Early Perspectives on City Life and Immigrants

It is undeniable that immigrants have played a vital role in the constantly changing city. That can especially be seen here in the United States, deemed the "melting pot" of cultures, where immigration has helped grow early city populations such as in New York City and Chicago. Early social theorists tried to explain different facets of urban life, with a heavy focus on the causes and effects of immigrants moving into the cities.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw this growth of laborers in a city as an opportunity for them to develop a class consciousness, a way to communicate with each other and share their struggles from an economic perspective. Marx believed that if they fought together the working class would be able to overcome the inequalities they faced due to capitalism. While many disagreed with his ideas of communism, Marx made an important point about the ability of people from different cultures and backgrounds to come together for a shared cause.

The German social theorist, Ferdinand Tonnies, concerned his studies of the city with how it differed from the earlier forms of social life. Gemelnschaft, the German term for community, was what Tonnies used to describe the close and intimate relationships between people seen in small towns and villages. By contrast, Gesellschaft, the German term for society, was what Tonnies described as the partial and impersonal relationships between people seen in the larger new cities. Tonnies did, however, recognize that the close and intimate relationships of Gemelnschaft could also be seen within the neighborhoods of large cities, for example with an immigrant neighborhood that has retained much of its culture and thus created bonds in their communities.

The German scholar Georg Simmel also sought to explain life in the modern city. Simmel found city life to be impersonal and anonymous. In this social idea of how the city was constructed, Simmel viewed everyone in the city as strangers, leaving out how people form bonds within their communities within the city, as immigrants often find within their neighborhoods, or even how people outside of their neighborhood develop friendships based in interaction for pleasure, not business.

Scholars from the Chicago School of Sociology created different ideas about how the social life of the city worked. Chicago had become one of America's great cities, with a population over one million people, including many immigrants from Europe and people from rural parts of the United States. Because of this diverse population, Chicago became a polyglot city, or a place with a variety of languages spoken and different cultures coming into contact every day. Robert Park and his colleagues became interested in the idea of human ecology, or how the change in cities can be construed in the terms of rivalries among different population groups.

Ernest Burgess studied social space, or how the spatial patterns and areas of cities are shaped and influenced by their residents. This led to the concentric zones theory, where Burgess and Park theorized metropolitan areas could be displayed in a set of circular areas radiating from the center with dominant social institutions and forces. Park went on to claim that the central mechanism for the development of the city was the competition for social space. He suggested that groups, many of them immigrants, competed for social dominance in areas of the city. The book Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience states:

...like the forces of modernization themselves, the dominance of a particular group in a particular neighborhood was neither certain nor permanent. As the city expanded in size, groups and institutions throughout this social order constantly competed with one another to become powerful and to establish their own rules and institutions within a particular area. (Chen, X., Orum, A. M., & Paulsen, K. E.; pg. 41).

Louis Wirth, another social theorist, echoed the ideas of Tonnies and Simmel with this theory of urbanism as a way of life. He viewed urban life as impersonal and anonymous, and took the idea of strangers in the city to an extreme, claiming everyone in the city acted as an individual, not as being a part of a community or family.

These early perspectives on urban life, although not necessarily strictly believed today, are an important foundation of studying urban life, especially that of immigrants, which was a common social change and challenge of the time. Tonnies, Simmel, and Wirth found the city impersonal and anonymous, making it more difficult for immigrants to the city to retain their cultural ties. Tonnies did, however, recognize that this could still be possible within the city neighborhoods. Marx found the city as an opportunity for workers to band together for a common cause, regardless of cultural traditions. Finally, the scholars of the Chicago School of Sociology found that the city was a competition for social space, where cultures were able to be retained in particular areas of the city. All of these theories have helped shape our views of city life today.

Source

Chen, X., Orum, A. M., & Paulsen, K. E. (2013). Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience. Wiley-Blackwell.

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