Urban Sociology and Urbanized Society

J.R. Mellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135682279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geographie

Focusing on urban sociology as practised in Britain, the author argues that it is a key element in the response of the 'intellectual proletariat' to urbanization and the calls on it by the State to control the ensuing way of life. The themes of urban sociology have been the concerns of the Welfare State and, despite radical inputs, the discipline has remained tied up with the assumptions and methodological precepts of liberalism. The author's contention is that urbanization should be analysed in the framework of the political economy of regional development.

This book was first published in 1977.

part one
The British experience

By 1900 the British élite had already lived with mass urbanization for a full century. This was then a rare experience, for no other society had undergone so marked a shift in way of life. But only as satisfaction in the new dispensation clouded in the last decades of the century were there purposeful moves towards the organization of the swollen towns. For guidance the urban bourgeoisie and the new middle classes turned to the Americans, French and Germans, all of whom had less familiarity with urban problems, but who already had taken initiatives in directing capital resources into unprofitable urban infrastructure. The characteristic features of British urban policy in the twentieth century—restrictions on the growth of existing towns, the encouragement of suburban development, controlled rebuilding of old urban districts, all without direct intervention by central government—took shape in the period before the First World War. In the decades 1890—1913, the ruling élite of the most urbanized society in the world were impelled to take stock of their towns, and the failures of private capital in their construction and maintenance.

The balance struck between the state as central government, its agencies the local authorities, and private investors, was, however, peculiar to Britain. The very earliness of mass urbanization, the relative isolation of urban aggregates, and their independence of existing concentration of power and wealth, had resulted in a diversity of communities resistant to direction by central government based on London. Arrangements for local government had to take account of these interests and attitudes. In the same manner, state intervention over investment into land or buildings had to respect existing arrangements for the circulation of capital. State control over urbanization in Britain has, therefore, been indirect, standardization of policy slow, and a considerable diversity retained. Although this is in statistical terms an urbanized society and in law subject to remarkable centralization, past experience and present practice contribute to a notable unevenness of development.

Urban sociology in Britain has its origins in the same period as the consolidation of policies for urban development by government. Traditionally it has been concerned with the environmental aspects of Welfare State policy, i.e. housing and land-use planning, and the issues for debate have reflected the shifting consensus as to the scope and directions of state intervention into development decisions. Of necessity, therefore, a discussion of British urbanization must embrace its urban sociology. It would be misleading to extract the academic discussion from this political context for the latter has given the vocabulary as well as the subject matter of urban sociology. Its frequent blandness of language and lack of specificity in analysis, which the account in this section reflects, are indicative of its role in this governing consensus. Its weaknesses are of more than academic significance.

As this section presents British urban sociology as integral to the response by the ruling elite to the problems experienced in the towns, the conventional headings—suburbs, slum, twilight area, housing, urban renewal, planning—have been used. These have been the debating issues of urban policy in this society. From this it should not be inferred that they are the basis for any future development of urban sociological study. As the language of liberalism and the Welfare State fall into disuse a different range of issues—industrial investment, labour migration, community politics, as well as questions of class and class culture, language and ideology—will come to the fore. A programme for the development of either urbanization or urban sociology in Britain cannot be derived from this survey of experience over the last century.

1 The British experiment^*

1 Uneven development in cities and regions

There are in Britain, as in other developed societies, marked regional distinctions. One in particular is conspicuous, that between the stagnant economies of the provinces—Scotland, Wales, South West and Northern England—and the prosperity of the Midlands and South East. It is as noticeable in British society as the cleavages between slums and suburbs; of greater salience perhaps than the familiar division between town and country. The major differentials in way of life apparent between these two zones extend to the towns. Just as the countryside has been remodelled over the centuries to meet the requirements of international trade and urban markets, so now existing urban settlements in the provinces find their economic basis removed, reorganized or replaced, their fabric neglected or restructured, and their population induced into alternative forms of commodity production. ‘Urban’ as a category of experience pales in significance as relations of dependency assume new patterns.

In any assessment of British society in the past ten years certain geographical changes are evident for which there is no adequate sociological language. There has been a decentralization of productive activity from the major metropolitan regions, a devolution of administrative control from the capital, and a general deconcentration of population. New areas are subject to development pressures in the search for alternative sources of energy and raw materials, ever distant country districts are being penetrated for homes, for holidays and for work, detached from the major centres, and formerly remote regions are being reindustrialized. Underdevelopment has become a resource, as in Latin America. Cheap labour, cheap land, minimal congestion costs, and living conditions which attract the managerial class precisely because they do not raise issues of the ‘urban problematic’ are the inducements to capital investment away from established urban centres. Peripheral communities outside the metropolitan regions, some subject to persistent neglect for a half century, some longer, now find themselves, their labour force and their resources, reappropriated.

Urbanization, in the sense of concentration of productive activity into densely populated settlements, was an important phase in the transformation of agrarian Europe into capitalism. The antagonism between industrial or commercial town and the countryside was in the nineteenth century stark; day-to-day experience of work, housing, social life, political opportunity, confirmed the impact of the towns on old ways of life. The European sociologists could therefore argue that there had been a major break with the past (so shifting attention from class formation to the retrieval of community), and postulate a dualism between town and country. Urbanization was to become the shorthand symbol for the impact of capitalism as a fully developed mode of production on social and political life. ‘The ideas [of town and country] mediate human interests and purposes for which there is no other immediately available vocabulary.’¹

For example, in the writings of Tönnies, it is clear that he used forms of community organization—village, town, metropolis—as illustration of the underlying reorientation of social relations. The rural/urban distinction located his argument, but on his prediction ‘the rural organization is doomed to dissolution’,² its usefulness would soon be outlived. A generation previously Marx and Engels had also singled out the town/country separation as ‘The greatest division of material and mental labour . . . here first became manifest the division of the population into two great classes . . . the antagonism of town and country . . . is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour’,³ but had related it to specific class relations at a moment of history. The town signified the beginning of property having its basis in labour and exchange.

Urbanization once seemed an inexorable process: once traditional sanctions on rural migration had broken down governments were powerless to stem the movement from the land to the towns. The most decisive edicts against new building in the major cities were disregarded by all classes. The concentration of population and centralization of activity associated with the development of capitalist society were seen as inherent to the new mode of production, and not to be checked by direction, or reform in administration. So thought Marx and Engels, hence the exhortation to achieve the proletarian revolution before ‘the abolition of the antithesis between town and country’.⁴

To those familiar with the capital cities of Western Europe, or its new manufacturing centres, in the nineteenth century, this was a natural conclusion. Urban growth was traumatic, for both rulers and ruled. The stagnation, even decline, of smaller centres could be overlooked, and interruptions in the previous expansion of the large cities disregarded. Now, however, it is the interruptions, the changing relationships between towns and cities that intrigue. Growth no longer impresses, the inevitability of urbanization is in doubt. Is it strictly accurate to speak of ‘the accelerating concentration of the means of production . . . monopolistic state capitalism . . . progressively concentrating large masses of the population . . . establishing vast communal units to organize daily life’?⁵ Empirical evidence from most developed societies can be assembled to demonstrate the converse: the deconcentration of productive units and the associated aggregates of population, and the reforming of the ‘vast communal units’ on a more personal scale.

The voices of dissent to this ‘urban view of history’ come from the regions. There it is apparent that concentration in control of productive forces in society does not necessarily entail centralization in location. A new industrial plant, a government office removed from the primate city, may generate renewed development in a peripheral region without any diminution in the web of controls radiating from corporation headquarters of central office. The spatial analogies in sociological vocabulary—hierarchy, lower/upper, centralization, centre/periphery, convergence, centrifugal/centripetal–have confused the debate so that issues of social structure have been subsumed in questions of geographical location. From a regional vantage there is no question as to the maintained concentration of power in the metropolitan centres, hence the efflorescence of nationalist movements, but equally the impact of development in the peripheral regions is inescapable. The environmental issues, the planning pressures, the social problems, and political movements, the turmoil in the social map of the region and its intellectual world all demand systematic investigation. Regional rather than urban issues come to the fore; in ideas, as in politics, the dominance of the metropolis is challenged.

Given the sensitivity of regional populations to the proclaimed hegemony of the metropolitan centres, it is not surprising that there has been a resistance to received wisdom in the social sciences, and a search for alternative vocabularies in which to articulate the changing situation. The dissatisfaction general among students of academic economics, geography, planning, politics or sociology, in this context, has been focused on development studies, in particular the neo-Marxist theories derived from experience of societies with apparently similar development issues, i.e. Latin America. Dependency theory, as expressed by Frank in his statements on underdevelopment, was derived in reaction to the subordination of the Latin America economies to those of the imperialist nations, and was advanced to explain both the distortions in their pattern of economic development and the nature and balance of political power in the subcontinent. The aspect of Frank’s statements which has been seized on is that of the relationship of metropolis to province, one which is replicated in a chain of exploitation within the regions and subregions of a country, prevents autonomous development, and aggravates economic stagnation, the ‘development of underdevelopment’.⁶

Superiicially at least, there are tempting comparisons between developed and underdeveloped societies. Most of the former show marked internal disparities in development between one dominating region and its satellite regions: France, Italy, Japan, USA, are in this respect similar to Brazil or Nigeria. But this observation is no more than recognition that in all these societies the national elites are concentrated in regions appreciably more prosperous than the rest of the country. Frank’s own statements were grounded in a careful examination of historical material especially for Brazil and Chile. They are to be understood as ‘a specific aspect, or a mentally dissected part of a historically concrete of existing bourgeois society’.⁷ His arguments as to the further economic and political development of regions within these satellite states can be extended only with difficulty to a society, Britain, with a much longer, and more intricate, history. The British Isles were once on the very edge of the developed world, and yet they achieved dominance over international markets and independent industrialization. Remote provinces became the industrial power houses of the world despite the concentration of capital in London and the opposition of agrarian capitalist and industrial bourgeoisie. Many of the conspicuous strands in political, scientific and intellectual life took shape and colour in the provinces. It is arguable that the hegemony of the metropolis was broken in the nineteenth century and has never been reassumed. And in this century centralization of power has not prevented economic diversification elsewhere and with it renewed political challenges to the state. At the very least the thesis of metropolitan dominance needs to be examined closely against the historical evidence.

Development studies, like all area studies, have an eclectic quality. Not only have the conventional distinctions between the social sciences in subject matter been disregarded, so that elements of anthropology, sociology, economics, geography and politics are all pressed into service, but the theories around which these disciplines have been built have been pulled apart to be reassembled in unfamiliar ways. Frank’s own critique of sociological theory is well known; there are also restatements of classical economics from the West Indies,⁸ of academic geography from North East England and elsewhere.⁹ Marxism has met the same fate. Perhaps because ‘straight’ Marxism was only indirectly concerned with most of the issues of regional (and urban) studies, perhaps in reaction to its metropolitan characteristics, Marxist categories of analysis have not been arbitrarily adopted. The quest for an n + 1 science once met by sociology, now frequently by Marxism, is answered in development studies by a patchwork quilt of concepts, theories, empirical studies and polemic. It is doubtful whether a ‘political economy of cities and regions’ is a sufficiently precise specification of what is required to confer scientific status on area studies.

Since the era of Ricardo, Malthus or von Thunen, regional questions have been missing in ‘political economy’. (The tremendous attraction of Henry George’s book, Poverty and Progress, may well have been its novelty in relating popular concern about land to economic distress and political discontent.) And few academics now would have the audacity to tackle such wide-embracing questions as the consequences of regional disparities in use of resources and rate of growth for the economic development and political institutions of a society. Conversely, how could one relate regional disparities in development to a society’s social structure and its status in the international economy? And yet it is questions of this level of generality and range to which answers are sought. Modern scholarship is more cautious, its field of study more circumscribed than that of writers such as Semple or Mackinder whose interests were in continents not islands, the comparison of societies not regions and cities.

Despite the interest of the Chicago School in the urban region as the natural area for study, sociologists subsequently have paid little attention to regional questions. Formality in conception allowed urban groupings to be lifted out of their regional matrix and preoccupation with issues of the environment emphasized the phenomenal distinction of urban and rural. The synthesis sought in regional studies was in methodological terms alien to the analysis directed by the sociologist at the city. The learned quasi-metaphysical appeal of the former has had short shrift from zealous students of urban systems. If the city has, in sociological concept, become detached from the region, equally urbanization has been treated as a process quite apart from issues of regionalism.

It is the contention here that the sequence and form of urbanization in Britain can only be discussed in the framework of a political economy of regional development. That there is a definite sequence to urbanization in this society cannot be in dispute: the contrasts between the medieval landscape of small towns, the three centuries, c. 1500–1800, in which London was the only large city, the reversal of the rural urban balance in the nineteenth century, and the ebbs and flows of investment between regions and their centres this century, are accepted features of Britain’s historical geography. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• part one The British experience
• part two Theories of urbanization
• Epilogue The city or the town?
• Notes
• Index