Urbanism as a Way of Life

In this selection, sociologist Louis Wirth first proposes a working concept of what cities are and then moves on to what he calls a “sociological definition” of modern urban life as he saw it in the Chicago of the 1930s. The working concept is that all cities have three key characteristics in common – large population size, social heterogeneity, and population density. These, he asserts, contribute to the development of a peculiarly “urban way of life” and a distinct “urban personality.” According to Wirth, a “sociologically significant definition of the city” looks beyond the mere physical structure of the city, its economic product, or its characteristic cultural institutions – however important all these may be – to discover those underlying “elements of urbanism which mark it as a distinctive mode of human group life.” In an analysis that many find bleak, he sees real personality differences between urban and rural people and between community-based and society-based styles of living. He explains those differences in terms of the functional responses of urban dwellers to the characteristic environmental conditions of modern urban society. If, for example, city people are regarded as more socially tolerant than rural people – and, at the same time, more impersonal and seemingly less friendly – these are merely adaptations to the experience of living in large, dense, socially diverse urban environments.