As in the notion of modernity, urbanism refers to the form of social organization and values typically found in large urban settings. The values in urbanism are those of individualism and impersonality and the major characteristics of social organization are a developed division of labor, high rates of geographic and social mobility and predominance of impersonality in social interaction despite the acute social interdependence. Sociologist Louis Wirth is best known as the author of a classic essay on 'Urbanism as a Way of Life.'
Douglas Kelbaugh identifies three paradigms within urbanism: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and Post-Urbanism. New Urban Sociology began in Europe at the beginning of the 1970s and then spread to the United States.
Urbanism is a component of disciplines such as urban planning, and urban sociology which is studies urban life and culture. Urbanism is synonymous with Urban Planning, and the Urbanist refers to an Urban Planner. Paul L. Knox refers to contemporary urbanism as the "aestheticization of everyday life."
Alfred Agache, French Sociology, and Modern Urbanism in France and Brazil - David K. Underwood. Abstract: The 1930 master plan for Rio de Janeiro, drawn up by the French architect-urbanist Alfred Agache, had an important impact on Rio and on the development of modern planning in Brazil. Reflecting the socioscientific methods of Edmond Demolins and the Musee Social in Paris as well as the sociological ideas of Gabriel Tarde and David Emile Durkheim, the plan exemplifies the ambitions and techniques of the urbanism of the Societe Francaise d'Urbanistes. Agache, a leading theorist, teacher, and practitioner of SFU urbanism, developed a sociological urbanisme parlant that evolved out of his Beaux-Arts training and his background in French sociology.
Urbanism as a way of life - By Louis Wirth, The City and Contemporary Civilisation. Because the city is the product of growth rather than of instantaneous creation, it is to be expected that the influences which it exerts upon the modes of life should not be able to wipe out completely the previously dominant modes of human association.
To a greater or lesser degree, therefore, our social life bares the imprint of an earlier folk society, the characteristic modes of settlement of which were the farm, the manor, and the village. 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 perspective for the analysis of the basic models of human association as they appear in contemporary civilization.
Urbanism, Race, and Crime
John H. Laub.
There is general agreement that urbanism is an important correlate of criminality.
However, the interpretation of the relation is a matter of theoretical dispute.
The most common argument is that there is a confounding effect between urbanism
and race. This paper uses National Crime Survey data to test the compositional
argument. The findings imply a reconsideration of the accepted relationship
between urbanism and crime generally portrayed in the criminological literature.
New Agendas for Social Policy and Criminology: Globalization, Urbanism and the Emerging Post-Social Security State, Tony Fitzpatrick. Abstract: The subjects of social policy and criminology have long been concerned with the criminalization and regulation of the poor.
The Role of the Family and
Women Under Contemporary Urbanism
Mackenzie, Suzanne; Seymour, Lee.
This paper examines how selected aspects of contemporary urban environment influence the
form and function of the family and the position of women within the family and within
society. The study was undertaken within the framework of Marxian analysis and with a
specific focus on how advanced industrial capitalism perpetuates the family in its present
form. Review of socialization, historical, and
political-economics literature indicates that, in addition to these historical
influences, several other phenomena have contributed to the position of the
family and of women in modern urban societies.
Street culture - The dialectic of urbanism in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-werk - Joseph D. Lewandowski.
This article develops a sociological reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’, or Passagen-werk. Specifically, the essay seeks to make explicit Benjamin’s non-dualistic account of structure and agency in the urban milieu.
I characterize this account as the ‘dialectic of urbanism’, and argue that one of the central insights of Benjamin’s Passagen-werk is that it locates an emergent and innovative cultural form, a distinctive ‘street culture’ or jointly shared way of modern urban life, within haussmannizing techniques of architectural administration and spatial domination.
In the modern metropolis, Benjamin sees a new kind of collective, an embedded and effervescent sociocultural group held together not by the functionalist imperatives of capitalist urban planning but by an improvisational mode of street life.
Type of Place, Urbanism, and Delinquency: Further Testing the Determinist Theory -
A. LEIGH INGRAM.
This research examines the relationship between type of place and juvenile delinquency in
an effort to extend knowledge about determinism or
the "determinist" theory. This theory predicts a positive relationship between
type of place and delinquency, and that relationship will be mediated by
"urbanism," the negative consequences of exposure to urban environments. The
theory is tested using two measures of type of place, six measures of urbanism,
and three delinquency indexes. The results provide little support for the
determinist theory. Delinquency does not predict urbanness, and urbanness does
not predict urbanism. Urbanism does, however, prove to be a significant
predictor of delinquency.
Society, State, and Urbanism: Ibn Khaldun's Sociological Thought by Fuad Baali -
Review: Christopher Prendergast.
Tokyo Urbanism (Anthropology 470)
- Instructor: David Slater.
Course Description: The city has been at the center of much of the most important
developments in the social science (including modernization, urbanization, class and race
relations), and today it is once again at the forefront of social theory (see
postmodernism, transnationalism,
identity politics and social geography). By the same
token, the city in general and Tokyo in particular, has been a very important feature in
modern Japanese history.