urban sociology
urban sociologySociological concern with urbanization began with sociology itself, for it was the rapidly growing 19th-century industrial cities that first supported those social relationships and structures which inspired the new discipline. Most early sociologists shared the anti-urban bias of much Victorian thought and writing—and a correspondingly romanticized view of rural life. A key concern was the apparent breakdown of community and social control consequent upon urbanization.
Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903) incorporated these concerns in a brilliant, impressionistic discussion of urban life-styles and personality, viewing the social organization and culture which typified urban areas as the consequence of large population aggregates, thus linking causally the physical characteristics...
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