Abstract
Although Wirth’s statement has been extensively quoted, much of the impact of its imagery of the city has been overlooked. The words that have been italicized in the quotation point to a particular urban imagery that has led to an emphasis on certain types of research and to a deemphasis on other approaches to the city.
The central problem of the sociologist of the city is to discover the forms of social action and organization that typically emerge in relatively permanent, compact settlements of large numbers of heterogeneous individuals.1
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Reference
Louis Wirth, On Cities and Social Life, ed. Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 68. (Italics added.)
For a discussion of the importance of the concept of community in sociological analysis, see Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966).
Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 1.
Max Weber, The City, trans. and ed. by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: Free Press, 1958).
Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, trans. Kurt H. Wolff and Reinhard Bendix (New York: Free Press, 1955), 138. For an excellent discussion of the dualistic nature of Simmel’s sociology, see the introduction by Donald N. Levine to Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
Simmel, Conflict,148–149.
lhid., 150–151.
Major works that have shaped the network perspective are Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (London: Tavistock, 1957); and J. Clyde Mitchell, ed., Social Networks in Urban Situations (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–50. Two of the best contemporary network analyses are Claude Fischer et al., Networks and Places (New York: Free Press, 1977); and Barry Wellman, “The Community Question: The Intimate Network of East Yorkers,” American Journal of Sociology, 84 (March 1979):1201–1231.
Sociological Inquiry 43 (Dec. 1973):57–88.
One of the few discussions of this critical distinction is by Hans Paul Bahrdt, “Public Activity and Private Activity as Basic Forms of City Association,” in Perspectives on the American Community, ed. Roland Warren (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961), 78–85.
Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed., Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1951), 415. For an attempt to test Simmel’s ideas empirically, see Stanley Milgram, “The Experience of Living in Cities,” Science 167 (March 1970):1461–1468.
Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 17–32.
Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959); Coffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1963).
“Privatizing public space” is a phrase used by Lofland, ibid., 118–157. See also Sherri Cavan, “Interaction in Home Territories,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 8 (1963):17–32.
One of the best of the early Chicago studies is Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929).
Jungle imagery has often been connected with a concern about crime in the city, as in Robert Cooley Angell, “The Moral Integration of American Cities, II,” American Journal of Sociology 80 (Nov. 1974):607–629. The classic work of the Chicago school on crime is Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).
Herbert Spencer, On Social Evolution, ed. J. D. Y. Peel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 57.
Functionalism,“ in A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 327–328.
I bid., 335.
Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1933).
Roland L. Warren, The Community in America, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1978), 52–95.
Pp. 325–326.
Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, ed. T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 97.
Alex Ganz and Thomas O’Brien, “The City: Sandbox, Reservation, or Dynamo?” Public Policy 21 (Winter 1973):107–123.
American Journal of Sociology 82 (Sept. 1976):309–332.
Ibid., 309. For other works from this perspective see William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers, eds., Marxism and the Metropolis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Manuel Castells, The Urban Question (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1977). For a very different use of machine imagery, see Christine L. Fry, “The City as a Commodity: The Age-Graded Case,” Human Organization 36 (Summer 1977):115–123.
Middletown (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1929), 23–24.
Robert F. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937).
f the contemporary network analysts, Wellman (op. cit.) and Fischer (op. cit.) are most aware of the static quality of much network analysis. Wellman’s work in progress is developing more dynamic approaches to urban networks. 30Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1947.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1960).
The Social Construction of Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 22. Also see Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
Suttles, Social Construction, 233–268. A critical theoretical discussion of these issues is in Herman Schmalenbach, “The Sociological Category of Communion,” in Theories of Society, ed. Talcott Parsons et al. (New York: Free Press, 1961), Vol. I, pp. 331–347.
“The Loss of Community: An Empirical Test through Replication,” American Sociological Review 40 (Oct. 1975):546; see also Hunter, Symbolic Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
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Langer, P. (1984). Sociology-Four Images of Organized Diversity. In: Rodwin, L., Hollister, R.M. (eds) Cities of the Mind. Environment, Development, and Public Policy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9697-1_6
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