Physical Structure - Social Organization - Set of Attitudes and Ideas
When looking at an urban environment, we have to keep three things in mind: (1) who the people are who populate the area, and what they center around, whether it be technological or economical order; (2) what the social structure is, how it is organized, and what social institutions exist in it; and (3) the ideas that tie the particular environment together. These three characteristics define an urban environment, according to Louis Wirth in an essay entitled "Urbanism as a Way of Life." Looking at the urban environment around us with these three factors in mind makes the viewer more in tune with the reasons why s/he sees what s/he sees. Knowing the history, or the reasons that people have grouped together, helps us understand not only the people, but the social construct of "urban environment" that we are observing.
Wirth's first classification, a populous organized around technology or economics, defines the urban environment quite well. People group together to work in large buildings. The more people the buildings hold, the more jobs that are available, the more people will come to the city and work. To understand the specific order that will comprise our focus is not as simple, however. As we begin to brainstorm ways to show our topics the best, we will have to get to the root of "why are these people here," or "why was this built?" Defining the general reason something is created helps us to look further and understand more about the topic we study.
In Wirth's second generalization, dealing with human interaction, attempts to define the organization of the people who make up an urban area. Revealing the hierarchy is depressing, but in order to categorize people into statistics one has to generalize.
Wirth continues to berate the human psyche in his third point: people who live in the same area have to have some unifying ideas and goals. He later goes on to prove himself wrong by noting that urbanites flit from social group to social group, rarely staying organized with the same type of people for long. The only solidifying theory that ties urbanites together is the knowledge that all of them could be different. There is more variety of social classes in urban environments than rural, because there are more opportunities and more possible downfalls and expenses.
Understanding the group, not the individual, is what I have learned from this reading. In order to portray an "urban" environment, we have to know what group of people organized to make the area possible.
My Response
This article makes quite a few contradictions, which rather upset me, but perhaps I do not fully grasp Wirth's point. As a writer, I do not like Wirth's style of writing in the slightest, so it makes it difficult for me to see through his choppy and rigid prose. If I understand anything, however, I can see two instances where he directly contradicts himself. First, I will quote Wirth's third generalization: "Urbanism as a characteristic mode of life may be approached empirically from [the perspective]…as a set of attitudes and ideas, and a constellation of personalities engaging in typical forms of collective behavior…" (102). I have underlined words that I want to emphasize. Before Wirth writes this, however, in the previous section "Heterogeneity," Wirth writes on the topic of the individuals that comprise an urban society: "individuals who are thus detached from the organized bodies which integrate society comprise the fluid masses that make collective behavior in the urban community so unpredictable and hence so problematical" (101). If the society is fluid and behavior unpredictable, how could you understand what was "typical forms of collective behavior?" By his second statement, the reader is to understand that there is no such thing as collective behavior.
To summarize my feelings on this article, I feel that Wirth is a bad writer, and his ideas are muddled and unclear. I still stand by what I wrote in the beginning of this "reader response," but I have to put in my two cents.