ancient cities

the establishment of an assertive and self-confident
gay rights movement.
By no means has all work on forms of association
in urban areas focused on minority or
discriminated-against social groups. A great deal
of attention has also been paid to the concrete networks
of social relations that characterize urban
dwellers as a whole. Much of this work has run
counter to the neighborhood, or subcultural studies,
research outlined earlier. Rather than stressing
the importance of particular neighborhoods and
the intensity of ties within a particular local area,
urban sociologists and anthropologists in Europe
and North America have shown the degree to
which, for many urban dwellers, their personal ties
spread across their city in a spider-like manner.
Technologies like the telephone and the automobile
have disembedded many people’s social lives
from the narrow confines of a walkable neighborhood.
Of course as researchers such as Claude
Fischer and Barry Wellman have stressed, the
kinds of socially rich neighborhoods described by
many community study authors do exist. But in
many North American and European urban areas,
this kind of neighborhood is more the exception
than the rule. It is also worth stressing that the
analysis of personal networks reveals a great deal
of variation in form and spatial density depending
on the age, sex, occupation, social class, and marital
status of the individual being studied. This
variation is often manifested within individual
households. The male head of the household often
leads a much more mobile, spatially distanciated
life than that of his spouse, while the spatial horizon
of his children are even more circumscribed.
Whereas there is a tendency within both the academic
and the popular literature to place a high
value on tightly knit neighborhood social networks,
often this pattern of spatial concentration
of personal social networks is as much a barrier to
social advancement as it is a valuable source of
social support. Douglas Massey, for example, in
his work on the contemporary inner-city African
American ghetto has demonstrated how the spatially
concentrated social networks that define
many ghetto dwellers’ lives effectively imprison
them within the inner city.
As a final point on urban forms of association,
it is important to stress that for many urban dwellers
much of urban life involves interactions and
Urban Life
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relationships that are defined by, and often valued
for, their lack of temporal and emotional depth.
The collective life of a city is defined in all sorts of
ways by what Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2002)
call “light sociality”—the interactions with everyday
strangers required as individuals go about
their business in a city: rituals of standing in line,
greeting the supermarket cashier, talking small
talk at a bar or café, or thanking the bus driver.
Ecologies of Urban Life
Beyond the question of the forms of social association
and the types of social networks that characterize
different social groups within cities, urban
researchers have also repeatedly returned to the
idea that urban life as a whole in some sense exists
as a distinctive ecology of human existence. To a
significant extent this is to revisit a theme that concerned
earlier writers like Simmel and Wirth.
Wirth had argued in his 1938 essay “Urbanism as
a Way of Life” that the three defining characteristics
of urban life were density of population, its
size, and its heterogeneity. These three elements
remain constants in much of the discussion about
the ecology of urban life—although how they each
should be measured or defined is the focus of a
great deal of debate.
There are four principal ways that urban scholars
have examined the notion of an urban ecology.
The first focuses on the generative capacity of
the urban environment. In essence this is to ask
why it is that populations agglomerate together in
the first place. The answer offered by thinkers
from Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s, through to
Edward Soja in his Postmetropolis (2000) and
contemporary economic geographers such as Allen J.
Scott and Michael Storper, is that through the
specialization, the unexpected mixtures, the concentration
of resources, and the challenges of living
in a dense, heterogeneous environment, urban
life creates a productive dynamic that transcends
the sum of its parts. A second body of literature
has focused on the related question of how cities
manage to generate order despite their size and
heterogeneity. This has led both to detailed ethnographically
based accounts of how trust is produced
and maintained among strangers, and work
drawing on systems and complexity theory that
seeks to understand cities as emergent, self-ordering