What Consequence Does Life in the City Have for the Individual - Essay Example

 The perspective that removes urban places from the context of their societies, may be appropriate to what these disciplines wish to learn of and from the city.

Engels underlines that urban settings have a negative impact on an individual and his morals. He writes that: “the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together”. Such an approach is less useful in anthropology, however. For cross-cultural comparisons and analyses of urban development, the city must be treated as only one of many social institutions such as kinship, religion, and subsistence activity that anthropologists always have conceptualized as parts of a socio-cultural whole. A spirit of independence and autonomy, a desire for innovation, a predilection for social status based on achievement rather than birth, and a sense of community beyond the family or kin group are characteristics often associated with the city. In this view, urban places become centers of social change, economic development, and personal freedom in contrast to conservative, ascriptive, and traditional rural settlements. Cities are thus perceived as sources of novel economic and productive arrangements and new political orders that challenge the fabric of society. The ideological approach thus studies the "rules" that compose the cultural roles of cities and their societies. It investigates the derivation of these rules outside the city or their diffusion from the urban sphere into the cultural setting (Engels).

Whyte pays special attention to increased poverty in urban settings and slums as a dominant feature of the eastern city. Whyte writes: “People appear as social work clients, as defendants in criminal cases or as undifferentiated members of the masses”. It is possible to say that the ideological and interactional roles and links between cities and societies are not unchanging. Therefore the concept of "adaptation" must be added to introduce a dynamic aspect. Cities are and always have been in a continual process of adjustment to their external socio-cultural environments. "Environment" in this context does not directly involve physical circumstances affecting the city, such as water supply, soil type, and rainfall average.

Following Durkheim and Tonnies, with a specifically urban population and a distinctly urban pattern of social organization, the administrative city is further from the rural countryside in ideology and lifestyle than the regal-ritual type is. The patterns of belief and social life, the cultural "rules" of the state society, may remain the same in the village and city. The urban area, on the other hand, concentrates a sophistication--an elaborateness of custom and ideology--that marks it off sharply from the rural zone. Rather than a hiatus in belief, rather than an antagonism based on wholly different urban and rural patterns, the administrative city is simply so much more than its rural environs that rural areas appear culturally denuded, socially deficient, and ideologically backward by comparison. The city may still reflect the countryside, but it does so with such intensity that it appears to have its independent luminosity. Durkheim underlines that: “solidarity in industrial society is based not on uniformity bit on difference”. The industrial city becomes a node of the power and administration that maintain the ruling elite's control over the rural food source. It becomes a market in which to convert wheat, rice, and maize into swords, servants, gold, and silk. Even when the city does produce wealth autonomously through large-scale and long-distance trade--this source of riches is rigorously controlled through law and taxation to serve the ruling elite. Commerce in the city is subjected to the same state administrative control as rules the rural areas; and merchant wealth, like peasant produce, is either suppressed as a threat to political stability or extracted to subsidize the state. Consumption of rural capital and control of merchant wealth are the major activities of the state and form the adaptive pattern of administrative cities. These points are more fully illustrated in the case material that follows. This pattern of administrative hierarchy is modified in two ways that determine a range of secondary variations in the urbanism of the bureaucratic state type. These variations develop from particular historical circumstances that may be present in some bureaucratic state societies and absent in others. One variant consists of the persistence of decentralized power holders, such as a feudal elite, in what were formerly regal-ritual cities. Such cities may not be incorporated as administrative places in the encroaching bureaucratic state. Their survival means that an atrophied urban hierarchy of prestige and ideological emulation may persist alongside the administrative one.

In sum, the urban setting shapes the individual and makes him indifferent towards others and his own life. The urban hierarchy that develops in bureaucratic state societies does not rest on a chain of ideological emulation linking the premier regal-ritual city with secondary ones. Neither does it depend on a gradation of communication, transportation, and commercial services that rank local, regional, and national urban places into an industrial pattern of urban dominance. Administrative cities are linked into an urban hierarchy based on their position in state administration, their relative importance in the performance of bureaucratic functions, and the relative size and strength of their military and civil establishments representing the state. The relationship among capital, provincial, and local administrative centers is therefore a political one.