Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Two
SOCIETAL EFFECTS OF URBANIZATION
ON CITIES AND COMMUNITIES
Photo: Jethro Mullen http://instagram.com/jethromullen/
Main discussion question:
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF
URBANIZATION ON COMMUNITY?
Concepts:
Community
Neighborhood
Social network
Social capital
A certain day @ 珍can
A CONVERSATION…
“WHY JUST YOU ONLY?”
“WHERE ARE YOU FRIENDS?”
YANNIE’S ANSWER… :P
串門子﹑閒話家常﹑R偈傾
• How often you have a conversation with
• Someone in canteen or lift lobby? (串門子﹑閒話
家常﹑R偈傾)
• Why? Strange to talk to strangers? Nothing to talk
to your neighbors? Why we talk to people we
know or we don’t know very well?
• Actually who are strangers? Who are your
neighbors?
• Let’s talk about neighborhood and community
City and Community
• Two dichotomies?
• More of city, less of community
• Less of city, more of community
• Recapture classical views on
urbanization…
Classical Thoughts of Urban Sociology
• Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936)
• Georg Simmel (1858 – 1918)
• Louis Wirth (1897–1952)
Rise of cities…
• A process of urbanization (city construction)
• A development of capitalism
• Involves huge changes in people’s social
norms and psychological mentalities
• What is the core matter of the rise of cities
and urban way of life?
Ferdinand Tönnies
• A transition from traditional society to
modern one.
• Comparable to Emile Durkheim (mechanical
solidarity vs. organic solidarity)
• Mechanical solidarity: similar values, beliefs,
backgrounds
• Organic solidarity: a complex division of labor
Ferdinand Tönnies
• Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
• Decline of primary ties and community life
• Increasing specialization in the division of
labor and social life
Georg Simmel
• Similar view to Ferdinand Tönnies
• Focus on the economic function of cities
• Not so much on social and psychological
consequence of being urbanites (city dwellers)
as Tönnies
• City is a social entity operated by the rules of
capitalism
It is good to be an urbanite
• More freedom!
• Decline of traditional norms and small‐town
prejudices
• Experience of modernity for individuals
(cosmopolitan)
Any down side of city life?
• City as a sensorium: can be felt its presence with five
senses.
• Pleasant experience? No, not really according to
Simmel
• City as sensorium: very aggressive and vigorous
• Non‐stop stimulation: sound and sights (reason why we
don’t have much energy to say “good morning” in the
morning. If we did it… well, we would lose our sanity in
Hong Kong.)
• Think about CWB: stand at the corner of Jardine Bazaar
and Yee Wo Street.
Google map 2019 (image captured in 2017)
Cities are filled with
sensation (stimulation)
• If Yannie asks you to stand there for five minutes, what
would happen?
• What would you see? hear? or smell?
– LED light advertising
– Commodities
– Pedestrians / tourists
– Vehicle traffic
– Ding ding sound of trams
• Sensation or stimulation?
City life as a paradox
• Urban commercial sensorium fed the self
while starving the spirit
• Liberating individuals yet making us restless
• Greater participation in urban society and
market place but urbanites become
rootlessness (e.g. 籍貫 and 族譜)
• Have you seen your own genealogy?
What is genealogy?
Negative consequences
• Louis Wirth further developed negative
consequences suggested by Simmel.
• Plus Durkheim’s anomie
• Disintegration of traditional rules and norms (no
more communities)
• City is a social place with so much freedom that
people have nothing to conform to.
• That explains why there are social problems and
personal disorder in the city E.g. higher crime
rate, delinquency, and mental illness.
What is the cause of these negative
consequences?
Wirth’s explanation:
• Social differentiation and “mosaic of social
worlds”
• Fosters social distance and social pathology
between people
WHAT ARE THE VIEWS OF
CONTEMPORARY URBAN
SOCIOLOGISTS ON CITIES AND
COMMUNITIES?
Claude Fischer
Jane Jacobs
Berry Wellman and Barry Leighton
Robert Putnam
Turn to positive consequences
Claude Fischer
• Social differentiation is NOT a symptom of moral
decline or social disintegration
• It is a creative process
• With the growth of urban life, traditional
communities are replaced by subcultural
differentiation.
• The growth of subcultural communities
counterbalanced the decline of community
• Can you name any sub‐culture in Hong Kong?
• It is NOT necessary a “more city life, less
community living” argument.
Revival of Communities
Jane Jacobs (an activist and a architecture critic)
• Critical assessment on the destruction of community
• Cause: misguided urban renewal policies after WWII
• Greenwich Village in New York in 1960s
• A case of Robert Moses (a power broker): a plan for an urban
expressway through Lower Manhattan.
• Clearing slums for expressway
• Shifted urban planners away from slum clearance
• Fought for policies to promote rather than destroy
neighborhood.
• Community assets and social fabrics were destroyed in urban
renewal.
Does that sound/ look familiar?
Any place in Hong Kong?
Something new?
Not really.
Where is this
place?
How would you
call this “street”?
Where was it previously?
• 花布街
• Try google map, can you search it?
• Search [ ]
• Can you find it?
Where was
Wing On
Street?
What is a community?
People are “glued” by certain rules
set up by people dwelling/working in
that place.
Social rules to “glue” people together
https://www.facebook.com/PangJaiHK/
Any academic reference to explain
how people glue together?
Neighborhood
Neighborhood as
“organs of self‐government”
• Neighborhood: significant part of city life.
• Informal surveillance networks of “eyes on the
street”
• That helps regulate public security for residents
living among urban strangers.
• Neighborhood preservation is NOT self‐
contained preservation of nostalgic sentiments
of small communal life.
• Therefore, neighborhood is an extroverted
component of urbanity.
From Yannie’s design of neighborhood
survey (Jan 2016)
Survey items might help you understand what is a community and
neighborhood.
• 你信任社區內大部份嘅人。
• 你會同鄰居打招呼。
• 你會同鄰居閒談。
• 你同鄰居會互相幫助。
• 你同鄰居會不時去對方屋企坐下。
• 喺你住嘅社區內,你認識到新朋友。
• 你認為你住嘅社區喺未來五年會變得更好。
• 你可以為社區帶嚟改變。
• 你知道搵邊啲嗰人,可以為社區帶嚟改變。
Policy implication (I):
• Neighborhood cannot be restored by city planners to
replace social life with new designs of housing, streets and
parks etc.
• To build a network of leaders: as they are efficient
mobilizers of trust and reciprocity.
• Reinvigoration of social networks and social
capital that are most central to these
neighborhoods.
“COMMUNITIES SAVED” APPROACH:
COMMUNITIES ARE USEFUL.
THEY ARE TO BE SAVED AND
PRESERVED!
Liberated Communities
Wellman and Leighton (1979)
• Community lost
• Social network (but different from Jacobs: not from
vested political interests)
• Secondary relationships: friendship, interpersonal and
other social ties.
• Further clarification of concepts like communities and
neighborhoods
– Jacob’s version: communities as neighborhood based.
– W & L: communities to be liberated from the attachment
to neighborhood.
Community without Propinquity
• Propinquity (nearness)
• Neighborhood a crucial nexus for integration of
individuals with the larger social system.
• Place attachment (dense social ties)
• Argue for freedom from place attachment
promote growth of a more sparsely knit social
networks (network with weak ties)
• A good thing about a community without propinquity
• New forms of networking: with the aid of new
transport and communications technologies.
Nature of liberated communities
• Looser network
• Sparsely knit network
• Branching
• Breaking into more networks
• Weakly sentimental or intimate network
• Advantage: bring access to greater external
resources.
What kind of issues
W & L might refer to?
• Faith in the potential of electronic forums, FB
groups or whatsapp groups in communicating
and mobilizing demonstrations and protests
• Public mobilization in cities e.g. Arab Spring or
Admiralty Village
Social Capital (I)
• Robert Putnam (1995) “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining
Social Capital”
• Long‐term decline in civic engagement
• Loss in trust, generalized reciprocity and social capital
• An important quality of democratic civil society
• U.S. civic engagement of declining membership in traditional
voluntary organizations
• E.g. Parent‐teacher Association, Boy Scouts, Red Cross etc.
• One of these traditional fraternities: recreational bowling
leagues
• Americans are still bowling in great numbers, they are going
there to bowl alone. (His article & book title: Bowling
Alone)
Social Capital (II)
• Argues that civic engagement and social
connectedness as important factors
addressing social needs and issues in
education, urban poverty, crime,
unemployment etc.
• Trust and reciprocity have strong effects on
reducing opportunism and corruption in
public life.
Reasons for declining social capital
• Entry of women into the workforce
• Greater geographic mobility from home
communities
• Erosion of the traditional family
• Growth of privatizing and individualizing
leisure and media technology, e.g. Internet
Summary
• Vs. Jacob and Wellman/Leighton Putnam: not
to give emphasis on resurgence of community
activism
• Putnam presents an alternative: civic and
fraternal organizations that have come into
existence for a long time in the American society
(Alexis de Tocqueville, his field observation of 19th
Century America)
• Build sustainable civic institutions and democratic
system for the long run.
What can be done?
• Integrating all these scholars’ point of view
• Give priority to local points of view (self‐
government)
• Empower leaders in the neighborhood
• Expand network without propinquity
• Continue to establish some associations
• A model in Sham Shui Po, e.g. Hong Kong
Citizens; some other alternative living space
(Little Post 「一小步」) or Sai Wan Concern
(城西關注組)
Public recreation area : Sheung Wan
http://hk.apple.
nextmedia.com
/realtime/suppl
ement/201701
14/56169728
• But exactly what are they? How different are
they?
END OF LECTURE