Week 2 Reading Response: Foundational Readings

Taking these early sociological readings as a whole, I notice that they consider their era (the mid-late 19^th Century) to be a time of great socioeconomic upheaval, uncertainty and crisis. This undertone is consistent through each reading, though their analytical approaches and conclusions differ. This offers me a different perspective on our current global crisis of wealth disparity and its attendant environmental degradation. On the one hand, for sociologists, it seems that no crisis is greater than the present one. On the other hand, and perhaps more soberingly, no crisis is distinct from what preceded it. I am thus reminded of Walter Benjamin’s conception of history as a continually unfolding catastrophe.

Durkheim conceives of the division of labour as a producer of what he terms organic solidarity; a solidarity that comes as a result of members within society recognizing their contingency upon other members, as though they are each merely parts of a larger organism. He brings this to a moral level by positing that people in this situation (and, of course, urban residents are far more contingent than rural residents) are insinuated into each other’s conscious, moral landscape. His conclusion is that law is a product of this moral conception of contingency. Human custom in such a situation is to preserve the balance of the whole, and since laws generally formalize existing customs, a society’s laws are representative of the degree and type of solidarity it exhibits.

Tönnies sees traditional, static, place-based, exchange-free community (i.e. Gemeinschaft) as being primary to Gesselschaft; moreover, the latter is associated with unhealth, and only by the contrivances of formal social institutions does it delay societal collapse. We can see in Tönnies’ conception of Gemeinschaft that this is more or less what Simmel has silently assumed as the starting point for “natural” social relations before the derivation of urban living imposed its changes.

For Simmel, urbanization is primarily represented as a change in personal perceptions and behaviors. The invention of the money economy, so central to all other urban changes, manifests most vividly not in the physical structures or social arrangements of the city (although Simmel definitely notes the changes to these aspects of settlements), but in the mind of the urbanite – her assignations, associations and decision mechanisms. In short, Simmel sees urbanization primarily as a way of seeing the world. It is self-perpetuating in so far as mental conceptions lead to an intensified physical urban condition, but it begins with the individual’s mental life.

Weber describes the essence of modern cities as being based on freedom from a subsisting, agrarian lifestyle (71). Again, like the others, there is an inference of the city being both the product and the cause of a division of labor. I think Weber’s observation that some cities are driven by the consumption of the wealthy while others are driven by the production of wealth still holds true today. It brings up the question of what unique classes can be found in these kinds of cities, and what each of those classes’ experience of the city is.

Of course, in reality no city is completely one type. However, having lived in Vancouver, a place dominated by tourism and real estate investment, it is a vastly different city depending upon whether one is part of the wealthy elite, middle class or underclass. This last point, I think, is a gap that remains in the other writings in so far as they fail to fully acknowledge how different the experience of the city is for different people. They seek to point out the universality of the urban mindset, the commodification of interactions, the overloading of stimuli. However, all these claims are set out in the abstract as a “general urban condition”, and are therefore difficult to assess. We could dissect them more effectively if we applied them to the constituents of Weber’s distinct types of cities.

I think Marx’s understanding of the essentially transient nature of capital accumulation is the most piercing observation among all the readings. He never explicitly links this quality as part of the urban condition in the same way that, for example, Simmel does with the concept of specialization. Nevertheless, of all the “syndromes” pointed out about cities among these authors, the one that resonates most with me in terms of the contemporary urban condition is the incessant cycle of capital investment and disinvestment that is constantly uprooting aspects of urban spatial and social structures.

Among all these authors, the notion of a “prior state” runs deeply as a departure point from the changes which they were experiencing at their times of writing. Whether this prior state is inferred, as in Marx, or stated explicitly, as in Tonnies or Simmel, it is portrayed relatively unproblematically in comparison to the modernizing changes that are occurring.

The static-ness of the prior state within the readings is, for me, a troubling concept. While many of these assertions about a more exchange-based society in which the needs of capital reproduction dictate people’s daily lives are asserted to manifest themselves most intensely in cities, I have found them to be just as strong in certain rural locations. Specifically, the farm on which I grew up on the Canadian Prairies has, within two generations, turned from a partially subsistence-oriented operation into a wholly specialized business. More importantly, the forces of global capitalism and specialization have not exerted pressure on the area to urbanize, but rather for people to acquire ever-larger tracts of land on which to turn a profit. I therefore find Simmel’s description of changes in mental life to be not a wholly urbanizing force, but rather either urbanizing or ruralizing, depending on the context.