hornets once again in 2014 when New Orleans relinquished the trademark
and became the Pelicans. “Buzz city” fans were happy to have their “old”
franchise back.
If a factory employing several hundred people were to close, it would no
doubt make the headlines of local papers. However, when a city is in danger
of losing a sports team or possibly gaining a franchise, it is big news for
months, even years. It is apparent that the economic, political, and cultural
vitality of urban life is tied up with the range of its institutions—museums,
220 BEING URBAN
zoos, public parks, symphony orchestras, and shopping malls. Certainly,

sports teams are among such critical urban institutions. Yet despite the
obvious centrality of athletic teams in reflecting the state and stature of
American cities, the analysis of sports has generated relatively little interest
among urban sociologists. Most texts on urban life either neglect the role of
sports in urban development altogether or relegate the treatment of sports
to passing comment. This chapter pursues the idea that a serious treatment
of sports yields important insight into the dynamics of the modern urban
world, helps to highlight some of the forces that have shaped American cities,
and illuminates important aspects of the social psychology of urbanites.
Sports are surely a pervasive feature of everyday urban life. Most metropoli-
tan newspapers allocate more than 20 percent of each day’s edition to sports
news. A huge swath of cable television channels are devoted to sports, some
exclusively purveying games and news of single sports such as football, base-
ball, and soccer. Casual conversation often reveals that people maintain an
emotional allegiance to the sports teams representing the city where they
grew up, regardless of where they currently reside. “Team loyalties formed
in adolescence and maintained through adulthood may serve to remind one,
in a nostalgic way, that there are areas of comfortable stability in life—that
some things are permanent amid the harrassing interruptions and transitions
of daily experience” (Stone 1973:73). And when a local professional team
wins a championship, it is the cause of major civic celebrations. When base-
ball’s Boston Red Sox ended their long streak without a World Series win in
2004, for example, over 3 million people came to celebrate at the team’s vic-
tory parade. It was a salute to the team, but it was also a moment symbolically
representing the success of the city. In the authors’ respective colleges and
universities, there are students from all over the country. When we engage
them in discussion of the relative merits of their home cities, they often spon-
taneously mention the quality of their sports teams. The success of sports
teams is emblematic of the success of the cities in which they play.
We should also recognize that professional sports is big business involving
huge amounts of money. Cities now routinely invest millions of dollars build-
ing stadia in order to keep teams in town or to entice teams to the city. Such
stadia are often financed by floating public bonds and thus are built at tax-
payers’ expense. Cities such as Saint Petersburg, Florida (which built its sta-
dium in the hopes of luring a professional team to the area), and Pittsburgh
have gone substantially into debt in order to build their stadia. Investing in
sports franchises has been an integral part of urban development in St. Louis,
Los Angeles, and Houston. While the argument is often made that the huge
investment in sports teams is a good one because it ultimately energizes the
SPORTS AND URBAN LIFE 221
economy, economic analyses call this assumption into question (Matheson

2006). In fact, there is a strong argument that forces of supply and demand
put cities at a disadvantage in their negotiation with teams. “The control of
the number and location of franchises has given sports entrepreneurs leverage
to exact concessions from those cities desirous of attracting a franchise as well
as those desperate to retain an existing franchise” (Johnson 1984:212).
Indeed, frightened by the departure of its team, the city of Oakland loaned
the A’s baseball team $15 million and the city of Pittsburgh has loaned the
Pirates more than $30 million, to be paid back only if the team leaves the city.
Why are cities willing to go to such great lengths to acquire and retain
sports teams? Part of the answer certainly is the belief that sports teams benefit
cities economically. However, to stress only the economic impact of sports
teams on cities and city life would be shortsighted. Equally important is the
fact that civic pride and identity are caught up with sports. There is an inextri-
cable link between sports and people’s image of their cities. Having a big
league sports team is a validation that a city is a big league place. Perhaps such
a linkage is especially true for medium to small cities. Cincinnati, St. Louis,
Kansas City, Green Bay, and Charlotte, although not among the biggest
American cities in population, have achieved recognition through their sports
teams. Having a sports team, you might say, is part of the “civic ego” (Fulton
1988). Although the economic benefits to cities of having professional sports
franchises is arguable, there is undeniably an emotional benefit provided by
sports. While we will explore in greater detail the social psychological func-
tions of sport in the urban context, it is enough right now to note that there
is a deeply symbiotic connection between cities and sports. In this chapter
we shall pursue the idea that such a connection has always existed. While we
certainly need to think about the role of sports in contemporary urban places,
we must also adopt the larger historical view allowing us to see how the rise of
sports and the rise of the industrial city were coincidental.
The sociologist Harry Edwards (1959) argued that “sport recapitulates
society.” By this he meant that sports closely reflect the structure of society
and are, therefore, one useful barometer for analyzing society. Edwards’s point
is that if you want to understand such issues as race relations, inequality, power,
and cultural values, you ought to turn your attention to sports. This chapter is
also based on the premise that sports provide a window for viewing the nature,
structure, and values of a society. More specifically still, the argument pursued
here is that sports are deeply associated with processes of urban growth, devel-
opment, and change. We can, though, use a stronger word than “association”
in describing the relationship between sports and the growth of cities. We main-
tain in this chapter that sports not only reflected processes of urbanization and
222 BEING URBAN
industrialization, but also helped foster such changes. We see sports as both a
cause and an effect of the growth of industrialized cities. Sports reflected the
growth of industrial cities. They also hastened that growth and channeled it in
certain directions. Our main hypothesis, if you will, is that there was a dialectical
relationship, a mutually transformative relationship, between sports and the
growth of American cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sports grew alongside cities, and also facilitated the emergence of values con-
cerning work and leisure that were consistent with the development of industrial
capitalism. To study the growth and development of sports is simultaneously to
trace the growth and transformations of modern American cities.
Another overall goal of this chapter is to consider some of the ways that a
closer look at sports may be a useful medium for thinking about a number
of different features of urban life. We shall consider the connections between
sports and social mobility, sports and race in the urban context, sports and
community identification, and the place of city games as part of self-
expression in a potentially anonymous urban world. Our most immediate
task, however, is to consider sports within the broad frame of history.
SPORTS AND THE URBAN REVOLUTION

There is always a connection between a society’s general cultural values and
the shape of its institutions. In a classic theoretical treatise, the sociologist
Max Weber (1958c) argued that capitalism emerged out of religious values.
His observation was that the “spirit of capitalism” and the “Protestant ethic”
emerged out of Calvinistic religious beliefs that equated worldly success with
the likelihood of eventually going to heaven. Calvinists believed that eco-
nomic success was a sign from God that one was among the “elect” rather
than the “reprobate.” Hence the impulse toward capitalistic accumulation.
Such a view of the world was consistent with a Protestant ethic that stressed
the primacy of work in one’s life. Under the spell of the Protestant ethic,
one lived to work, whereas some have observed that in contemporary society
one “works only to live.” The spirit of a work ethic was captured in the max-
ims of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, who advised, among other things,
that “[a] penny saved is a penny earned.”
It should not be surprising that such a worldview denigrated the role of
play in human affairs. An achievement ethic was at odds with a play ethic,
and Puritan America was deeply suspicious of any activities that seemed to
divert human energy from the higher tasks of “doing God’s work.” A reli-
gious emphasis on asceticism ran headlong into any activity that looked
frivolous. Weber explicitly commented on the Puritans’ aversion to sports,

the only goal of which was pleasure and self-expression:
Sport was accepted if it served a rational purpose, that of recreation necessary for
physical efficiency. But as a means for the spontaneous expression of undisci-
plined impulses, it was under suspicion; and in so far as it became purely a means
of enjoyment, or awakened pride . . . it was of course strictly condemned. Impul-
sive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from
religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism. (Weber 1958b:167)
The Puritan work ethic was coupled with an agrarian way of life that was
extremely demanding physically. Because of the twin factors of ascetic reli-
gious beliefs and an occupational way of life that left little time for amuse-
ment, the notion of leisure time, as we understand it, was not part of the
lived experience of colonial Americans. Indeed, before sports could emerge
in any unified way or become a mode of self-expression on a wide scale, there
had to be a revolution in people’s basic ideas about the meaning and matter of
leisure. The rise of sports is correlated with a fundamental reorientation
toward the meaning of work, play, and leisure in cities, a reorientation that
was interwoven with the effects of the Industrial Revolution.
The experience of the Puritans was a far cry from that of contemporary
Americans, who work a 40-hour week and who view the weekend as a time
for play of all sorts. Advertising agencies today sell leisure and play and the
products associated with them. Advertising for such products as golf clubs,
yoga mats, and running shoes are premised on the idea, contrary to the Prot-
estant ethic, that work is something to be endured from Monday to Friday in
order that one’s “real life” might begin on the weekend. We are suggesting
that, in part, to appreciate the rise and place of sports in contemporary soci-
ety, we need to trace such basic transformations in American life as the emer-
gence of urban industrial cities that fundamentally altered our value systems,
our images of work, and the existence of and meaning accorded to the idea
of leisure.
Historians of sports generally agree that the period beginning roughly with
the Civil War ushered in a period of revolutionary growth in the public’s
interest in and demand for sports. This was, of course, coincidental with the
beginnings of the transformation of the United States from a rural to an
industrialized society. It was during the postbellum period that the society
began to realize dramatically the effects of the technological and industrial
revolutions that had begun in late eighteenth-century England. Prior to the
Civil War there were no organized sports teams. But as huge numbers of
224 BEING URBAN
people settled in the newly emerging industrial cities in the decades immedi-
ately following the war, there developed a growing interest in both participa-
tory and commercialized spectator sports. Prior to 1850 the enjoyment of
sports was largely restricted to the leisured classes, who could involve them-
selves in such pursuits as fox hunting and horse racing. However, as multi-
tudes of persons settled in cities from the close of the Civil War to the turn
of the century, new forms of entertainment for the masses were required.
Workers in the cities now found themselves with periods of leisure that had
not been part of life in agrarian communities. In short, the period from the
mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century saw the twin processes
of industrialization and urbanization transform sports from unorganized rural
pastimes to a commercialized urban business. With industrialization there
arose a leisured mass along with the leisured class. Rader comments on the
connection between urbanism and the growth of commercialized sport:
Although American sports continued to have deep roots in rural life and in
smaller towns, it was in the cities that sports grew most rapidly. Not only could
people gather more easily in cities for playing and watching games, but also news
of sporting events could be conveyed far more quickly than in the countryside.
By preserving elements of the older, festive culture in a new urban setting,
games helped to compensate for some of the impersonality and loneliness of
modern life. (Rader 1999:20)
The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sports

While we have commented in general on the connection between urbani-
zation, population shifts, new patterns of leisure, and the growth of demand
for organized sports, there is another general idea that needs expansion here.
Among historians of sports, one writer stands out in his effort to trace the fac-
tors essential to the rise of sports between 1850 and 1900. John Rickard Betts
(1984) has detailed how a range of revolutionary inventions, most notably in
transportation and communication, made possible the extraordinary develop-
ment and expansion of sports during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. In his seminal essay “The Technological Revolution and the Rise of
Sport, 1850–1900,” Betts traces the impact of a range of inventions that
not only were instrumental in the growth of industrial cities but also made
possible the growth of sports. Following Betts, we can mention some of the
inventions that transformed the urban world and the place of sports in that
world. Of course, it would be possible to describe in detail the series of social
changes occasioned by any one invention. Here we shall provide only a broad
description of the key inventions whose effects Betts described. We shall
elaborate on Betts’s comment that “[t]he technological revolution is not the

sole determining factor in the rise of sport, but to ignore its influence would
result only in a more or less superficial understanding of the history of one
of the prominent social institutions of modern America” (1984:157).
Of special importance was the growth of rail travel. By 1850 the railroad
was quickly becoming the major mode of transportation in the United States.
Whereas there had been only 23 miles of rails in 1830, by 1880 more than
90,000 miles crisscrossed the nation (Lucas and Smith 1978). The growth
of rail transportation made it possible to bring spectators long distances to
view horse races, regattas, cycling races, track and field events, and prizefights.
As the public became interested in prizefighting, for example, the railroads
capitalized on this interest by selling tickets on excursion trains to the bouts,
and such fighters as John L. Sullivan went on grand tours in the 1880s. But,
as Betts notes, a range of sports was encouraged by the improved transportation
of the postbellum era. The growth of intercollegiate sports (the first intercol-
legiate football game was between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869) was made
possible by the railroad, which could transport students to the event. Most
important to our interests here, however, was the fact that the railroad made
possible a number of intercity rivalries and thus contributed mightily to the
growth of baseball as the national sport. There was a rapid expansion of baseball
clubs throughout the East and Midwest during the 1870s. The first professional
baseball team—the Cincinnati Red Stockings—was established in 1869, and in
1876 the National League was founded. Within 10 years of that date, Chicago,
Boston, New York, Washington, Kansas City, Detroit, St. Louis, and Philadel-
phia had baseball teams contending for the pennant.
Concurrent with improved transportation technologies were new commu-
nications technologies. Following the invention of the telegraph by Samuel
F. B. Morse, the first line was built between Baltimore and Washington,
D.C., in 1844. The telegraph ushered in an era of virtually instantaneous
communication over great distances. If the railroad allowed teams to travel
to each other’s cities, the telegraph made it possible for fans to learn how their
teams were doing. Obviously the telegraph revolutionized the dissemination
of news, since it made possible instantaneous reporting of baseball games,
horse races, prizefights, and other events. By 1846 The New York Herald
and The New York Tribune had installed wireless telegraph, and by 1870 daily
reports of box scores and other sporting information were routinely found in
most metropolitan dailies. Betts reports that by the 1880s “poolrooms and
saloons were often equipped with receiving sets to keep customers and bet-
tors posted on baseball scores and track results, while newspapers set up bul-
letin boards for the crowds to linger around” (1984:147).
226 BEING URBAN
The use of the telegraph had a profound effect on the development of

urban newspapers, whose sports pages, in turn, stimulated even greater
growth in fan interest. There was, in other words, a mutually reinforcing rela-
tionship between the emergence of urban mass media and urbanites’ interest
in sports. Betts observes that the numerous inventions that revolutionized
printing processes (for example, presses that allowed the printing of 20,000
sheets an hour) fostered the growth of urban newspapers. These same pro-
cesses, along with growing literacy among the urban population, were
responsible for the publication of dime novels and sports almanacs of various
sorts. By the 1870s sports was a dominant theme in fiction as young boys read
about the extraordinary exploits of characters such as Frank Merriwell.
Of course, the later and extraordinary impact of radio on sports, beginning
in the 1920s, and television, beginning in the late 1940s, has been obvious.
We have commented on the key communications and transportation
inventions that revolutionized sports spectatorship in the United States.
Beyond this, Betts suggests how a range of other inventions contributed to
the emergence of commercialized sports. His analysis is striking because we
might not ordinarily think to make the linkages he does between several prod-
ucts of the technological revolution and sports. For example, mass produc-
tion of goods in factories led to the standardized production of baseball
equipment, bicycles, billiard tables, fishing rods, and sporting rifles, among
other pieces of equipment. The sewing machine was one of several inventions
that helped to standardize sporting goods. Of paramount importance was
Thomas Edison’s development in 1879 of the incandescent light bulb, which
“inaugurated a new era in the social life of our cities” (Betts 1984:151). The
development of electrification generally paralleled improvements in transpor-
tation and made indoor sporting events possible. Numerous other inventions,
such as the stopwatch, vulcanized rubber, the camera, the bicycle, motion
pictures, and rapid transit, were part of the technological revolution that revo-
lutionized sports. Betts summarizes the findings of his own work thus:
Technological developments in the latter half of the nineteenth century trans-

formed the social habits of the Western World, and sport was but one of many
institutions which felt their full impact. Fashions, food, journalism, home appli-
ances, commercialized entertainment, architecture, and city planning were only
a few of the facets of life which underwent rapid change as transportation and
communication were revolutionized and as new materials were made
available. . . . While athletics and outdoor recreation were sought as a release
from the confinements of city life, industrialization and the urban movement
were the basic causes for the rise of organized sports. (1984:156–157)
SPORTS AND THE RISE OF MODERN CITY CULTURE

Thus far we have traced the connections between the urbanization, indus-
trialization, and technologizing of the United States and the growth of
sports. We have been commenting on how these related changes “caused”
that growth. Were we to use the language of science, it might be said that
the growth of cities was the independent variable (the cause) and the emer-
gence of sports was the dependent variable (the effect). However, to charac-
terize the relationship between urban growth and sports as unidirectional
oversimplifies matters. In seeing sports as resulting from urban growth, we
have examined only half of the equation. This is so because, as noted at the
outset of this chapter, sports played a reciprocal part in fostering the growth
of cities. Sports, we maintain along with a number of historians, served a vital
role in socializing millions of immigrants into the folkways and values of the
United States. In what follows we describe how games and play were inte-
grally connected with the assimilation of a range of ethnic groups to the
American way. We need to consider how interactions in the realm of sports
facilitated individuals’ development of ideals and values that were compatible
with the production and maintenance of a particular form of economic social
organization—industrial capitalism.
Certainly one of the primary forces shaping the United States from the
middle of the nineteenth century through World War I was the immigration
of foreigners to the country. About 10 million immigrants arrived in the country
between 1820 and 1880. During the next 20 years another 9 million arrived,
and between 1900 and World War I an additional 12 million came to the coun-
try. Immigrants from all over the world brought their indigenous games with
them and so contributed to the evolution of sports. More critical, though, was
the role of sports in preparing immigrants for participation in a new urban
world. Just as sociologists have shown that religious values reflect the social
structures in which particular religions are found, so do sports reflect and help
to sustain the cultural values of the societies that produce them.
In the following section of this chapter we will once more offer a historical
perspective. At this point, though, our focus shifts to the Progressive Era in
American history, the period from 1900 to 1930, during which social struc-
tures consistent with corporate capitalism were emerging. Economic histori-
ans describe the Progressive Era as the period during which both
professional sports and the modern corporate economy assumed their current
forms. As such it is a particularly critical moment for understanding the link-
ages between sports and modern capitalist society. A number of studies of
sports and play during this era (Goodman 1979; Hardy 1982; Pope 1997;
228 BEING URBAN
Rader 1999; Riess 1984; Vincent 1981) seem united in the view that sports
served the critical function of Americanizing immigrants and ensuring that
they were imbued with values consistent with the demands of the urban
workplace. (Though, as Pope (1997:14) points out, immigrant participation
in sports could take on a boozy aura, or even reinforce old-country traditions
such as hurling and Gaelic football. Such uses of sport were in tension with
American bourgeois capitalist values.) We must consider in general the role of
sports, games, and play in this socialization process. However, given the unique
place of baseball in our national consciousness, we do well to begin by consider-
ing its articulation with the requirements of an emerging urban order.
Baseball and the Americanization Process

Baseball is often described as the national game. The notion of a deep
compatibility between baseball and American values has been variously stated.
The social critic Jacques Barzun has commented: “Whoever wants to know
the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” (quoted in Warshay
1982:225). And, close to the point of our exposition here, Mark Twain
offered the opinion: “Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible
expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing,
booming nineteenth century” (quoted in Huffer 1985:22). That being so, it
makes sense to pay particular attention to the congruences between the struc-
ture of this game and the structure of the society it both reflected and helped
to create. In this pursuit we are fortunate to be able to rely upon a wonder-
fully imaginative social history of the rise of the modern city culture by
Gunther Barth. In his book City People, Barth (1980) examines, among other
things, the relationship between baseball and the rise of modern cities.
Barth’s central premise is that aside from providing a source of recreation
and diversion to the urban masses, baseball provided Americans with “a new
perspective on life in the modern city” (1980:149). Spectator sports held
the possibility of educating people as well as entertaining them. Baseball
“developed early within an urbanizing society, a society increasingly valuing
organized leisure as well as business, competition as well as cooperation, and
individualism as well as teamwork” (Warshay 1982:266). Baseball taught les-
sons about discipline, the meaning and place of rules in human conduct, pat-
terns of response to authority, the importance of commitment to excellence,
the value of competition, the balance between individual achievement and
group expectations, and the relationship between efficiency and excellence.
These were all messages implicit in the structure of the game that corresponded
well to the demands of the urban workplace and the daily experiences of
urbanites. It was this correspondence between the game and urbanites’ daily
lives that invested the game with its power.
Modern baseball was . . . drawing crowds of city dwellers because it spoke to them
as a game that reflected aspects of their own lives. . . . More and more spectators
became convinced that the game fitted uniquely into their modern world. “Any-
thing goes” was the message they eagerly distilled from the behavior on the base-
ball diamond because their familiarity with the rules of the game indicated to
them that certain plays reflected actions they experienced daily in the modern city.
The rules of the game seemed strict, but the etiquette governing the players’
behavior seemed lax. The game’s enormous success as the most popular spectator
sport in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was based on this relation-
ship between baseball and the larger society. (Barth 1980:172)
Baseball reflected the individualism intrinsic to capital accumulation while

reaffirming the underlying democracy of American life. We should not, however,
overstate the case. It was not that immigrants arrived at the ballpark with the idea
of seeing the egalitarian principles of the society in action. They came fundamen-
tally because the game harkened back to their pastoral origins and provided a res-
pite from the demands of modern living. At the same time, the game seemed
quintessentially to fit the democratic spirit and promise of American life. With
the important exception of the exclusion of blacks from major league profes-
sional baseball until 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers,
baseball was early open to gifted players from among the array of newly arrived
ethnic groups. Baseball taught a lesson consistent with the general American
emphasis on an individual entrepreneurial spirit. The game placed highest prior-
ity on winning—on success at any price—and while rules were important, it was
the player’s obligation to get around the rules whenever possible in order to
ensure victory. The game, then, spoke to the patterns of authority with which
new immigrants were grappling. Barth astutely observes that
[t]he umpire represented the voice of authority. To the spectators he was a con-
venient target for their frequent irritations and deep-seated frustrations both
within and outside the ballpark. The umpire became a personification of the rul-
ers of their lives, who in the workaday world remained hidden behind the whir
of urban life, the faceless corporate structures, the anonymity of technocracy,
and the mystery of public affairs. (1980:173)
Perhaps a most critical function of baseball was to help transcend the multi-
plicity of cultural differences that potentially stood as an obstacle to unifying
immigrant groups. Part of its democratizing motif is that baseball creates a
common bond among spectators regardless of their class, education, or
230 BEING URBAN
occupation. Baseball was a force in integrating a population ordinarily divided

by wealth, occupation, ancestry, and language. The common ballpark experi-
ence “forged a bond between diverse groups of people, and watching baseball
took precedence over ethnic games because rooting for a big city team also gave
rootless people a sense of belonging” (Barth 1980:187). We might also say that
baseball provided a common language. It was on the one hand a language of
box scores and statistics. But baseball also generated its own colorful vocabulary
that fans shared regardless of their particular heritage. As social psychologists we
are particularly sensitive to the role of common symbols and language in forging
a common culture, and so we agree with Seymour, who observed that
[t]he argot of baseball supplied a common means of communication and

strengthened the bond which the game helped to establish among those sorely
in need of it—the mass of urban dwellers and immigrants living in the anonymity
and impersonal vortex of large industrial cities. Like the public school, the settle-
ment house, the YMCA, and other agencies, baseball was a cohesive factor for a
diverse, polyglot population. With the loss of the traditional ties known in rural
society, baseball gave to many a feeling of belonging. (Seymour 1960:350–351)
So far the emphasis has been on the role of baseball in incorporating a

range of peoples into a common culture and imbuing them with common
sensibilities and aspirations. We need to acknowledge, however, that the role
of games in socializing immigrants extended well beyond the professional ball-
park. As the last quote indicates, play occurred in a range of urban contexts from
the school, to the settlement house, to city streets, to playgrounds. In order to
appreciate fully the role of games during the Progressive Era, we should indicate
how reformers explicitly treated play, especially children’s play, as an arena for
shaping the values, ambitions, and consciousness of young people. Noteworthy
is the growth of the Playground Movement, beginning around the turn of the
century. A concern with creating playgrounds at first seems to perform the sim-
ple function of protecting the lives of children who would otherwise play on
dangerous city streets. However, several historians have argued compellingly
that the Playground Movement served a larger purpose. It was, equally,
involved in a contest for urban space and the leisure time of immigrant children.
Consequently, control over play amounted to control over the hearts, minds,
morals, and values of a new generation of Americans.
The Playground Movement and the Meaning of Play

In his pioneering work Centuries of Childhood, the French social historian
Philippe Aries (1962) demonstrates that the meanings of children as a social
category and childhood as a life cycle period are shaped by particular historical
circumstances. Specifically, Aries argues that childhood was “discovered” as a
separate life stage during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.
He ingeniously demonstrates, moreover, that childhood carried a fundamen-
tally different meaning in the Middle Ages than in the contemporary world.
While we shall not pursue the complexities of Aries’s argument, we should
not be surprised that the social changes accompanying the emergence of
American cities constituted the historical basis for yet another change in the
meaning of childhood. Such an argument is central to Viviana Zelizer’s
(1985) book Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Chil-
dren. Zelizer maintains that by 1930 the definition of children as primarily
an economic resource had shifted to a “sentimentalization of child life”; that
as children were increasingly removed from the economic sphere, there was
“a ‘sacralization’ of children’s lives.” She explains her thesis this way:
While in the nineteenth century, the market value of children was culturally
acceptable, later the new normative ideal of the child as an exclusively emotional
and affective asset precluded instrumental or fiscal considerations. In an increas-
ingly commercialized world, children were reserved a separate noncommercial
place. The economic and sentimental value of children were thereby declared
to be radically incompatible. Only mercenary or insensitive parents violated the
boundary by accepting the wages or labor contributions of a useful child. Prop-
erly loved children, regardless of social class, belonged in a domesticated, non-
productive world of lessons [and] games. (Zelizer 1985:11)
Such a changing definition of and attitude toward children coincided with

a raised consciousness about the increasing dangers posed to children’s lives
on city streets. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the deaths of
children, especially deaths of children hit by cars while playing on city streets,
were met with indignation rather than resignation. By 1910 accidents had
become the leading cause of death for children between 5 and 14, far out-
stripping deaths from communicable diseases. As Zelizer describes it, the
growing number of childhood deaths, coupled with a new sentiment about
the meaning of childhood, was the genesis of a contest over urban space.
Reformers wanted to get the children off the streets. However, the street
holds a great deal of enchantment for children. At the turn of the century the
street was a place where a game might be interrupted and children’s attention
diverted by an ambulance, a funeral procession, a fire truck, or a street fight.
The few playgrounds that did exist were normally too distant from the tene-
ments to make their use sensible. However, this was to change dramatically by
1930. The Playground Association of America was founded in 1906, and by
232 BEING URBAN
1910 New York had built 250 playgrounds. In the country as a whole, only 180
cities reported having public playgrounds in 1910; by 1920 the number of such
cities rose to 428, and by 1930 the number was 695 (Steiner 1970:15). Another
striking statistic is that the number of employed “play leaders” for urban play-
grounds in 1910 was 3,345; 20 years later the number had increased to
24,949 (Steiner 1970:21). Correspondingly, the number of children dying on
the streets of the city began to decline rapidly by 1930.
A sharp decrease in the play-related deaths of children affirms the wisdom
of those at the forefront of the Playground Movement. But once again we
should not miss the connections between the reorganization of urban play
space and the construction of another means to socialize immigrant children.
Reformers jumped at the chance to supervise children on new urban play-
grounds because such a reorganization of urban play space provided a means
of social control over them. Cary Goodman (1979), in his penetrating study
of New York’s Lower East Side, persuasively argues that sports and games
played a key role in attempts to Americanize Jewish immigrants. His argu-
ment is that progressive playgrounds were quite consciously aimed at creating
a particular type of “productive” citizen. In contrast with the unorganized
structure of play on the streets, playground activities emphasized patriotism,
punctuality, and obedience to authority, all traits that were consistent with
the demands an industrialized work world would eventually make on the
young people who lost the contest over urban space.
It was not only on the playgrounds of the cities that new urban values were
instilled through sports. Another direction taken by reformers was the devel-
opment of settlement houses around the turn of the century. One such place
in Boston was the West End House, founded in 1906 primarily through the
efforts of James Jackson Storrow, a progressive reformer. The growth of
Boston’s West End neighborhood had been fueled since 1840 by successive
waves of immigrants from Ireland, Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and
Italy. From 1880 to 1920 the city had grown from 362,000 to 748,000; in
1920, 590,000 Bostonians were first- or second-generation Americans (Ueda
1981). Alarmed by the youth gangs forming regularly on street corners, social
workers founded the West End House. A central feature of the West End
House was the development of a number of athletic teams and contests. West
End House teams helped to increase neighborhood solidarity through the
development of a string of intracity rivalries. Such an involvement in sports,
however, was something that the boys’ parents could not understand.
Indeed, the often intense commitment to their teams was a source of conster-
nation for the parents, who could not appreciate the central place of play in
their children’s lives. One observer of the West End at the time recalls his
father’s inability to appreciate those features of American culture so central to

his own life.
My father looked upon ice cream as on the whole a shameful thing, and as child-
ren’s food at best. Whenever he’d see any of his children eat it . . . he’d
look . . . condescendingly and say, “A strange place America, a very strange
place.” . . . He knew 1 watched baseball games once in a while, but that didn’t
bother him. He apparently thought I would outgrow it when I reached the ripe
age of, say, thirteen or fourteen.
I once brought up the matter of [gymnasium] exercises cautiously to my
father. He said, “I don’t know about that. A poor man who works hard doesn’t
need exercise. His life is exercise enough.” (quoted in Ueda 1981:22)
And commenting on the puzzlement felt by immigrant parents at their

children’s involvement in a yearly race sponsored by the West End House,
Ueda describes this scene:
The Thanksgiving day race was a community event in the West End. Huge
crowds lined the streets to watch the boys run for neighborhood glory. To
parents and grandparents from the Old World, the cross-country run typified
the unfathomable effect of the American city upon the values of their children.
Why their sons, who were nearly men, chose to work so hard to win at children’s
games eluded their comprehension. . . . The anxious mothers of the Old World
would gaze from the tenement windows above, shaking their heads mournfully
at this display of American enthusiasm in a new world. (1981:64)
Settlement houses of this sort multiplied across Boston’s West End around
the turn of the twentieth century, as philanthropists disgusted with the lack of
city services to immigrants worked to fill the gap themselves (Spain 2001). They
saw overcrowding and poor sanitation afforded to immigrants, as well as the lack
of healthy recreation, as a significant social ill. Eventually, their work shamed the
city’s political leaders into action, inducing them to provide for greater public
health, and in particular to develop sporting facilities for its new citizens.
By 1900, Mayor Josiah Quincy had orchestrated the development of a system
of playgrounds in Boston—“Twenty-one playgrounds were managed under this
system, employing sixty supervisors and serving four thousand children daily at
an annual cost of $4,000” (Spain 2001:185). Similar efforts went on in a num-
ber of cities throughout the country, as the U.S. population swelled with immi-
grants, the industrial working army of the Gilded Age.
It should be apparent from our analysis that sports much more thoroughly
encompassed men’s than women’s lives. If sports served the purpose of inte-
grating men into the larger economic and occupational life of society during
234 BEING URBAN
the Progressive Era, the lack of athletic opportunities for women paralleled
and helped to maintain their subordinate role in society. Sports were only
one of several male urban worlds from which women were excluded. To the
extent that sports allegedly functioned to build the character of young men
and to make them fit for the occupational world, involvement with sports
was not seen as necessary for young girls, whose futures, after all, would be
at home raising families. While young girls were not excluded altogether from
playground activities during the early part of the century, sex-integrated activ-
ities, especially after the age of puberty, were strongly discouraged. Most of
the special activities designed for girls were oriented around the development
of poise and the cultivation of domestic skills (Coakely 1986).
Part of the reason that women have historically been systematically
excluded from participation in sports stems from the idea that sports are
inconsistent with the development of “womanly attributes.” As is so often
the case, discrimination practiced against a group is justified in terms of a
number of faulty beliefs or myths. Today, one still hears that athletic partici-
pation masculinizes women, that women are too frail for competitive sports,
and so on. Of all the changes that have taken place in sports over the years,
the participation of women has been one of the most recent. It has only been
since the early 1970s that many of the obstacles to women’s participation in
school sports have been removed. After federal legislation was passed in
1972 making it impossible for schools to get federal funds unless they provide
equal opportunities for men and women, the number of females participating
in high school and college sports increased dramatically. At the 35th anniver-
sary of the Title IX legislation that made this possible, the National Coalition
for Women and Girls in Education (2008) reported: “Before Title IX, only
294,015 girls participated in high school athletics; in 2006, that number
was nearly 3 million, a 904% increase. At the college level, prior to Title IX,
only 29,977 women participated in athletics compared with 166,728 in
2006, a 456% increase” (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Educa-
tion 2008). The place of women in sports in the last century once again veri-
fies the extent to which athletics mirrors virtually all patterns of social change.
There is another feature of our review that deserves elaboration. Implicit in
some treatments of the function of sports during the Progressive Era is a cer-
tain anti-urban bias. Involvement in sports and recreation has been viewed as
providing a safety valve, relieving the tensions and stresses created by the
essentially negative demands of urban life. Some of our earlier discussion sug-
gests that sports helped to initiate individuals into a world of work that might
otherwise be seen as oppressive. Underlying the analysis of parks, play-
grounds, and settlement houses as socializing agencies is the suggestion that
sports helped to create compliant workers who could be more easily manipu-
lated by those who, in Marx’s terms, controlled the means of production in
cities. There is a nearly conspiratorial tone to this view of the role of sports
in the evolution of American life. While we believe that these ideas have a
great deal of merit, such a view need not minimize the central and more pos-
itive role of sports in creating an integrated community life in American cities.
In Chapter 3 we showed that community life is quite vibrant in American
cities and draws its energy from unexpected sources. Let us briefly pursue
the connection between sports and a viable community life.
SPORTS AND COMMUNITY IDENTIFICATION

In his treatment of the place of recreation and sports in the growth of the
city of Boston, Stephen Hardy asserts that the range of recreational pursuits
characterizing the city at the beginning of the Twentieth Century “repre-
sented active attempts to develop community in the city” (Hardy 1982:87).
Included in Hardy’s analysis are the role of professional sports, collegiate
rivalries, the Boston Marathon, Boston’s representation on Olympic teams,
high school athletics, sports clubs, and the range of informal games fostered
by the development of a public parks system during the Progressive Era.
Hardy’s work conforms to the general thesis that sports and games played a
critical role in the incorporation of immigrant groups into the mainstream
value system. To that idea, he adds the role of sports in creating a sense of
community among Bostonians. His analysis is directed toward showing how
sports and recreation were “mediums through which Americans could strug-
gle to strengthen themselves and their communities in the face of larger eco-
nomic and social forces” (1982:202).
The notion that sports provide urbanites with a sense of subjective identi-
fication with the larger community is suggested by Hardy’s thesis. Once we
recognize, as pointed out in Chapter 3, the limitations of conceiving of com-
munity only in terms of space or territory, we open our analysis to the variety of
mechanisms that may contribute to a sense of community, even for those indi-
viduals who may objectively seem unattached to conventional social and spatial
groupings. To be sure, as social psychologists, we have been advocating the idea
throughout this volume that the city—and by extension community—is as
much a state of mind as it is a physical entity. The city is as much tied up with
our images and sentiments as it is connected to matters of geography or legis-
lated boundaries. We should consider that at the bottom of any definition of
community are ideas of belongings, integration, and solidarity. To belong to a
community implies that one feels a part of something, that one shares with
236 BEING URBAN
others a feeling of common identity, consciousness, and emotional involvement.

Sports are one important mechanism in creating such feelings among city
persons.
Following the writings of Gregory Stone (1968, 1972, 1973, 1981), we
conceive of sport as “a community representation.” Stone’s analysis stems
from Emile Durkheim’s (1984) classic view that the reality of society rests in
a “collective consciousness,” in the totality of passionately embraced beliefs
and sentiments held in common by a group of people. On the negative side,
such a passionate identification with sports teams as group representatives
can erupt in aggression and rioting, as has too frequently been the case among
fans of NCAA basketball. In a more benign way, as Stone’s review of the com-
munity literature illustrates, sports create and sustain community solidarity.
In such traditional, classic community studies as Robert and Helen Lynd’s
(1929) Middletown, August Hollingshead’s (1949) Elmtown’s Youth, John
Seeley, R. A. Sim, and Elizabeth Loosely’s (1956) Crestwood Heights, James
West’s (1945) Plainville, U.S.A., and Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman’s
(1958) Small Town in Mass Society, a discussion of the centrality of sports in
the life of the community is inevitable. In Middletown, for example, the
Lynds commented on the place of high school sports in promoting civic loy-
alty, culminating in an extraordinary community fervor during the basketball
team’s playoff games. Those of you who went to high school in small com-
munities will no doubt have experienced what they describe.
Leading citizens give “Bearcat parties” and prior to . . . the final games, hun-
dreds of people unable to secure tickets stand in the street cheering a score-
board, classes are virtually suspended in the high school, and the children who
are unable to go to the state capital to see the game meet in a chapel service of
cheers and songs and sometimes prayers for victory. In the series of games lead-
ing up to “the finals” the city turns out week after week to fill the doors of the
largest auditorium available. (Lynd and Lynd 1929:284)
Almost 100 years later, with small towns continuing to decline, Robert
Wuthnow paints a remarkably similar picture of the importance of sports in
the lives of rural communities: “If the town has a local newspaper, at least a
quarter of it is devoted to the week’s athletic events. . . . If the home team
has a winning season, the entire community turns out for its games. Towns
in rural areas typically have a highway sign at their edge stating the most
recent year of winning a state championship” (Wuthnow 2013:106).
Just as high school sports solidify smaller communities, Stone maintains
that professional sports teams serve the same kind of quasi-religious function
in larger cities. His argument, offered in a series of articles, is that sports teams
not only identify the cities where they play but also are a source of people’s
identification with and pride in their city. Just as New York’s skyline, San
Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and the French Quarter in New Orleans
both identify the city and become the source of people’s identification with
the city, so do sports teams. This view does not rest on theoretical speculation
alone. On the basis of a sample of 515 persons, Stone offers evidence that
“involvement with spectator sports makes for subjective identification with
the larger community under objectively improbable conditions” (1968:8).
By “objectively improbable conditions,” Stone meant that subjective identifi-
cation with the urban community through sports would be highest for those
who were, according to purely objective criteria, least integrated into the urban
community (those who had been residents of the city for the shortest time,
those who had the fewest friends in the community, and so on). The data sup-
port the theoretical contention that persons produce a symbolic transformation
of urban institutions to provide a source of identification that may not be avail-
able to them through routine sources of community involvement. His data
allow the conclusion that “sports teams should be thought of as collective repre-
sentations of the larger urban world. Significant then are the names of teams.
Such names have in the past designated urban areas. . . . Identification with such
representations may be transferred to identification with the larger communities
or areas they represent” (1968:10). This finding appears to be robust over time.
For example, a recent study of Turin, Italy, found that, among those residents
who have greater levels of attachment to their community, the fourth most
characteristic word they uttered when extolling Turin’s virtues was “sports”
(Rollero and Piccoli 2010).
We began this chapter by commenting on the trauma to generations of
people who grew up identifying with the Brooklyn Dodgers when that team
relocated to Los Angeles. The consternation felt by those living in New York
at the time was certainly heightened because of the very close connection that
had always existed between the borough of Brooklyn and the team. In fact,
the history of social change in Brooklyn is virtually a case study of the abiding
connection between the fortunes of a city area and the sports team that repre-
sented it from the early 1900s through the 1957 season. The history of the
Brooklyn Dodgers testifies to the correctness of the assertion that sports
teams can potently symbolize the range of sentiments people feel for an urban
area. The team played an integral part in the creation of an enduring sense of
neighborhood that characterized Brooklyn and gave it special charm as a dis-
tinctive urban place. We cannot, of course, undertake here a complete social
238 BEING URBAN
history of Brooklyn, but we should note, along with the novelist Philip Roth,
that Brooklyn was “the very symbol of urban wackiness and tumult” (quoted
in Laforse and Drake 1988:187) and that the antics and history of the team
over the years reinforced the distinctive imagery of the place. Whatever might
have been the ethnic and class diversity of Brooklyn over the years, it was the
ball club that provided a common community thread. As Laforse and Drake
indicate,
Brooklyn once had a civic identity of its own, and even in a city of such striking
divergencies, one commonality would be devotion to the local professional
baseball team. . . . It is fascinating to analyze the myth of frantic loyalty [to the
Dodgers] erected before the American public. Whatever the reality might have
been, enough people wanted to believe the lore about the Dodgers and their
fans to make the impression lasting. There was something quaint, off-beat and
ruggedly individualistic about the antics of fans in Ebbets Field, and the legend
was national in scope. . . . Perhaps, too, the charm was a symbolic exemplifica-
tion of continuity, community, and comradeship in an increasingly anomic
urban world. (1988:177, 216)
Because the emphasis of our comments has been on the role of sports
during the early part of the twentieth century, we should acknowledge that
the nature of professional athletics has changed quite dramatically since the
1960s. The sports pages of 2015 have a different tone. Today the knowledge-
able sports fan must know something about antitrust legislation, tax and con-
tract law, and collective bargaining. Where once sportswriters limited their
coverage of the seamier side of sports heroes’ lives, today’s elite athletes are
as likely to provide fodder for gossip sites like TMZ as they are to be featured
for their prowess on ESPN. It is common to see fans on discussion forums
lament the fact that sports have become big business and that professional
athletes today feel little loyalty to their teams, much less to the communities
where they play.
In order for teams truly to serve the function of community representa-
tion, they must exhibit some stability. The number of sports teams has
expanded dramatically since 1950. In 1950, for example, major league base-
ball was represented in 10 cities by 16 teams. Currently 30 teams are located
in 28 cities. Similar patterns can be described for football, basketball, and
hockey, while NASCAR expands its cup circuit to more tracks in the north
and west. Moreover, since the 1970s we have witnessed a bewildering array
of expansion teams and new leagues, some lasting only months. Though team
relocations have become relatively rare since the 1970s—only two MLB
teams have moved since 1970, and a half dozen NFL teams moved once the
league relaxed their rules on location in the 1980s (Leeds 2006)—the threat
of relocation is constantly used by team owners to extract public subsidies
from state and local governments (Davies 2007). How much can fans afford
to identify the local squad as “our team,” when owners like the Colts’ Robert
Irsay quip, “This is my team. I own it, and I’ll do whatever I want with it”
(Davies 2007:286)?
To the extent that there has been a diffusion of sports, there has been a
weakening of the role of sports in the creation of a distinctive community
consciousness. As the movements or threats of movements of teams become
more and more dictated by the market arrangements created by the demo-
graphics of television audiences, it becomes harder for fans to identify with
and commit themselves emotionally to teams. Ever more frequently the busi-
nesspeople who own the teams see them as sources of tax depreciation and
feel no particular attachment to the cities in which their teams are housed.
James Michener, in his wide-ranging analysis of sports in the United States,
makes the point that increasingly “teams have been owned not by local people
interested in the welfare of both the team and the community, but by outsid-
ers, sometimes from the opposite end of the nation, who happened to be in a
financial position in which ownership was a practical rather than an athletic
consideration” (Michener 1976:363). Among urban institutions, sports are
unique in being both a cultural resource and a business. As economic consid-
erations more exclusively determine where teams play and for how long, it
becomes increasingly difficult for sports to serve the cultural function of creat-
ing community integration as powerfully as they did during the formative
years of city and sports building in the United States.
MONEY AND MOBILITY: CLASS, RACE, AND SPORTS

Throughout this chapter we have been guided by the notion that sports
reflect major social currents and values. This is perhaps nowhere more plain
than in thinking about patterns of class, race, and mobility in the United
States. As indicated in Chapter 7, any consideration of the modern urban
world that left unanalyzed the accessibility to different groups of society’s
“goodies”—power, prestige, status, and wealth—would be incomplete. Cer-
tainly one important issue raised in a discussion of class in the United States
is the degree to which we have an open class structure, the degree to which
the rhetoric of the American dream fits the reality of the contemporary situa-
tion. The idea of the American dream is that the United States, and especially
the urban United States, is a place of boundless opportunity where hard work
and talent alone dictate one’s chances for success. The American dream in its
240 BEING URBAN
purest form describes the “rags to riches” stories of those with exceptional tal-
ent and motivation who move from the bottom of the stratification system to
the top. Moreover, sports are often mentioned as proving the vitality of the
American dream. After all, one need only consider the extraordinary salaries
paid to professional athletes, a large number of whom are members of minor-
ity groups and come from poor circumstances. In this section we shall con-
sider not only how sports have provided an avenue of mobility but also their
role in keeping alive what becomes, unfortunately, a painful and illusory
dream for far too many minority youths.
There is little doubt that members of minority groups have always viewed
sports as a route to success when other avenues have been closed to them.
In their classic study “The Occupational Culture of the Boxer,” Weinberg
and Arond (1952) documented the nearly perfect relationship between the
ethnic and racial composition of urban slums and the backgrounds of success-
ful fighters. Boxing has always drawn its talent from the most financially
deprived segments of the society. In the early part of the century, Irish boxers
dominated the sport. By 1928 Jews were the most visible fighters, only to be
replaced by Italian boxers in the late 1930s. In the post-World War II era,
boxing was dominated by black and Hispanic fighters, and now world title
holders increasingly come from the Global South—Latin America and Africa
in particular. Although the poor often turn to boxing in hopes of social
mobility, baseball historian and statistician Bill James has made the same
observations about that sport. In his decade-by-decade account of the major
leagues, he traces the changes in the backgrounds of the players. For example,
of the 1900s he writes:
Whereas baseball in the nineteenth century was in danger of becoming a game

of the Irish, by the Irish, and for the Irish, it now appealed to a broader cross-
section of the public. In a nation of immigrants, ethnic identity was important;
when you knew a man, you knew where his family came from and when they
got off the boat. Many of the game’s biggest stars were the heavily accented sons
of immigrants, and in particular German and French immigrants. (James
2001:73)
He concludes his discussion of 1960s players (increasingly black and Latino)

by noting that “[i]t will probably always be true that star athletes come pre-
dominantly from the bottom of the economic spectrum” (James 2001:251).
While it would be possible to document the place of athletics in the expe-
riences of a number of different groups, the most outstanding feature of the
American professional sports scene since the 1950s has been the extraordinary
role played by black athletes. We should first observe that prior to World War II,
black participation in professional sports was virtually nonexistent. Boxing

was one of the few sports open to blacks before the mid-1940s (Jack Johnson
was heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915, and Joe Louis became a black
folk hero during the 1930s and 1940s). As mentioned earlier in the chapter,
blacks were absolutely excluded from major league professional baseball until
1947. The color line was not broken in professional basketball until 1950,
and very few blacks played professional football even in the 1950s. Such his-
torical exclusion of blacks makes their current involvement in major sports
even more remarkable. Although blacks constitute about 13 percent of the
nation’s population, 67 percent of players in the National Football League
are black, about 80 percent of the rosters of professional basketball teams
are black, and about 18 percent of professional baseball players are black.
As the statistics above indicate, blacks have become most particularly promi-
nent in basketball. At the collegiate level only 10 percent of basketball teams
had one or more black players in 1948. That proportion was 45 percent in
1962 and 95 percent in 1985 (Eitzen 1989). By 1999, black players were in
the majority on NCAA Division I teams, at 55 percent, and by the 2009–
2010 season, they comprised 61 percent of the basketball players (“Blacks
Now a Majority on Football Teams,” 2010). Moreover, the success of black
players within the major sports has been equally dramatic, as indicated by
their extraordinary overrepresentation as statistical leaders, all-star players,
and MVP award winners.
It is not surprising, in light of the statistics offered and the high visibility of
black athletes in the media, that black youngsters are far more likely than their
white counterparts to see sports as a route to social mobility. -While these
aspirants may be aware of their heroes’ statistics, they tend to ignore the sta-
tistics concerning their own chances of making it to the professional level.
In fact, young athletes are wildly off the mark in terms of evaluating their
chances of becoming professionals. Many studies have documented that play-
ing for the NBA is a serious goal for a number of young minority men, espe-
cially those from poorer backgrounds (for example, Carter 2005; Dubrow
and Adams 2012). Their actual chances are far less than that. According to a
2013 report from the NCAA (NCAA Research 2013) 1,086,627 boys played
high school football, 538,676 played basketball, and 474,791 played base-
ball. At the college level, the total number of athletes competing in all these
sports was 120,581. Of those students, only about 1.2 percent of basketball
players and 1.6 percent of football players go on to play professionally.
9.4 percent of NCAA baseball players go on to play some professional ball,
but we must remember that most of those players will be farm hands in the
MLB’s myriad minor league teams. Of course, only a proportion of those
242 BEING URBAN
who play professionally will do so at the highest level of their sport. Prudence
Carter put these numbers in perspective of the lives of the high schoolers she
studied in Yonkers, NY:
Some thinkers have suggested that a fixation with excelling in sports has become
an alternative to classroom success for minority—particularly Black
males. . . . The love of sports does not mean that these young men did not
acknowledge the value of a high-school diploma. But it does suggest that these
young men, influenced by normative cultural values about work and manhood,
sought a high-school credential as a path to financial success. Unfortunately,
most desired to obtain this success through one of the few avenues that an
exclusionary limited opportunity structure opens to many men of color—
professional sports and the hip-hop entertainment industry—even though less
than one percent of college athletes make the cut into professional sports, and
few break into fame in the music world. (Carter 2005:88)
Famed black historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., quoting his grandfather, puts it
more succinctly: “If our people studied calculus like we studied basketball . . .
we’d be running M.I.T” (Gates 2004).
The picture is more discouraging still when we consider that the financial
pot of gold at the end of the professional sports rainbow is not as great as
many might think. Some superstars like Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, and
Derrick Rose in basketball make extraordinary amounts of money. It is also
true that in 2008 the average NFL player earned $1.1 million, the average
NBA player made $5.85 million, and the average major league baseball player
earned $2.93 million (Conrad 2011). However, the most usual career route is
for an athlete to play his sport several years at the minor league level without
ever making it to the “bigs.” In contrast with those who make it, most minor
league baseball players earn between $3,000 and $5,000 per season (McCann
2014), and players in the NBA’s development league earn from $12,000 to
$24,000 annually (Koutroupis, 2014). It is also important that the typical
player making it to the NBA or the NFL can expect to play less than four
years, and the average career of major league baseball players is only slightly
longer. The vast majority of players, whether or not they make it to the big
leagues, will be retired before they are 30 years old, and all too often they
are without the academic and occupational skills necessary to ensure mean-
ingful work for the remainder of their lives. And to put a final nail in the coffin
of any poor inner city kid’s hoop dreams, a 2010 study found that poor kids
are the least likely in any racial group to make it to the NBA—66 percent of
black players came from a middle class background or higher, and less than
8 percent of white players came from a lower class background (Dubrow and
Adams 2012).
We would also be misled to believe that the large numbers of black profes-
sional athletes is evidence that racism has been erased in sports. LA Clippers
owner Donald Sterling’s comments confirm that even for a personage like
Magic Johnson whose talents have been proven on the court and off, there
is virulent racism in certain offices in pro sports. Despite the large number of
black players, sociologist Earl Smith points out that, since Jackie Robinson’s
signing in 1947, “[t]here have been only three African American managers
in professional baseball, no more than a handful of head coaches in profes-
sional basketball, and fewer than ten head coaches in professional football”
(Smith 2007:41). Very few nonwhites are employed in the front offices of
pro sports teams, and even in the NCAA, as of 2006 there were only 4 black
presidents and 10 black athletic directors at the roughly 100 Division IA cam-
puses (Smith 2007). This situation has led some to describe college and pro-
fessional sports as operating under a “plantation model.”
The contemporary situation resembles a plantation in that almost all the over-
seers are white . . . and almost all the top players are black. Moreover, when the
professional basketball playoff games roll into town, we are faced with the odd
situation of predominantly black teams playing before predominantly white sub-
urban audiences. . . . This is . . . highly reminiscent of the Roman amphitheater
gladiator contests in which African and Greek slaves performed for the predomi-
nantly Roman audiences. (Hoch 1974:382)
It is often said that in order to be successful at the higher levels of the

occupational world, members of minority groups must perform better than
members of the majority group. Such an assertion, difficult to prove in most
conventional occupations, can be more plainly tested in sports. Using statis-
tics from 1986, Richard Lapchick (reported in Rosellini 1989) showed that
twice as many black baseball players as whites had career batting averages
greater than .281, while three times as many whites as blacks had averages below
.241. The same study reported that among veterans in the NBA (those who
played five years or longer) blacks had a much higher scoring average than
whites. Through the 1980s, it was fairly clear that there was significant wage dis-
crimination by race in the MLB. But since the 1990s, the picture seems to have
changed. Several studies (for example, Bellemore 2001; Palmer and King 2006)
find little evidence for continued wage discrimination in baseball. If there is any,
it is at the very lowest salary levels—that is, the most marginal black and Latino
players still seem to earn less than whites (Palmer and King 2006). When it
244 BEING URBAN
comes to hiring and compensating players, Lapchick now gives both the MLB
and the NBA “A” ratings (Lapchick 2012a, 2012b).
Still, the story of discrimination in professional sports is not done. In a
series of studies beginning with a paper by John Loy and Joseph McElvogue
(1972), a number of researchers have documented what they call “stacking”
in professional sports. “Stacking” refers to the fact that players are not
assigned randomly to positions on their teams. Instead, consistent with the
stereotype that black athletes are not smart enough to hold leadership posi-
tions, data indicate that white players in baseball and football are overrepre-
sented in the most organizationally central roles (those requiring the most
thinking, communication, and responsibility), while blacks are overly repre-
sented in positions requiring speed and dexterity. In football, for example,
this means that on offense, kickers, quarterbacks, and linemen tend to be
white, while wide receivers and running backs are more often black. In base-
ball, blacks are overrepresented in the outfield positions, which are the “most
peripheral and socially isolated positions in the organizational structure of a
baseball team” (Loy and McElvogue 1972:311), and greatly underrepre-
sented as pitchers and catchers, for example. More recent evidence (Lapchick
2013) suggests that this is still a problem for professional sports.
While we must entertain the hypothesis that black players voluntarily select
themselves into certain positions, the more reasonable interpretation is that
allocation of positions in both football and baseball is premised on the belief
that blacks are not intellectually fit to occupy leadership positions within
sports organizations. Such a view excludes blacks from leadership positions
in a range of occupations and institutions. Notwithstanding the gains that
blacks have made in the realm of professional sports, data on stacking remind
us not to underestimate the degree of institutionalized racism that remains.
As sociologists, our intellectual bias is to look beneath apparent social real-
ity, to question critically prevailing wisdoms. Such a perspective on sports has
caused us to consider whether the participation and great success of relatively
few minorities in professional sports can be taken as evidence that equality of
opportunity accurately describes fundamental American values. We are inclined
to agree with Howard Nixon that “[t]he tendency for black athletes to dream
longer and harder about sport as their route to success . . . [reflects] the fact that
black people have been denied so many other routes to success in American
society . . . [and] explains why successful black professional and college athletes
have encouraged the belief in sport as a significant mobility lever” (Nixon
1984:133). Indeed, we think it not too cynical to suggest that sports indirectly
help to maintain the disquieting view that when members of minorities do not
make it in mainstream society, it is their fault. The few startling successes of
minority individuals in sports, government, entertainment, and the professions

allow the continuing view that if these individuals can make it, those who don’t
are responsible for their own condition. In this respect we might view sports
as, in fact, ultimately helping to maintain the status quo that guarantees the per-
sistence of inequality along class, ethnic, and racial lines. Were it not for the
highly visible successes of a few minority individuals in sports and other institu-
tions, it would be much harder for even the most conservative ideologue to
maintain the belief that the American dream is alive and well.
SPORTS, ANONYMITY, AND INDIVIDUALISM

In his engaging book of the same title, Pete Axthelm (1970) describes
basketball as “the city game.” We have already looked at statistics indicating
the degree to which professional basketball has come to be dominated by
black players. In large part this is explained by the fact that basketball is the
most immediately accessible game to city youth. Sports like golf and tennis
belong to the suburbs and the country club. Baseball, however much it might
reflect urban values, requires open space and is played at a pace that is nearly
inconsistent with the hustle and bustle of inner-city life. Football, although
having captured the imagination of Americans since the 1970s, demands a
degree of planning and institutional support that makes it incompatible with
spontaneous urban play. Basketball, in contrast, requires sneakers, shorts, a
ball, and two baskets. It fits the city well. In most cities one doesn’t have to
go very far to find a court and a pickup game.
One certainly can take the popularity of the game at face value as a fast-
paced, exciting sport. However, along with Axthelm, we think the game and
its meaning to participants must be understood in social psychological terms
as well. One has only to witness the intensity and involvement with which
the game is played, and then to listen to the comments of those watching,
to realize that more is riding on the game than continued control of the
court. Those waiting appraise the talent of those playing, and much of the
sideline talk is of particular players’ extraordinary abilities, some of them
present on the court and others more legendary. The playground is a place
where particularly graceful efforts are applauded; it is a place where reputa-
tions are made and identities fashioned. As such, the game is the medium
through which a certain ritualized drama is enacted, one that centers on com-
petition, competence, and coolness.
In the face of an impersonal, anonymous urban world, persons have a need
to create forums for the expression of their individuality and uniqueness. Urban-
ites are creative in finding ways to express and assert their distinctiveness,
246 BEING URBAN
especially in those anonymous situations where one seems most in danger of los-
ing one’s self. To use the metaphor suggested in the writings of Erving Goffman
(1959), we can liken social life to a series of stages on which we perform roles
and offer various presentations of self. We are not suggesting that sports are
the only means through which individuals try to express publicly a valued sense
of self. Urban sociologists would do well to detail how neighborhood bars, res-
taurants, pool halls, and even street corners become platforms on which persons
vie for status, esteem, and recognition. From among the several possibilities,
however, sports are a particularly compelling means through which young
men can achieve a degree of fame within their neighborhoods, and in some
instances throughout the city. “Street ballplayers develop their own elaborate
word-of-mouth system. One spectacular performance or one backwards, twist-
ing stuff shot can be the seed of an athlete’s reputation. If he can repeat it a
few times in a park where the competition is tough, the word goes out that he
may be something special” (Axthelm 1972:199).
While we want to avoid painting an overly bleak picture of the lives of
poor, inner-city youngsters, we must nevertheless acknowledge once more
that their opportunities for achievement in the larger society are often limited.
To be sure, a tradition of sociological literature concerns itself with the mech-
anisms of adaptation employed by individuals who have internalized society’s
standards of success but do not have available the usual means for realizing
economic and occupational success (Liebow 1967; Merton 1938). For exam-
ple, one line of argument offered in the literature on the poor school perfor-
mance of poor minority youth is that the school is a socially sanctioned place
for young people to achieve status. However, according to this view (Carter
2005), the school is a middle-class institution run by middle-class teachers and
administrators who reward behaviors most reflecting white middle-class stan-
dards of intelligence and achievement. As such, the school is not an especially
hospitable place for black and Latino working- or lower-class youth. Unable to
compete easily in school and often fearing social retaliation if they “act white”
by following teachers’ expectations, they act out and work to look tough as an
alternative competitive system. In an analogous but more positive fashion, city
games lift some players above the ordinary anonymity of their lives and provide
them a context for status-enhancing achievement.
The point is that in social worlds where occupational and educational
achievement is elusive, persons must find alternative ways to express a compe-
tent and valued self. The playground is one of the few places where many
inner-city young people can establish the sense of individuality, status, and
manhood that too often seems denied them by the larger society. Moreover,
aside from its easy availability, we suggest that the game of basketball is itself
structured in a way that allows the expression of unique talents. It is a team

sport that does not diminish the colorful performances of individuals who
go one-on-one with opposing players and create “moves” that become, in
neighborhood lore, equivalent to personal signatures. We also agree with
Axthelm that in a world in which inner-city youth may feel buffeted by forces
that seem beyond their control, the game is a source of order and provides the
possibility for momentarily transcending the more mundane reality of their
lives. Here is Axthelm’s lyrical description of the game’s significance in the
lives of street players:
The game is simple, an act of one man challenging another, twisting, feinting,
then perhaps breaking free to leap upward, directing a ball toward a target, a
metal hoop ten feet above the ground. But its simple motions swirl into intricate
patterns, its variations become almost endless, its brief soaring moments merge
into a fascinating dance. To the uninitiated, the patterns may seem fleeting, elu-
sive, even confusing; but on a city playground, a classic play is frozen in the
minds of those who see it—a moment of order and achievement in a turbulent,
frustrating existence. Basketball is more than a sport or a diversion in the cities.
It is a part, often a major part, of the fabric of life. . . . Other athletes may learn
basketball, but city kids live it. (1972:188)
Just as among the pros, there comes a time when one is too old to compete
successfully on the playground. One rarely sees players beyond their mid-thirties
on playgrounds. However, involvement with sports, especially for men, hardly
ends when they hang up their spikes. Although one might no longer be able
to play a good game, it is possible to talk a good game throughout life. On its
most obvious level, sports provide a universal language for people and thereby
lubricate the gears of social interaction. Sports give even strangers access to each
other. While, as pointed out in Chapter 4, norms of noninvolvement character-
ize public places, sports are one of the few topics that seem to legitimate strang-
ers’ initiating contact with each other. It is hard to imagine someone reading a
newspaper in a public place spontaneously beginning a conversation about
Eastern Europe, the president’s latest speech, or the state of the economy. It is
not, however, uncommon for someone checking sports scores on their smart
phone to spontaneously comment to a stranger on a home team’s recent win
or loss. Such openness may partly be attributed to the relative “safety” of sports
talk. Discussion of topics such as abortion, religion, or politics is somewhat
dangerous because they may easily cause expression of deeply felt emotions
and animosities. Sports talk, however, normally engenders friendly disagree-
ments. As radio sports shows illustrate, talk is easily generated for hours at a time
on the wisdom of decisions made by managers or coaches, the reason one or
248 BEING URBAN
another player is performing badly, or the player acquisitions necessary to make

the local team a playoff contender.
Just as participating in playground games provides inner-city youth with a
sense of personhood, we think it not too far afield to suggest that sports talk
provides many men the opportunity to demonstrate a degree of expertise
and knowledgeability that is status-enhancing. While we recognize the specu-
lative nature of these comments, we feel persuaded that involvement in
sports, whether making a great playground move or being applauded for
one’s incisive sports knowledge, provides those who might otherwise be
undifferentiated in the urban crowd with the opportunity to assert themselves
and to display their individuality.
CONCLUSION
As is too often the case in social science research, discussions of different
institutions, behaviors, or life spheres remain separate. There are, for example,
voluminous literatures on family and work, but relatively little effort has been
expended in analyzing how the worlds of work and family life intersect and
transform each other. In Chapter 6 we integrated literatures on gender roles,
occupations, and urban life to understand how the urban context shapes the
experiences of women, a neglected topic in the literature on cities. This chap-
ter proceeded from the similar observation that discussions of the role of
sports in the United States have been artificially separated from treatments
of the growth and development of urban life. Consequently, the overall pur-
pose of this chapter has been to review the sociological literature on sports
with an eye to understanding the connection between the development of
sports and of the city itself. In making this connection our aim was to intro-
duce into the dialogue about city life the important place of sports, play,
and games. Sports, however, are more than a convenient tool for reflecting
on urban processes. The central thesis of the chapter has been that the growth
of cities and of sports is coincidental and, even more pointedly, that sports
facilitated the emergence of the industrial city.
Institutions, of course, do not come into existence spontaneously, and to
appreciate how the form of city life and the form of sports are intertwined,
we adopted a broad historical view. Analysis shows that the emergence of
sports on a large scale could not have happened apart from a number of tech-
nological innovations that were intrinsic to the process of industrialization.
Especially critical in this regard were the communications and travel technol-
ogies that promoted the development of intracity team rivalries. The work of
historians was used to illustrate the significance of sports in contributing to
the development of an emerging capitalist order, especially during the

Progressive Era (1900–1930). Our central argument here was that sports,
most particularly baseball, fostered values that were instrumental in socializ-
ing immigrants to the requirements of the newly emerging industrial order.
Implicit in this discussion is the idea that sports were used by reformers as a
means of social control. Such an idea is most compellingly affirmed in a
number of historical analyses of the Playground Movement. Although the
manifest function of the Playground Movement was to ensure the safety of
children who would otherwise play on dangerous city streets, an important
latent function was to shape young people by inculcating in them values,
behaviors, and consciousness consistent with the needs of an industrialized
work world.
The historical processes described in the chapter, it should be understood,
refer to global, structural, institutional, or macro aspects of American urban
culture. Throughout this text, however, we have insisted that such elements
of social structure always be related to the day-to-day experiences of urban-
ites. In the second half of this chapter, therefore, we used sports as a medium
for analyzing a number of social psychological processes. Sports, we main-
tained, provide urban persons with a sense of subjective community identifi-
cation. In making this argument we picked up on a central theme of our
discussion in Chapter 3. There we suggested the importance of seeing com-
munity in other than strictly territorial terms. A sense of community can rise
out of identification with urban places, objects, events, and institutions. Once
we recognize community as tied up with images, sentiments, and feelings, it is
a short step to realize the extent to which many urbanites equate pride of
place with pride of local sports teams.
In the two remaining sections of the chapter we examined the particularly
significant role that sports play in shaping the identities and aspirations of
minority youngsters. Faced with limitations on their mobility through con-
ventional routes, minority youth have always looked to sports as a system
through which they might achieve the American dream of wealth and status.
A look at appropriate statistics reveals, however, that the dream is an illusory
one except for a precious few and, indeed, that institutionalized racism per-
meates what at first seems a wholly meritocratic system. Finally, we offered
some speculative thoughts on the notion that playground athletics can pro-
vide a forum for the expression of self, identity, and individuality in an urban
world where anonymity appears at first glance to rob us of our uniqueness.
Let us now turn to one more great urban institution to further flesh out
our understandings of the myriad forces at play in cities. The arts have long
made their home in the city, and demonstrate how works of art contrary to
250 BEING URBAN
being the products of lone geniuses as we often imagine, are in fact social
products. Without an array of supporters, art could not happen. And while
the production of art often depends on cities, we must also consider how city
dwellers consume art in its various forms, to the extent that many municipal
governments now worry as much about budgetary appropriations for the arts
as they do about keeping the water flowing.
CHAPTER 9
Arts in the City
W hile most of us now live in suburbs, almost any kid who grows up in
the United States is loaded onto a yellow school bus at several points in his
or her youth and trekked into “the city.” When the schoolchildren get there,
they are disgorged upon marble steps, perhaps flanked by snarling lions.
Whether they are at the opera, a theater, the symphony, or an art museum,
these trips make it clear to us from an early age that cities are where art is
and where artistic creation happens.
In this chapter we will explore several dimensions of the arts’ relationship
to cities. We will see that it is no accident that the arts are largely an urban phe-
nomenon and that the enshrinement of the high arts in great museums and per-
formance spaces was a highly deliberate process on the part of civic leaders who
have sought, since the nineteenth century, to provide a buffer against barbarian-
ism and mass entertainment. Not only will we find that powerful forces in the
city promote the arts for aesthetic purposes—today municipal leaders are heed-
ing the findings of urban researchers that suggest that artistic institutions like
galleries, music venues, and theaters draw tourist dollars as well as longer-term
residents to cities. Today, the arts are big business.
First, in keeping with our interactionist focus, we will investigate why it is
that cities are usually the key sites for artistic production. Though we often
tend to think about artists as disconnected geniuses, laboring in painful isola-
tion while meticulously crafting masterworks, the sociology of art has taught
us that art is in fact a social affair. Even works with a sole “author” rely upon
a network of others for their realization, not to mention their dissemination
to a broader public. Generally, cities are the places where such creation and
252 BEING URBAN
dissemination happen. To that end, we must consider both the institutional

supports that often cluster in cities as well as the networks of artists that
encourage each other, critique each other’s work, and spark new ideas and
movements in art. We will look at how this process has played out at different
times in several cities, from Vienna to Berlin, Paris, Chicago, and New York.
We then go on to consider the consumption of art in cities. Both as a
means to enshrining certain objects as monuments to great culture for all time
and as a diversion for troubled city dwellers, powerful forces have ensured that
since the nineteenth century, cities have provided art to the public in museums,
galleries, symphonies, and operas. Many cities have also provided homes to
bohemian art scenes that prove attractive to starving artists as well as well-off
urban professionals. We will see how in cities like Chicago and Austin, Texas,
people with disposable incomes actively seek out the pleasures of funky art
scenes. People enjoy art for art’s sake, but also because it can provide a quintes-
sentially local experience. Thus, blues music carries connotations of authentic
Chicago, as traditional jazz does for New Orleans, and R&B in Memphis.
Finally, we will investigate how many cities have begun to actively cultivate
the arts in hope of attracting tourist dollars and well-to-do residents. Based
on readings of the works of researchers like Terry Nichols Clark and Richard
Florida, who regard urban amenities like art galleries, coffee shops, and night-
clubs as attractive to the kind of knowledge workers who drive our contempo-
rary economy, many municipalities have made significant investments in their
arts sectors. We will see how those investments have played out, for better and
possibly for worse.
CITIES AS ART WORLDS

A popular image of an artist depicts her as working alone in a studio.
We imagine that someone like an O’Keefe or Picasso is an individual of extraor-
dinary genius. The ideas for the artist’s masterworks spring forth from their
mind as if from the firmament—unprecedented, inimitable, beyond category.
The signature she puts to a piece establishes that it is the work of just one person.
Thus, it may seem that the production of artworks is unsusceptible to
sociological analysis. After all, is there really anything social in this deeply indi-
vidual act of creation? Until the 1970s, most sociologists seemed content to
accept this image of isolated artistry, and to leave art out of sociology. But
since that time there has been what we often refer to as the “cultural turn”
in sociology (Bonnell and Hunt 1999)—sociologists pay a lot of attention
to culture and to how it is consumed and created by groups of people, and
in fact we now realize that the apparently individual act of artistic creation is
ARTS IN THE CITY 253
highly dependent upon the involvement of many different actors. We have

further come to understand that people have to come together in physical pla-
ces to make art happen, and cities generally provide a very amenable space for
such coming together.
The sociology of art is probably best introduced by interactionist Howard
Becker’s seminal work Art Worlds (Becker 2008[1983]). In this work, he
provides us with a generalizable framework for understanding the social pro-
duction of works of art in everything from paintings and photographs to sym-
phony performances and movies. In general, Becker notes that the following
things must happen for any work of art to appear:
1. Somebody has to have the idea to make a particular piece of art. It is

generally the person we call the “artist” who does this. The idea could
be anything from a musical composition to a sculpture or painting.
2. Somebody has to execute the idea. In the case of a painting, this can be the
same person who had the idea for it in the first place. But in the case of a
symphonic composition, the various musicians of a symphony orchestra,
under the direction of a conductor, must execute the composer’s idea.
In the visual arts, a sculptor may require a foundry to cast a bronze sculp-
ture, or a print maker may require a lithographer to execute prints.
3. Somebody has to make all the materials for making the artwork. While it
was once common practice for painters to mix their own pigments, and
some still do, most purchase their paints from an art store. Similarly, film-
makers buy cameras and sound equipment, musicians buy their guitars
and saxophones, and sculptors buy chisels and mallets.
4. Artwork must be distributed. While in some transcendent sense, a piece of
music that nobody but the composer ever hears may count as “art,” in a
social sense, art is not fully realized until it reaches an audience. For any art-
work, there may be diverse avenues of distribution. Music can be distributed
through live performances, recordings available on the Internet, or physical
recordings on vinyl or compact discs. Paintings can be displayed in museums
or galleries, or may be reproduced by lithography for a mass audience.
5. Becker describes myriad activities that qualify as support activities that en-
able art to be produced and received. This may include a number of mun-
dane activities such as ensuring a musical group receives beer and food
backstage, transporting artworks from one place to another, or generating
the electricity required to light a theater. Becker notes that, in this sense,
the art world is without boundaries (Becker 2008[1983]:35)—to
some extent almost everyone is an unwitting participant in an art world
at one point or another.
254 BEING URBAN
6. Artworks need audiences, at a minimum pay to attention to the artworks,

if not to pay for them outright.
7. Art requires people to create and maintain the rationale according to
which works of art are or should be produced. This role is generally filled
by critics and academics whose critiques and research provide an impor-
tant arbiter of what is “good” art, and give some instruction to neophyte
producers and audiences about the art they are making or consuming.
8. Everyone involved in producing works of art requires some degree of
training. While numerous artists are self-taught, as art worlds are estab-
lished, schools increasingly take on the job of teaching the techniques
required to produce works of art.
9. Finally, Becker notes that there needs to be a broad civic order to allow art
worlds to survive and thrive.
While none of Becker’s points specifically refer to the necessity of cities for
producing works of art, it should be clear that cities are ideal locations for this
constellation of activities and order. Cities amass dense collections of people
who can provide all of the inputs necessary to the creation of a piece of art,
and crucially include enough people that there are audiences for a diverse
range of artistic genres. If one wishes to build an art gallery, it makes sense
to do so in a place where one may be reasonably certain enough people will
visit to make it financially viable. Further, as we have seen in previous chap-
ters, cities are known for their tolerance of somewhat unusual lifestyles, and
artists with unusual temperaments can more easily fit in. Recall the flamboy-
ance of Basquiat, or Warhol’s shocking white mop-top, or the brash attitudes
of film actors, and consider how much more in place they seem in New York
and Los Angeles than they would in most small towns or suburbs.
This is not to say that art is not made in out-of-the-way places. Indeed,
some of the best-known art worlds are rural arts colonies, like Big Sur in
California or the Byrdcliffe colony in upstate New York. But while the dra-
matic output of such places is dependent on the thick networks of artists
who live there, we should also note that these places tend to be reasonably
close to big cities—Big Sur and Byrdcliffe are just a couple hours’ drive from
San Francisco and New York City, respectively. Residents who need supplies
or access to markets or performance venues depend in part on the big city
art worlds.
A number of sociological studies of artistic production have highlighted
the important role that particular cities play in the creation of great art. In
describing the constitution of particular art worlds, they show us how these
worlds make use of the densities of cities. Even the constitution of a genius
artist, like Beethoven, can be shown to be dependent in part on the city where
he lived—Vienna.
Tia DeNora (1995) traces Beethoven’s biography in her masterly socio-
logical study of his artistic output, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius.
Subtitled “Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803,” DeNora’s work shows
how Beethoven’s move from Bonn to the more cosmopolitan Vienna was
absolutely crucial to the development of his compositional style, as well as to
the fame he enjoyed in his lifetime and his canonization as a musical genius
in subsequent years. A particularly crucial dimension of Vienna’s musical art
world was the significant number of private patrons who could provide money
and an audience to a composer like Beethoven—“twenty-one families of prin-
ces, seventy of counts, and fifty of barons (altogether about a thousand individ-
uals); this group, plus members of the then growing newly ennobled ‘second
society,’ made up approximately . . . 2,611 people” (DeNora 1995:20).
Coupled with a new ideology among the upper classes that saw “serious music”
as an important pursuit, Vienna was an ideal location for Beethoven to dissemi-
nate his musical ideas and make a reasonable living.
Additional organizational changes served to enhance the possibilities of
Beethoven presenting more complicated music and finding a wider audience.
First, the patronage of music by Vienna’s upper-class citizens—not only roy-
alty but an expanding middle class—allowed for the development of a profes-
sional class of musicians. Rather than being house servants who happened to
be reasonably proficient at playing an instrument, concert musicians were
now “emancipated” musicians (46). Such professionals could now play the
more technically demanding pieces Beethoven was composing. Second,
public concerts began to take shape—music moved out of the small social
events of aristocrats who had their own performing groups and into a realm
approachable by the middle class. “Now,” DeNora writes, “with less of an
economic barrier to music participation, those who would not have been able
to keep any form of kapelle [musical group] . . . could engage in musical life by
purchasing a subscription ticket or by hosting or attending a private concert”
(46). Thus, Beethoven’s music was exposed to a broader—not to mention
more lucrative—audience.
As the audiences for music grew, aristocrats took an even greater interest in
aligning themselves with the best music, composers, and musicians. Through
his social ties to Haydn and others, Beethoven was able to position himself as
uniquely suited to taking on the mantle of an artistic genius, to compose and
perform works that would receive broad acclaim in Viennese society.
Another dimension of Vienna’s musical art world helped to cement Beet-
hoven’s reputation and further his creation: the musical instrument industry.
256 BEING URBAN
Vienna was one of a handful of centers in Europe for the production of

pianos. Beethoven’s playing called for an instrument louder and more tolerant
of heavy-handed playing than he found contemporary pianos. In Vienna, he
had access to piano maker Andreas Streicher. Streicher custom made pianos
for Beethoven, and Beethoven was increasingly pleased with the results, writing
to Streicher that “I am delighted, my dear fellow, that you are one of the few
who realize and perceive that, provided one can feel the music, one can also
make the pianoforte sing” (DeNora 1995:176). DeNora writes:
What Beethoven wanted was a piano capable of a more resonating (less harplike)
tone, of registering nuances of touch (“to produce my own tone”), and of with-
standing a greater force. Eventually, this led to triple-strung pianos with a firmer
action. (DeNora 1995:176)
And her broader point here is that the piano thus developed became Streich-
er’s model for future pianos. As Beethoven’s reputation grew, so did the
importance of this new, more robust piano in Western music.
Altogether, DeNora shows us how important the city of Vienna was to the
constitution of Beethoven’s music and its subsequent reception. He cannot
be adequately understood, she notes, “without examining the construction
of a cultural, organizational, and technological environment for Beethoven’s
talent and its perception in Vienna” (DeNora 1995:187).
So as DeNora’s work makes clear, cities were key to artistic production in
the early modern era. This only became more true as industrialization created
great metropolises and as a culture industry grew to feed the increasing leisure
time needs of the industrial workers and a burgeoning middle class. Studies of
the industrial era show further how cities cemented their reputation as centers
of the arts. One study that focuses on Berlin at the same time that Simmel was
observing it (as we discussed in Chapter 2) makes clear that while Berlin was
indeed a cacophonous, bustling metropolis that engendered a blasé attitude
in many of its denizens, it was also an important center for the passionate
practices of artists.
Eric Weitz’s Weimar Germany shows how Berlin provided fertile ground
for a flourishing art world in the early twentieth century. Weitz observes that
the Weimar period in Germany, from the end of World War I in 1919 until
the economic crisis and rise of the Nazis in 1933, was one of immense artistic
production. Its artists, writers, and architects have had a long-lasting influ-
ence on Western culture, and many are still held up as exemplars of their craft.
The churning metropolis of Berlin was central in the cultural life of
Germany in this era. Of the city, Weitz writes:
Weimar was Berlin, Berlin Weimar. With more than four million residents, the
capital was by far the largest city in Germany, the second largest in Europe, a
megalopolis that charmed and frightened, attracted and repelled Germans and
foreigners alike. In the 1920s it was one of Germany’s and Europe’s great cul-
tural centers, the home of the Philharmonie, the State Opera, the Comic Opera,
scores of theaters, and a cluster of great museums, all located in the center of the
city. Berlin was a magnet for artists and poets, the young and ambitious. (Weitz
2007:41)
Among the artists and poets who lived or worked in Berlin during the
Weimar republic were playwright Bertolt Brecht; composer Kurt Weill; colla-
gists Hannah Höch and John Heartfield; photographer László Moholy-Nagy;
painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wassily Kandinsky; authors Thomas
Mann and Erich Maria Remarque; critic-philosophers Walter Benjamin, Ernst
Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer; and architects Erich Mendelsohn and Walter
Gropius. These artists fed off of—and fed on conflicts with—each other’s
ideas, and benefitted from Germany’s economic upswing in the 1920s as well
as its excellent educational system. And frequently, they did so in close prox-
imity to each other, especially in Berlin:
They inhabited a social world that prized erudition and was not, after all, so very
large. Brecht and Weill moved in theatrical, musical, and literary circles where, it
seems, everyone knew everyone else. They and Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer, and
others sat in cafes together and talked; sometimes they lived in the very same
neighborhoods in Berlin. . . . And virtually all of them . . . were connected to a
larger European world of cultural creativity. (Weitz 2007:293)
This last point is especially telling and important. Like Simmel (1971),
Weitz here is recognizing the importance of the cosmopolitan outlook
engendered by city life. Many urban denizens have a tendency to shed their
provincial ties and lead lives as citizens of the world. This is particularly impor-
tant to artists, who are often trying to confront transcendent issues of the
human condition. It is not surprising that the artists who we remember,
whose books we continue to read, whose paintings or collages hang in gal-
leries around the world, whose plays are translated and performed many years
after their death, are those who lived in cities like Berlin and took on a cosmo-
politan attitude.
A study of a different city—Paris—from the same time period, makes even
clearer the role that urban institutions play in fomenting an art world. Among
the varied subcultures described by Mark Abrahamson in his book Urban
Enclaves are the American artists and writers who flocked to Paris in the
258 BEING URBAN
1920s. American residents of Paris in this period, and in the Montparnasse

neighborhood in particular, included “the young Alexander Calder,
Josephine Baker, Man Ray, William Faulkner, Aaron Copland, and other of
the twentieth century’s most notable American artists, and composers”
(Abrahamson 2006:139). In part because they had helped France defeat the
Germans in World War I, in part because the city was beautiful and relatively
inexpensive, and in part because they found less bigotry against racial minor-
ities and homosexuals, American artists found Paris quite welcoming. But
Paris also offered certain institutions necessary to the Americans’ artistic pro-
duction. Some of these were formal institutions, such as the American Baptist
Center, where expats could use the gym, or the American Conservatory of
Music, where Copland studied composition. But Abrahamson argues that
even more important were some less formal organizations. Places that artists
could get together, exchange ideas, drink, and argue gave them spaces in
which to hone their creative proclivities.
Such other places included the bookstore Shakespeare and Co. The store’s
proprietor, American expat Sylvia Beach, allowed patrons to browse freely and
read without purchasing new works in English. She also used her connections
to help authors, as when she facilitated the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Cafes and bars were also central to the interactions that helped the American
artistic community in Paris flourish. In particular, Abrahamson singles out the
Dome Café and the Dingo Bar. The Dome provided a cheap repast to impover-
ished artists as well as a sort of community center. Certain Americans, such as
painters George Biddle and Jules Pascin, made the Dome such a regular haunt
that they sent “messages, gifts, keys, and so on to each other” at the Dome, so
sure were they that their compatriots could be found there sooner or later
(Abrahamson 2006:144). On a typical evening, painters could be found “argu-
ing about geometric shapes and the true meaning of love” (Abrahamson
2006:145). The Dingo Bar, with its amicable English bartender Jimmy Charters
also, proved a popular destination for Americans, writers in particular. Not only
did the Dingo provide a bartender’s sympathetic ear and a venue for drunken
shenanigans. It also was a key location for network building among the writers:
Abrahamson notes that Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo.
Though their relationship would prove somewhat tumultuous, it is also among
the more storied friendships in the history of English literature.
Though Abrahamson goes on to note that in later years, the community of
American artists in Paris exhibited a disturbingly high degree of disorganiza-
tion and concomitantly high suicide rates, his sketch also demonstrates the
importance the community had to American culture in the twentieth century.
While it lasted, the enclave of Americans made the most of their network of
friends and institutions, a network that depended on the density of a city like
Paris. Again, this example demonstrates how important a city can be to the
development and cohesion of an art world.
Studies of more contemporary urban art worlds continue to find that cities
play a vital role in artistic production. Nicholas Dempsey’s (2008, 2010)
work on jazz musicians in Chicago shows how that city provides a vital center
for jazz musicians to hone their craft. In particular, jazz’s institution of the
jam session provides a space for musicians to learn from each other, meet
new collaborators, and practice their art. Dempsey writes that jam sessions are
[i]mportant to jazz musicians, not only as a space to have fun and collaborate with
each other but also as a place to learn the art of jazz and a place to network with
other musicians. In jazz, jam sessions involve musicians getting together and play-
ing compositions. These are often arcane jazz pieces written by past masters like
Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, but they are just as likely to include compositions
from the Great American Songbook—easily recognized songs of yesteryear like All
of Me or I’ve Got Rhythm. At the weekly jam sessions . . . any musician off the street
is free to participate in the performance. (Dempsey 2008:59)
While Dempsey regularly attended three of these weekly sessions, there are
over a half dozen such sessions in Chicago, and even more in jazz meccas like
New York and New Orleans. Ample evidence from the history of jazz perfor-
mance shows that the urban agglomeration of jazz musicians has enabled the
existence of these sessions, and in turn, they have provided the loci for major
innovations in the music. Cities provide dense enough audiences to give a
community of musicians employment. But those paid gigs tend to demand
that musicians refrain from much deviation from familiar melodies. By pro-
viding safe spaces for experimentation, jam sessions have allowed jazz to
remain a breathing, ever-changing art form. In New York, innovations have
ranged from the bebop innovations of the 1940s by players such as Charlie
Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Lopes 2002) to avant-garde experimentation in
downtown lofts in the 1970s and beyond (Osby 2003).
This latter loft scene also provides us one last example of the vitality cities
give to art worlds. Anne Fensterstock has documented the transitions of vari-
ous neighborhoods in New York, the SoHo loft scene being one of the most
important. In part, artists were pulled to SoHo because of the wide open loft
spaces and the low rents:
Artist refugees from Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side therefore
eagerly sought out the open, unpartitioned working spaces of the abandoned
factories and sweatshops of SoHo. Old, dilapidated and small by modern
260 BEING URBAN
industry standards, they were huge in comparison to the tenement alternatives

and, despite their lack of adequate heat, ventilation, plumbing or electrical sys-
tems, they were not that much less comfortable to live in. And the price was
right. With their properties no longer in demand by the legitimate tenants they
were zoned for, landlords of the empty spaces were in no position to drive a hard
bargain with the only bidder on an essentially illegal deal. As a result, up until
the mid-1960s, 2,500 square feet of unobstructed, light-filled space could often
be had for as little as $90 a month. (Fensterstock 2013:53)
Fensterstock demonstrates throughout her book how such migrations to

neighborhoods are a common theme throughout the history of various art
scenes in New York, with relatively poor artists moving to low-rent districts.
The artists are then driven out by gentrification in subsequent years, as the
now-hip neighborhoods become hot tickets on the real estate market.
But Fensterstock also shows us that the story is a bit more complicated
than rent. After all, if it was just cheap rent they were after, myriad artists’
individual real estate decisions would likely drive them to various spots on a
city’s fringe, isolating one from another. But Fensterstock notes that “if an
artist’s studio, a gallery or a not-for-profit exhibition program is situated in
a hopelessly inaccessible location, very few in the art world audience will go
there” (Fensterstock 2013:23). And perhaps more to the point, harkening
back to our discussion in Chapter 3, artists, like other city residents, desire
community. Fensterstock drives this point home:
One of the strongest factors that surfaced during my five years of researching
this topic is the notion of arts professionals colonizing in like-minded commun-
ities. In my own interviews with present-day artists (struggling and no-longer-
struggling), with directors of both underfunded nonprofit organizations and
megamillion-dollar revenue dealers, the need for proximity, collegiality, and
mutual support was palpable.
Visual arts workers’ stock-in-trade is essentially ephemeral, not concrete; it is
psychic rather than physical. The worth of the “product” is measured in aes-
thetic, intellectual or otherwise intangible terms. For many artists working alone
in their studios, the result is an interiority and isolation that proves unsettling at
best and terrifying at worst. Fundamentally visual communicators, artists still
need language (their own or that of a studio visitor), reaction (from collectors
or critics visiting their exhibitions), debate (about the process, not just the prod-
uct), support (when a work is floundering or a show bombs) and confirmation
(when the reverse is happily the case). (Fensterstock 2013:21–22)
Thus, her findings gel with Becker’s notion of art worlds: arts are not just
produced in isolation, but rather within a network of amicable producers.
These findings also fit our more general understandings of the important role
community plays in cities, providing a buffer against anomie and isolation.
And this allows Fensterstock to understand why, though the specific neigh-
borhoods where art is centered have continually changed since the 1950s,
artists have continually gravitated toward each other. As the subtitle to her
book notes, a number of iconic neighborhoods have been home to important
artists and galleries, “from SoHo to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond.” But
throughout, New York has remained an art mecca.
As our brief review has shown here, cities are often homes for artists. But
we should also keep sight of the fact that they are destinations for the lovers
of art, and that art has provided a welcome respite for many from the troubles
of workaday urban life. As we will explore in the next section, sociologists
have increasingly been paying attention to the importance of the arts in draw-
ing people to cities and particular neighborhoods, and to how the consump-
tion of the arts is a crucial dimension of many people’s experience of the city.
ARTS CONSUMPTION IN CITIES

First, if we look back to how early urbanists thought they could cure the ills
they considered endemic to cities, we will find that the arts have been per-
ceived as an important aspect of being urban for some time. While settlement
houses were often focused on maintaining the health and well-being of immi-
grants, providing vocational education and lessons in home economics, we
will also find that arts and crafts were an important dimension of settlement
house programs. Such activities were seen as a wholesome alternative to par-
ticipation in the various vices cities had to offer and as counters to the debili-
tating conditions endemic to factory labor. For example, Jane Addams’s Hull
House settlement in Chicago offered a variety of artistic programs, from dis-
plays of photographs and paintings curated by the Art Institute of Chicago
to classes in engraving and drama. Of her perception of the importance of
the arts in people’s lives, Addams wrote:
It has been pointed out many times that Art lives by devouring her own off-
spring and the world has come to justify even that sacrifice, but we are unforti-
fied and unsolaced when we see the children of Art devoured, not by her, but
by the uncouth stranger, Modern Industry, who, needlessly ruthless and brutal
to her own children, is quickly fatal to the offspring of the gentler mother.
And so schools in art for those who go to work at the age when more fortunate
young people are still sheltered and educated, constantly epitomize one of the
haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of this most precious
262 BEING URBAN
human faculty, this consummate possession of civilization? When we fail to pro-

vide the vessel in which it may be treasured, it runs out upon the ground and is
irretrievably lost. (Addams 1912:382–383)
On a perhaps grander scale, the scions of the Gilded Age also worried that
urban life in the United States was too focused on the pursuit of the almighty
dollar, and that serious culture was being neglected in lieu of petty entertain-
ment. Lawrence Levine (1988) observed that the need for fine art was often
framed in religious or quasi-religious terms. Levine cites a Reverand Frederick
W. Sawyer, who in 1860 opined that “[i]f we want to drive far from us, vice
and crime—if we want to outbid the wine-cup and the gaming-table we must
adorn . . . We must adorn our parks and gardens; adorn our churches and
public edifices. We must have something to claim the attention, to mould
the taste, to cultivate” (quoted in Levine 1988:150). To that end, many cities
saw the founding of important institutions for the presentations of the arts in
the late nineteenth century. Though Levine argues that the broader aim of
using such institutions as the Boston Atheneum and New York’s Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art was often corrupted from providing a public good to
defending and enshrining the culture enjoyed by the upper classes, urban
publics continued to demand, and often receive, access to these collections.
The Met, at the urging of New York politicos and the editorializing of the
New York Times, opened its doors to the public on Sundays in 1891 (at which
time few working people had any day beside Sunday for leisure). The initial
opening was greeted with a crowd of 12,000 people. Though some were dis-
turbed at their lack of upper-class decorum, the Times noted that the crowds’
enjoyment of the art was palpable, and ultimately not much different than
those of the Met’s weekday patrons (Levine 1988:183). By the turn of the
twentieth century, many cities were offering arts destinations such as these,
offering high-culture diversions to educate and delight urban denizens, many
of whom were otherwise toiling in the factories that were casting the United
States as an industrial superpower.
While cities like New York and Boston of the nineteenth and much of the
twentieth centuries used art as a diversion from their more important eco-
nomic bases as manufacturing and transportation hubs, in the late twentieth
century, those traditional industrial economies largely broke down. Contem-
porary cities in the United States and other developed nations now largely
base their economies in the service sector, and industrial production has
moved offshore (see, for example, Sassen 2012). Now, the arts and entertain-
ment form a vibrant part of cities’ economic core, and they attract new resi-
dents and tourists to cities to partake of artistic offerings. Sociologist Terry
Nichols Clark has gone so far as to call cities “entertainment machines” (Clark
2011). In response to arguments by Logan and Molotch and others that a
city is a “growth machine” (see Chapter 7), perceived by various rentiers
and others as gaining vitality by constant growth in terms of real estate and
business development, Clark argues that others perceive the city as a site to
be consumed. While part of that consumption is wrapped up in experiences
like hanging out in the park or a coffee shop, or ogling and buying the wares
of a city’s shopping districts, a powerful aspect of that consumption involves
taking in the arts that a city has to offer. Clark is able to quantify this effect—
considering population growth from 1977 to 1995, he finds that after natural
factors (warm temperatures, light rainfall, and proximity to the coast), the next
most important predictors of growth are consumption venues—in particular
restaurants and live venues for artistic performances (Clark 2011:139).Various
studies have investigated how artistic consumption plays out in the lives of urban
residents and visitors alike.
In a pair of books on urban nightlife, David Grazian has explored the ways
that people consume the city by going out to clubs and bars. In Chapter 4, we
discussed his book On the Make, which traced the various ways young people
find enjoyment in each other’s company in nights out on the town. In the
spaces discussed in that book, while clearly people’s focus is their efforts at
finding interesting mates, it is noteworthy that this often takes place while
consuming musical performances. In his previous book, Blue Chicago,
Grazian (2003) trained his sociological eye specifically on the role of music
in a city’s nightlife. In Blue Chicago, Grazian writes of Chicago’s blues music
scene and of how it is consumed by different groups of fans, both casual and
devoted. Here he makes clear that for many listeners, music is a crucial dimen-
sion of the Chicago experience.
Grazian argues that the blues are seen as part of the “authentic” experience
of Chicago—a sort of essential, home-grown facet of the culture of the city.
As one may go to New Orleans to enjoy Dixieland and jambalaya, or seek
out barbecue and R&B in Memphis, blues music is perceived as an important
avenue through which to experience Chicago, on par with a trip to the lake-
front or eating deep-dish pizza. The city sells the blues to residents and tou-
rists alike. The city government sponsors blues performances at the Chicago
Cultural Center, hosts a large annual festival in Grant Park, and even offers a
blues- and jazz-oriented bus tour among its offerings of local neighborhood
tours.
For a twenty-six-dollar ticket price, tour buses escort guests from the Chicago
Cultural Center to the ethnic enclave of their choice. Upon arrival, such
264 BEING URBAN
travelers explore the urban terrain of the city as they consume . . . the blues her-
itage of the South Side’s Bronzeville district. By capitalizing on exoticized
notions of ethnicity, community, and urban space, these “motorcoach expedi-
tions” transform local communities and their landscapes of everyday social inter-
action into commodified tourist attractions. (Grazian 2005:201)
Such experiences are highly desirable, to both locals and out-of-towners.

Through their enjoyment of homegrown arts—here, the blues in particular—
people come to gain a sense that they have gotten in touch with the “real”
Chicago. Grazian judiciously advises us to be aware of the very crafted, racial-
ized, and commodified presentation of the blues—he describes a number of
ways in which the music, far from being an unfiltered presentation by an indige-
nous folk, is outrageously crafted to excite and titillate paying audiences. But he
also shows that it is a very real and important part of many people’s experience of
Chicago. Describing a typical out-of-towner’s experience at a blues club,
Grazian notes that club visitors are valuing not just the music itself, but the
entire context of its performance as Chicago blues—“By drawing on celebrated
images of Chicago’s authenticity, Dave [a business traveler] consumes the blues
club as a means of experiencing that legacy firsthand, and in some ways, such an
experience overshadows the significance he places on the actual music per-
formed there” (Grazian 2005:69).
A different consideration of Chicago also shows how the arts can draw
people to a neighborhood, and indeed to transform it relatively rapidly.
In Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, Richard Lloyd
(2010) traces how one particular neighborhood in Chicago, Wicker Park, was
transformed from a rundown, hardscrabble neighborhood to a hip, bourgeois
destination in large part through the efforts of artists. While we looked at the
subcultural status of this neighborhood’s denizens in Chapter 5, here we
should consider how subcultural cache can be commodified.
While some argue that urban spaces have undergone a standardizing pro-
cess of “Disneyfication,” wherein different cities are made into relatively sim-
ilar playgrounds for adults (Lloyd 2010:129), Lloyd shows us that the process
is somewhat different on the ground in Wicker Park. As bohemians—artists,
poets, musicians, and various other kinds of nonconformists—moved into
the neighborhood, they brought with them eclectic restaurants, nightclubs,
cafes, and various performance spaces. Far from the chain “Disneyfied” ven-
ues like Planet Hollywood or Hard Rock Café located near Chicago’s down-
town Loop, these places pride themselves on their eclecticism and ties to the
local neighborhood community. The various artists and bohemians who
own and staff these venues often deride “yuppies,” the young urbanite
professionals who work in downtown office buildings as accountants, bond

traders, or perhaps in advertising. The yuppies are perceived as materialists,
uninterested in arts or community values. But Lloyd observes that the yuppies
are an essential part of the economic makeup of the neighborhood, buying art
at the galleries, coffee at the cafes, drinks at the nightclubs that provide the
artists with the jobs they need to pay the rent while they try to make it as artists.
Such patronage is part and parcel of the contemporary city. Lloyd writes
that “the ability of the global city to capture and retain ‘talent’ hinges in part
on responsiveness to the aesthetic dispositions, typically ‘omnivorous’ tastes
that include fondness for the Chicago Bulls as well as off-Loop theater, or at
least the idea of off-Loop theater” (Lloyd 2010:130). “Off-loop” theater is
Chicago’s equivalent to off-Broadway: low budget productions with few if
any “name” actors. Here, Lloyd is using it as a synecdoche for the broader
eclectic, off-mainstream arts tendered in neighborhoods like Wicker Park.
The implication is that for many residents of the contemporary city, such arts
are a vital experience, a powerful draw to a new kind of urbanism.
A similar process is going on in some smaller cities like Albuquerque,
Asheville, and Austin. Joshua Long (2010) looked at the movement to “Keep
Austin Weird” in the face of an influx of well-paid tech workers. The weird-
ness of Austin, much like that found by Lloyd in Wicker Park, is tied to locally
owned bars and stores, and also to the arts and music. Austin particularly has
gained renown for its music scene. The storied nightclub dubbed Armadillo
World Headquarters; the long-running PBS music program Austin City Lim-
its; artists like Steve Miller, Willie Nelson, and Stevie Ray Vaughan; and the
huge South by Southwest music festival all helped to brand Austin as one of
the nation’s premier sites for musical production. The city in fact calls itself
the “Live Music Capital of the World” (Long 2010:144). Combined with a
thriving university and several tech businesses, the artsy city began to attract
a large class of educated, well-off residents. But it came with a cost:
The Austin mystique attracts new jobs and new immigrants to the city. . . . The
affluent can afford the rising cost of living and rising property taxes. New resi-
dents, attracted by the city’s artistic idiosyncrasies, end up displacing the musi-
cians, artists, and creative slackers, who are suddenly forced to spend more
time worrying about paying the rent and less time creating music, alleyway
murals, and bizarre yard art displays. (Long 2010:84)
To resist this change, a movement to “Keep Austin Weird”—to retain its off-
kilter, artsy bent—was begun. But Long shows that in general, the displace-
ment seems almost inevitable.
266 BEING URBAN
This new kind of urbanism, with its focus on arts and lifestyles, has become
something of a tail that now wags the dog. Rather than the arts following
behind economic development, or filling in the edges of cities where the core
has been populated by moneymaking concerns, in recent years, urban leaders
have recognized the power of the arts to drive development. As Lloyd showed
in Wicker Park, and Long in Austin, arts can attract a rich population to a
given neighborhood. Others have argued that the arts can drive talented pro-
fessionals to choose to live in one city over another with fewer interesting
offerings. In the next section, we will consider the impact of such thinking
on contemporary cities.
THE ARTS AND URBAN PUBLIC POLICY

Beyond the fact that people in cities are clearly making use of cities’ arts
and cultural resources, that experiencing art is for many a crucial dimension
of the experience of the contemporary city, many thinkers are now realizing
that the arts may be in many respects a driver of urban economies. In The City
as an Entertainment Machine, Terry Nichols Clark (2011) details how this
view has come to drive certain aspects of public policy, as economists, geogra-
phers, sociologists, and urban planners become increasingly attuned to the
fact that arts provide destinations for tourist dollars, and drive well-paid resi-
dents to live in certain cities or neighborhoods. This contrasts with a tradi-
tional economic or materialist view that the drivers of urban growth are
primarily work and production (that is, the production of goods or services
or even less tangible products like financial instruments such as bonds and
derivatives). Clark and others focus upon “consumption, amenities, and cul-
ture as drivers of urban policy” (2011:2), and considerable evidence has
mounted to show that these kinds of drivers really do matter for economic
and population growth in cities.
Another leading advocate of this position is Richard Florida. Florida, par-
ticularly in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, argues that a strong core
of creative people is necessary for a city to succeed in today’s economic and
cultural landscape. This so-called creative class includes artists and musicians,
but also people in intellectual careers such as advertising or even the law.
Florida’s studies have demonstrated a link between the presence of these crea-
tives within a city and rises in income, employment levels, real estate develop-
ment, and home values. In general, Florida identifies at least two mechanisms
linking the presence of members of the creative class to these phenomena.
In part, the link is due to the attraction that people have to the works of
various kinds of artists—art galleries and musical performances are among
the urban amenities that well-off people seek out during their free time. For
example, in a focus group Florida held with a group of people in creative
industries, he questioned how they made locational decisions, such as how
they chose to consider working for a firm in one city over another city. They
told him that among other factors like the natural environment and commu-
nity spirit, a quality place has interesting things going on—“street life, café
culture, arts, music, and people engaging in outdoor activities” (Florida
2002:232). In particular, Florida, like Grazian, focuses on music’s ability to
craft a city’s identity as a home that members of the creative class enjoy:
Music is a key part of what makes a place authentic, in effect providing a sound
or “audio identity.” Audio identity refers to the identifiable musical genre or
sound associated with local bands, clubs and so on that make up a city’s music
scene: blues in Chicago, Motown in Detroit, grunge in Seattle, Austin’s Sixth
Street . . . Music regularly soundtracks our search for ourselves and for spaces
in which we can feel at home. (Florida 2002:228–229)
Florida also proposes that the presence of artists within a city acts as a signal
that the city is relatively open or welcoming to diverse groups of people.
In essence, signaling such openness broadens the attraction of a city to diverse
populations, including ethnic minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ popula-
tions. Florida shows, for example, that cities with larger high-tech economic
centers, with firms involved in designing things like computer hardware and
software, also tend to be places that are tolerant of people who participate in
different subcultures. His explanation:
It is not because high-tech industries are populated by great numbers of bohe-

mians and gay people. Rather, artists, musicians, gay people and the members
of the Creative Class in general prefer places that are open and diverse. Low
entry barriers are especially important because today places grow not just
through higher birth rates (in fact virtually all U.S. cities are declining on this
measure), but by their ability to attract people from the outside. (Florida
2002:250)
Interestingly, elsewhere Florida has pointed out that big-ticket, traditional

high-culture venues like operas, symphonies, and large art museums don’t
seem to be highly correlated with a city having a sizeable creative class or
growing tech industry (Florida 2002:71). Rather, more grounded, populist
art creation in small galleries, or local music played at nightclubs, seems to
268 BEING URBAN
be the sort of production that goes hand in hand with the general mix of
amenities most attractive to the creative class.
That said, the simplified message that has been received by many cities
inspired by the work of Florida, Clark, and others is that the arts drive growth.
Indeed, municipal leaders can be found touting the message that they must
provide significant support to the arts if the city wishes to compete in today’s
consumer-oriented economy. In a report commissioned by the Mayors’ Insti-
tute on City Design, a group that includes representatives from the National
Endowment for the Arts as well as the United States Conference of Mayors,
researchers put an exclamation point on the enthusiasm many municipalities
have for rebuilding cities using arts and culture amenities (Markusen and
Gadwa 2010). The report, entitled Creative Placemaking, encourages
municipal leaders to revitalize places with attractions like art festivals, gal-
leries, artists’ studios, and theaters. The authors describe the process of cre-
ative placemaking thusly:
Public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical
and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cul-
tural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuve-
nates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public
safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.
In turn, these creative locales foster entrepreneurs and cultural industries that gen-
erate jobs and income, spin off new products and services, and attract and retain
unrelated businesses and skilled workers. Together, creative placemaking’s livabil-
ity and economic development outcomes have to potential to radically change
the future of American towns and cities. (Markusen and Gadwa 2010:3)
Much of the economic impact described by Markusen and Gadwa in their

report would come from the direct contributions that American arts make
to our exports—by their estimates over $45 million in 2008. They encourage
places to tap into this export market by making places for artists and other cre-
ative individuals. But like Florida, they also point to the indirect effects the
arts have in attracting young, hip, creative workers in hot industries like soft-
ware development. To that end, Creative Placemaking includes numerous
recommendations to civic leaders: designing programs that accentuate dis-
tinctive local practices or places (like Grazian’s blues clubs above); garnering
popular support for cultural initiatives; getting financial support from local
private sector actors; forging links between politicians, business, and artists.
Their case studies of places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Cleveland, Ohio,
make it seem like these kind of creative place initiatives might be panaceas
for contemporary American cities.
Saint Petersburg, Florida, provides an interesting case of a city that takes

these kind of messages to heart. In in 2010, the local paper remarked that
the city administration was reading The Rise of the Creative Class. They noted
that the book “made its rounds at St. Petersburg city hall this year, wending
all the way to Mayor Bill Foster’s desk” (Van Sickler 2010). The city has
devoted considerable tax dollars toward trying to polish their image as an arts
city. From 2000 through 2011 the city doled out $3.3 million to support a
range of nonprofit arts groups in the city, including everything from the city’s
Museum of Fine Arts, to children’s theater groups, to a literary festival at a
local college (Dempsey 2011).
In a somewhat extraordinary move, the Saint Petersburg city government
also provided a sizeable contribution to the building of a new space for a
museum devoted to the art of Salvador Dali. After roughly 20 years in its pre-
vious location, the museum secured a new location, closer to downtown, in
2004. The museum began building an ambitious new home for the collection
without having completed the capital fundraising campaign. After the economic
downturn in 2008, the institution was about $5 million short of the $36 million
needed to complete the already-begun building. The city made up $2.5 million
of that difference, while the rest came from county funds (Dempsey 2011).
In addition to arguing for the indirect positive effects of generating an
artistic climate, per Florida, Saint Petersburg also commissioned a study tout-
ing the direct benefits of artistic institutions to the local economy, arguing
that these institutions contribute over $23 million to the local economy each
year (Ebrahimpour, Collins, and Corton 2010). Such studies tend to suggest
that the presence of arts institutions in a city significantly boosts the economy
by drawing in people who pay for tickets as well as giftshop swag and thus
payroll a museum staff that pays taxes to the city. They also assume that the
people who visit museums often spend money in other venues in the city—
they may stay overnight at a hotel, purchase souvenirs at local shops, and eat
their meals at downtown restaurants. The generation of this additional money
is referred to as a “multiplier effect,” so-called because the dollars spent at the
museum are “multiplied” when patrons also spend money at other venues.
While some multiplier effects are certainly plausible, a number of economists
have serious doubts about their accuracy (Markusen and Schrock 2006; Sea-
man 1987). They point out that a significant proportion of the money
included in multiplier effects may have been spent in the city anyway—if a
couple comes to Saint Petersburg to visit their Aunt Bea, the trip to the
museum may just be an aside. They could have gone on a fishing trip or to
the movies instead, and in any case, would have had to buy food and stay at
a hotel because there is no guest room in Aunt Bea’s condo.
270 BEING URBAN
But regardless of the voices of doubters, it is undeniable that Saint Peters-

burg is far from alone among cities who see the arts as the key to future eco-
nomic prosperity. At Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center, researchers found that
there was a “boom” in the building of museums, theaters, and performing arts
centers in U.S. cities from the 1990s through the 2000s, especially between
1998 and 2001 (Woronkowicz et al. 2012). The motivations for such buildings
were diverse—while some were built because a symphony or a ballet felt that
they could not perform up to world-class standards in the existing facilities to
which they had access, others were clearly built out of a motivation to positively
impact the surrounding community. In some cases that meant using a perform-
ing arts center to try to boost a neighborhood with a flagging economy. Look-
ing specifically at multi-use performing arts centers, the authors noted that
a large majority of these projects used economic impact arguments as rationales

for building. Included in these arguments was the implicit assumption that by
building a cultural facility in a blighted area, it would automatically attract and
sustain a substantial audience who would not otherwise have ventured there.
(Woronkowicz et al. 2012:21)
Unfortunately, they also found that “[n]ine times out of ten, these assump-
tions were not accurately tested, and when the facility project was completed,
the desired swarm of activity never materialized” (Woronkowicz et al.
2012:21–22).
Other cities, like Roanoke, Virginia, had even loftier goals. Wishing to
emulate the so-called “Bilbao effect,” where the Frank Gehry-designed
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, ignited a cultural and economic
renaissance for that city, some American cities spent big on large, flashy muse-
ums. In Roanoke that meant spending $68 million to expand the Taubman
Museum of Art into an “architectural landmark so as to redefine the city’s iden-
tity and boost economic development” (Woronkowicz et al. 2012:26).
Unfortunately, the museum, not unlike Saint Petersburg’s Dali, was not able
to raise adequate funds to pay for this renovation. This led to operating budgets
in the red, drastic increases in admissions feeds, and extensive layoffs.
Overall, the researchers from the Cultural Policy Center found that
between 1994 and 2008, there were 725 arts-oriented building projects with
values over $4 million each, projects that either enhanced the facilities of an
existing institution or built a new institution altogether. The median cost of
these projects was $11.3 million, and the total expenditure on these projects
was over $15.5 billion (Woronkowicz et al. 2012:9). Though enthusiasm
for these projects was always high at the start, the effects the projects have
had on their cities were quite mixed.
With respect to how the projects were funded, perhaps the best immediate
measure of the fiscal impact a project has on a city, the researchers found that,
in a subsample of projects, 60 percent of funding came from outside sources
such as foundation grants. Those projects represent a direct injection of money
to a local economy, but we must also note that 40 percent of those funds came
from local sources that would likely have been put to different uses close to
home. To measure broader community effects, the authors surveyed 444 differ-
ent arts organizations about the impact that new building projects had on their
cities. Though the respondents in these organizations might be expected to be
strong boosters for arts spending, the results of the survey were decidedly
mixed. While 88 percent of respondents agreed that a new project “makes the
city a more attractive place to live,” less than 70 percent saw the projects as
having an overall positive impact on the community (Woronkowicz et al.
2012:28–29). And ultimately only 23 percent of respondents “believed the
project opening was the key cause of new businesses in the area” (29).
Such results are surely disappointing to those who read of Florida’s or
Clark’s findings, and believe that arts are a sort of silver bullet that can kill
a city’s woes and promote a city to the creative class. But a closer read of
Florida’s work suggests that art is part of a total package—a city needs various
amenities to attract people, and often the institutions that draw or keep the
creative class are longstanding organizations like colleges and universities
(Florida 2002). More pointedly, economic geographer Enrico Moretti has
criticized narrow readings of Florida’s perspective and municipal leaders
who invest heavily in art while paying inadequate attention to other economic
sectors. He writes:
Florida’s prescription became a popular remedy as scores of public officials and

local policymakers embraced the idea that public redevelopment resources
should be mainly focused on improving city amenities to attract the “creative.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and are still being spent in commun-
ities across America, from Pittsburgh to Detroit, Cleveland to Mobile. . . . It is
certainly true that cities that have built a solid economic base in the innovation
sector are often lively, interesting, and culturally open-minded. However, it is
important to distinguish cause from effect. The history of successful innovation
clusters suggests that in many cases, cities became attractive because they
succeeded in building a solid economic base. (Moretti 2012:142)
Moretti goes on to cite examples—Seattle developed as a tech powerhouse

before it became a really cool place. Austin had a strong educational sector
long before the Sixth Street scene gained national notoriety. Despite big
and splashy cultural institutions, Cleveland still wallows in economic
272 BEING URBAN
stagnation. Internationally, Berlin is awash in interesting cultural offerings,

from late night dance clubs to multiple orchestras and zoos—but it suffers
from higher unemployment than anywhere else in Germany (Moretti
2012:144). Moretti does not deny that the arts are an important part of the
mix of a successful city—certainly the most successful cities, from San Fran-
cisco to Boston to New York, have amazing art scenes—but his findings sug-
gest that the arts cannot act alone to revitalize a place. Where an economic
base thrives, the arts will thrive as well.
CONCLUSION
Even if the arts do not provide a miracle cure to cities that are lagging eco-
nomically, it is clear that for many city dwellers, the arts are vital to the expe-
rience of urban life. Not only have cities proven to be key sites in the
production of art, providing artists with dense networks of like-minded artists
as well as institutions that support their creativity. Cities have acted as the
hubs for presenting the arts to the public, from grand, well-financed venues
such as fine art museums, operas, theaters, and symphonies to small galleries,
cafés, and nightclubs presenting experimental drama and music.
While our review of art worlds in cities has given us a sense that art has a long
history in the cities, it is clear that its role in a postindustrial society is perhaps
more important than ever. Now we witness the active plannings of arts districts,
and the expenditure of remarkable sums to make cities into arts destinations, aim-
ing to attract both well-off residents and tourists. Though the results of such
efforts to spur growth through the arts are mixed, it is clear that this developmen-
tal strategy is a major force that will change the face of cities for years to come.
In Chapter 10 we must consider still other powerful demographic, political,
and cultural forces that are reshaping cities. Perhaps the outstanding cultural
transition in the United States since the 1940s has been the suburbanization
of the country. There has been so much population movement to the suburbs
since World War II that many have wondered whether older cities can survive,
or whether we even need cities at all in a society so infused by information tech-
nologies. Social scientists have been obliged to consider the consequences for
American cities as we move into a postindustrial era. In Chapter 10 we focus
on suburbanization and the problems it has created for many cities, as well as
evidence that cities may be becoming more vital than ever to contemporary soci-
ety. As social scientists who see the health of the nation as inseparable from the
well-being of cities, we will need to think pragmatically about how to ensure a
vibrant future for our cities.
CHAPTER 10
New Urban Dynamics:

Gentrification, Suburbanization,
Globalization, and the
Federal Divestiture
T hroughout Being Urban, we have worked to demonstrate a fairly simple

thesis: that life in cities constitutes a special form of human existence. Though
we have shown throughout the text that various social forces affect our expe-
riences in cities, we have also worked to show that it is small-scale interactions
that form the greater structures that constitute city life. Those interactions
take place in finite communities, for the poor as well as the rich, in ways con-
ditioned by gender and race, on street corners, in art galleries and nightclubs,
at sports stadiums, and at the corner bodega.
We have also found a great deal of continuity in how city life affects
people’s interactions. From the earliest writings of Simmel or Park to contem-
porary analyses of gentrifying neighborhoods and nightlife, we have observed
that cities bring together diverse groups of people who must negotiate a pub-
lic order. In so doing, they often pursue a more cosmopolitan outlook than
their rural or exurban counterparts, and—excepting those most isolated in
poor neighborhoods—enjoy access to a broad range of opportunities:
economic, culinary, diversionary, or otherwise.
That said, a further key dimension of cities is that they are in a constant
state of change. Of course, Park and Burgess recognized this early on, as they
274 BEING URBAN
discussed the changes that occurred in each of their concentric rings as cities
grew, as some neighborhoods grew in size or value, as other areas declined.
Though we do not see cities changing in the same way that they tended to
in the 1920s when Park and Burgess observed them, we can point to certain
characteristic dimensions of change we can observe in many cities in the early
part of the twenty-first century.
In this chapter, we detail several of what sociologists believe are the most
important dynamics affecting cities today. First, we discuss globalization—
the increased interconnectedness of economies, information, and culture on
a global scale. The dynamics of globalization have fundamentally transformed
cities: some have become centers for a new economic order, some industrial
cities like Detroit have lost much of their productive economy to foreign
nations, and increased transnational flows have also ignited new waves of
migration. Second, we address the increased inequality in cities. While
inequality has been on the rise since the 1970s, it appears particularly pro-
nounced in cities, and is often especially notable in a job structure that is
bifurcated between highly compensated skilled service professions and
unskilled service jobs that barely pay subsistence wages. Next, we consider
issues of federal divestiture from financing urban programs in the United
States. Where once cities could rely on a relatively great degree of support
from the national tax base, that is no longer the case. Fourth, we consider
the resilience of mid-sized cities. Often forgotten in urban sociologies, or
consigned to failure as being unable to compete in a global economy, some
researchers are finding that mid-sized cities are in fact quite viable, and may
even be an ideal size for many of the functions of a postindustrial economy.
Finally, we consider the movement of the U.S. population in and out of
inner-city areas and suburbs. Where once we observed massive out-
migration from cities to suburbs, that trend has recently reversed. And where
we could once assume that suburbs were reasonably well-to-do, we have in
recent years observed the rise of low-income suburbs.
Let us first turn to our consideration of globalization. This greater inter-
connectedness across the globe, in particular in the economic sphere, has
powerful implications for all the other changes we discuss in this conclusion.
GLOBALIZATION
Perhaps the foremost force changing our urban dynamics is globalization.
The forces of globalization have been with us for centuries—Marx already
understood that capital was a force that could obliterate national boundaries:
NEW URBAN DYNAMICS 275
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . .
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. (Marx
and Engels 1948:12–13)
In recent years, this universal interdependence of nations has become nothing

if not more pronounced. The global ramifications of the United States’
mortgage crisis, natural gas disruptions in the Russia-Ukraine dispute, or of
Greece’s credit crisis have shown us all that economies worldwide are inextri-
cably linked.
Some commentators, like geographer David Harvey (2006), see the global
economy trending toward greater regionalization, as international govern-
mental associations take a larger role in regulating economic transactions
and as capital seeks new markets—both of labor and for commodities—and
new supply chains. Harvey posits that capital functions more or less the same
the world over, and seeks these markets and supplies in order to counter the
inevitable shocks produced by overproduction (as evinced in the housing
crisis) or, less frequently, shortages. He also notes that certain cities have
gained particular importance in these recent reshufflings of economic organi-
zation. Of the ramifications for places, Harvey writes:
Capitalistic hegemonic power has steadily shifted scales over time from the Italian
City States (like Venice and Genoa), through the intermediate organizational
forms of Holland and Britain, and, finally, to the United States. The most recent
bout of capitalist globalization has been accompanied by strong currents of reterri-
torialization reflecting changing transportation and scale pressures. Organizations
like the European Union, NAFTA, Mercosur, have become more salient at the
same time as urban regions (like Catalonia) and in some instances even quasi-city
states (Singapore and Hong Kong) have become vigorous centers of capitalist
endeavor. . . . Traditional nation-states have become . . . much more porous (par-
ticularly with respect to capital flow) and they have in some important respects
changed their functions (mainly towards the neo-liberal goal of establishing a
“good business climate” . . .). (Harvey 2006:105–106)
Harvey’s analysis suggests that the role of cities has changed considerably
during these latter waves of globalization. While some places now function
quasi-independently, almost as city-states, it is clear that the nation-state
grants cities more direct access to global in general. In a world where
economic focus is trained on the regional level, cities may not be able to rely
on a place in a national economic system. Nor may they rely on the assistance
276 BEING URBAN
of a national government in their own times of fiscal crisis, if indeed the

nation-state is more concentrated on aiding capitalist accumulation than on
maintaining the welfare of the polity.
Saskia Sassen’s research has further investigated the effects of globalization
on cities throughout the world (Sassen 2001, 2012). Sassen, rather than
focusing on capitalism in general as Harvey does, points specifically to the
effects of high finance on changing urban dynamics. She notes that the
tertiary sector of the economy—the service sector—has grown rapidly in all
places in the world since the 1970s. She notes that the part of the tertiary sec-
tor that deals in services to high finance has grown particularly rapidly. These
so-called “producer services” include “legal, financial, advertising, consulting,
and accounting services” (Sassen 2012:129). While we might imagine that as
this sector has taken off, cities in general would matter less: if the important
parts of the economy are concentrated in knowledge work, on services that
may be performed at the click of a button or consultations over a conference
call, won’t corporations simply move their offices to far-flung suburbs where
the rents are cheap? Sassen’s answer is a resounding “No.”
In fact, Sassen finds that certain cities have gained a more important role
than, perhaps, they ever have in terms of their contribution to the global
economy. She dubs a number of such cities “Global Cities,” and describes
them thusly:
Global cities are strategic sites for the management of the global economy and
the production of the most advanced services and financial operations that have
become key inputs for that work of managing global economic operations. The
growth of international investment and trade and the need to finance and service
such activities have fed the growth of these functions in major cities . . . [I]t is
precisely the combination of geographic dispersal of economic activities with
simultaneous system integration that gave cities a strategic role in the current
phase of the world economy. (Sassen 2012:34–35)
Sassen shows that these high-level services work best when they are nearby
to each other in space. But she also discusses the important caveat that only
certain cities can take on this role of the global city. In the United States, such
successful cities include New York, Chicago, and Miami. These cities concen-
trate banks, corporate headquarters, and the various producer services they
demand. On the other hand, old industrial cities in the United States and
Europe that do not have strong ties to the global economy have fallen behind.
This is not simply a coincidence. Sassen observes that the same globalization
that makes New York so important as a financial hub also allows industrial
concerns like car companies to use foreign labor to craft their goods.
Thus, she writes that “when Detroit lost many of its manufacturing jobs,
New York City gained specialized service jobs. This was in response to the
work of major auto manufacturing headquarters becoming increasingly com-
plicated and the increased demand for state-of-the-art legal, accounting,
finance, and insurance advice” (Sassen 2012:34).
This bifurcation of cities engendered by globalization is necessary for con-
temporary and future urbanists to understand the new dynamics of city sys-
tems (though, as we will see below, it may be a bit overstated). A further
dynamic of globalization affecting cities is the increased participation of
immigrants in the fabric of urban life. While this was commonplace to observe
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and helped spark early
interest in urban sociology as we saw in Chapter 3, immigration subsided
notably for most of the last century. Within the last 30 or so years, however,
global dynamics have once more encouraged a profound increase in immigra-
tion worldwide. In the United States, particularly after the relaxation of immi-
gration quotas in 1965, immigration dramatically increased. In particular, the
United States saw substantial waves of immigrants from Latin America and
Asia, amounting to about 11 million immigrants in the 1990s (Fischer and
Hout 2006). As of 2010, the U.S. Census estimated that about 40 million
Americans were foreign born, roughly 13 percent of the population (Grieco
et al. 2012). While an increasing proportion of those immigrants are settling
in the United States’ hinterland (Wuthnow 2013), cities are still the primary
destination for most immigrants. Sassen has pointed out that they form a sig-
nificant proportion of the many low-wage jobs that serve the very well-paid
workers in the producer services industry in global cities (Sassen 2001). But
immigrants also form an increasingly important part of the fabric of many
smaller cities, like Nashville. Unused to this new diversity, such cities are faced
with important challenges in incorporating new communities into the fabric
of urban life (Winders 2013).
BIFURCATION OF THE JOB STRUCTURE

As we detailed in Chapter 7, good jobs for working-class people have been
fleeing cities for almost 50 years now. While authors like Richard Florida tout
the rise of a “creative class” of knowledge workers who are highly paid and
experience a great level of autonomy in their positions (Florida 2002), others
point to the increasingly desperate situation experienced by working-class
laborers (for example, Newman 1999; Venkatesh 2006). As good-paying jobs
278 BEING URBAN
in manufacturing have disappeared, inner-city workers with poor educational

credentials are left with few decent options for earning money. The jobs that
are open to them run from work in fast food restaurants to jobs in the shadow
economy, such as providing childcare at home, to outright illicit activities
such as drug dealing.
We may argue that this is in fact a structural part of the contemporary
urban economy. Sassen has pointed to this in her work on the global city: as
manufacturing jobs have disappeared, global cities concentrate not only those
very well-paid jobs in producer services. They also demand low-paid service
work—anything from the baristas who serve coffee to accountants, to office
building cleaning staff, to the nannies that allow executive moms to return
to work soon after having children (Sassen 2012). John Koval writes of the
effects this has on the urban economy:
As wrenching as the transformation from a manufacturing economy to a service-

and information-based economy may be—in terms of occupational obsoles-
cence, re-training, learning new occupational and economic systems, and the
like—it might well be tolerable if the middle-class lifestyle of the majority could
be maintained. This does not appear to be the case. Wage gaps and increasing
inequality in the economy have been an item of public discussion and media
focus for some time now. The economic hourglass of the new economy greatly
exacerbates that trend. (Koval 2006:5)
Without some sustained public policy response to the challenges of this

extremely disparate distribution of wealth and income in our cities, there
can be little doubt that many children will continue to grow up in dangerous
neighborhoods, with poor educational chances and poor life chances. With-
out significant interventions from the public and private sectors, those chil-
dren will grow up to face the same hopeless lives filled with deprivation and
despair faced by their parents. Some cities are facing up to this task.
In Seattle, Washington, D.C., Santa Fe, and San Francisco, local govern-
ments have implemented significant raises to the minimum wage, ranging
up to $15 per hour in Seattle by 2018 (Wallace 2014). Though some com-
mentators worry that such increases in wages will cause businesses to lay off
workers or take their business to lower wage cities, evidence so far has sug-
gested that this scenario has not obtained. Reviewing the effects of over
10 years of raised minimum wages in San Francisco, Arindrajit Dube notes
that “[t]hat city currently requires a minimum wage of $10.55 per hour for
all workers within city limits and this new minimum wage has raised pay in
the bottom of the distribution. Yet employment growth does not appear to
have been adversely affected in that city relative to its surrounding areas, even
in a high-impact sector like restaurants” (Dube 2014:141).
Again, such moves are not uncontroversial. Many in the business commu-
nity strongly oppose increasing wages, and there is a certain logic to the argu-
ment that business can simply look elsewhere. On the other hand, we clearly
cannot afford to simply allow generations to trickle to the bottom of the eco-
nomic hourglass. For many urban residents, the status quo is simply not good
enough, and will not ensure the production of a viable urban United States in
the years to come.
FEDERAL DIVESTITURE
In part, the need to solve urban problems at the municipal level has been
engendered by a radical degree of divestiture from urban spending by the
federal government. Until the 1980s, the federal government played a signifi-
cant role in urban finances, through various block grants and by funding
agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD),
which worked to enhance housing options for poor people. Since the Reagan
administration, however, the funds made available to cities from the federal
government have steadily declined. In part, this reflects a move away from
cities and toward suburbs by the American population—and politicians tend
to steer tax dollars toward the places where their constituencies live. In part,
this also represents a more general change in political philosophy in the
United States, toward a privatization of public problems.
An example of such privatization can be found in our policies for housing
the worst-off poor. The federal government was once directly involved in pro-
viding housing for poor Americans, particularly in cities. Through HUD,
numerous projects replaced dilapidated tenement housing through the 1950s
and 1960s. Unfortunately, much of it was poorly designed, and the mainte-
nance of projects was often underfunded, to the extent that by the 1970s, some
of these projects were already being demolished (see, for example, Hyra 2008;
Jacobs 1961; Logan and Molotch 2007). The names of some of these projects,
like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini Green in Chicago, still induce cringes in
residents of those cities who remember the crime, broken windows, and broken
dreams associated with these failed projects. Beginning in the 1970s, and
expanded considerably since then, the federal government largely replaced its
place as a home builder with the provision of housing vouchers, often known
as “Section 8.” Thus, many of the former dwellers of housing projects are
allowed to seek apartments on the private market. However, the unfortunate
280 BEING URBAN
reality for many of those who receive the vouchers is that they do not provide
adequate money to rent housing in middle-class neighborhoods. Further, land-
lords may reject applications from potential tenants who receive the vouchers,
either fearing additional burdens of government inspections of housing quality
or fearing the stigmatized population of aid recipients. Thus, recipients often
cannot escape neighborhoods of chronic poverty, and continue to lose the
chance to strive for a better life (Hyra 2008).
More general federal funding for community development has also
declined. One key federal support for cities comes in the form of the Commu-
nity Development Block Grant (CDBG). Begun during the Nixon era, these
grants were used for various projects to enhance cities. Grants in the program
are given directly to municipal governments, and those governments have a
great degree of leeway in choosing how to spend the money. Thus, it can
pay for anything from capital improvement projects like streetscaping or park
building to neighborhood community organizations. (Of course, the pro-
gram is not without its abuses, as Ferman found in Chicago, where the grants
were used to maintain structures of political patronage (Ferman 1996).)
These grants have been declining since the 1980s (Finegold, Wherry, and
Schardin 2004), and continued their decline in the Obama administration.
In 2011, the New York Times chronicled the impact of declining block grants
in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The article noted that in that year, “the federal
government is giving out just $2.9 billion—a billion dollars less than it gave
[in 2009], and even less than it gave during the Carter administration, when
the money went much farther” (Cooper 2011:A16). In cities like Allentown,
a once-thriving steel town that has seen its tax base decline precipitously in
the wake of globalization, the shrinking of block grants means a reduction
in their abilities to provide basic city services like home inspections. Services
to the poor, such as after-school education and mental health services, also
were cut. Any efforts to rebuild the community into a more attractive place
for the creative class were also curtailed by the loss in funds. The mayor rue-
fully observed that the city’s block grant funds “really helped us limit blight,
and rebuilt some of our poorest neighborhoods. . . . With the continual
reduction of this funding, we’re able to do less and less” (Cooper 2011:A16).
Though the overall story of our nation’s commitment to urban problems
thus appears bleak, there is at least one noteworthy exception: help to the
homeless. Homelessness attained epidemic proportions in the 1980s, as cuts
to mental health facilities coupled with job losses in industrial businesses liter-
ally put many people on the street, especially in deindustrialized cities. How-
ever, attention to the problem at the local, state, and federal level has meant
that since roughly 1988, homelessness has been on the decline in the United
States. The Obama administration has enacted a “Federal Strategic Plan to

Prevent and End Homelessness,” since 2010, and evidence from both the
federal government and homeless advocates suggest that, though we are far
from beating homelessness altogether, we have made significant inroads in
combatting homelessness. For example, a government report notes that the
“number of individuals experiencing chronic homelessness declined by
16 percent, or 17,219 people, between 2010 and 2013” (U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development 2013:3). It is in that population—the
chronically homeless—as well as the population of homeless veterans that
declines have been greatest (National Alliance to End Homelessness 2013).
While we continue to see a disturbing total number of homeless people at
any given time—over 600,000 in 2013—the good news is that few of those
people will remain homeless for even one year (U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development 2013).
THE RESILIENCE OF SMALL- AND MID-SIZED CITIES

With all our discussion of cities like Allentown and Detroit, with the focus
of authors like Sassen on the importance of fewer, bigger cities that are central
to the global network of finance, it may be tempting to write off smaller cities
as obsolete relics of a bygone era. This would be a mistake. In fact, some of
our most vibrant and sustainable urban places are cities of less than 1 million
people.
If the findings of Richard Florida that we discussed in Chapter 9 regarding
the attraction of workers in the best-paid industries to cities ripe with amen-
ities like arts institutions, entertainment venues, and access to natural beauty
are correct, we should not be surprised that certain smaller cities are poised
for success. Thus, among the places that score high on Florida’s “creativity
index,” alongside the big cities in dense regions like San Francisco, Atlanta,
and Boston, we find smaller, relatively isolated cities like Albuquerque and
Madison, Wisconsin. These cities all rank high on the proportion of residents
who are in creative occupations, on the number of patents filed per capita, the
size of the local technology industry, and the size of the local gay population
(a proxy measure of tolerance in general) (Florida 2002). Though these cities
are clearly not participating as control centers of the global economy, it is
clear that they are successful by other means—including a strong emphasis
on fostering educational facilities and on home-grown arts communities.
Jon Norman, a sociologist inspired by his experiences growing up in
another smaller city—Green Bay, Wisconsin—has investigated the divergent
fates of the United States’ small- and mid-sized cities in his book Small Cities,
282 BEING URBAN
USA. As a “small” city, Norman focuses on those cities with populations

between 100,000 and 200,000 people that the Census defined as centers of
metro areas. While he finds that there are certainly cities that have suffered
through an inability to compete in a postindustrial world, others are doing
just fine, even continuing to grow. Summarizing how these cities fit into the
national and international arenas, Norman writes:
Smaller places have some of the same economic characteristics that global cities
possess, and they also function as the center of local regional areas. However,
smaller cities are generally not significant players in the international arena.
Instead, these smaller places are perhaps best thought of as “glocal
cities” . . . places that are most successful because they look like global cities in
terms of economic diversity and activities, but operate on a much more local
level, be it regional or national. (Norman 2013:9)
He also notes that though they may not function as the central command
hubs of the global economy in the way that Sassen’s global cities do, they
are still important places for large firms in the United States: in Norman’s
study, 20–40 percent of the smaller cities he studied acted at some point as
home to a Fortune 500 company (Norman 2013:9). And he further shows
that while some cities certainly benefit from embracing the kind of new
economy jobs highlighted by Florida and others, older manufacturing indus-
tries can be compatible with continued success.
Norman writes that places like his old home town of Green Bay are still rel-
atively successful, despite the fact that they have held on to their role as manu-
facturing cities. In Green Bay that has meant continued devotion to the paper
industry, while diversifying into high-end services, “mostly from growing firms
such as AMS (an insurance firm) and Humana (a managed health care com-
pany” (Norman 2013:127). But, of course, certain other cities are certainly
struggling. He notes that poverty is on the rise in Providence, Rhode Island,
while the population stagnates. That city has lost work in the higher-end service
industries as well as seeing the decline of older manufacturing work in metals
and jewelry production.
SUBURBANIZATION, GENTRIFICATION,
AND CHURNING
In our previous edition of Being Urban, we focused a great deal of atten-
tion on processes of suburbanization. As the economy of Western nations
moved away from manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s, many urbanists
were concerned that we may see the death of cities. Suburbs appeared to
provide the right setting for newer, higher-end service businesses. Earlier
writers like Park and Burgess saw manufacturing businesses locating near cen-
tral city areas because they provided dense transportation networks that bring
raw materials for assembly, and later deliver assembled products to markets.
They benefitted as well from dense populations of unskilled workers—
without access to cars—who provided cheap labor. As manufacturing jobs went
offshore, it made sense that the service businesses would locate in suburbs: they
had no need for transporting bulky items. Their business was insurance policies
and banking transactions, business that could be conducted through the mail
or, increasingly, electronically. Their more skilled employees drove to work,
commuting on interstates largely built by the federal government. Those
employees lived in those same suburbs in single-family, detached homes subsi-
dized by the GI Bill, government-guaranteed mortgages, and tax rebates for
mortgage interest payments.
As those suburbs grew, unskilled workers were left behind in the inner city.
As we saw in many of the studies described throughout this book (particularly
in Chapter 7), those left behind were often the most impoverished members
of ethnic minority groups, especially African-Americans and Latinos (see, for
example, Duneier 1999; Pattillo 2008; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-
Rowley 2002; Venkatesh 2006; Wacquant 2008; Wilson 2009; Wilson and
Taub 2006). Certainly some cities have proven, so far, to be unable to bounce
back from the decline that came with deindustrialization. LeDuff’s (2013)
renderings of Detroit make clear that the city is over the brink, and may never
bounce back from its abandonment by Big Auto and the failure of its leaders
to make a successful transition to new industries.
But other cities and suburbs are now following quite different narratives.
In some instances, we can see urban core areas in postindustrial cities being
revitalized by new development. As work like Hyra’s (2008) shows, areas of
certain cities that had once been centers for dilapidated housing, poverty,
and crime can undergo the process of gentrification. These areas, like Bronze-
ville in Chicago and Harlem in New York, are now residential destinations for
well-paid workers in the knowledge economy. Where once we may have
expected such workers to flee to the suburbs, cities are now (again) seen as
highly desirable places for people to live, even raise families, during the prime
years of their lives.
This is not to say that suburbs are on their way out—far from it. Overall,
demographic trends in the United States still favor suburbs overall, at least in
terms of population growth. It is certainly still true that the average American
does not live within the boundaries of a central city, but rather within a subur-
ban municipality. Nor is it to say that inner-city areas are being entirely purged
284 BEING URBAN
of the poor. They continue to be shifted in many places to intraurban neighbor-

hoods that have seen declines in the quality of housing stock, as well as aging
residents (see Wilson and Taub 2006).
But it is rather to say that the dynamics of urban change have changed.
Just 20 or 30 years ago it appeared to many of us that big American (and
European) cities were failing. In their place, the suburbs had risen—or
“Edge Cities” to use Joel Garreau’s (1991) term for sprawling suburban cen-
ters like Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, or Schaumburg, Illinois, smaller cities just
outside Washington, D.C., and Chicago, respectively. In the book of the
same name, Garreau comes off as quite certain that the downtowns of big
American cities are dead. In their place, the United States had reinvented
itself around these new kinds of places, home to shopping malls, low-rise
office complexes, industrial parks, and some higher-end residential neighbor-
hoods. Given the dynamics of suburban growth and urban decline that char-
acterized the nation for the 40 or so years prior to the 1990s, the thesis
seemed pretty reasonable. But the subsequent 20 years have shown that it
wasn’t quite right.
While suburbs have continued to grow, inner cities have bounced back,
sometimes in unlikely places. In Chicago, for example, by the early 1990s,
State Street in the downtown area had become a shadow of its former self.
Once it had been heralded in song as “that Great Street,” but now it was
not so great. While certain department stores like Marshall Fields and Carson
Pirie Scott held on, many storefronts, like F. W. Woolworths were shuttered,
and others housed down-market retailers of discount clothes and handbags.
The street was closed to most traffic, and often had the feel of an abandoned
shopping mall. But over the course of the late 1990s and 2000s, State Street,
along with the rest of downtown Chicago, experienced a considerable
renaissance. New retailers like Old Navy moved in, old storefronts were revi-
talized, the long-vacant Block 37 was developed, and as a further sign of the
times, the Pacific Garden Mission, a former beacon to skid row denizens,
was moved to make way for a college prep academy.
Chicago’s story is not unique. Though similar turnarounds have not been
experienced in every rust-belt city, enough places have seen center cities
redevelop since the 1990s that urbanists are taking note. One journalist, Alan
Ehrenhalt, has referred to the process as the “Great Inversion.” It is an inver-
sion in the sense that, where for most of the post-World War II era we
saw people fleeing cities for suburban homes, downtowns have grown
since the 1990s. In an interview with Richard Florida, Ehrenhalt described
the inversion thusly:
The inversion is a trading of places within major metropolitan areas. For the past
half-century, we’ve gotten used to thinking of central cities as enclaves of the
poor, and suburbs as refuges of the affluent. But in the past decade, suburbs
have become the entry points in which immigrants settle when they first arrive
in a metro area, while the center—in places such as Washington, Atlanta,
Chicago, and Boston—have become magnets for a largely affluent and profes-
sional class of young adults in their 20s and 30s. In Atlanta, virtually no new-
comers from foreign countries settle within the city limits anymore; they all go
to suburbs like Gwinnett and Cobb counties. Meanwhile, neighborhoods in
the center are gaining population and becoming more expensive to live in.
(Florida 2012:n.p.)
To be clear, we should be careful not to overstate the degree of inversion

we see here. To observe that central cities are once again growing is not to
say that suburbs are now shrinking. They are, in fact, still growing. They con-
tinued to outpace the growth of central cities for the first decade of the
twenty-first century, though both suburbs and cities grew substantially in
the 1990s and 2000s (Frey 2012). But interestingly, cities do appear to be
growing faster than the suburbs in the first few years of the 2010s. Driven in
part by uncertainty in the housing market, and in part by the attraction of
the Millennial generation to cities, people have moved to cities faster than
they have moved to suburbs since 2010. Studying the latest census data,
William Frey observes that
many cities have gained more people in the three-plus years since the 2010
Census than they gained for the entire previous decade. This includes three of
the five largest cities, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago (which lost popula-
tion in the previous decade). Among the 25 largest cities, nine are already ahead
of their previous decade’s gains, including Dallas, Denver, Memphis, San
Francisco, San Jose and Washington, D.C. (Frey 2014:n.p.)
Frey goes on to note that, though suburban growth outpaced cities from
2000 to 2010, “this changed in the each of the three subsequent years.
In 2012–2013, 19 of the 51 major metropolitan areas showed faster primary
city than suburb growth including New York, Washington D.C., Denver and
Seattle” (Frey 2014:np). Suburbs are still growing, just at a more modest rate
of about a half percent per year, as opposed to around 1 percent in cities.
Finally, it is worth noting that the dynamics of suburban population
changes have changed in the last 20 or so years. Historically suburbs have
been the province of the middle classes, and often of whites: Herbert Gans’s
sociological classic The Levittowners explores a suburban development that
286 BEING URBAN
was all white by design, not uncommon through the 1960s (Gans 1967).
But now many of those suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s are filled with old,
sometimes dilapidated housing stock. The middle class has moved on, some
back toward the central city, some to newer suburbs or older, more affluent sub-
urbs with better housing stock. Bernadette Hanlon, in her book Once the
American Dream, has chronicled the decline of these inner-ring suburbs:
“Once the bastion of the middle-class lifestyle, many older inner-ring suburban
communities, especially those built in the immediate postwar period, have
declined into places of desolation and decay” (Hanlon 2010:18). This deso-
lation and decay generally goes along with an overall decline in population,
increases in poverty, and increases in the size of the minority population.
Concomitantly, these suburbs have lost the tax base needed to make capital
improvements to make their communities more attractive, safer places to live.
Poor blacks and Latinos who have been pushed out by gentrification from
inner cities have apparently found homes in these old inner suburbs, and the
problems of racism, poverty, and joblessness that we observed plaguing inner
cities in Chapter 7 have, in some cities, been exported to their suburbs. One
stark example of such a suburb is Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is an inner-
ring suburb like those detailed in Hanlon’s study. And it has experienced a
movement toward poverty and to a black majority in recent years. A New York
Times article notes that “in 1980, the town was 85 percent white and 14 percent
black; by 2010, it was 29 percent white and 69 percent black” (The Death of
Michael Brown 2014:A22). Yet the powers of segregation have meant that the
remaining white homeowners retain control of the local political structures.
Blacks have moved into rental properties, and often have not yet come to par-
ticipate in the political process. This is reflected in the fact that Ferguson has just
three black officers on a 53-person police force, and five of six city council mem-
bers, the police chief, and mayor are all white (The Death of Michael Brown
2014). As most readers will know, in the summer of 2014, the stark divisions
of race and poverty played out on the streets of Ferguson. Following the shoot-
ing death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white
police officer, the suburb played host to weeks of riots protesting racial and eco-
nomic injustices. In the Washington Post, Peter Dreier and Todd Swanstrom
worried that these, the first large-scale suburban riots in the U.S. history, might
be a harbinger of things to come:
Today, about 40 percent of the nation’s 46 million poor live in suburbs, up

from 20 percent in 1970. These communities (often inner-ring suburbs) are
beset with problems once associated with big cities: unemployment (especially
among young men), crime, homelessness and inadequate schools and public
services. Their populations are disproportionately black and Latino.
Ferguson is a microcosm of these problems and how they can erupt.
But without major reforms, the current upheaval may be the first in a wave of
suburban riots. (Dreier and Swanstrom 2014:n.p.)
We can hope that they are wrong. But as sociologists, we believe that their
analysis of the available data is all too right. Without some comprehensive public
policy interventions to give greater voice to minorities in these suburbs, without
jobs to occupy the hands of poor young men and women, and without hope of
a better tomorrow, the future of these inner-ring suburbs, and the inner-city
ghettoes that persist in many cities, is indeed bleak.
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Index
Abbott, Andrew, 54 building boom for, 270–71; cities as

Abrahamson, Mark, 129, 257–59 centers of entertainment and,
Addams, Jane, 159, 261–62 262–63; class and, 255, 256, 262,
Albuquerque, 265, 281 267–68; classical versus popular,
Alienation, 11 267–68; commodification and, 264;
Allentown, Pennsylvania, 280 community for artists and, 260; con-
Anderson, Elijah, 197 sumption of, 255, 261–66; creative
Anderson, Nels, 60, 62, 160 class and, 266–69, 271; creative pla-
Anomie, 20, 78 cemaking and, 268; distribution of,
Anonymity: city as world of strangers 253–54; diversity and, 267; economic
and, 92–94; freedom and, 121; development and, 266; in European
intimate, 101, 118; norms of cities, 255–58, 272; gentrification
noninvolvement and, 98–100; shared and, 260, 265–66; importance of for
social knowledge and, 101; social cities, 261–62, 272; multiplier effect
production of, 117–18; sports and, of revenue from, 269; music in cities’
245–48; suspension of rules of, 110, identity and, 265–66, 267;
117; urban overload and, 97 neighborhood art scenes and, 252,
Antigovernment impulse, 213 259–61, 264–65; patronage of, 255,
Aries, Philippe, 230–31 265, 271; public policy and,
Armstrong, Elizabeth A., 134 266–72; quintessentially local
Arond, Henry, 240 experiences and, 252; residents’
Arts: arts-oriented cities and, 265–66, locational decisions and, 267; rural art
269–70; as big business, 251, 252; colonies and, 254; school field trips
budgetary appropriations for, 250; and, 251; settlement houses and,
318 INDEX
261–62; as social products, 249–50, 272; Boston Atheneum and, 262;

251–54, 260–61; sociology of art cognitive map of, 139; creativity index
and, 253–54; support activities for, and, 281; downtown revitalization in,
253–54; urban growth and, 266, 268; 285; pay for women in, 156;
urban music scenes and, 259–60 professional sports and, 220, 225;
Asheville, North Carolina, 265 recreation and sports in growth of,
Atlanta, Georgia, 136, 281, 285 235; school busing in, 123; Social
Austin, Texas, 190, 252, 265–67, 271 Register and, 177; street-corner gangs
Axthelm, Pete, 245, 247 in, 78–79, 82; top industry groups in,
203–4; West End House in, 232–33
Baker, Josephine, 258 Boston Marathon, 235
Ball, Richard, 108 Boulder, Colorado, 156
Baltimore, Maryland, 156, Bourgois, Philippe, 133
177, 219, 225 Brecht, Bertolt, 257
Barnes, Sandra L., 153–54, 155 Bridgeport, Connecticut, 156
Barnstable Town, Massachusetts, 156 Brown, Michael, 286
Barth, Gunther, 228–29 Bryant, Kobe, 242
Barzun, Jacques, 228 Buffalo, New York, 177
Basquiat Jean-Michel, 254 Burgess, Ernest W., 30, 59, 61–63,
Baunach, Dawn M., 153–54, 155 273–74, 283
Beach, Sylvia, 258 Bush, George H. W., 182
Beame, Abraham, 219
Becker, Howard, 60, 130–35, 253–54, Cahill, Spencer, 105
260–61 Calder, Alexander, 258
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 255–56 Campbell, James, 190
Bell, Wendell, 67 Canada, Geoffrey, 214–15
Benjamin, Walter, 257 capitalism: globalization and, 274–76;
Berger, Peter, 53, 94, 119, 143–44 in history of cities, 42–43
Berlin, 256, 272 Caren, Neal, 183
Betts, John Rickard, 224–26 Carter, Jimmy, and Carter
Bicycling, 112, 120 administration, 280
Biddle, George, 258 Carter, J. Scott, 128, 129
Bilbao effect, 270 Carter, Prudence, 242
Blau, Francine, 153 Carter, Valerie, 129
Blau, Peter, 199, 200 Charlotte, North Carolina, 219, 221
Bloch, Ernst, 257 Charters, Jimmy, 258
Blumenberg, Evelyn, 166–67 Cherney, Robert, 133–34
Boden, Deirdre, 18 Chicago, Illinois: 1995 heat wave in, 84;
Boies, John, 187 authenticity and, 263–64; bicycling
Boston, Massachusetts: arts scene in, in, 112; blues in, 252, 263–64, 267;
INDEX 319
Bronzeville neighborhood of, 193, Cities: cash nexus in, 11–12, 46;
194, 283; bus tours of, 263–64; cosmopolitanism and, 26, 40, 273;
Chicago Cultural Center and, 263; definitions of, 36–38, 49 n.9, 55;
city planning and, 112; Community Disneyfication of, 264; distrust in, 88,
Development Block Grants in, 280; 90, 94; ecology of, 30–34, 36, 59; as
defended neighborhoods in, 124; entertainment machines, 262–63,
deindustrialization and, 137; 266; federal divestiture from, 274,
displacement of inner-city residents 279–81; freedom in, 26, 27, 121,
of, 207; downtown revitalization in, 122, 145–46; global, 276–77, 278; as
284; extreme poverty in, 209; female- growth machines, 263; as hubs for the
headed households in, 209; funky art arts, 272; as impersonal, 13;
scenes and, 252; gangs in, 77; gentri- individualism and individualization in,
fication in, 203, 283; as global city, 19, 27–29; latent hostility in, 25–26,
276; Hull House and, 159, 160, 261– 29–30; mimimax hypothesis of urban
62; hypersegregation in, 207; life and, 100–101; negative pictures
immigrant communities in, 207; of life in, 54–55, 88–89, 118; as
inclusive versus machine politics in, network of networks, 74;
191–94; jazz in, 259; music festivals opportunities for women in, 161;
and nightlife in, 263; Pacific Garden resilience of, 274, 281–82; right to
Mission in, 284; professional sports the city and, 43–44; secondary versus
and, 225, 265; public housing in, primary relations in, 33–36, 40,
193–94, 279; as representative city for 46–48, 121; social worlds of,
urban sociologists, 60–61, 62–63; 120–22; as state of mind, 72; status
social order of low-income commun- struggle in, 4; stimulus overload in,
ities and, 79–80, 81–82, 186; Social 96–99; urban personality type and,
Register and, 177; suburbs of, 284; 24–25, 27–28, 45, 99; as world of
theater scene in, 265; top industry strangers, 92–94. See also Norms of
groups in, 203; urban geography and, everyday city life; Suburbs;
61–63, 64–65, 86 n.3; Wicker Park Urban geography; Urbanism;
neighborhood of, 111, 137, Urbanization
264–65, 266 Citizens United v. FEC, 187
Chicago School of Sociology: city as a City planning: bicycling and, 112;
research laboratory and, 58; diversity creative placemaking and, 268; nature
in cities and, 121–22; ecological of street life and, 111–12; New
conceptions of the city and, 59; Hull Urbanism and, 70–71, 112;
House and, 160; individuality in cities small community businesses
and, 29; negative pictures of city life and, 70–71; urban geography
and, 54–55; urban geography and, and, 63
61–63, 64–65, 86 n.3 Clark, Terry Nichols, 252,
Cincinnati, Ohio, 177, 221, 225 262–63, 266, 271
320 INDEX
Class: activist women and, 164; the arts 71, 235–39; strangers in organized life
and, 255, 256, 262, 267–68; growing and, 93–94; subjective community
inequality in cities and, 274; identification and, 68–72; as subsocial,
multidimensional social stratification 86 nn.2–3; symbolic value of space
and, 40–41; as new social category, and, 64–65; as troublesome concept in
3–4; noblesse oblige and, 163; sociology, 56; urban networks and,
political involvement and, 185, 186; 72–76
school performance and, 246; sports Community Development Block
and, 239–45, 246; voluntary Grants, 280
organizations and, 186; women’s Community organizing, 66
movement versus community Contessi, Silvio, 155
organizations and, 164 Contracts: versus customs in history of
Cleveland, Ohio, 177, 202, 203, 268, cities, 42; solidarity and, 17–18, 20;
271–72 status and, 24; urbanism and, 47
Clinton, Bill, 182 Conversation Analysis, 105
Cloward, Richard A., 182 Cook, James M., 185
Collective behavior, 41 Cooley, Charles Horton, 28
Collective conscience and con- Copland, Aaron, 258
sciousness, 14–16, 19, 144–45, 236 Cosmopolitanism: the arts and, 257; as
Collins, Patricia Hill, 149 characteristic of cities, 26, 40, 273;
Comer, James, 213 encounters between strangers and,
Community: among homeless street 165; freedom and, 121; gender
vendors, 82–84; for artists, 260; integration and, 161; urbanites’
classic community studies and, 236; appreciation of, 119
communication and, 65–66; Cotter, David A., 154, 155
community organization and, 76–84; Crage, Suzanna M., 134
definitions of, 56–58, 85; ecological Cressey, Paul, 60, 62
conceptions of, 57–63, 80; gangs and, Crime and criminal justice: “broken
77, 79; invisible community structures windows” and, 83; defended
and, 82; nonterritorial bases of, 68–72, neighborhoods and, 124; ecological
74, 84–85, 86 n.1, 149, 249; structure of the city and, 61;
nonurban, 57; pigeon flyers in New employment rates for ex-cons and,
York City and, 68–70; residents’ own 209–10; fear of crime and, 169–71;
images of their lives and, 87; singleness gangs and, 77–79, 82, 137–38, 141;
and, 132; slums and, 77, 78–82; small incarceration rates and, 209–10;
businesses and, 70–71; social functions known offenders and, 171; neighbor-
of, 56; social interaction as primary hoods and, 171; organized crime and
feature of, 57; as social psychological community organization and, 77, 79;
production, 72; social systems and, 56– primary group nature of, 34–35; racial
57; solidarity and, 235–36; sports and, and economic isolation and, 198–200;
INDEX 321
rape and rape culture and, 169–70, Diversity: arts and, 267; cities’
171–72; social conditions and, adjustment to, 277; diverse groups’
199–200; tolerance in San Francisco interpretations of the city and, 120;
and, 130–31; unreliable police and, 82; eccentrics and “characters” and, 36,
urban geography and, 62, 86 n.3; 100, 119–20, 165; interesting street
women’s vulnerability and, 95–96 life and, 111; people watching and,
Cultural Policy Center (Chicago), 270 136; special interest groups and,
120–21, 122; urbanites’ appreciation
Daamen, W., 102–3 of, 119. See also Tolerance
Daley, Richard M., 112, 124 Dobbie, Will, 215
Dali, Salvador, 269, 270 Domhoff, William, 176, 187, 194–95
Dallas, Texas, 190 Donnelly, Peter, 108, 109
Daniels, Arlene Kaplan, 162–63 Drake, James A., 238
Darley, John, 99 Dreier, Peter, 286–87
Davis, Miles, 259 Dube, Arindrajit, 278–79
Deegan, Mary Jo, 160 Duneier, Mitchell, 57, 82–83, 104–5
Dempsey, Nicholas P., 116, 259 Dunham, H. Warren, 60
DeNora, Tia, 98, 255–56 Durkheim, Emile: on the church and
Denton, Nancy A., 200 sin, 16; on civil lawsuits, 17; on
Denver, 285 collective conscience or
Depersonalization, 40, 41, 55–56, consciousness, 14–16, 19, 144, 236;
60, 68–70 on contracts, 17, 20; on deviance, 16;
Detroit, Michigan: globalization and, on division of labor, 18–20, 22 n.6,
274; industrial decline in, 201–2, 27, 145; versus Ferdinand Tönnies,
277, 283; Motown in, 267; 13, 14; influence of, 19, 21, 23, 27,
professional sports and, 225; top 47, 48; influences on, 8, 22, 22 n.7; as
industry groups in, 205 intellectual father of sociology, 41;
Deviance: eccentrics and “characters” negative pictures of city life and, 54;
and, 36; moral deviances and, on occupational specialization, 14; on
120–21; necessity of for boundary organic nature of society, 13;
definition, 16; as pejorative term, population density and, 38; on
122; as social construction, 143; as religion and individualism, 19; on
social problem, 146; versus society as a moral order, 24; on
subcultures, 122; tolerance and, 122, solidarity, 15–21, 23, 34, 144–45; on
138; unconventional versus symbolic interaction, 22 n.5;
conventional groupings and, 47; technology and, 22 n.4
urban geography and, Dworkin, Ronald, 187
60–61, 62, 86 n.3. See also
Subcultures Ecology: community and, 80; defended
Di Leonardo, Micaela, 75–76 neighborhoods and, 134–35;
322 INDEX
ecological conceptions of community and identity and, 70, 85; minimum

and, 57–63; ecological conceptions of wage and, 278–79; multiplier effect
the city and, 30–34, 36, 59, 62–63; and, 269; poverty and unemployment
formal theory of, 59; human behavior and, 202, 206; professional sports
and, 64–68; inadequacy of ecological and, 220–21; racial economic
perspective and, 64–67, 76–77, 84, inequality and, 197–200; shadow
86 nn.2–3; locational socialization economy and, 278; sports and,
and, 136; natural ecological boundaries 238–44; tax base of cities and, 26; top
and, 65; Park and Burgess’s “Green industry groups and, 203–5; upward
Book” and, 59; poor adaptation to mobility and, 83–84; women in the
urban environment and, 60; paid labor force and, 150–51;
segregation and tolerance and, women’s unpaid work and, 75–76
134–35; social disorganization and, Edison, Thomas, 226
61; social psychology of city dwellers Education, 211–14, 246
and, 121; urban geography and, Edwards, Harry, 221
61–62; urbanites’ sense of place and, Ehrenhalt, Alan, 284–85
138–43. See also Urban geography Elections. See Voting and elections
Economics and money: American dream Ellwood, David T., 208
and, 239–40; anomie and, 20; the arts Enclosure acts, 4
and, 266, 268, 269–72; assumptions Energy Policy Act of 2005, 178–79
of classical economists and, 12; as Engels, Friedrich, 42
basis of association, 46; bifurcated job Erikson, Kai, 16
structure and, 274, 277–79; cities as Ethnography, 61, 121–22
markets and, 31–32; contracts and,
17–18; distribution of wealth and, Family and kinship: childhood and, 231;
176–77, 180, 197; dropping out of in cities versus small towns, 74–75;
school and, 211–13; economic disintegration of, 60, 62; female-
organization of cities and, 45–46; headed households and, 196,
exchange value of space and, 43, 44; 208–11, 212; as fictitious source of
federal budget and, 211–12; federal authority, 8; Gemeinschaft and, 10;
divestiture from cities and, 274, 279– versus geographic residence as basis of
81; Gesellschaft and, 11; global community organization, 8; versus
economy and, 193, 275–76; Great individual as unit of society, 7–8; kin
Recession of 2007–2009 and, 154; work and, 75–76; in low-income
high finance and changing urban neighborhoods, 81; urban networks
dynamics and, 276; industrial shifts and, 74; women’s role in, 74–75
and, 196–97, 201–2, 206–8; informal Faris, Robert, E. L., 60
economy and, 82; interests replacing Faulkner, William, 258
sentiments and, 34; low-income Feminism, 150, 152, 157–59, 164
neighborhoods and, 81; marketplaces Fensterstock, Anne, 259–61
INDEX 323
Ferguson, Missouri, 286–87 Giddens, Anthony, 176

Ferman, Barbara, 191–92, 280 Gilded Age, 262
Fischer, Claude, 66, 74, 126–28, 129 Gillespie, Dizzy, 259
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 258 Globalization, 274–77
Fitzpatrick, Kevin M., 212 Goffman, Erving: on civil inattention,
Florida, Richard: creativity index and, 103, 110; on contact with strangers
281; great inversion and, 284–85; during extraordinary events, 113–14;
investments in arts sectors and, 252, on development of the self, 19;
271; on local small businesses, 71; on dramaturgical view of interaction and,
rise of creative class, 266–69, 271, 91, 93; on everyday urban concerns,
277; on symbolic representations of 89, 91; on front and back regions,
cities, 72 104; on impression management,
Form, William H., 66 91–92, 93; influences on, 19; on
Foster, Bill, 269 presentations of self, 246; on
Franklin, Benjamin, 222 preservation of public image, 91, 100;
Freud, Sigmund, 85 on society as a building, 157; on
Frey, William, 285 tightness of city street life, 110
Fryer, Roland, Jr., 215 Goodman, Cary, 232
Gottdiener, Mark, 44
Gadwa, Anne, 268 Government. See Power arrangements
Gangs. See Crime and criminal justice Gowan, Teresa, 133
Gans, Herbert, 285–86 Grannis, Mark, 142–43
Gardner, Carol Brooks, 168–70 Grazian, David, 116, 263, 267
Garreau, Joel, 284 Greece, credit crisis in, 275
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 200, 242 Green Bay, Wisconsin, 221, 281–82
Gehry, Frank, 270 Griswold, Wendy, 86 n.1
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, 9–13, Gropius, Walter, 257
21–24, 42, 47, 55 Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao,
Gender: Great Recession of 2007–2009 Spain), 270
and, 154–55; organization Gulia, Milena, 75
membership and, 161, 162–63;
pedestrian behavior and, 103; political Hall, Edward, 140, 141
involvement and, 185; socialization Hanlon, Bernadette, 286
and, 170; sports and, 233–34. Hardy, Stephen, 235
See also Women Harlem Children’s Zone, 214–15
Gendron, Richard, 194–95 Harris, Chauncy, 62
General Social Survey (GSS), 128 Harris, Marvin, 150–51, 152
Gentrification, 193, 260, 265–66, 283, 286 Hartford, Connecticut, 156
Geographical Information Systems Harvey, David, 275–76
(GIS), 68 Hawley, Amos, 59
324 INDEX
Haydn, Joseph, 255 Immigrants and immigration:

Heartfield, John, 257 globalization and, 277;
Heimer, Karen, 170–71 neighborhood conditions and, 207;
Hemingway, Ernest, 258 Playground Movement and, 230,
Hillery, George, 56, 57–58 232; segmented assimilation and,
Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 11, 25–26 207–8; settlement houses and, 232; in
Höch, Hannah, 257 smaller cities, 277; sports and,
Holbrook, Thomas M., 183 227–30, 232–33, 249; U.S.
Hollingshead, August, 236 immigration law and, 277
Homebuilders program, 216 Indianapolis, Indiana, 168, 219, 239
Homelessness, 82–84, 133, 280–81 Individualism and individualization, 19,
Hoogendoorn, Serge P., 102–3 27–29, 60, 229, 245–48
Horowitz, Irving Louis, 130–35 Industrialization: arts and, 262;
Horowitz, Ruth, 137–38 deindustrialization and, 196–97,
Housing: federal investment in, 279–80; 201–2, 206–8, 277–78, 283;
mortgage crisis and, 275; public, globalization and, 274; separation of
193–94. See also Homelessness work from household and, 4–5; sports
Housing and Urban Development and, 221–24, 248–49; top industry
(HUD), 193–94, 279 groups and, 203–5; urbanization
Houston, Texas, 220 and, 4
Hout, Michael, 129 Inequality. See Class
Howe, Florence, 151 Interaction. See Symbolic interactionism
Hoyt, Homer, 62 Irsay, Robert, 239
Hughes, Everett, 120 Iseel, William, 133–34
Hull House, 159–60
Hurst, Michael, 140 Jacksonville, Florida, 219
Hutchison, Ray, 44 Jacobs, Jane, 71, 111
Hyra, Derek S., 66, 192–94, 207, 283 Jacobson, Gary C., 188
James, Bill, 240
Ideal types, 9, 10, 22, 63, 64 James, Lebron, 242
Identity: cities’ audio identity and, Jencks, Christopher, 208
265–66, 267; community as social Jerolmack, Colin, 68–70
psychological production and, 72; Johnson, Jack, 241
gangs and, 79; interaction and, Johnson, Magic, 243
91–92; in low-income neighborhoods, Johnson, Richard, 76
81; marketplace and, 70, 85; ordered Joyce, James, 258
life between strangers and, 100;
protecting personal identities and, Kandinsky, Wassily, 257
106–8; repertoire of identities and, 92; Kansas City, Missouri, 221, 225
sports and, 71–72, 85, 235–39 Karp, David A., 106–7, 109
INDEX 325
Kasarda, John D., 197, 202 Liebow, Eliot, 80–81

Kelley, Florence, 159 Lilly, Robert, 108
Kelling, George L., 83 Literacy, 7
Keyssar, Alexander, 182–83 Lloyd, Richard, 137, 264–65, 266
kinship. See Family and kinship Lofland, Lyn: on civil inattention, 103;
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 257 on locational socialization, 136; on
Klinenberg, Eric, 84, 132 neglect of women in works of urban
Konrad, Miriam, 170 sociologists, 149; on public ordered
Koval, John, 278 life among strangers, 100, 118 n.1,
Kracauer, Siegfried, 257 135–36; on the public realm, 165; on
Krivo, Lauren J., 199, 200 self-management in public
Kuhn, Thomas, 54 settings, 109
Logan, John, 44, 263
Labor: of children, 159; division of, Long, Joshua, 265, 266
18–20, 32–33, 45, 145; eight-hour Loosely, Elizabeth, 236
day and, 159; identity and, 27; occu- Los Angeles, California: professional
pational specialization and, 14; sepa- sports and, 219, 220, 237–38; riots
ration of work from household and, in, 41; segmented assimilation in,
4–5; sweatshops legislation 207; transportation in, 166; voluntary
and, 159 associations in, 186
Laforse, Martin, 238 Lo Sasso, Anthony, 76
Lane, Vince, 194 Louis, Joe, 241
Lapchick, Richard, 243–44 Loy, John, 244
Laslett, Peter, 4–5 Lubell, Mark, 184
Latane, Bibb, 99 Luckman, Thomas, 143–44
Lauritsen, Janet L., 170–71 Lynch, Kevin, 138–39
Law: basis of social control and, 35; Lynd, Helen, 236
collective conscience and, 15–16; Lynd, Robert, 236
cooperative, 18; customary, 7; legal
fictions and, 7–8; origins of legal Madison, Wisconsin, 281
codes and, 6–7; repressive, 15–16, 18; Maine, Henry Sumner: on familial
restitutive, 16–17; social solidarity versus territorial bases of social
and, 15–16 relations, 22; Gemeinschaft and
League of Women Voters, 159 Gesellschaft versus theory of, 9;
LeDuff, Charlie, 201, 283 influence of, 8–9, 21–23, 27, 47, 48;
Lefebvre, Henri, 41–45, 48, 140 on origins of codified law, 6–7; on
Levine, Lawrence, 262 social contract, 7–8, 13, 22; social
Levittowns, 285–86 solidarity and, 15
Li, Li, 155 Mann, Thomas, 257
Libertarians, 213 Markusen, Ann, 268
326 INDEX
Marshall, Gordon, 56 Napa, California, 156

Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 3–4, 11, Naples, Nancy A., 164
41–44, 48, 274–75 Nashville, Tennessee, 277
Massey, Douglas S., 200 National Endowment for the Arts, 268
Mayors’ Institute on City Design, 268 Neighborhoods: city as network of
McCain-Feingold Act (2002), 187 networks and, 74; city employees in,
McDowell, Mary, 160 124; in city politics, 192–95;
McElvogue, Joseph, 244 cognitive maps of, 142–43; collective
McKenzie, R. D., 59 efficacy and, 84; crime and, 171;
McLanahan, Sara, 210–11, 212 defended, 123–24, 134–35;
McLaughlin, Steven D., 152 destruction of, 34; ecology of the city
McPherson, Miller, 161, 185 and, 32; neighborhood art scenes
Mead, George Herbert, 28 and, 259–61, 264–65; poverty and
Memphis, Tennessee, 252, 263, 285 unemployment in, 202, 206; small
Mendelsohn, Erich, 257 businesses in, 70–71; social isolation
Mental illness, 60, 62, 86n3, 280 in segregated neighborhoods and,
Messner, Steven, 199, 200 206, 207; social organization in,
Miami, Florida, 276 78–82; territorial space and, 141; use
Michels, Robert, 175 versus exchange value and, 44;
Michener, James, 238–39 vibrancy of in network society, 55–56;
Milgram, Stanley, 73, walkable, 71; weather disasters and,
96–99, 140 84. See also Gentrification
Miller, Steve, 265 Nelson, Willie, 265
Mills, C. Wright, 27, 176, 177–78 Network society, 55–56, 73–75,
Minimax hypothesis of urban 85, 86 n.1
life, 100–101 Newark, New Jersey, 96
Mirowsky, John, 88 New Haven, Connecticut, 156,
Mobility, destruction of primary group 213–14, 216
life and, 34 New Orleans, Louisiana: French
Moholy-Nagy, László, 257 Quarter in, 72, 237; gender and fear
Molotch, Harvey, 18, 44, 263 of crime in, 170; jazz in, 252, 259,
Money. See Economics and money 263; professional sports and, 219
Moore, Gwen, 176, 178–79 New Urbanism, 70–71, 112. See also
Morality, as social Urbanism
construction, 143 New Urban Sociology, 44
Moretti, Enrico, 271 New York City: activist women in, 165;
Morse, Samuel, 225 as art mecca, 261; arts scene in, 272;
Motor Voter law, 182, 185 bicycling in, 112, 120; diamond
Mowrer, Ernest, 60 market in, 13, 17; displacement of
Murray, Charles, 213 inner-city residents of, 207; education
INDEX 327
spending in, 216; gang conflict in, personal identities and, 106–8; public
77–78; gender and fear of crime in, bargain and, 110; romance and, 116;
95–96; gentrification in, 193, 283; as self-management in public settings
global city, 57, 276–77; great inver- and, 108–9; sociability and, 110–12;
sion and, 285; Harlem Children’s social invisibility and, 108; street har-
Zone in, 214–15; homeless street assment and, 105; variations in, 110–
vendors in, 82–84; jazz in, 259; Met- 11; violations of, 104–5
ropolitan Museum of Art and, 262;
neighborhood politics in, 192–93; Oakland, California, 221
number of anonymous encounters in, Obama, Barack, and Obama
96; pay for women in, 156; personal administration, 182–83, 199–200,
freedom in, 119; professional sports 280, 281
and, 219, 225, 237–38; public hous- Ocean City, New Jersey, 156
ing in, 194; rooftop pigeon flyers in, Older Women’s League, 76
68–70; rural art colony near, 254; Oleson, Virginia, 76
skyline of, 72, 237; Social Register Olson, Phillip, 74
and, 177; SoHo loft scene in, 259–60; Olympia, Washington, 156
spatial provincialism in, 142; street life O’Malley, Walter, 219
in, 111; suburbs of, 207; subways of, Oxnard, California, 156
77; top industry groups in, 204
Nineteenth Amendment, 182 Paducah, Kentucky, 268
Nisbet, Robert, 3–4 Paris, 257–59
Nixon, Howard, 244 Park, Robert: agreement among urban
Nixon, Richard, and Nixon sociologists and, 44–46; ambivalence
administration, 280 about city life and, 27; on basis of
Norman, Jon, 281 social control, 35; cities as markets
Norms of everyday city life: anonymity and, 31–32; city as a research
and, 117–18; behavior in public laboratory and, 58–59; on city as state
bathrooms and, 105; behavior of of mind, 72; on communication, 33;
pornography consumers and, 106–8, on constant state of change in cities,
109; civil inattention and, 103–6, 273–74; critiques of, 41; on diversity
110; communicating openness to in cities, 121; on division of labor,
interaction and, 115–16; context and, 32–33, 45; ecology of the city and,
113–14, 116; cooperating to produce 30–34, 36, 86 n.2; economistic
and sustain social order and, 102–3, approach to study of urban life and,
105–6; establishing relationships with 34, 46; Georg Simmel and, 30;
strangers and, 113–16; front and back “Green Book” by, 59; Hull House
regions and, 104; noninvolvement and, 160; influence of, 36, 48;
and, 98, 100, 115; pedestrian methodology of, 58–59; mosaic of
behavior and, 102–3; protecting urban life and, 60; negative pictures of
328 INDEX
city life and, 55; on political machine politics and, 192–95; one-party rule
versus good government and, 193–94, 195; pluralist politics
organizations, 35, 46, 47–48; on and, 175, 191–95; political cultures
secondary versus primary relations in and, 192; political machines and, 35,
the city, 33–36, 47, 121; urban 183, 188–89, 191–92, 194; political
geography and, 283 patronage and, 181; resource
Parker, Charlie, 259 distribution and, 192; socioeconomic
Parsons, Talcott, 56 correlates of political involvement
Pascin, Jules, 258 and, 185–86; in towns versus cities,
Paxton, Pamela, 186 35; voluntary associations and,
Perry, Mark J., 154 185–86; voting patterns and,
Peterson, Karen, 128 180–83, 184; wealth and,
Peterson, Ruth D., 199, 200 176–78, 179–80, 186–88,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 189, 191
177, 225, 285 Prewitt, Kenneth, 189–90
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 177, 191–92, Pribesh, Shana, 88
220–21, 271 Progressive Era: electoral reforms and,
Piven, Frances Fox, 182 183; Playground Movement and,
Playground Movement, 230–35, 249 230–35, 249; public park systems
Police. See Crime and criminal justice and, 235; sports and, 227–28,
Politics. See Power arrangements; 233–34, 249; women and voluntary
Voting and elections associations and, 159
Population, effects of size and density Providence, Rhode Island, 282
of, 38–41, 46–47 Public transit. See Transportation
Portes, Alejandro, 207–8 Putnam, Robert, 71
Power arrangements: campaign finance
and, 186–89, 190; competing Quincy, Josiah, 233
interests in cities and, 191; corruption
in urban politics and, 183; council- Race and ethnicity: changing
manager form of government and, demographics of suburbs and,
183, 184–85, 190; electoral reforms 285–87; commodified presentation of
and, 183–85; governing regimes and, the blues and, 264; continued
191; growth coalitions and, 194–95; significance of, 199–200; defended
hierarchical, 175–80; incumbency neighborhoods and, 123–24;
and, 189–91; industry leaders in economic inequality and, 197–200;
crafting of legislation and, 178–79; employment levels and, 209–10;
institutional frameworks and, exoticization of, 264; family
191–92; interlocking directorates composition and, 208–9;
and, 178–79; iron law of oligarchy gentrification and, 286; incarceration
and, 175; neighborhoods in city rates and, 209–10; Parisian tolerance
INDEX 329
and, 258; pedestrian behavior and, San Francisco, California: arts scene in,
103; residential segregation and, 200; 272; creativity index and, 281;
school performance and, 246; economics of, 194; Golden Gate
segmented assimilation and, 207; Bridge and, 237; minimum wage
sports and, 239–45, 246; increase in, 278; pay for women in,
suburbanization and, 283; tolerance 156; politics in Bay area and, 189; rural
and intolerance and, 126–29, 132, art colony near, 254; Social Register
133–34; voluntary organizations and, and, 177; top industry groups in, 204
186; voting and elections and, 181, San Jose, California, 156, 190, 285
182–84; white-by-design Santa Cruz, California, 156, 194–95
suburbs and, 285–86. See also Segre- Santa Fe, New Mexico, 278
gation Santa Rosa, California, 156
Rader, Benjamin G., 223–24 Sassen, Saskia, 57, 276–77, 278
Raphael, Steven, 171 Sawyer, Frederick W., 262
Ray, Man, 258 Schaumburg, Illinois, 284
Reagan, Ronald, and Reagan Schonberg, Jeff, 133
administration, 279 Schorr, Lisbeth, 213, 215
Reference-group theory, 68 Schutz, Alfred, 93–94
Reflexivity, 28 Scott, Ann Firor, 157–58
Reid, Lesley Williams, 170 Scott, John, 56
Religion, 16, 19, 21, 222–23 Seattle, Washington, 267, 271,
Remarque, Erich Maria, 257 278, 285
Ricardo, David, 12 Seeley, John, 236
Richter, Linda, 149–50 Segregation: cognitive maps of the city
Riesman, David, 48 n.1 and, 143; controlled contact and,
Roanoke, Virginia, 270 135–39; defended neighborhoods
Robinson, Jackie, 229, 243 and, 123, 134–35; ethnicity and,
Rose, Derrick, 242 207–8; hypersegregation and, 206–8,
Rosenbloom, Sandra, 166 212–13; locational socialization and,
Ross, Catherine, 88 136; population size and density and,
Roth, Philip, 238 38–39; in residential housing, 200;
Rotolo, Thomas, 162 social isolation and, 206, 207; social
Ruhil, Anirudh, 184 organization and, 80–81; social
Rumberger, Russell W., 212 selection and, 32–33; tolerance and,
Russia, Ukraine and, 275 134–39; of women in associational
memberships, 160–62; of women in
Saint Petersburg, Florida, the workplace, 150–51, 153–56,
220, 269–70 161–62. See also Race and ethnicity
Sampson, Robert J., 84 Settlement houses, 159–60, 232–33,
San Antonio, Texas, 190 261–62
330 INDEX
Sexuality: controlled contact and, 136; 105–6; defended neighborhoods and,

diversity and tolerance and, 258, 267, 123; formal versus informal, 40,
281; intolerance and, 134; night clubs 46–47; organized crime and, 77–78;
and, 116; reality construction and, personal, territorial, and lived space
144; urban geography and, 66 and, 141; persons’ appearances versus
Shaw, Clifford, 61, 160 geographical location and, 118 n.1,
Shevsky, Eshref, 68 135–36; political machines
Sigle-Rushton, Wendy, 210–11, 212 and, 192
Sills, Melissa, 171 Social media, 85
Sim, R. A., 236 Social order. See Social control and
Simmel, Georg: agreement among social order
urban sociologists and, 44–46; Berlin Sociology: authenticity and, 21; case
in the time of, 256, 257; on studies in, 129–30; central questions
boundaries of the city, 26, 31; cash of, 21; cultural turn in, 252–53;
nexus in the city and, 11–12, 25, 46; debunking motif of, 53–54;
on cosmopolitanism, 26; critiques of, development of as a discipline, 3;
41; on devaluation of others, 28; on everyday social interactions in, 89–90;
freedom and loneliness in cities, 26, experimental methods and, 102; folk
27; on freedom in cities, 121; society and, 21; inadequacy of prior
freedom versus equality and, 48 n.2; explanations in, 54; intellectual
on hostility in cities, 25–26, 29–30; fathers of, 41; neglect of interpersonal
influence of, 30, 48; on membership relations in, 6, 9; quantitative and
in small groups, 30; negative pictures qualitative poles in, 54; shifts in social
of city life and, 54; on psychic life of organization and, 5; social
city dwellers, 97; on strangers in disorganization as field and, 61;
organized life, 93; on urban society versus community and, 21;
personality type, 24–25, 27–28, 87 study subjects in their own terms and,
Small, Albion W., 30 87; themes addressed by early social
Smith, Adam, 12 theorists and, 3–4; urban settlement
Smith, Earl, 243 movement and, 160; viewing city
Smith, Leslie, 128 from a distance in, 58; women in
Smith-Lovin, Lynn, 161, 185 works of sociologists and, 6, 147,
Snedker, Karen, 95–96 149. See also Symbolic interactionism
Social area analysis, 67–68 Solidarity: community and, 235–36;
Social contract, 7–8, 110, 130–33, 146 contracts and, 17–18, 20; division of
Social control and social order: labor and, 18–19, 20; heterogeneity
anonymity and, 117; basis of, 35; and, 145; law and, 15–17;
collective consciousness and, 144–45; mechanical, 15–18, 21, 34, 144;
collective efficacy and, 84; negative versus positive, 17; organic,
cooperating to produce, 102–3, 18–19, 21, 23, 145; sanctions for
INDEX 331
deviance and, 16; unperceived, 24; Sterling, Donald, 200, 243

urbanism and, 47 St. Louis, Missouri: professional sports
Sommer, Robert, 141 and, 220, 221, 225; public housing
Sports: aggression and rioting and, 236; in, 279; Social Register and, 177
American dream and, 239–45, 249; Stoll, Michael A., 186
Americanization and, 228–30, 232– Stone, Gregory, 71, 236–37
33, 249; anonymity and, 245–48; Storrow, James Jackson, 232
basketball as city game and, 245, Stouffer, Samuel, 125–26, 128–29,
246–47; business of, 238–39; class and 134–35
race and, 239–45, 246; community Strangers: civil inattention on the
identification and, 235–39; function subway and, 104; eccentricity and
of in cities, 71; gender and, 233–34; “characters” and, 100, 165;
growing number of teams and, 238; establishing relationships with,
identity and, 71–72, 85; immigration 113–16; face information and, 95;
and, 227–30, 232–33; individualism information and risk and, 94–96;
and, 245–48; industrialization and, norm of noninvolvement and, 98,
221–24, 248–49; intercollegiate, 100; numbers of encountered, 96; in
225; Jackie Robinson and, 229; organized life, 93–94; public
locations of sports franchises and, harassment and, 167–70; public
219–21, 237–39; modern city culture ordered life among, 100, 135–36;
and, 227–30; money invested in, public privacy and, 101, 168; risk and,
220–21; new media and, 238; news 95–96, 100, 113; sports talk and,
coverage of, 220, 225–26; postbellum 247; support of interactions
growth in, 223–24; production of among, 110; women in public
compliant workers and, 234–35; settings and, 165
public subsidies for, 239; quasi- Strauss, Anselm, 120
religious function of, 236–37; racism Streicher, Andreas, 256
and, 243–45, 249; as recapitulation of Subcultures: boundaries of behaviors in,
society, 221; religious asceticism ver- 132; controlled contact with, 137;
sus, 222–23; rise of rail travel and, critical mass for, 120, 126; versus
225; sports talk and, 247–48; stacking deviance, 122; intolerance and, 146;
in, 244; team loyalty and, 220; team neighborhood art scenes and, 264;
names and, 71; team ownership and, reality construction and, 144; spatial
239; technological revolution and, myopia about, 139; tolerance and,
224–26; Title IX and, 234; urbaniza- 122–23, 139; unconventional
tion and industrialization and, behavior and, 120; urban arts scenes
221–24, 227 and, 267. See also Deviance
Stainback, Kevin, 151 Suburbs: changing demographics of,
Starr, Ellen Gates, 159 285–87; as edge cities, 284; financial
Steffens, Lincoln, 77 challenges for cities and, 26;
332 INDEX
ghettoization in, 206; great inversion classical sociologists on, 121;

and, 284–85; growth of, 283, 285; controlled contact and, 135–39, 146;
population movements and, 274, diffusion of social reality and, 143–45;
282–83, 286; survival of cities and, for gang violence, 137–38;
272; urban geography and, 62; white- interaction versus isolation and, 134–
by-design suburbs and, 285–86 36, 142, 146; and intolerance in San
Sullivan, John L., 225 Francisco, 129–34; number and
Sussman, Marvin, 57 visibility of subculture members and,
Suttles, Gerald, 79–80, 123, 134 144; in Paris, 258; power and, 147;
Swanstrom, Todd, 286–87 reality construction and, 143–44;
Symbolic interactionism: cities as key reasons for breakdown of, 146–47;
sites for artistic production and, segregation and, 134–39; social
251–52; communication and, 33; bargain and, 130–33, 146; spatial
construction of social worlds and, myopia and, 139; terminology related
149; definitions of community and, to, 121; urbanism and, 123, 125–29;
57; doubt and trust and, 94; urbanites’ sense of place and, 138–40,
dramaturgical view of interaction and, 142, 146. See also Diversity
91–92, 93; economics and, 82; Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald, 151
identity and interaction and, 91–92; Tönnies, Ferdinand: on authority, 10,
impression management and, 91–92, 22 n.2; blurring between individual
93, 107; interpretation of and social phenomena and, 9; on
environment and, 13; moral or contracts, 17; versus Durkheim, 13,
dynamic density and, 22 n.4; neglect 14; Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and,
of everyday interaction in cities, 89– 8–13, 21–22, 23–24; influence of,
91; persistence of communal ties and, 21–22, 22 n.7, 23–24, 27, 47, 48;
48; power arrangements and, 176; influences on, 8–9, 11, 22; on occu-
residents’ definition of own behaviors pational specialization, 14; psycho-
and environment and, 78–79, 80, 87; logical level of analysis and, 9, 13
space and human behavior and, Torrington, Connecticut, 156
64–65; types of interaction and, 90–91 Transgender people, 16. See also
Gender; Sexuality
Taub, Richard, 64–65, 124, 186, 207 Transportation, 104, 165–66, 225
Tea Party, 213 Trenton, New Jersey, 156
Technology, 85, 86 n.1, 98, 224–26 Trounstine, Jessica, 184, 190
Thomas, Scott L., 212 Tuch, Steven, 129
Thomas, W. I., 68 Twain, Mark, 228
Thrasher, Frederick, 60, 77 Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, 284
Title IX, 234
Tolerance: versus avoidance or Ueda, Reed, 232–33
ignorance of diverse groups, 132–33; Ukraine, 275
INDEX 333
Ullman, Edward, 62 theory and, 126–27; definition of

Unemployment, 196–97, 200, 206, urban and, 43–44; tolerance and,
209–10, 272, 286–87 123, 125–29, 131–32; unified life
United States Conference of and, 44; as a way of life, 36–41, 126.
Mayors, 268 See also Cities; Urban geography;
Urban geography: arbitrary lines of Urbanization
demarcation in, 66–67; census studies Urbanization: factors in urban growth
and, 67; central business district and, and, 263, 266, 268; population
61; city boundaries and, 26, 31, 37, movements and, 274, 282–83; in
45; city planning and, 63; cognitive post–Civil War period, 158; reasons
maps of the city and, 140–43; for, 4; shifts in social organization
concentric circles and, 61–62, 274; and, 5; social consequences of, 23–24;
definition of community and, 57–58; social disorganization and, 61; sports
deviance and, 86 n.3; ecology and, and, 221–24, 227; women and
61; exchange value of space and, 43, voluntary associations and, 158. See
44; gentrification and, 286; great also Cities; Urban geography;
inversion in, 284–85; meaning of Urbanism
space for people and, 64–65; multiple Urban planning. See City planning
nuclei and, 62; natural ecological Urban problems: bifurcated job
boundaries and, 65; personal, structure and, 278; cost effectiveness
territorial, and lived space and, 141– of addressing, 216; dropping out of
42; population movements and, 274, school and, 211–13; federal
286; post–World War II history and, divestiture from cities and, 279–81;
283; revitalization of urban core and, female-headed households and, 208–
283, 284; shifting of low-income 11; industrial decline and, 196–97,
populations and, 283–84; slums 201–2, 206–8; poverty and unem-
around city centers and, 32; social ployment and, 206; racial and ethnic
area analysis and, 67; spatial and moral inequality and, 198–202, 206–8;
order of the city and, 61; spoked roots of, 196–97; social isolation in
wheel model of, 62; street layouts segregated neighborhoods and, 206;
and, 142–43; urbanites’ sense of place social programs addressing, 213–17
and, 138–43; walkable neighbor-
hoods and, 71; zone of transition and, Valdini, Melody, 184
61–62. See also Ecology Vallejo, California, 156
Urban history, women neglected in, Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 265
149–50 Venkatesh, Sudhir, 81–82
Urbanism: arts’ importance to, 261–62, Vienna, 255–56
265–66; change in dynamics of urban Voting and elections: barriers to voter
change and, 284; classic sociological registration and, 180–82; campaign
concepts and, 47; compositional finance and, 186–89, 190; Citizens
334 INDEX
United v. FEC and, 187–88; council- Wietz, Eric, 256–57

manager form of government and, Williams, Marilyn, 68
183; election of 2012 and, 187; elec- Wilson, James Q., 83
toral reforms and, 183–85; incum- Wilson, John, 162
bency and, 189–91; at-large elections Wilson, Thomas, 127–28
and, 183–84; local party support and, Wilson, William Julius: defended
188–89; Motor Voter law and, 182, neighborhoods and, 124; on
185; national versus local elections economic and industrial shifts,
and, 180–81; nonpartisan elections 196–97; on female-head households,
and, 183; political machines and, 209; on immigrant neighborhoods,
188–89; socioeconomic correlates of 207; on sentimental value of space,
political involvement and, 185–86; 64–65; on social isolation of
voter ID and, 182; voter purges and, inner-city residents, 206;
182; voter turnout and, 180, 182, on voluntary organizations, 186
183, 185, 189; Voting Rights Act of Wirth, Louis: agreement among urban
1965 and, 182 sociologists and, 44–46; ambivalence
about city life and, 27; on city as
Wacquant, Loı̈c, 197, 198–200, 209 impersonal, 13; critiques of, 41;
War, capitalism and, 42–43 definition of the city and, 37–38, 45,
Warhol, Andy, 254 47, 55; on effects of urban population
Warr, Mark, 169 size and density, 38–41; Hull House
Warren, Roland, 56 and, 160; influence of, 48, 96;
Washington, D.C.: downtown influences on, 36; money as basis of
revitalization in, 285; minimum wage association and, 46; permanence of
increase in, 278; pay for women in, cities and, 49 n.9; on rural
155, 156; professional sports and, characteristics of cities, 36–37; on
225; Social Register and, 177; suburbs secondary versus primary relations in
of, 284, 285; telegraph and, 225 the city, 121; on segregation and
Washington, Harold, 191 tolerance, 134–35; on social
Weber, Max, 41, 49 n.6, 54, stratification, 40–41; urban
222–23 determinism and, 126–28; on
Weill, Kurt, 257 urbanism as a way of life, 36–41, 126
Weinberg, S. Kirson, 240 Wolff, Edward N., 177
Weinschenk, Aaron C., 183 Women: activism against rape and, 172;
Welfare policy, 166–67 best cities for working women and,
Wellman, Barry, 74, 75 155–56; class and activism for, 164;
West, James, 236 educational attainment of, 153, 154;
West End House (Boston), fear of crime among, 169–71;
232–33 historical exclusion of, 158; ideology
Whyte, William F., 77–79, 111–13 of domestication and, 152, 167; kin
INDEX 335
relations and, 74–75, 157; leadership harassment and, 95–96; wage gap
in professional organizations and, and, 152–53, 154, 155, 156; wom-
157–58; municipal housekeeping en’s movement versus community
and, 163; neglect of in sociology, 6, organizations and, 164; workforce
147, 149; neglect of in urban history, participation rates for, 152, 155;
149–50; objectification of, 167; in the workplace opportunities and, 155,
paid labor force, 150–56; physical 161; workplace segregation and,
vulnerability of, 165; pink-collar jobs 150–51, 153–56, 161–62. See also
and, 150–51; in politics, 164–65; Feminism; Gender
private sphere and, 152, 158; rape and Wuthnow, Robert, 236
rape culture and, 169–70, 171–72;
rates of violence against, 169, 170– Xie, Min, 170–71
71; in settlement house movement,
159–60; sexual harassment and, 105, Yale Child Study Center, 213–14, 216
167–70; suffrage and, 182; Yoels, William C., 212
transportation and, 165–67; unpaid
work of, 76, 151–52, 157, 167, Zelizer, Viviana, 231
172 n.1; voluntary associations and, Zhou, Min, 207–8
157–65; vulnerability to crime and Zorbaugh, Harvey, 60, 62, 160
About the Authors
DAVID A. KARP, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at Boston College, where

he taught for 42 years. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard
University and his doctorate in sociology from New York University. Among
his recent books are Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the
Meanings of Illness; The Burden of Sympathy: How Families Cope with Mental
Illness; and Is It Me or My Meds? Living with Antidepressants. Each of these
books is rooted in the kind of social psychological perspective that animates
“being urban.”
GREGORY P. STONE, PhD, who died in 1981, was Professor of Sociology

at the University of Minnesota. He received his doctorate from the University
of Chicago. Stone co-edited Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction
and published numerous articles in the American Sociological Review,
American Journal of Sociology, and The Sociological Quarterly. His article
“Appearance and the Self” is considered a classic in symbolic interactionist
writings. He was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Symbolic
Interaction and served as the society’s first president.
WILLIAM C. YOELS, PhD, retired as Professor Emeritus at the University

of Alabama-Birmingham. He received his doctorate from the University of
Minnesota. His published works include Symbols, Selves and Society: Under-
standing Interaction; Experiencing the Life Cycle: A Social Psychology of Aging;
and Sociology in Everyday Life. He has published articles in the American
Journal of Sociology, Symbolic Interaction, Qualitative Sociology, The Sociological
338 ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Quarterly, and The Sociology of Health and Illness. He is a founding member of

the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and served as one of three
Associate Editors for the Society’s official journal, Symbolic Interaction.
NICHOLAS P. DEMPSEY, PhD, is Associate Professor of sociology at

Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL. He has published articles in Symbolic
Interaction, Qualitative Sociology, and Studies in Symbolic Interaction. Dempsey
holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Karp City Life

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Being Urban

DAVID A. KARP, GREGORY P. STONE,

For the extraordinary joy they provide, I thank Cody,

To Jack, Bridget, and Angela.

Preface to the Third Edition ix

Part I Issues and Perspectives in Urban Sociology 1

Part II Experiencing City Life 51

Part III Urban Institutions and Social Change 173

Chapter 10 New Urban Dynamics: Gentrification,

O ver 20 years have passed since we published the previous edition of

In fact, the interactionist paradigm that informs Being Urban is key to

WHAT’S NEW IN THE THIRD EDITION

business. Our discussion of sport in Chapter 8 has been updated to recognize

the recurrent themes and concerns essential to a social psychological view of

dominance by better-off sectors of the population. We also note, however,

W e would like to thank a number of persons whose help and encourage-

T he development of sociology as a discipline, as Nisbet (1966) demon-

factory discipline himself.” It is also important to note the following

As our brief discussion indicates, a profound shift in the basis of social

A FRAME OF REFERENCE: THE CITY AND

1. to demonstrate how three major theories of social organization proposed

2. to show how sociological interpretation of urbanism in terms of these

The review of these contributions is necessarily selective. Any thorough

SIR HENRY SUMNER MAINE: STATUS AND CONTRACT

Society in primitive times was not what it is assumed . . . to be at present, a collec-

The transformation of society’s basic units was not accomplished suddenly

FERDINAND TÖNNIES: GEMEINSCHAFT AND

shared liking or respect. He did not consider conflict relationships in his

Gemeinschaft, then, is an ideal construct that abstracts the essence of the

In contrast with Gemeinschaft relationships—in which human beings are

of interpersonal relations in the city. Relations in Gesellschaft, then, are char-

1. Natural society consists of a horde of unorganized individuals.

It is clear, then, that if you presume society is built on a horde of individ-

EMILE DURKHEIM: MECHANICAL AND ORGANIC

Like an article of common law, boundaries remain a meaningful point of refer-

crime against society—a moral offense—and, accordingly, the defendant in

For Durkheim, the division of labor is, ultimately, a further reflection of a

In effect, then, Durkheim is suggesting that as traditional forms of religion

It may be, as Durkheim argued, that in complex societies, individuation is

Durkheim recognized the proliferation of contractual relationships in contem-

The impact upon Tönnies’s theoretical system of Maine’s distinctions

I n Chapter 1 we dealt at length with the treatments of urban industrial

THE CITY AND THE SOCIOLOGIST

of contract upon status, Gesellschaft upon Gemeinschaft, and organic solidar-

GEORG SIMMEL: THE METROPOLIS AND

creating a mental predominance through the intensification of conscious-

At the base of the functional expansion of the metropolis is the division of

he submitted. Also, Simmel was fond of uncovering the apparently profound

ROBERT E. PARK: THE CITY—A SPATIAL PATTERN

is constituted by the number, position, and mobility of city dwellers.

speculator’s chances for realizing a profit on an investment. Consequently,

The point is that change of occupation, personal success or failure—changes of

location. The physical or ecological organization of the community, in the large

As a matter of fact, “all we ordinarily conceive as social may be eventually

The world of communication and of “distance,” in which we all speak to main-

relations in the associations of individuals in the community” (1925:23).

Perhaps no area of urban life has undergone more drastic readjustment

In contrast with the political machine, the “good government” organiza-

primary restraints permit a great diversity of individual expression. Whereas

LOUIS WIRTH: URBANISM AS A WAY OF LIFE

and rural—folk society as ideal types of communities, we may obtain a perspec-

The presence or absence of rural characteristics, in what we are accustomed

1. Urbanism must be defined as a mode of life.

The multiplication of persons in a state of interaction under conditions which