Urban Youth: A Sociological View

Abstract

The development of contemporary civilisation based largely on industrialisation has engendered a rapid growth in towns and cardinal changes in residential structure. Urbanisation as a logical consequence of industralisation has occurred at different rates and in diverse forms in various parts of the world; but the growth in number of towns and cities has been a universal indicator of the process. The classical American and British literature of the turn of the century, no less vividly than the work of Frederick Engels, has given us a picture of the growth of giant cities and especially of the fate of the little person lost in this world. Today, over a hundred years after urbanisation began in Europe and the United States, those patterns and examples are being felt in exceedingly diverse ways. Here are a few lines from one letter among many received from our respondents during a 1989–90 postal survey.