SOURCE: "Louis Wirth and the Chicago School of Urban Sociology: An Assessment and Critique," in Humanity and Society, Vol. 9, No. 1, February, 1985, pp. 1-12.

The city as a built form can .. . be regarded as a set of objects arranged according to some pattern in space. But there are few who would argue that cities are just that.

—David Harvey
Social Justice and the City

INTRODUCTION

Louis Wirth's essay "Urbanism As A Way Of Life," (Wirth, 1938:1-24) marked the beginning of conventional views in urban sociology on the relationships between the individual and the urban environment. Using the city as an isolated unit of analysis and claiming its study to be the sole province of sociology Wirth and the contemporary proponents of "The Chicago School" advanced a series of related paradigms that attempted to describe and understand the city. Though Wirth's views are no longer appropriate to the analysis of the capitalist city, much urban sociological literature of the last forty years reflects his useful orientation. Through critiquing Louis Wirth one may move beyond the limits of his position to more substantial theories regarding the genesis and persistence of the city as a modern social formation.

WIRTH'S MODEL OF THE CITY

Like other sociologists, Wirth described the city as the embodiment of civilization—the historic center of progress, education, and higher standards of living. Wirth pointed to the city as the locus of slums, poverty, crime, and defined the city as a "relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals" (Wirth, 1938:8) with a universally distinct pattern of behavior.

Urbanism, then, was typified by "secularization, secondary group relations, increased role segmentalization, and poorly defined social norms." (Wirth, 1938:1-24) Furthermore, Wirth saw this way of life as existing only in the city as opposed to the rural community.

Key determinants of this urban behavior pattern were the ecological variables of size, density, and heterogeneity. Wirth posited the following linear relationship: "the larger, the more densely populated and the more heterogeneous a community, the more accentuated the characteristics associated with urbanization will be" (Wirth 1938:9). In other words, the bigger the city the more one should expect to find individual differences, mechanisms of formal control, segmenting of roles, utilitarian social relationships, and what Wirth defined as the "schizoid" character of urban personality—anonymity, superficiality, anomie, lack of participation, and impersonality. Density or physical closeness intensified these segmented social interactions, diversified the social activities, and increased social disorganization.

In Wirth's model, social heterogeneity reinforced the tendency of the individual to pursue their own interest in a competitive setting (over that of the community), thereby weakening community ties, traditions, and commonly acknowledged social norms of behavior. This increased social heterogeneity culminated in the disorganization of the individual and, along with the other variables of size and density, produced higher incidences of social pathologies. Wirth described urbanization as a spatial form solely in terms of the development, intensification, and diffusion of characteristics associated with urbanism. The analysis disregarded the relationship between social processes and spatial form. Furthermore, he made no attempt to relate the city to the larger society. While his paradigm was specific to the inner core during the 1930's, he generalized his analysis into a grand theory purporting to describe a lifestyle indigenous to any city, applicable to all its denizens, regardless of their location in the world.

The characteristics Wirth ascribed to urbanism lacked a clear theoretical framework. They neither demonstrated how cities function nor explained the reason for a city's existence. Wirth's ecological concept of urbanism more successfully described the adaptation of a certain group of urban people to a physical environment than accounted for all social action. Lifestyle reflects the role humans play in a social and political system and therefore, class fractions, not merely residence. Furthermore, the city way of life must be traced to the larger social, economic, and political systems that determine the situations in which it operates. To focus on the internal dynamics of the city without considering the effects on it of dominant political, ideological, and economic systems is far too limiting theoretically.

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY

The Chicago School of Sociology, strongly influenced by the European theorists Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Tonnies and Wirth posited a series of generalizations that idealized rural folk society. Urban life was viewed as somewhat undesirable, while the lifestyle of the "yeoman farmer" was seen not only as the ultimate symbol of American culture, but Utopian as well. Rural areas were idealized by these scientists as the embodiment of folkways, desired traditions, social continuity, and cultural conformity. By contrast, the city was characterized by innovation, change, and disorganization. Its more sophisticated, more rational inhabitants had less real warmth and feeling. This estranging sophistication Wirth ascribed to the universal process of urbanism.

The Chicago school developed during an era of extreme and rapid social change. The influx of millions of immigrants at the turn of the century who settled principally in urban areas, along with deteriorating economic conditions culminating in the Great Depression, created a series of social problems (crime, suicide, prostitution, lack of integration, anomie, alcoholism) erroneously assumed to be uniquely urban. The sheer numbers of individuals from highly diverse ethnic backgrounds greatly contributed to the rapid growth and social diversity of not only existing American urban areas, but many new cities plagued by the same social problems.

Widespread concern with urban problems prompted the Chicago School to make these problems the central focus of their research. Their analysis centered solely on Chicago, yet their findings were generalized into a macroscopic urban theory. They developed a series of "natural" laws (zones and processes of invasion, competition, segregation, and succession) and used ecological factors (population, density, technology, size, heterogeneity) to explain the creation, arrangement, way of life, and expansion of cities.

Like other members of the Chicago School, Louis Wirth viewed cities as fostering secondary contacts in place of the primary relationships found in rural areas. He believed that the sources of social control, represented by the family, the neighborhood, and the local community were largely undermined by the demands of an irrational urban existence.

The anthropologist Robert Redfield, a student of Robert Park, a founder of the Chicago School of Urbanization, described a "folk" or "rural" society as having the following characteristics: isolation, a high degree of genetic and cultural homogeneity, slow cultural change, preliteracy, small numbers, minimal division of labor, a simple technology in which every individual is a primary producer, a social organization based on blood and fictive kinship, traditional and uncritical behavior, the viewing of traditional objects and acts as sacred, the importance of magic and religion and the absence of the economic motive (see Mintz, 1953-54:137). Redfield viewed the rural economy as one of status rather than market, with the family group representing the primary production unit. He argued that since this type of society exhibited a strong sense of group solidarity and common understanding, it did not require legislative and formal social control.

Parallel to Redfield's description of a folk society, Wirth's urban society exhibited an extensive division of labor, an emphasis on innovation and individual achievement, lack of primary ties to neighborhoods, reliance on secondary forms of social control such as the police and courts, the breakdown of primary groups, social disorganization, interaction with others as role players rather than as total personalities, the destruction of close family life and transfer of its functions to specialized agencies outside the home, a diversity in values and religious beliefs, social mobility and universal or codified rules applicable to all (Wirth, 1938:1-24). Wirth claimed that while the urban lifestyle was based on rationality, secularism, diversity, innovation, and progress, it was also disorienting to the individual.

Increasing population, size and density especially when accompanied by heterogeneity, decreased the power of informal social controls. These controls, effected largely through the interplay of folkways and mores, gave way to the increased formal control of laws, police, courts, jails, regulations, bureaucracies and orders. Wirth considered the breakdown in informal social controls to be largely responsible for the increase in juvenile delinquency, crime, prostitution, drug addiction, suicide, mental disease, social unrest and political instability. Their sheer urban numbers meant that residents had to rely on representatives rather than themselves in the political process.

Wirth's view of urban life and the urban resident was derived particularly from the slum and ghetto areas of the city. He saw the slums as suffering from acute social disorganization, deteriorating to a state of anomie—the "loss of spontaneous self-expression, the morale, and the sense of participation that comes with living in an integrated society" (Wirth, 1938:12).

Beginning about 1943, sociologists began to study slum areas to test Wirth's hypotheses. The work of Whyte (1943), Gans (1962), and Suttles (1968) focused on the key elements in Wirth's essay and found little to support his hypothesis. Whyte's study, Street Corner Society, documents a high degree of social organization and predictability in a Boston Italian slum. Gans' study of social bonds, in The Urban Villagers: Group And Class In The Life Of Italian Americans, reveals the presence of strong family life and relationships as strong and as meaningful as bonds found in a village. Gans' salient point was that to find a sense of community one must look beyond the physical appearance of the urban area. And last, Suttles, after studying four major ethnic groups in urban slums (Italian, Black, Mexican and Puerto Ricans), discovered a pattern of social organization in which each group carefully defined its boundaries. These boundaries, not apparent to strangers, were well-known and respected by residents. Members of each ethnic group remained safe and comfortable as long as they stayed in their own territory. These studies undermined Wirth's contention that urbanization bred disorganization and the loss of primary group contact. Gans demonstrated that much urban behavior remained traditional rather than irrational, and, in many ways, resembled folk rather than urban characteristics.

Wirth's essay "Urbanism As A Way Of Life," delineated the distinctions between folk and urban societies. In establishing the legitimacy of the rural-urban continuum Wirth posited that "The city and the country may be regarded as two poles in reference to one or the other of which all human settlements tend to arrange themselves. In viewing urban-industrial and rural-folk society as ideal types of communities, we may obtain a perspective for the analysis of the basic models of human association as they appear in contemporary civilization" (Wirth, 1938:3). Like others who tried to define the differences between settlement patterns (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie: 1925), Wirth tended to retain a "rural ethos" in his analysis, preferring the "rural" culture and viewing the city as destroying that culture. He attached a negative value to "urban" life. His distinctions between folk and urban society and urban and rural social order became so widely diffused in the sociological literature, that they were viewed as empirically based.

Wirth, Redfield (1956), Tonnies (1940), Weber (1947) and Durkheim (1938), regarded their typologies as ideal-typical constructs for historical comparative analysis. These constructs were little more than exaggerated, imagined, "pure" societal states with no basis in social reality. In his discussion of typologies, Redfield asserted that "in every isolated little community, there is civilization; in every city, there is folk society" (Mintz, 1953-4:137). As Mintz pointed out, "Redfield does not maintain that either the ideal folk or the ideal urban society can be found anywhere in the world. His conception of an ideal type consists of .. . an enumeration of societies . . . which are then put together to form the type" (Mintz, 1953-54:137).

These theorists cautioned others against using ideal types in an "either-or" perspective, and warned that the generalizations they prompted were subject to the values of the interpreter. Unfortunately, these admonitions have been ignored by many sociologists and students of urban studies. Societies—rural or urban—fall, if at all, somewhere between the two ideal types.

It is in Wirth's leap from an analysis of the social system to conjectures about individual personality (Wirth, 1938:22-24) that his theory is most suspect. The assumption that the urbanite is blasé, indifferent, calculating, utilitarian, rational, anonymous, and anomic, in addition to possessing a heightened and intellectual consciousness compared to the countryside compatriot, has yet to be verified empirically. Wirth also assumed that all people living in cities were affected by this experience in profound and similar ways. For him, the process of urbanization was essentially the process of disorganization. By extending his theory to its logical conclusion, one would have to surmise that the elite, the intellectual and the slum dweller have a similar urban personality—a fallacy requiring no further comments. Social life is not a mass phenomenon. It occurs, for the most part, in small groups—in the family, neighborhoods, formal and informal situations, rural and urban areas. No evidence suggests that secondary relations diminish the strength and importance of primary group relations. Primary groups retain the same importance psychologically for city people as for rural.

No one can doubt that the city differs in important ways from the town. Yet, too rigorous a comparison of urban and small town life has led to a distorted picture of urban social relations. . . . The tendency to view two types of social organization, "gemeinschaft and gesellschaft," as opposites obscures elements in both. Forms of social organization are not static but in a continual state of change. In viewing urban life, one shouldn't focus on whether various features of human relations exist but on how they've been or are in the process of being modified. One shouldn't ask whether primary relationships exist in cities as they do in towns, but how they've assumed new forms.

THE MARXIST PERSPECTIVE ON URBANISM

In contrast to the traditional Chicago School, Marxist sociologists see the city as evolving from a particular economic mode. Their view, as it began to emerge in the 1960's and in the research of Manuel Castells and David Harvey, offered a fundamentally different and more systematic method of urban analysis than could be found in Wirth's rural-urban continuum model.

Relying on such Marxian concepts as capital accumulation, over-accumulation, class struggle, surplus value, conflict, circulation of surplus, and modes of economic integration, theorists from this school viewed the city as a social product, defined by an identifiable social, economic, political and ideological structure, and the conjunction of social relations resulting from those structures (Castells, 1977:430). Denying the existence of an autonomous city as the appropriate unit of analysis, to explain urban lifestyles and forms, the paradigm focused on the mode of production dominant in the society and the social relationships which developed from it. Urban economies reflected not only the national social and economic systems, but were mirror images of local and regional systems. One could expect variations in spatial and social form. Unconcerned by the city's effect on behavior, Marxist urbanists, as Goering pointed out, aimed their studies at the control and distribution of scarce resources, associating class antagonism with the management of scarcity (Goering, 1978:78).

In the Marxist view, a city such as Chicago had its roots in the Industrial Revolution and the evolution of the capitalist economic system. In his essay, "Urbanism And The City—An Interpretative Essay," Harvey, for example, reconstructed the evolution of the modern city from Medieval feudal society, attempting to show that a new system of production was responsible for the demise of the established social, economic, and political order of the rural hinterland (Harvey, 1973:195-285).

The Marxist critique of the Chicago School basically revolves around issues concerning the appropriate unit of analysis, the conceptual framework to be used, the restrictions of time and space and the lack of comparative studies. The Chicago School viewed the city as a clearly defined, autonomous spatial form with a specific political boundary and therefore as an appropriate unit of analysis. Urban life, assumed to be formed by the composition, size and density of the urban population, created the forces which shaped the pattern and consequences of urban growth. In contrast, the Marxist position is that cities are no longer, if they ever were, independent, but have become increasingly dependent on regional, national and global political economic forces. For Marxists the laws for the formation of cities and the transformation of urbanism are not embedded in population size and concentration, but are derived from economic and political conditions.

Before the sixteenth century, society in Europe was dominated by a rural-based economy, whose primary mode of production was subsistence agriculture. The rural hinterland established and controlled the social and political structure, social relationships, property and material wealth, and maintained a mode of production which tied people to small, isolated, self-sufficient geographic areas. Organized for religion or defense, medieval cities played a minor role in feudal society.

The development of trade and commerce created a new series of conditions which threatened the existing economic and social order. This crisis was resolved by confirming these activities to the city. The quest of the merchant class for expanded internal and external trade routes, the development of the guilds and the origin of state apparatuses to administer and control trade and commerce posed a challenge to the dominant rural hinterland.

In the Marxist view, subsequent opposition between "town" and "country" and the dominance of the rural order over more concentrated spatial forms was totally transformed by the Industrial Revolution and the changing relationships between capital and labor under the new production mode of capitalism, and the process of market exchange. The factory system separated the worker not only from his work, but removed the production process from the home. Lacking control over the means of production, labor became a commodity exchanged for wages. Control over property, material existence, social relations, the means of production, the political system (including the State), and the wealth derived from production became vested in the hands of a new class, the capitalist entrepreneur.

The development and expansion of profit required that the city became the dominant social form. Capital, needing labor, recruited that commodity not only from the urban population, but increasingly, from the rural areas.

For the Marxist this movement of labor to the city ended the power of the rural feudal order and generated the new urban form, the capitalist or industrial city. This social unit became "a production site, a locale for reproducing the labor force, a market for circulating commodities and realizing profit, and, most important, a control center for these complex relationships" (Hill, 1976:31). The city's purpose then was to organize and legitimize this new mode of production and not only maintain it, but help it to expand by providing those services that foster capital accumulation and labor reproduction; such as transportation routes, communication, utilities, social control mechanisms, housing and education. As Etzkowitz and Mack put it:

The Marxist views the transportation, housing, and other city institutions as organized for the benefit of the capitalist class. Such institutions enable capitalists to concentrate workers near factories and enable people and goods to move swiftly from one enterprise to another. . . . The city government to facilitate the coming together of employers and employment .. . in order to create the goods and services necessary for the generation of profits and wages . . . by providing the infrastructure base of municipal services of streets, water, security, sequage, and often transportation and communication. Cities are administered for the benefit of private business activities (Etzkowitz and Mack, 1978:46-47).

As transportation equipment, communication and technology improved, new cities were built nearer to the raw materials and labor needed to produce finished products. They were interconnected to one another, and to the wider society. The expansion of this economic system, put an end to the rural lifestyle as these urban forms and their social relationships absorbed the hinterlands into their sphere of influence. This urbanization of society so transformed the previous social order that the term rural-urban became meaningless.

The conceptual framework of the Chicago School, which David Harvey described as "the fragmentation of knowledge into rigid, academic disciplines" thus ignoring the obvious relationships between the other social sciences: psychology, history, economics, and anthropology. Continued adherence to this fragmented approach resulted in problems of definition and scope. It leads one to the morass of the rural-urban continuum model and to misplaced attention on explaining and defining what is "urban," what is unique about "sociology," and even more so, "urban sociology" (Harvey, 1978:35). The Marxist interdisciplinary framework is a more effective analytic stance for studying the city.

A third Marxist objection is to the limits inherent in sociological concepts of time and space. Studies like Wirth's essay based their generalization on one or at most a few American cities. Microscopic studies like "Ethnicity In Sydney In The 1960's" and "Family Relations In Flint, Michigan, In The Depression Of The 1930s" became, as Harvey put it, "the standard breadand-butter product and diet of the urban sociologist" (Harvey, 1978:31). These theorists did not pursue comparative studies between different cities within and without a specific culture, region, or society. Had Wirth tried this, for example, his concept of urbanism might have been understood in the context of the effects of the Depression, rather than of urbanization and physical form.

In his critique of traditional urban sociology, Martindale (1958) found added theoretical difficulties with the Chicago School: its orientation toward the "geo-physical aspects" of the city; the unnecessary primitivism of its crucial concepts; and the omission of the sociological concepts of groups, institutions, and social structure (Martindale (Weber), 1958:28-30). Social relationships and action, in his opinion, could not be ascertained by studying transportation routes, buildings, zones, or statistical rates of crime, mental disease, suicide or other social pathology indices.

The characteristics of Wirth's "urbanism," or what Martindale called "the primitivism of concept," is "found as easily in rural life as they were identified in city life. They could apply to social life in the past or the present. The basic conceptualizations were insufficiently precise to differentiate the theory of the city from any other branch of sociological theory" (Martindale (Weber), 1958:29-30). Reducing the city to an itemized list of social problems, traditionalists precluded an analysis of the social groups, institutions and political-economic system which determined the structure, form, and relationships of an urban area.

A key feature of cities is that they offer, "at least potentially, a wider range of alternatives for individuals in most aspects of living than is provided by the non-urban areas of a given nation or society at a given time. Urbanization and urbanism involve the availability of a wide range of services and alternatives in terms of work, food, clothing, educational facilities, modes of travel, medical facilities, voluntary organizations, types of people and ways of life" (Hauser, 1965:499). This value-free recognition of what a city may offer is more appropriate to the study of the city than Wirth's treatment of the "urban mentality." It also moves scholars away from the polarizing and normative judgments of the urban-rural construct, which has, for too long, dominated urban sociological reasoning. Only from within the context of industrial capitalism and the industrial city, says the Marxists, can we define the processes of urbanization and urbanism. Industrial capitalism is seen as rooted in "the production, reproduction, circulation, and overall organization of capital accumulation; while the industrial city is regarded as the particular geographic form and spatial patterning of relationships taken by the process of capital accumulation" (Hill, 1976:31). The concepts of "urbanism" and "urbanization" derived their existence only after the emergence of the industrial city. From the Marxist viewpoint, everything described by Wirth as urbanism was, in fact, the cultural expression of capitalist industrialization, the emergence of the market economy, and the process of rationalization of modern society (Fischer, 1978:12). Or, in other words, that which existed prior to capitalism cannot be considered "urban."

CONCLUSION

Do the Marxist political-economic factors transcend Wirth's ecological variables of size, density, and heterogeneity? Is this paradigm a more systematic method of urban analysis, and does it explain the urban phenomenon? I am, as yet, somewhat unclear on whether the Marxist approach offers the sound alternative needed for moving beyond Wirth and the overall influence of The Chicago School.

To begin, Marxist concepts and generalizations are abstract and often vague. Marxist theoretical attempts to define and clarify their concepts often fall short. Consider, for example, Harvey's definition of surplus value: "Surplus value is surplus value expressed in capitalist market exchange terms" (Harvey, 1973:238). For those struggling to understand Marxist generalizations, such a definition is unacceptable. Harvey himself observed that "He could testify to some of the extraordinarily complex problems which arise when confronting the Marxian meanings, as it took him almost seven years to acquire a limited fluency in the use of the Marxian concepts . . ." (Harvey, 1978:29). If the Marxist paradigm hopes to gain wider understanding, and just as important use, its proponents must clearly define their concepts and explain how they relate to the generalizations hypothesized.

In addition to vagueness and linguistic complexity, the Marxist perspective has seldom been tested empirically. Few Marxists have engaged in empirical research, and the tools they might use for such research are not at all clear. Castells argued that one can analyze space as an "expression of the social structure by studying the elements of the economic system, the political system, and the ideological system, and by their combinations and the social practices that derive from them" (Castells, 1977:126). He defined the economic system as a composite of the subelements of production, consumption, exchange, and administration, and asserted that "the politico-institutional system could be organized around the two essential relations defining this system (domination-regulation and integration-repression)" (Castells, 1977:127). Castells' following explanation of the ideological system, typifies the abstractness of Marxist language: "The ideological system organized space by marking it with a network of signs, whose signifiers are made up of spatial forms and whose signifieds are ideological contents, the efficacity of which must be construed from their effects on the social structure as a whole" (Castells, 1977:127). How one would apply such propositions to an urban setting or case study within a city remains unclear.

Then too, after a perusal of Marxist readings, especially Harvey and Castells, one is left with a feeling of incompleteness. (The same, obviously, can be said of Wirth and The Chicago School). The question at once arises: where does Marxist urban theory take us? Should one conclude that the social issues of class conflict and inequity exists only in capitalist cities? Should one further infer that socialism (socialist mode of production) and socialistic cities have eradicated these conditions and are created and transformed by other factors? If so, what are those factors? Finally, is it not true that from reading the Marxist literature on urban society their policies seem to point in the direction of eradicating the injustices caused by capital accumulation and the capitalist class within capitalist social formations? Questions such as these remain unanswered by the Marxist School of the New Urban Sociology.

Joseph Bensman succinctly summarized my concern with the Marxist position: "To support the claim that contemporary urbanism is a product of capitalistic economic development, the Marxists would be required to prove that these developments did not exist in pre-capitalistic societies . . . and that the problematics of advanced capitalism do not exist in contemporary societies labeled as non- or anti-capitalist" (Bensman, 1978:72). One would, therefore, have to show that socialist cities have no competition, no inequities in consumption, services, occupations, housing, and material wealth; and furthermore, performs different functions than the capitalist city. Finally, it must be demonstrated that socialism and its urban system do not display such tendencies ascribed to capitalism as slums, crime, unemployment, mental illness, riots, unemployment, strikes, and suicides.

If comparative urban research cannot demonstrate the differences between the socialist and capitalist city, one may have to conclude with Bensman that the

problematics of contemporary urban society are not related to Marxian theory, historical materialism, or dialectical materialism . . . (but) are the problematics of urbanization, industrialism, population density, and the struggles for control of the scarce resources by organized elites, classes, regional groups, and rural and urban dwellers in all societies, whether capitalistic or socialistic, developed or underdeveloped, colonial or neo-colonial (Bensman, 1978:73).

SUMMARY

This paper was written to examine the major hypothesis of Louis Wirth's essay, "Urbanism As A Way Of Life," (Wirth, 1938) and to discuss what I consider to be some of the weaknesses and criticisms of his approach. His theory reduced the city's complex force of actions to the psychological effects of increase, density, and heterogeneity of population on the individual, their way of life, and the interaction with others (Martindale (Weber), 1948:42). My second objective was to look at the Marxian urban paradigm as a possible alternative model for studying the city. It, too, proves somewhat unsatisfactory. Much to be preferred is the idea of studying the city as one aspect of society. The analysis, therefore, should not be conducted in isolation from the whole of society or the city's historical context. Equally attractive is the Marxist attempt to interrelate the thought and inquiry of economics, history, sociology, psychology and anthropology. However, until some of their generalizations and conclusions are clarified and more empirical research has been conducted to support their hypothesis, and until it can be demonstrated, through comparative studies, that socialism, as a mode of production, does not replicate the conditions found in capitalist cities, the Marxian perspective cannot be acclaimed as a totally workable (alternative) model for the study of the city.

In the final analysis, what Martindale referred to as "the state of city theory" (Martindale (Weber), 1958:28), may pose the same problem for contemporary urbanologists as it did in Lewis Wirth's day:

In the rich literature on the city, we look in vain for a theory or urbanism presenting in a systematic fashion the available knowledge concerning the city as a social entity. . . . Despite the multiplication of research and textbooks on the city, we do not as yet have a comprehensive body of compendent hypotheses which may be derived from a set of postulates implicitly contained in a sociological knowledge which may be substantiated through empirical research (Wirth, 1938:8).

WIRTH'S URBAN THEORY

Population Size Results In:

1. Increased diversity of cultural characteristics
2. Increased diversity of occupational characteristics
3. Professional structure with advanced division of labor
4. Increase in impersonal human relationships: segmentalized social life based on roles rather than personal characteristics
5. City structure "hardening" into commercial enterprise
6. Moral structure of city "loosening" toward state of anomie intensification of effects noted above

Population Density Results In:

1. Ecological specialization: city as mosaic of differentiated land areas
2. Districts reflecting productive speciality
3. Devices to facilitate visual recognition: status symbols or unusual dress
4. Increased toleration of differences
5. Increased "social distance"
6. Increased antisocial behavior: friction and irritation intensification of effects noted above

Heterogeneity Results In:

1. Acceptance of insecurity and instability
2. Increased physical relocation
3. Increased use of stereotypes and categorical thinking
4. Increased importance of money as basis of social relations

Source: Adapted from Wirth (1938)

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