Urban Differentiation: Problems and Prospects

Cities are focal points for a great variety of America's ills. City people daily clog highways, befoul air, pollute water, challenge sewer systems, make streets hazardous and public spaces lethal. Their sick, indigent, deviants, and aged make demands; their slums spread; their race relations sicken our conscience; their children run amuck; and their girls go bad. Most of these problems, however, though identified with urban America, are not unique to this growing sector of society. It is patently impractical, undesirable, and almost meaningless in a complex society undergoing rapid and widespread change to separate the city, with its problems and prospects, from the larger society. Cities today are part-societies where everyday activities are linked to greater polities, economics, and extended networks of kin and friend. Much current discussion of urban affairs nevertheless treats this portion of society without reference to the whole. It is a curious abstraction to view both social order and its concomitant problems within the community as static or discrete, since all activities in an urban society are interwoven to form a large fabric whose pattern, like an "op" painting, constantly vibrates, restructures, moves unceasingly, and never settles down. The fascination of urban sociology lies in defining and understanding this constantly changing organization of thousands of disparate yet widely interdependent acts performed daily by all the people of the city and all those linked to it by interdependence or interaction. A profoundly important perspective may be thus gained for evaluating, formulating, and implementing enlightened public policy. Such a perspective is not easy to acquire. No neat theory of urban social organization exists today even though the current renascence in urban studies and its attendant affluence has greatly increased research, writing, and systematic thinking in this area. What is being formed, instead, are sets of related ideas which are grounded in careful observations and which hang together well enough to be termed theoretical frames of reference. Basically, the framework for analysis of urban problems and prospects which is used here relates broad changes occurring in the larger society to the activities and opportunities of people settled in local areas of the city. This patterned sifting and sorting of people into local areas is part of the present transformation of urban communities, and a source of many current difficulties. Of the several recent and significant influences, industrialization and urbanization are the two major changes most instrumental in transforming society through healing