J 880. Human Geography and Mass Communication.
Class discussion lead for week 2 - Classical geographic arguments
by Yong Jun Shin 01/25/05
Classical human geographers were concerned with emergence and development of urban area or cities since all those issues take place based on space. Historically, the eighteenth century enabled people to claim their liberty and autonomy from the bondage of autocratic absoulute powers in the state and religion, and the claims were based on rationalization along with scientific specialization and technical differentiation. In a sense, the cities were the spaces which were formed to represent a new hope and vision for the oppressed. From the classical sociologist Simmel to the contemporary scholar Gans, the space of urban were the most attractive and important topic to be investigated because the physical aspects of cities profoundly affect human individual as well as group life.
Georg Simmel, through his analysis, tried to deal with human mental and psychic traits which were derived from the physical aspects of urbanization by investigating the relationship “between the individual aspect of life and those which transcend the existence of single individuals.” He explained the metropolitan individuality as “intensified,” “intelligible,” “protective,” and “rational” due to the psychological intellectualistic attitude and the money economy in metropolis. In addition, punctionality, calculability, and exactness are required for metropolitan life. Interestingly, Simmel dealt with the changed mentality from urbanization in terms of historical process neither by accusing nor pardoning metropolis. However, his tone sounds worrisome about all kinds of metropolitan individual characters like impersonality, colorlessness, blasé attitude and indifference, and so on.
Next, Ernest Burgess as a member of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology analyzed the interrelation of the social growth and the physical expansion of modern cities and took a step for providing a large framework to understand cities through his conceptualizing work, paying attention mainly to the growth of great cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Burgess tried to explain the urban growth from the standpoint of expansion, metabolism, and mobility. He presented a model based on a series of concentric circles that divided the city into five zones. According to Burgess, the facility of transformation enabled people to expand their places to live and work. Cities, in addition to extension and succession, are undergoing centralized decentralization which is studied in the development of the chain stores. In terms of metabolism, urban grows as resultant of organization and disorganization. However, disorganization process must not be considered as pathological, but as normal. Movement of the city life is related with mobility. As the population and the stimulation increase, the mobility tends to confuse and demoralize the person. His idea may be summarized the notion that “there is an underlying logic to urban form that occurs even in the absence of formal planning.”
Louis Wirth, following the footage of the Chicago School’s research, analyzed and conceptualized urban space mostly based on the theory of mass society and the definition of industrialized urban area like other above scholars. Wirth maintained that “the central problem of the sociologist of the city is to discover the forms of social action and organization that typically emerge in relatively permanent, compact settlements or large numbers of heterogeneous individuals.” His work seems to summarize other previous scholars’ works on urbanism and urbanization with more organized concepts.
In contrast, Hebert Gans takes a different perspective of urbanism based on popular or folk culture society. Gans pointed out Wirth’s conception of the city dweller as “depersonalized, atomized, and susceptible to mass movements” based on the observation of residential instability and argued that “the most important factors to affect choice seem to be class – in all its economic, social, and cultural ramifications – and life-cycle stage.” Also, Gans maintained that “changes in the national economy, society, and culture can affect people’s characteristics – family size, educational level, and various other concomitants of life-cycle stage and class” and concluded that “writing about the cities will be even more time bound.”
From the four articles, we can raise a variety of questions. First of all, my question is about framework. Obviously, even though the writers didn’t acknowledge their perspectives, there are roughly two viewpoint of human group life in urban area. If we accept the Gans’ last statement: “writing about the cities will be even more time bound,” Does our approach to urban issues need to be ad-hoc like issue by issue? Is there possibility to generalize the framework across the time?
And, is it necessary to generalize the framework?
Second of all, how do we need to approach to urban problems such as crime, inequality, poverty and so on? I mean if we approach to urban issues from the urban pathology, what difference will we see from those non-pathological perspective?
Third, as Chris raised on the class web-blog, to what extent in modern society can an individual's way of life be affected by larger forces and trends--historical, economic, social and cultural--that are beyond individual control?
