RURAL AND URBAN COMMUNITIES

Early Beginnings

In the earliest times, people gathered most of their food from hunting and fishing. They
lived by hunting the available migratory herds of animals. This can be traced back to the end of
the period known as the Upper Paleolithic. These food gatherers were probably highly mobile in
order to follow the migrations of animals.

As early as 14,000 years ago, people in some regions began to depend less on big game
hunting and more on relatively mobile food sources such as fish, shellfish, small game and wild
animals.

About 8000 B.C. there was evidence of a change over to food production – the cultivation
and domestication of plants and animals in the Near East. This shift is called the Neolithic
Revolution. The line between food collecting and food gathering occurred when people began
to plant crops and to keep and breed animals. The process of cultivation started when people
started to plant crops.

Reasons Why People Started to Cultivate

1. There was a drastic change in climate. The post-glacial period was marked by a decline
in summer rainfall in the Near East and North Africa.
2. Having discovered that some wild animals could be domesticated, people desired to
produce what was wildly abundant.
3. Hunter population had increased and the people could no longer relieve population
pressure by moving to uninhabited area.
4. People saw that population was the most efficient way to allow more people to live in
one place.
5. In the post-glacial period, there was the emergence of greater seasonal variation in
rainfall.
6. The population growth in regions of bountiful wild resource pushed people to move to
marginal areas where they tried to reproduce their former abundance.
7. Global population growth filled most of the world’s habitable regions and forced people
to utilize a broad spectrum of wild resource and to domesticate plants and animals.
8. There emerged a variation in rainfall, which forced people to plant crops and raise
animals to get themselves through the dry season.

Effects of Food Production

1. Accelerated population growth. Spacing between children was reduced further and
fertility increased which was perhaps caused by the greater value of children in farming
and herding economies.
2. Declining Health. Although the rise of food production led to increased fertility, health
gene declined. Overdependence on a few dietary staples that lacked nutrients and few
 sources of food as well as the unequal access to food and other resources caused
nutritional problems.
3. Elaboration of material possession. Houses became more elaborate and
comfortable, and construction methods improved which led the people to adopt a
somewhat different lifestyle.

Some Features of Philippine Rural Communities

1. The population is small enough to promote primary group interaction.

2. The economy is characterized by such occupations as agriculture, fishing, and forestry.
3. Intimacy and mutual efficiency are the main patterns of community spirit.
4. Neighborliness continues to be an important part of human behavior and is manifested
in various situations.
5. Economic cooperation is seen in mutual helpfulness at the time of harvesting and
planting.
6. Every individual is bound to his/her neighbors his/her contacts are meaningful, intimate,
and personal.
7. The community is traditional and relationships are personalized, with the bayanihan type
of culture patterns.

Trends in the Rural Family

In the Philippines, the life cycle of is the main concern of the family. Family care begins
from the cradle to the grave. The life cycle starts from conception, birth, infancy, childhood,
adolescence, adulthood, courtship, marriage, birth, and death. Like death, marriage is both a
religious and a family occasion.
Every occasion in the life cycle is an opportunity for celebration. Celebrations are
occasions for get-togethers, family homecoming and reunion, and community gatherings.

Specific Features that Characterize Rural Culture in the Philippines (Ortigas and
Regalado as edited by Hunt, 1978)

1. Formal Belief Systems. The rural people are often regarded as more religious than
their urban counterpart. Christianity has developed a great influence in the life of the
rural people, and natural forces such as weather, the change of seasons, growth, and
life itself largely control their life.
2. Animistic Beliefs. Animism has been defined as the belief that all objects are endowed
with indwelling souls. In the rural areas, religion, which is viewed as an embodiment of
profound human experiences, is committed to the expression and explanation at what
Paul Tillich calls the “ultimate concern” of society as fulfillment of the “restlessness”
within the flux of daily activities.
3. Fiestas. Fiesta is most typically an annual celebration held on the feast day of patron
saints. This is the time of the year when friends and relatives from a considerable
distance return to the barrio and town to renew old ties and acquaintances.
Three Functions of Fiestas (Lynch, SJ, 2004)
1. On the religious aspect, fiesta attains three notable effects: (1) the fulfillment of
the community’s obligations to its heavenly patron; (2) the renewal of the individual’s
 spiritual life; (3) the renewal (or creation) of the individual’s consciousness of
membership in the church. In most cases, a Hermana or Hermano mayor is designated.
2. Socially, fiesta functions to renew community and kinship ties to reinforce status and
prestige, bolster existing authority, and renew the system of reciprocal obligations.
3. Economically, fiesta is a time of crowded transport and thronged markets. In some
places in the country, fiesta is a time where people sell their native products.

Sociocultural Dynamics in the Rural Villages

Basically, a village is a social system. It is a network of interactive relationships

which arise all other systems and their components that are inherently interdependent with
each other. The components of the village social system include the family and
kinship system, life cycle, economic and social life, matrix of social control and
behavior, religious orientation, belief system, and educational system.

These components may be viewed as system themselves, but they are a part of one
another, and when taken all together constitute the bigger system-the village social system.

The Development of Cities

Many anthropologists believe that man started to inhabit the world ab out a million years
ago. However, cities are a relatively recent addition to the story of human of human evolution.
The first true cities are estimated to have appeared about 5,500 to 6,000 years ago.

Early Cities

According to sociologists and anthropologists, there are two requirements that had to be
met in order for cities to emerge.

1. There had to be a surplus of food and other necessities. Farmers had to be able
to produce more food than their immediate families” needed to survive.

2. There had to be some form of social organization that went beyond the
family. A form of social organization have to emerge to guarantee a fair distribution.

Evolution of Cities

1. Pre- Industrial Cities. Gideon Sjoberg, an anthropologists, noted three things

necessary for the rise of pre-industrial societies:
(a) a favorable physical environment
(b)Some advance technology in either agricultural or non-agricultural areas have to
leave developed areas.
(c) A well- developed system of social structures must emerge so that the more complex
needs of society could be met.
2. Industrial Cities. Industrial cities were brought about by the Industrial revolution, the
application of scientific methods to production and distribution, where machines were
used to perform work that had formerly been done by humans or farm animals.
Industrial cities are large and expansive, often with no clear physical boundary that
separates them from surrounding towns and suburbs.
Urbanization

Urbanization refers to the process of concentration of population through migration

patterns. According to anthropologists, this movement is caused by a push from the province
because of poverty and attraction to city life.

Classification of Urban Environments

1. Urbanized Area. This contain a central city and is continuously built up closely-settled
surrounding territory that together have a population of 50,000 or more.
2. Metropolitan Area. This has a large population nucleus together with adjacent
communities that are economically and socially integrated into that nucleus.
3. Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). This has either one or more central cities, each
with a population of at least 50,000 people or a single urbanized area that has at least
50,000 people and that is part of an MSA with a total population of 100,000.

Urban Ecological Structures

1. Concentric zone model. This is often called the bull’s eye model, as expounded by
Park, Burgess, and McKenzie (1921). According to this model, the typical city has at its
center a business district made up of various kinds of office buildings and shops. This
model illustrates the development of a city with the following trend: central business
district; zone in transition; zone of working people’s homes; residential zone;
and commuter zone.
2. Sector Theory. This was developed by Homer Hoyt in the 1930’s as a modified version
of concentric zone model. The city is conceived as a number as a number of sectors
rather than a series of concentric zones. The sector model follows the pattern of
development with this trend: central business district; wholesale; light
manufacturing; low-class residential; medium class residential; and high class
residential.
3. Multiple Nuclei Model. This is the third ecological model developed by Harris and
Ullman in 1945, this model stresses the impact of land costs, interest rate schedules,
and land use patterns in determining the structures of the city. This model features the
following pattern of development: central business district, wholesale light
manufacturing, outlying business district, residential suburbs, and industrial
suburb.

Urban Ecological Processes

1. Concentration. This refers to the increase of population in a given area and is

determined by density of population.
2. Dispersion. It refers to the outward spread of the population to the outlying sections or
the suburbs. This process is usually adopted when there is already the problem of
crowding in the center.
3. Centralization. This is the drawing together of institutions and activities in a new
population or new functions in the area.
 4. Decentralization. As land values go up and competition becomes keen, some of these
business establishments are pushed toward the outlying sections. It is therefore the
scattering of functions from the main business district to the outlying district.
5. Invasion. Invasion refers to the entrance of a new population or facilities into an
occupied area.
6. Succession. This refers to the dominance of the new population or new functions in
the area. This is the complete invasion. It is said to have generally occurred when the
majority of the population of an area is replaced by a new type.

Theories of Urban Impact

(A) Gemeinschaft identifies the qualities of life, which Toennis thought were being lost
because of urbanization. It describes small, cohesive communities like the farming
villages. The people know one another and are connected by bonds of friendship,
kinship and daily interaction.

(B) Gesellschaft is the exact opposite. People tend to be strangers united only by self-
interest not by any sense of common purpose or identity. There is little agreement
about norms and much deviance. Relationships are fleeting and manipulative rather
than warm and intimate.
(C) Anomie theories- According to Emile Durkheim, the primary consequence of
urbanization is the breakdown of order-urbanites live in a situation in which norms lack
definition and force, a state he called anomie-state of normlessness.

The Future of the City

The fast, continuous urbanization of the world is inevitable. It can be expected that in
developing countries, the base of urbanization will expand as the number and sizes of cities
increase and the density of the residing population rises. Urban growth will be sustained
through births and migration.
With this boom in population, problems are likely to come up: some of these are
squatting, unemployment, crowding, crime and delinquencies, and pollution. On the other hand,
developed countries face problems resulting from modernization as well as from pressures of
the world economy. Many developed countries have highly diversified economies with varying
degrees of specialization in selected sectors, made possible through technology, labor, and
capital, which support these specialties.