ancient cities

886 Urbanization
transition, or the urban poor who are unable to
leave the inner city), there are other groups who
have very different lifestyles (ethnic communities
in the city where primary group relationships are
important, young families in the suburbs where
family obligations determine everyday activities).
It is important to note this is a peculiarly
American debate, determined in large part by the
mass suburbanization following World War II,
when young families left the city for single-family
homes in the suburbs, leaving established ethnic
communities in the city behind; when the migration
of African American households from the
South would transform the inner city; and
when high levels of poverty and unemployment
among these groups would lead to the concentration
of the urban poor. There was no similar
debate of Wirth’s model in the European literature.
Generalizations about urban and suburban
life in the United States are cast further into doubt
by more recent changes in the American city,
where many suburbs have higher levels of population
density than are found in the city (due to the
concentration of apartment buildings in workingclass
suburbs), where a majority of immigrants
move into suburban enclaves, and poverty in the
older industrial suburbs often is comparable to
that in the central city.
In the United States, Urbanism as a Way of Life
stimulated another important area of study
and research. Claude Fischer’s essay “Toward a
Subculture of Urbanism” directly confronted Gans’s
assertion that there are no particularly significant
social effects that can be attributed to urbanism
and focused on Wirth’s discussion of size and density
to argue that population concentration produces
a diversity of subcultures, strengthens them,
and promotes diffusion among them, accounting
for the “urban unconventionality” that is often so
apparent to outsiders (although sometimes not so
apparent to others in the city, due perhaps to their
own blasé attitude and greater tolerance for diversity
and heterogeneity). This discussion of subcultures
is very different from that found in the United
Kingdom, which locates subcultures within the
class structural and cultural milieu of English society,
rather than in the ecological structure of particular
urban areas.
Urbanism has proved to be a vital construct within
urban studies, provoking important discussion about
the character and quality of life brought about by
industrial capitalism and about the emergence of subcultures
within contemporary society. These are fundamental
debates within urban sociology, but they
further determine the research focus of other disciplines,
such as urban psychology (with a focus on
urban pathologies). Several entries in this encyclopedia
provide important discussion of the work of
Simmel and of Tönnies, while the entry on urban life
discusses their work and urbanism more generally.
Ray Hutchison
See also Chicago School of Urban Sociology;
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; Manchester, United
Kingdom; Simmel, Georg; Urban Anthropology;
Urban Life; Urban Psychology; Urban Sociology
Further Readings
Engels, Friedrich. [1844] 2009. The Condition of the
Working Class in England. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Fava, Silvia. 1956. “Suburbanism as a Way of Life.”
American Sociological Review 21:34–37.
Fischer, Claude S. 1975. “Toward a Subcultural Theory
of Urbanism.” American Journal of Sociology
80:1319–41.
Gans, Herbert. 2005. “Urbanism and Suburbanism as
Ways of Life: A Reevaluation of Definitions.”
Pp. 42–50 in The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by
J. Lin. New York: Routledge.
Simmel, Georg. [1905] 1950. “The Metropolis and
Mental Life.” Pp. 409–24 in The Sociology of Georg
Simmel, edited by H. Wolff. New York: The Free
Press.
Smith, Michael P. 1979. The City and Social Theory.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1957. Community and Society
[Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft]. Translated and
edited by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press.
Wirth, Louis. 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.”
American Journal of Sociology 44:3–24.
Ur b a n i z a t i o n
Urban studies is commonly divided into two subject
areas: urbanism (the study of urban life, or the