Modern Living

As prehistory’s primitive human groups began to settle down in one place, the foundations of civilization were laid. From these early beginnings, humans increasingly lived together in larger and larger groups, and civilization grew further with the establishment of villages, towns, and cities. But for the greater part of human history, most people lived in rural communities. Large-scale urbanization came about only with the Industrial Revolution, which was accompanied by a huge expansion of towns and cities, and massive numbers of people migrating to work in the factories and mills  that were located there

Living in an urban environment became as much an aspect of“modernity” as industrialization and the growth of capitalism, and sociologists from Adam Ferguson to Ferdinand Tönnies recognized that there was a major difference between traditional rural communities and modern urban ones. This alteration of social order was ascribed to a variety of factors by an assortment of thinkers: to capitalism by Karl Marx; to the division of labor in industry by Émile Durkheim; to rationalization and secularization by Max Weber. It was Georg Simmel who suggested that urbanization itself had affected the ways in which people interact socially—and one of the fundamental characteristics of modern living is life in the city.

Community in the city

Simmel examined not only the new forms of social order that had arisen in the modern cities, but also the effects upon the individual of living in large groups, often separated from traditional community ties and family. Building upon his work, the so-called Chicago School of sociology, spearheaded by Robert E. Park, helped to establish a distinct field of urban sociology. Soon, however, sociologists changed the emphasis of their research from what it is like to live in a city, to what kind of city we want to live in.

Having evolved to meet the needs of industrialization, the city—and urban life, with all its benefits and disadvantages—was felt by many sociologists to have been imposed on people. The Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre believed that the demands of capitalism had shaped modern urban society, but that ordinary people could take control of their urban environment, what he called their “social space.” Similarly (but from a different political standpoint), Jane Jacobs advocated that people should resist the plans of urban developers and create environments that encouraged the formation of communities within the city.

In the late 20th century, several sociologists took up this idea of the loss of community in our increasingly individualized Western society. A communitarian movement emerged, led by US sociologist Amitai Etzioni, suggesting new ways to restore community spirit in what had become an impersonal society. Robert D. Putnam also gave prominence to the idea of community in his explanation of “social capital,” and the valuem and benefits of social interaction.

Not everyone agreed, however, that the answer to the social problems of urban life was a return to traditional community values. Niklas Luhmann pointed out that the problem today is one of communication between social systems that have become increasingly fragmented and differentiated. In the post-industrial age, with all its new methods of communication, new strategies for social cohesion need to be found.

 

Post-industrial cities

The nature of cities began to change in the late 20th century, as the manufacturing industries moved out or disappeared. While some cities became ghost towns, others became centers of the service industries. As working class areas were gentrified, and industrial buildings became desirable postmodern living spaces, the concept of modern metropolitan life became associated with prosperity rather than gritty industrialization.

This manifested itself not only in the transformation of urban living spaces, as described by Sharon Zukin in the 1980s, but throughout the postmodern social order. George Ritzer likened the efficiency and rationalization of the service industries to the business model pioneered by fast-food chain McDonalds, and Alan Bryman has noted how a US entertainment culture created by Disney has influenced modern consumerism. Modern urban society, having been created by industrialization, is now being shaped by the new demands of post-industrial commerce. 

STRANGERS ARE NOT REALLY CONCEIVED AS INDIVIDUALS BUT AS STRANGERS OF A PARTICULAR TYPE GEORG SIMMEL (1858–1918)

The Industrial Revolution was accompanied in Europe and the US by urbanization from the 19th century onward. For many people, this resulted in increased freedom as they experienced liberation from the constraints of traditional social structures. But in tandem with these developments came growing demands from capitalist employers for the functional specialization of people and their work, which meant new restrictions and curtailments of individual liberty.

German sociologist Georg Simmel wanted to understand the struggle faced by the city dweller in preserving autonomy and individuality in the face of these overwhelming social forces. He discovered that the increase in human interaction that was brought about by living and working in an urban environment profoundly affected relationships between people. He set out his findings in The Metropolis and Mental Life. Whereas in pre-modern society people would be intimately familiar with those around them, in the modern urban environmentm individuals are largely unknown to those who surround them. Simmel believed that the increase in social activity and anonymity brought about a change in consciousness.

The rapid tempo of life in a city was such that people needed a “protective organ” to insulate them from the external and internal stimuli. According to Simmel, the metropolitan “reacts with his head instead of his heart”; he erects a rational barrier of cultivated indifference—a “blasé attitude.” The change in consciousness also leads to people becoming reserved and aloof. This estrangement from traditional and accepted norms of  behavior is further undermined by the money culture of cities, which reduces everything in the metropolis to a financial exchange. Simmel says that the attitude of the metropolitan can be understood as a social-survival technique to cope with the mental disturbance created by immersion in city life— an approach that enables people to focus their energies on those who  matter to them. It also results in them becoming more tolerant of difference and more sophisticated.

Space in the metropolis

Degrees of proximity and distance among individuals and groups were central to Simmel’s understanding of living in a metropolis, and ideas about social space influenced one of his best-known concepts: the social role of “the stranger,” which is set out in an essay in Sociology. In the past, he says, strangers were encountered only rarely and fleetingly; but urbanite strangers are not drifters—they are “potential wanderers.” Simmel says that the stranger (such as a trader), or the stranger group (his example is “European Jews”), is connected to the community spatially but not socially; he or she is characterized by both “nearness and remoteness”—in the community but not of it.

The stranger was one of many social types described by Simmel, each becoming what they are through their relations with others; an idea that has influenced many sociologists, including Zygmunt Bauman. Erving Goffman’s concept of “civil inattention,” whereby people minimize social interaction in public—by avoiding eye contact, for instance—is also informed by one of Simmel’s insights: his notion of the “blasé attitude

 

Georg Simmel

Born in Berlin in 1858 to a prosperous Jewish family, Georg Simmel is one of the lesser-known founders of sociology. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1881. Despite the popularity of his work with the German intellectual elite, notably Ferdinand Tonnies and Max Weber, he remained an outsider and only gained his professorship at Strasbourg in 1914.

He developed what is known as formal sociology, which derives from his belief that we can understand distinct human phenomena by concentrating not on the content of interactions but on the forms that underlie behavior. But it is his study of life in a metropolis that remains his most influential work, as it was the precursor to the development of urban sociology by the so-called Chicago School in the 1920s.

THE FREEDOM TO REMAKE OUR CITIES AND OURSELVES HENRI LEFEBVRE (1901–1991)

The city need not be seen as a concrete jungle— grimy, unpleasant, and threatening. For French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who dedicated most of his life to the study of urban society, it is an exciting and complex combination of power relationships, diverse identities, and ways of being.

Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Lefebvre maintained that one of the most fascinating aspects of the city is not simply the people in it, but the fact that it is an environment that both reflects and creates society. Applying a Marxist perspective to his analysis, Lefebvre also says that urban spaces are shaped by the state and serve the interests of powerful corporations and capitalism. Parts of the city mirror the class relations contained within it: the opulence of some areas reveals the power and wealth of elites, while rundown inner-city areas and ghettos

outside the center indicate the displacement and marginalization of the poor, the working class, and other excluded groups.

Public and private

Many modern cities, for example, have become dominated by private spaces, such as shopping malls and office complexes, built in the service of capitalism. The loss of public space has severely restricted the arenas in which people can meet on an equal footing with others, so eroding their personal freedoms and stifling their means to satisfy their social and psychological needs. This can lead to serious social problems, such as crime, depression, homelessness, social exclusion, and poverty.

Considerable power is wielded by those who own and control urban spaces—architects, planners, “the merchant bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, and politicians,” according to Lefebvre. But he believes that decisions about the exact nature of the urban environment—what takes place in it, how social space is built and used—should be open to all. Ordinary people should participate in creating a space that reflects their needs and interests—only by claiming this “right to the city” can major social issues be addressed.

Lefebvre’s vision is of cities that pulse with life and are vibrant expressions of human freedom and creativity, where people can play, explore their creative and artistic needs, and achieve some form of self-realization. City streets should, he says, be designed to encourage this type of existence—they may be raw, exciting, and untamed but precisely because of this they will remind people that they are alive

Lefebvre’s demand for the right to the city is not simply a call for a series of reforms but for a wholesale transformation of social relations within the city, if not wider society— it is, in essence, a proposal for a radical form of democracy, whereby control is wrested from elites and turned over to the masses. This, he says, is only achievable by groups and class factions “capable of revolutionary initiative.”

Henri Lefebvre

Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, France, in 1901. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris, graduating in 1920. He joined the French Communist Party in 1928 and became one of the most prominent Marxist intellectuals in France. He was, however, later expelled by the Communist Party and became one of its fiercest critics. In 1961 he was appointed professor of sociologyat the University of Strasbourg, before moving to Nanterre in 1965. Lefebvre was a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects. His work challenged the dominant capitalist authorities and as such was not

always well received, but has gone on to influence several disciplines, including geography, philosophy, sociology, political science, and architecture.

THERE MUST BE EYES ON THE STREET

Jane Jacobs spent her working life advancing a distinct vision of the city—in particular focusing on what makes a successful urban community. Her ideas were formed from her observations of urban life in the neighborhood of West Greenwich Village, New York, where she lived for more than 30 years. Jacobs was opposed to the large-scale changes to city life that were occurring in New York during the 1960s, led by city planner and her archrival Howard Moses; these included slum-clearance projects and the building of high-rise developments. At the heart of her vision is the idea that urban life should be a vibrant and rich affair, where by people are able to interact with one another in dense and exciting urban environments. She prefers chaos to order, walking to driving, and diversity to uniformity.

For Jacobs, urban communities are organic entities—complex, integrated ecosystems—that should be left to grow and to change by themselves and not be subject to the grand plans of so-called experts and technocrats. The best judges of how a city should be—and how it should

Jane Jacobs’ vision of what a city street should be like is exemplified by this New York scene of vibrant urban life, with residential apartments, streetlevel businesses, and sidewalk bustle. evolve—are the local residents themselves. Jacobs argues that urban communities are best placed to understand how their city functions, because city life is created and sustained through their various interactions.

Ballet of the sidewalk

Jacobs notes that the built form of a city is crucial to the life of an urban community. Of prime importance are the sidewalks. The streets in which people live should be a tight pattern of intersecting sidewalks, which allow people to meet, bump into each other, converse, and get to know one another. She calls this the “ballet of the sidewalk,” a complex but ultimately enriching set of encounters that help individuals become acquainted with their neighbors and neighborhood.

Diversity and mixed-use of space are also, for Jacobs, key elements of this urban form. The commercial, business, and residential elements of a city should not be separated out but instead be side by side, to allow for greater integration of people. There should also be a diversity of old and new buildings, and people’s interactions should determine how buildings get used and reused.

Finally, urban communities flourish better in places where a critical mass of people live, work, and interact. Such high-density— but not overcrowded—spaces are, she feels, engines of creativity and vibrancy. They are also safe places to be, because the higher density means that there are more “eyes on the street”: shopkeepers and locals who know their area and provide a natural form of surveillance.

Jane Jacobs was a passionate writer and urbanist. She left Scranton, Pennsylvania for New York in 1935, during the Great Depression. After seeing the Greenwich Village area for the first time, she relocated there from Brooklyn—her interest in urban communities had begun. In 1944 she married, and moved into a house on Hudson Street.

It was when Jacobs was working as a writer for the magazine Architectural Forum that she first began to be critical of large top-down urban regeneration schemes. Throughout her life she was an activist and campaigner for her communitybased vision of the city. In 2007 the Rockefeller Foundation created the Jane Jacobs Medal in her honor to celebrate urban visionaries whose actions in New York City affirm her principles.

ONLY COMMUNICATION CAN COMMUNICATE

Modernity’s defining feature, according to German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, is advanced capitalist society’s differentiation into separate social systems— nthe economic, educational, scientific, legal, political, religious, and so on. Luhmann argues that the term “society” refers to the system that encompasses all the other systems: society is, he says, the system of systems.

Individuals, Luhmann insists, are socially meaningless. Society’s base element is not the human actor but “communication”—a term that he defines as the “synthesis of information, utterance, and understanding” arising out of the activities and interactions, verbal and nonverbal, within a system. Luhmann argues that just as a plant reproduces its own cells in a circular, biological process of self-production, so a social system is similarly self-sustaining and develops out of an operation that possesses connectivity—emerging when “communication develops from communication.” He likens communication to the structural equivalent of a chemical.

Structural couplings

Luhmann uses George Spencer- Brown’s ideas on the mathematical laws of form to help define a system, arguing that something arises out of difference: a system is, according to this theory, a “distinction” from its environment. And, says Luhmann, a system’s environment is constituted by other systems. For example, the environment of a family system includes other families, the political system, the medical system, and so on. Crucially, each individual system can only make sense of the events—the activities and ways of communicating—peculiar to itself; it is relatively indifferent to what takes place in the other systems (and the wider society). So, for example, the economic system is functionally dedicated to its own interests and is uninterested in moral issues, except where these might have an impact on the profitability of economic activities and transactions—whereas moral concerns are of great consequence in, say, the religious system.

Luhmann identifies this lack of systems integration as one of the major problems confrontingadvanced capitalist societies. He identifies what he calls “structural couplings”—certain forms and institutions that help to connect separated systems by translating the communications produced by one system into terms that the other can understand. Examplesinclude a constitution, which couples the legal and political systems, and a university, which couples the educational and, among others, economic systems.

“Structural coupling” is a concept that helps to account for the relationship between people (as conscious systems) and social systems (as communications).

Despite its extreme complexity, Luhmann’s theory is used worldwide as an analytical tool for social systems. His critics say that the theory passes academic scrutiny, but operationally it fails to show how communication can take place without human activity.

 

Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg, Germany, from 1946 to 1949, before becoming a civil servant in 1956. He spent 1960 to 1961 on sabbatical at Harvard University, studying sociology and administrative science, where he was taught by Talcott Parsons.

In 1966 Luhmann received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Munster and in 1968 he became professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld, where he remained. Luhmann was the recipient of several honorary degrees, and in 1988 he was the winner of the prestigious Hegel Prize, awarded to prominent thinkers by the city of Stuttgart. He was a prolific writer, with some 377 publications to his name.