Urban Sociology

Section B; Chapter 2
Introduction
• Class position is important because it determines the possible opportunities or
constraints for future achievement open to any individual. One’s social standing
in the society’s hierarchy depends not only on possession of wealth but also on
particular cultural attributes, such as religion, ethnicity, or symbolic differences,
and on the possession of political power.
• In a hierarchical society, the top control most of the society’s resources; they also
enjoy the most symbolic prestige and political influence. Those below are the
most numerous and have the least power.
• In a hierarchical society, there are different groups based on what social scientists
call SES, or socioeconomic status. SES is a particular combination of wealth,
occupation, education, gender, and race, among other factors.
• Socioeconomic standing also involves the ability of the household to establish
residence in a particular place. Thus, a significant component of socioeconomic
status will be determined by one’s address and the symbolic reputation of
particular neighborhoods.
What is Class?
• Definition & Forms of Class:
• Karl Marx: According to Marx -
“ Class is the economically determined and inherently conflictual divisions of
society based on ownership of property, e.g. lord and serf in feudal society,
Bourgeoisie and Proletariat in capitalist society, which characterize all large-
scale societies and which are held ultimately to determine the destiny of
each type of society.”
• Based on ownership of capital and means of production, according to
Marx, there are two major classes of people -
I. The Capitalist (Bourgeoisie) - the owner of capital and property.
II. The Proletariat - the propertyless, labour people
• In addition, Marx mentioned two other classes of people, i.e. the 'peasants'
and 'small proprietors', who were vanished with the maturation of
capitalist system
What is Class?
• Max Weber: According to Weber -
• ‘Class is differences between categories of groups of persons in their 'typical probabilities' of
'procuring goods' (wealth), 'gaining position in life' (prestige) and 'finding inner satisfaction'-life
chances (power)'.
• Based on ownership and non-ownership or property and income, according to Weber, there are
four major classes of people -
• Propertied Class
• Commercial Class
-Intellectual
- Administrative
-Managerial
• Social Class
-The Petty Bourgeoisie
- The 'propertyless' intelligentsia
- Classes privileged by property and education
• The Working Class
The Wealthy
• The upper classes often have the advantage of owning many homes because they are
able to afford it.
• Many wealthy people alternate among townhouse, suburban estate, and rural
recreational home. Obviously, at any given time the family can occupy just one of these
residences, so multiple home ownership is a symbol of wealth and power that has some
meaning and prestige in our society.
• In the city, the wealthy are associated with the more fashionable places.
• Their homes are located at the greatest heights. In the suburbs, this often means that
estates are built on the high ground or on hillsides. In the city, this “god’s eye view” is
acquired with apartments at the top of luxury high-rises.
• Their activities take place within certain spaces that are allocated to the particular mix of
restaurants, resorts, and social clubs reserved for the upper class.
• One important way the wealthy manifest their power and status is by isolating
themselves as much as possible from the rest of the population. This type of segregation
is voluntary. In the city, voluntary segregation may be accomplished by living in ultra-
expensive housing with security guards and controlled entrances.
• Even though public transportation and taxis are available, the wealthy often utilize
private, door to-door limousine services. Shopping and recreation are all located in
heavily policed areas.
The Wealthy
• The wealthy people who have chosen voluntary segregation often share
some specific attributes-
I. Their lifestyle consisted of a withdrawal from civic affairs and the
concentration on business by the males;
II. Females were expected to stay close to home and were expected to be
involved in philanthropic enterprises outside the home, such as
organizing charity balls or fund-raising activities for the arts.
III. Children were sent to exclusive private schools, and social life meant
interacting only with other members of the upper class on the Social
Register.
IV. Family time for these people was divided between town and country
residences. In this way, the upper class maintained its spatial and social
isolation from other segments of the society.
The Wealthy
• Thorsten Veblen (1899) coined the concept “conspicuous consumption” to
refer to this particular aspect of the affluent style of suburban life. This
concept refers to an outward display of consumption that demonstrates
wealth and power through the wasting of resources and the symbols of
upper-class membership. Here-
I. Houses were huge with many more rooms than were necessary to
service the immediate family.
II. Estates had large front and rear lawns that were landscaped and
attended to by a staff of gardeners.
III. For their leisure time, They took membership in the golf/tennis club,
which costs huge amount of money.
• In short, the wealthy possess a distinct lifestyle founded on class privilege
and symbols of high social status
Middle Class
• Since the 1970s, as manufacturing has declined in the city, there has been a
phenomenal increase in service-related jobs and middle class arises from the young
urban professionals.
• Many of these are professional positions created by the information-processing
economy of the city, such as the financial and legal institutions associated with
corporate headquarters.
• The shift to information-processing professional services has also affected
metropolitan settlement space by reinforcing certain upper-middle-class patterns of
behavior. Such as-
• The term yuppie, or young urban professional are relatively young (late twenties to
early forties), middle-class professionals who live in the city. They contribute
tremendously in the development of multi-cultural city centres in this way-
Yuppies were responsible for gentrification and the upgraded housing and
renovation of older loft buildings
Their culinary demands spurred the opening of many new and often exotic
restaurants;
Their more specialized everyday needs, such as last minute food shopping, health
and fitness requirements, and reading and cinema tastes, have opened up new
sectors of employment for a host of immigrant groups and working-class urban
residents looking for entry-level service positions.
Middle Class
• Most households that we would identify as part of the middle class do not live
in the city. Decades of white flight for those who could afford to move to the
ever-expanding suburbs have emptied the central city of much of the middle
class. Middle-class suburban living might be thought of as the upper-class
lifestyle within a more modest budget-
The typical suburban home is a scaled-down replica of the upper-class estate.
It consists of a front yard that is strictly ornamental and a backyard reserved
for leisure.
In the warmer parts of the country, the desirable backyard may contain a built
in swimming pool, most new middle-class homes have decks in the backyard
where children play and adults cook on the gas barbecue, and home
improvement chain stores have spread across the suburban landscape.
While the upper-class estate requires a team of gardening and maintenance
people to take care of the yard, the middle-class homeowner is a “do-it-
yourselfer.”
Middle Class
A stereotypical activity of the suburban male invariably involves fighting
crabgrass on the lawn, repairing roofs, and maintaining homeowner
appliances. Women in suburbia also have a stereotypical lifestyle.
For suburbanites, leisure activities are confined to the weekend, when
there is some free time from work—at least for those households where
parents do not have to work overtime.
In many municipalities, tax monies have been used to acquire the kind of
public facilities that the affluent enjoy in private. These include public golf
courses, swimming pools, tennis courts, and parks.
In areas close to the ocean or a lake, suburban municipalities often build
and service public marinas for boating and other water sports.
The Working Class/Working Poor
• In the nineteenth century, life in the city was dominated by factories.
• Modest working-class housing was constructed in grid-pattern rows nearby.
• Weekly schedules were centered in this space, which included the few amenities
available to the working class—the pub, the association football park or the local
baseball diamond and the streets themselves, which served as playgrounds for
children.
• In the period immediately after World War II, the cities contained a density of
such working-class districts.
• Since the 1960s, however, this pattern has been in decline. One reason is that
many factory workers attained middle-class status with the ability to purchase
single-family homes in the suburbs. A second, more drastic cause was the decline
in manufacturing itself.
A significant change occurred in the life and living status of the poor-
Despite being employed in odd jobs, the working class still remain within the city
centres.
Their living standard declines stiffly as the cities become expensive places to
reside.
The Working Class/Working Poor
They depends largely on the public services, offered by the local and regional
authority- They depend on the mass transportation which is gradually becoming
expensive.
They depend on the city-supported medical assistance, such as government
hospitals and community clinics as the private hospitals and clinics are out of
reach of the mass people.
They are struggling for basic amenities, including education for children, security
for women and children, recreational facilities as well as sanitation facilities for
all.
Residing in the worst places of the city centres), the ghettos/slums/the poor are
experiencing endless list of social pathologies -
• Public health crisis, including maternal and infant mortality, drug addiction,
tuberculosis.
• Child labour and abuses at home and at work
• School drop out, early marriage and juvenile crime.
• Alcoholism and violence against women (VAW).
• Crimes such as robbery, rape and murder
Urban Culture-Nightlife
• In an urban area, local bars draw large crowds almost every night and many offer
live music, although drinking and hooking up with the opposite sex seems to be
the major attractions.
• The popularity of these activities brings people back into the downtown core,
which had been abandoned as a place for leisure and consumption by most
people due to the suburbanization of the population.
• For this reason, development of such nighttime businesses as bars and theaters
has, in the last two decades, been viewed as a major aspect of urban
regeneration that greatly benefits the city, through amusement taxes and the like,
as well as local businesses.
• There are permanent residents of these areas who complain about the increased
noise and nuisance congestion in the evenings when non-night crawlers simply
want to sleep.
• Beverage corporations have targeted locally owned pubs and nightclubs for
takeover and for outlets that sell their products.
• Another aspect of the urban life is “the girl hunt.” College and young adult males
make their way to the so-called city nightclubs in search of girls.
Urban Culture-Women Role
• Women and the Urban Political Economy
• During the nineteenth century in the early stages of industrial manufacturing, it
was common for entire families to labor; ten and even twelve hours a day, six
days a week, was the norm. Home life was second to the needs of the factory,
and even children were pressed into the service of wage labor in textile mills and
other industries. But the growing number of middle-class families during the
1920s enabled people to copy the upper-class lifestyle with married women
remaining at home.
• During World War II, however, many women returned to fulltime occupations,
including manufacturing. After the war and especially during the suburbanization
of the 1950s, middle-class women were once again expected to remain home as
housewives. But in the 1970s, real wages in the United States began to decline,
a majority of all adult women worked outside the home.
Urban Culture-Women Role
• Working-class and minority women have always had to secure employment
outside the home, even if limited to part-time work.
• There is a form of patriarchy too. Certain industries, such as garment
manufacturing, depend almost exclusively on the exploitation of female
labor in factories. Domestic labor is unpaid and has low status. Housework
is usually not a family topic of importance.
• Yet the well-being of the family depends on the cooking, cleaning,
nurturing and monitoring of the household. In most societies, it has been
women’s lot to bear the responsibility for these tasks. Even when women
work outside the home, men expect them to complete a “double shift” of
cleaning, cooking, and child care when they return home.
Urban Culture-Women Role
• Women and the environment
• Due to the family division of labor, women have been assigned the main task of
decorating the home. For women, their control over the environmental space of
the home has meant an opportunity for self-expression. For the middle class, it
also has developed into a restricted domain within which women are allowed to
influence their environment.
• If the female gender role assigns a certain power to women through control of
the home environment, the opposite is the case for the larger physical
environment of the city and metropolis. Once out in public space, women have to
beware. They are subject to harassment and, quite often, danger.
• In contrast to men, women are situated in a constrained space and do not enjoy
the same freedom of movement. For example, women are cautioned not to go
out alone at night, and with good reason. If they walk or jog around the
neighborhood, they usually do so only in secure places.
Urban Culture-Women Role
• The secondary status of women is reinforced through spatial design. Community
planning invariably assigns the major portion of open space to traditionally male
dominated activities, such as sports. Places for mothering are rarely considered at
all and are often restricted to playgrounds. Creating safe environments for
children and mothers requires some planning.
• Finally, there is a sharp difference between men and women regarding travel.
Men travel more than women, and most, but not all, use transportation solely for
work related purposes. Men, more than women, are drawn away from their
homes for business trips. Married women, in contrast, most often seek out jobs
close to home and, although they commute, their everyday space is confined to
family chores using a car that is close to home as well.
What is Ethnicity?
• Ethnicity refers to cultural traits that are shared by a category of people
such as language, religion, or national origin. When people integrate
ethnicity as part of their identity and create a specific cultural, religious or
national community, they self-consciously constitute an ethnic group.
• An ethnic group deliberately invokes ethnicity as part of its members'
identity and engages in cultural rituals (such as specific holidays like
Christmas day Day or Eid Day or Durga puja) that generate a sense of
peoplehood: the sense that members of the group have common
characteristics and belong together.
• An ethnic identity may not only be claimed as part of one's identity; it may
also be assigned by and shape what one can accomplish in a given society
What is Ethnicity?
• According to Schermerhorn -
• 'A collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common
ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one
or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood.'
• According to Stein
• 'A group possessing some degree of coherence and solidarity composed of
people who are, at least latently, aware of having common origins and
interests.'
• Features
Herodotus enumerated the following features of ethnicity -
• Shared descent
• Shared language
• Shared sanctuaries and sacrifices
• Shared customs
What is Race?
• Races are populations which can be readily distinguished from one another
on genetic grounds alone. Thus, a race is a large population of individuals
who have a significant fraction of their genes in common and can be
distinguished from other races by their common gene pool.
• Brues: (1977:1-2) A race is a division of a species which differs from other
divisions by the frequency with which certain hereditary traits appear
among its members-
Among these traits are features of external appearance that make it
possible to recognize members of different populations by visual inspection
with greater or less accuracy
Members of such a division of a species share ancestry with one another
to a greater degree than they share it with individuals of other races
Finally, races are usually associated with particular geographic areas .
Race, Ethnicity, Immigration and Residential
Segregation
• Beginning with Columbus’s fateful voyage in 1492, Western European settlers
from the British Isles, Spain, Holland, and France confronted the Native
Americans.
• During the 1840s, the potato famine in Ireland forced many people from that
country to immigrate. The Irish people were the first large group of immigrants
who were not Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and they confronted extensive
discrimination because they were Catholics. By the time they arrived, the earlier
groups had entrenched themselves as the ruling class.
• By the 1800s, industrialization was in full bloom and the cities of the United
States were expanding. At about that time a second substantial wave of new
immigrants arrived here from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
• Most second-wave immigrants made their homes in the city. Many had come
from rural backgrounds and had to make adjustments to the urban way of life.
• Housing for most immigrants lacked the basic necessities of sanitation and
sewage. Public health crises and crime waves were quite common. The quality of
urban life went into decline. In addition, they found most jobs in the factories of
the largest cities, and they had to accommodate themselves to the industrial
daily schedule.
Cont.
• Changes to immigration laws enacted in 1965 replaced the earlier quota system
(which had been designed to keep Asians and other non-European groups out of
the country) with a preference system based on occupational characteristics.
• Between 1968 and 1990, some 10 million people immigrated to the United
States.
• A third distinct characteristic of the new immigration is that it is economically
diverse. Many recent immigrants exhibit the classic characteristics of the past:
limited education, rural backgrounds, and limited resources. A large number,
however, are the exact opposite. These well-endowed immigrants are educated—
many have college degrees—they are former city dwellers, and they often come
with enough personal financial resources to start their own businesses.
• In their home countries of India, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere, this loss
of a young and highly educated population is referred to as a “brain drain.” Thus,
many third-wave arrivals also achieve success in the United States in a relatively
short time.
Cont.
• The new immigration already has had a profound effect on settlement
space within metropolitan regions across the country. Some groups
have moved into older ethnic neighborhoods, greatly expanding their
numbers and size.
• In southwest Chicago, for example, the Mexican neighborhood in
Eighteenth Street has expanded across the Little Village community
into suburban communities beyond the city limits, while the older
Chinatown area near the Loop has seen extensive redevelopment
that has doubled the number of business establishments and
dwelling units.