What have we learned (Week 2)

We are told that one of the authors of our textbook and his wife have led Gmelch & Gmelch ("Student Fieldworkers in  Village and City") student fieldwork trips for thirty years and that this is a comparison between the rural and urban fieldwork experience.  What should we take away from this article?

  

In Barbados students lived in villages of 200-800, furthest removed from the capital; in Tasmania students lived in the capital city, Hobart.  Secondly, when students in Barbados left their homes they rarely encountered someone who was not a potential informant; in Tasmania they rarely ran into someone who could be an informant.  Hobart students were always having to explain themselves to people they met—who they were, why they were there—interviews were set up by phone and required traveling; in Barbados they could fall out the door and find someone who could potentially have useful information.  To no one's surprise the Barbadian students had an average of thirty informants, where the Hobart students had fifteen; that Hobart students had far fewer field notes from observation—the students had far more difficulty identifying a “neighborhood” or a “community” in which to work.  They most easily met other students and went to bars/clubs to meet folks of the same age as them, whereas the Barbadian informants skewed to the older spectrum of age.  The Gmelch's solution: to offset the fieldwork difficulties each student in Hobart volunteered & conducted research for an organization.

"Urbanism as a Way of Life" is a 73 year-old landmark article by Louis Wirth.  According to him, urban life is characterized by relations between strangers--key terms: anonymity, transient & impersonality.  He definitely approaches this as a sociologist—it’s all numbers & things & quantification, not about people.  The sociological “definition of the city seeks to select those elements of urbanism which mark it as a distinctive mode of human life” (103).  So, in 1938 one of the defining features was a census count of 2,500+ as urban and anything smaller is rural.  Additionally, whether the density has to be 10,000 or 1,000 persons/sq mi. it is still arbitrarily dependent upon the characteristics of the population involved.  So, he says a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous people.  In his

Theory of Urbanism he identifies what he see as the primary characteristics of the city—size of population, density, heterogeneity, etc.  The result once again: depersonalization.

So when he defines the distinctive features of urbanism as form of social organization: substitution of secondary for primary contacts, weakening of bonds of kinship, declining social significance of family, disappearance of neighborhoods, and undermining of traditional bases of solidarity, I have to say that this is far too dark for me.  Perhaps the data are 73 years old. Perhaps there are some dark sides to the urban environment.  But, I cannot agree that there are no positive aspects of living in an urban environment.