Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
82
characterized by intimate relations and collective activities, and the capitalist society,
characterized by impersonal relations and contractual bonds. On a similar line, in his work on
Suicide
(1951 [1897]), Emile Durkheim introduced the concept of
anomie
to argue that anomic
suicide occurred among those who lived in impersonal settings, such as modern cities. More
generally, anthropologists appear to have been influenced by the nineteenth century sociologists’
view of the city as a fragmenting, rather than unifying place; that is, a place of greater freedom
and opportunities for the individual but also a place of isolation, conflict and bureaucratization of
all aspects of life (see, for example, Simmel 1990 and Weber 1958). Most interestingly,
especially in view of North American anthropologists’ interest in urban research, de
Tocqueville’s analysis of
Democracy in America
(1945), in which he described the expanding US
urban areas as places of identity that transcended social division, was virtually ignored by both
urban anthropologists and urban sociologists.
Initially, alongside classical sociological works, anthropologists were strongly influenced
by the production of what became known as the Chicago School of Urban Ecology (for short, the
‘Chicago School’), bringing together urban sociologists who worked under the leadership of
Robert Ezra Park at the University of Chicago. This group of scholars basically drew on the
conceptualization of cities as ecosystems segmented in ‘natural areas’ (Park, Burgess and
McKenzie eds 1925), which included ‘ordinary’ neighbourhoods and slums and ghettos for
immigrants and African Americans. According to the Chicago School’s approach, these areas
were subject to laws of residential succession; thus, a major aim was to study changing
residential patterns as part of the broader investigation of cities’ ‘social problems’. The research
methods adopted by these scholars reflected such a broad interest, focusing on historical
evidence, interviews and, especially, quantitative demographic and statistical material. This kind
of quantitative empiricism was rejected by a new generation of sociologists who instead favoured
a more qualitative ‘ethnographic method’; they became the most influential inspiration to
anthropologists. Their production is exemplified by Carolyn Ware’s
Greenwich Village, 1920-
1930
(1935) – on the incorporation of Greenwich Village into New York and the process by
which it maintained its distinctive character; William Foote Whyte’s
Street Corner Society
(1955
[1943]) – a study of an Italian neighbourhood, in which he applied the classical anthropological
method of participant observation; and W. Lloyd Warner’s
Yankee City
(1963) – a study of a
New England city, which combined an ethnographic perspective with formal interviews.
While the Chicago School influenced the methodological approach of the early
anthropologists who worked in urban settings, theorizations of ‘urban life’ were influenced above
all by the work of the sociologist Louis Wirth. In his essay
Urbanism as a Way of Life
(1938),
Wirth described the city as a specific ‘social institution’ with distinctive attributes, which were
reflected in the urban physical structure – that is, the urban plan and the city’s size – in the urban
social organization and in the attitudes and ideas of city-dwellers. According to Wirth, the city’s
social heterogeneity and population density promoted differentiation and occupational
specialization. Therefore, he argued, social relations tended to be impersonal, transitory,
