LESSON 3: EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY

OBJECTIVES:

1. Ideas of community
2. Problems defining community
3. Rural, urban & suburban
 IDEAS OF COMMUNITY
Tonnies put forward 2 concepts for his idea of community:

• Gemeinschaft=community:
-homogeneous group of people
-strong kinship ties
-bounded by common norms & values (religious in nature)
-family & church as moral guardians
Traditional, pre-industrial community

• Gesellschaft=association/society:
-face-to-face relations becoming impersonal, superficial & short-lived
-contractual instead of sentimental ties
-weakening of kinship, friendship & neighbourhood ties

Concepts used to differentiate pre-industrial & industrial societies + urban & rural societies
 IDEAS OF COMMUNITY
Simmel:

• Society neither an organism or total reality

• Society/community is product of sum total of interactions between members making up

its constituent parts

• Cities require a cold, calculating & self-interested personality to survive its demands

• Others seen as ‘objects’

• City life can be liberating for some but detrimental to others

 IDEAS OF COMMUNITY
Weber:

• Developed concept of ‘urban community’

• Social institutions social relations social actions

• Urban community is characterized by a legitimate administration

Feudal community: traditional authority

Industrial community: rational-legal authority
 DEFINING COMMUNITY
• Parsons:

‘that aspect of the structure of social systems which is referable to the territorial location of
persons and their activities…. The population…is just as much a focus of Study of
Community as is the territorial location.’

• Definition of community beset of problems

 DEFINING COMMUNITY
• Hillery (1955)
-no less than 94 definitions of community
-definitions can be condensed into 3 components:
1. area
2. common ties
3. social interaction
-all definitions deal with people

• Newby (1979)
-studied English villages
-definition of community is value-loaded

• Others link community to concepts of ‘locality’ and a symbolic boundary

• Inappropriate to relate to class for classification

-concept of class not uniform
-gender & ethnicity further complicate things
 DEFINING COMMUNITY
• Cooke (1989)
-rejects term community as it over-emphasizes on insularity, continuity & stability
-locality is a better word. Why?
it expresses rights of citizens in area where they
work, consume and live
-this conception of locality overcomes Giddens’ (1984) definition of ‘locales’, which
is mere synonym for space

• Cohen (1985): Symbolic community

-defines community as a ‘symbolic boundary’
-rarely used as subject to varied interpretations
-can still be used to refer to mining area, middle-class district or a nation

• Community as a set of social relationships

-Shared values, institutional ties & regular interaction
 DEFINING COMMUNITY
• Subcultural community
-Sharing some values of the wider society, but having its own cultural identity, e.g,
Barcelona

• Imagined community
-National community as example of imagined community

• Spirit of community
-Nisbet (1970): community indicates commitment, solidarity, emotional bonds and
sentimental attachments
-Potent sense of identity

• Exclusive community
-’insiders’ v/s ‘outsiders’
-e.g. Belfast communities of Shankhill (Protestants) and Falls (Catholics)
-strong internal solidarity
 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
Redfield (1947): ‘Folk Society’

• Folk society = rural society

• Rural society urban society

• Rural society: ‘small, isolated, non-literate and homogeneous, with a strong sense of
group solidarity’
-traditional behaviour
-spontaneous
-uncritical
-personal
-sacred prevails over the secular
-ascribed status prevails

• Criticisms:
-Avila (1969): noted no stagnation in four Mexican villages studied by
Redfield
 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
Wirth (1938): Urban society
• 3 features of urban society: size, density & heterogeneous population

-Implications: urban and rural dwellers live qualitatively different lives

-work demands lead to impersonal relationships
-high population density leads to irritability & tension
-heterogeneity leads to animosity amongst distinctive social groups

-Consequence:
-urbanites lose intensity of primary relationships
-weaker social control
-people treated as means to ends

• Suburban area nestles beyond urban end of the continuum

 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
Criticisms towards concept of rural-urban continuum
• Pahl (1968):

-Wrong to tie particular patterns of social relationships to specific geographical area

-some people may be of the city but not in it and vice-versa
-Gemeinschaft exists within Gesellschaft and vice-versa

• Willmott & Young (1957):

-found strong sense of community & solidarity among people who occupy a common
territory, even in cities

• Gans (1967):
-little evidence of urban lifestyle
-studied whether there is community life in suburbs (‘The Levittowners’)***

• Whyte (1956):
-egalitarian community ethic in suburban area
 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
Gans (1967): ‘The Levittowners’

• Levittowners described as ‘sub-locals’ as they are home-oriented than community-

oriented
-indicates that social class & stage in family life cycle have greater bearing on people’s
lives than geographical location

• Wirth had studied the inner city, i.e., ‘zone of transition’

-inner cities characterized by homogeneous groups who face deprivation, instability
and uncertainty
-these people do not stay in any one place for long
-Wirth ignored outer city and suburbs

• Moving from inner to the outer and suburbs does not necessarily mean people’s
behaviour changes
-wrong to speak of urban and suburban way of life
 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
‘The myth of suburbia’
• Child-rearing
• Family-centredness
• Active social lives
• Homogeneous & middle class
• Political conservativism

Berger (1960): attempted to explore this ‘myth’/stereotype

• Suburbs differ in many ways: size, income profile & origin of residents, educational
levels etc etc

• Research on suburbs biased towards middle class suburbs

• Suburbs can be WC, MC or both

 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
The city

• Castells (1977): Marxist

-priority to study structure of society producing forces acting on urban areas
-no good reason to study urban areas as distinct and separate entities
-urbanism does not produce distinct forms of behaviour

-urbanism is mere expression of level of capitalist development

-riots, slum housing, traffic congestion are expression of inequality characterizing

capitalism

Capitalism should be studied instead of cities

 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
The city

• Castells (1977): Marxist (cont.): city is the arena for class conflict

-cities are ‘spatial units of collective consumption’

i.e., places where mass of people are housed, schooled etc

-cities are places where capitalists transfer cost of producing & reproducing the
labour force to the state and proletariat

-At some point the state will find it impossible to run urban facilities and apply cut-
backs
-urban social movements will emerge contesting
-state will be unable to suppress revolutionary ardour of WC
-welfare state to be revealed as instrument of class control
 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
Evaluation of Castells:

• No explanation why, or where, urbanites will develop collective awareness and protest

• State not necessarily acts under influence of bourgeoisie

• Marxists: point of focus should have been production of goods, not consumption

• Castells acknowledged concept of consumption as too narrow

• Emergence of ‘new social movements’ in 1980’s give some credibility to Castells work,
despite being mostly concerned with gender & environmental issues
-new social movements are non-hierarchical & decentralized; use direct
actions
 RURAL, URBAN & SUBURBAN
The inner-city: a zone of transition

• A zone in the city centre, with a high turnover of residents

• Related to Burgess’ (1925) concentric zone theory

• Characteristics: typically run-down area

few plans of long-term investment & development
high crime rate
little sense of community

• Like a ‘social jungle’ where people fight for survival until they move to more stable &
affluent outer rings (see Burgess’ model overleaf)

• Criticisms of Burgess:
-urban development not necessarily a natural & neutral process
-inability to explain frequency of riots in inner cities
 Burgess Model

Central Business District

Transitional zone: recent immigrants, deteriorating housing, factories,

abandonment
Working class zone: single family tenements

Residential zone: single family homes with yards and garages

Commuter zone: suburbs

THANK YOU!!