ancient cities

National Urban League. 1950. 40th Anniversary Year
Book. New York: National Urban League.
———. 1980. 70th Anniversary Year Book. New York:
National Urban League.
———. 2004. Annual Report 2004. New York: National
Urban League. Retrieved May 15, 2009 (http://www
.nul.org/publications/AnnualReport/2004AnnualRpt
.pdf).
Ur b a n life
Urban life might most easily be defined as life
lived in a built-up area. Although the term itself
has little analytical definition, the question of the
central characteristics that define urban life has
been a major preoccupation of urban theorists
throughout the history of urban studies. Classical
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urban
theorists such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber,
Georg Simmel, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth
argued that urban life was distinctive because the
size and scale of life in modern industrial cities
demanded specific individual and societal adaptations.
Subsequent writers have questioned this
claim. Some argued that many of the relationships
that seemed to define urban life were in fact characteristic
of modern life in all its forms. Others
argued that in all sorts of ways, life in cities still
retained much of the intimate character of nonurban
ways of life. Nonetheless, few contemporary
analysts would claim that there is nothing distinctive
about urban living. Urban life tends not to be
seen as being distinctive because of just one or two
isolatable characteristics. Rather, it is in the complex
ecology of relationships that urban systems
pull together that urban life gains its definition.
Whereas previously urban life was contrasted to
rural or traditional modes of life, increasingly the
relevant contrast is understood as being between
urban life and suburbia or urban life and exurbia.
Modern Life and the Industrial City
The first systematic social scientific analysis of the
contrast between urban and rural life was Ferdinand
Tönnies’s Community and Society, published in
1887. Seeking to understand the social and economic
transformations then sweeping through his
Urban Life
891
native Germany, Tönnies argued that industrialization
was fundamentally transforming the
nature of social bonds between people. Where
previously social relations were defined by their
Gemeinschaftlich (or, loosely translated, communal)
character—relations were organized through
custom, obligation, and paternalism—in modern,
industrial societies social relationships were primarily
Gesellschaftlich in orientation. Under the
term Gesellschaftlich Tönnies described a society
(not a community) defined by contractual market
relations, rationality, and individual autonomy.
Crucially Tönnies also argued that Gesellschaftlich
relationships were defined by their urban nature.
The rise of modern, commercial society was also
simultaneously the rise of an urbanized society.
For Tönnies, as for many subsequent thinkers,
modern society equated with urban society, modern
life with urban life.
This idea—that to understand modern society it
was necessary to understand urban society and
that to understand urban life was to understand
what was to be modern—dominated urban thought
through much of the twentieth century. Georg
Simmel in his 1903 essay “The Metropolis and
Mental Life,” for example, argued not only that
urban life was fundamentally different from rural
life but also that city life demanded a higher level
of intellectual faculty than did rural life. The offshoot
of this was the urban dweller’s famous blasé
attitude, which was not so much a sign of indifference
as of an elevated degree of mental capacity. In
a similar manner, Robert Park, the founder of the
Chicago School of Urban Sociology, saw the city
as “the natural habitat of civilized man”; although
simultaneously Park also stressed that in its dependence
on secondary relationships, the city with its
“intensity of stimulations, tends . . . to confuse and
demoralise the person.” Louis Wirth, in his essay
“Urbanism as a Way of Life,” which in many ways
marked the apogee of this line of thinking, argued
that “the beginning of what is distinctly modern in
our civilisation is best signalized by the growth of
great cities. . . . The distinctive feature of mode of
man living in the modern age is his concentration
into gigantic aggregations.” Equally the writings
of the great modernist architects such as Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, along with those of Garden City advocates
such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, and