254 Part IV: All Together Now: The Ins and Outs of Social Organization

In this chapter, I begin by talking about classic sociological studies of the city. I then talk about urban change and diverse neighborhoods, and finally look to the future of the city. Can cities remain peaceful, productive places for everyone to live? Sociologists believe they can, but they acknowledge that there’s always going to be tension, always going to be diversity and change. That’s what urban life is all about.

Sociology in the City

Sociologists have always looked to the heart of the city for people and situations to observe. Urban life is enormously complex, and it will always be a challenge to understand how it works. (It’s often a challenge just to live it!) In this section, I explain how 19th century sociologists understood city life, and how 20th century sociologists threw themselves right into the thick of it.

The loneliness of a crowd

“The lonely crowd” is a cliché (and the title of a classic sociology book that actually has more to do with suburban life than with urban life), but it is one of the paradoxes of social life that being in a crowd of people can indeed be

lonelier than being alone. Hundreds or thousands of people may be in the same place as you, but if don’t or can’t relate to them, it can feel very isolating — even frightening.

That’s a new feeling for people who move to big cities from small communities: the feeling of almost always being surrounded, even crowded, by people, but by people who don’t necessarily know or even care who you are or where you came from. On a bus or subway car, you may have your face jammed into the armpit of someone who’s completely ignoring you. For a number of reasons, that’s not pleasant.

The sociologist who’s best known for writing about why it feels different to be in a city than in a small community was a German named Ferdinand Tönnies, whose most important work was published in the late 19th century.

In his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies explained what he saw as a difference between Gemeinschaft — a world usually translated into English as “community” — and Gesellschaft, which is usually translated as “society.”

For Tönnies, Gemeinschaft characterizes a community that feels like a community. It’s characteristic of a group you’re usually born into, and like other members of the community, you share many things in common. You naturally feel a kinship with other people in Gemeinschaft because you have a set of shared interests and, for that and other reasons, you do many of the same things. Examples of groups bound by Gemeinschaft include:

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Farming communities

Families

Religious communities

Gesellschaft, on the other hand, characterizes a group of people who come together by choice, usually for very specific practical reasons. When you opt to move to a place or join a group because there’s something in particular that you want to accomplish — not necessarily because you feel any particular affinity for the other people in that group — the bond you share with the other people in that group is the impersonal bond of Gesellschaft. Examples of these groups include:

Urban business centers

Corporations and trade cooperatives

Universities

Political parties

In Gemeinschaft, when you encounter someone you can safely assume that he or she has a lot in common with you and is, or wants to, share a personal relationship — in other words, that he or she is your friend. In Gesellschaft, people are together for a very specific reason and may otherwise want nothing to do with one another. In fact, in some such groups (for example, in business ventures), close personal relationships may be discouraged or even outright forbidden!

In Gemeinschaft, bonds among people are intimate and personal. In

Gesellschaft, bonds are practical and impersonal.

Groups characterized by Gemeinschaft are generally much more comfortable, and if you ever read Tönnies’s writing, you may get the feeling that he prefers Gemeinschaft and wishes there could be more of it. From a sociological perspective, though, Gemeinschaft isn’t something you can just put in a can like paint and spray wherever you think the world needs some peace, love, and understanding: it’s the result of living among people who have a lot in common with you. In most social situations today, the fact is that you just don’t have much in common with the people around you and it would be silly to pretend that you do.

When I was living in the Boston area, a neighbor from St. Paul — the quieter, less crowded city where I grew up — came to visit, and as we walked through downtown Boston he turned to me. “I keep saying hi to people,” he said, “but they don’t say hi back!” Were people in Boston less friendly than people in St. Paul? Yes, but for a reason. When you’re walking down a crowded city street, you’re continually passing people who you are not friends with and may never see again. If you stop to say hi to everyone, you’ll essentially be wasting breath that could be saved for the people you are friends with.

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Over time, though, if you watch carefully, patterns will emerge. You’ll notice the shopkeeper who always comes out for a smoke break at three specific times each day, the bus driver who helps the little old lady up the steps with her shopping cart each Tuesday morning, the kids who come home from school every weekday and pass by the musician playing his guitar. You’ll notice cops on a beat — and, maybe, criminals on their own beats. There are rules and regularities to even the most chaotic urban neighborhood.

Though many different research methods have been used to study urban life, the research method most closely associated with urban sociology has been ethnography: hitting the streets to talk to city residents and understand how their lives and relationships work. From the Chicago School on down (see Chapter 3), this has been an enormously productive pursuit that has yielded some of the most important studies in all of sociology.

One of the most famous studies is described in the book Street Corner Society by the great American sociologist William Foote Whyte. Over the course of several years in the 1930s, Whyte lived among the predominantly ItalianAmerican residents of an inner-city neighborhood in Boston. His careful study shows many of the complex aspects of life in that place at that time:

The tension between neighborhood-oriented “corner boys” and the upwardly mobile “college boys.”

Local politics, with officeholders and candidates for office working to win the allegiance of important individuals and families.

The prevalence of organized (and disorganized) crime, with racketeers knit into the neighborhood’s social fabric.

The most memorable, and poignant, aspect of Street Corner Society is Whyte’s description of the complex relations among a gang of “corner boys”; he captured the way they had to balance their personal friendships and relationships with complex social forces. Over Whyte’s years of observation, various boys’ fortunes rose and fell, and those boys in leadership positions faced hard choices about how to use their influence with their peers.

Books like Whyte’s — and, to be sure, there have been many more excellent studies along these lines — demonstrate the complex nature of urban life, even in communities that look desperate and disorganized. Many Bostonians dismissed the North End neighborhood where Whyte lived and worked as a “slum,” but Whyte’s book paints a complex picture: one that isn’t always pretty, but does show the strong webs of social organization present in the neighborhood.

Street Corner Society was also pioneering in Whyte’s use of the research method known as “participant observation,” in which the researcher joins a social group and participates in activities along with its members. (See Chapter 4.) The method has its drawbacks — it can be hard to objectively