ancient cities

Ga n s, He r b e r t
The sociologist Herbert J. Gans was born in 1927
in Cologne, Germany, and was naturalized as an
American citizen in 1945. His work has informed
social science and public opinion for almost half a
century, ranging from publications in prestigious
academic journals, to award-winning books, to
widely read articles in the popular media. In particular,
he has made an enormous contribution to
the field of urban studies. Gans is a true public
intellectual, tackling polemic social problems
whose relevance is widely recognized, defying stereotypes,
and uncovering new perspectives.
Gans’s biography reveals the trajectory of a
scholar who has contributed to a wide range of
fields in social science including urban studies,
urban planning, poverty, race and ethnic studies,
and American studies, as well as the media and
popular culture, liberal democratic theory, and
public policy. Gans received his PhD in planning
from the University of Pennsylvania and went on
to work at various municipal and federal agencies.
In 1971, he was appointed to Columbia
University’s Department of Sociology, holding
the title of Robert S. Lynd Professor from 1985
until he retired in 2008. Gans served as president
of the American Sociological Association (ASA)
in 1989. He was honored in 1999 with the
ASA’s Award for Contributions to the Public
Understanding of Sociology, and in 2005, he was
recognized by the association for his career of
distinguished scholarship.
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Gans’s urban ethnographic work was rooted in
the tradition of urban community studies, in the
footsteps of Louis Wirth’s 1927 The Ghetto and
William Foote Whyte’s 1943 Street Corner Society.
This tradition, born of the Chicago School, focused
on the importance of place and highlighted the rich
social ties that were a fundamental part of social
life in the city. Gans firmly advocated that participant
observation must be part of the methodological
tool kit in analyzing urban and suburban life.
The Urban Villagers, published in 1962, was an
ethnography of Boston’s West End neighborhood,
which was slated for demolition and replacement
with modern high-rise apartments. His criticism of
urban renewal and its effects on communities
remains salient today. Gans’s well-known academic
correspondence with Mark Granovetter, concerning
the failure of West End residents to effectively
mobilize to prevent the demolition, highlighted the
limitations of network analysis for uncovering
complex social processes. Gans’s work repeatedly
advocated the importance of highly contextualized
ethnographic data—gleaned from extended field
immersion—to generate social scientific claims.
In The Levittowners, published in 1967, Gans
challenged the prevailing postwar stereotype of
suburbs as spaces promoting social conformity,
isolation, and moral bankruptcy. He argued that
individual agency plays a strong role in shaping
social outcomes; physical environment does not
automatically produce social, moral, and cultural
outcomes. Gans’s Middle American Individualism:
Political Participation and Liberal Democracy is a
subtle analysis of middle- and working-class