“Secondary Contact” Concept and Ecological Urban Research

Abstract

Originally, the term secondary contact seems to be used in dual ways. Sometimes R.E. Park used the term as an interaction under the “social control” or “consensus”, and sometimes he used the term when he intended to explain the state of STADT LUFT MACHT FREI. It is well known that Park divided interactions into two parts, competition and contacts. Contacts, or interactions under “consensus”, are chiefly composed of conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Secondary contacts are, according to him, synonimous with “conflict” and “accommodation”, though “assimilation” is a type of interactions that fall into the field of primary contact (Introduction Introduction to the Science of Sociology, p. 50, 286, 737) So long as contacts are interactions under “social control”, and secondary contacts are among the contacts, the logical conclusion is that the secondary contacts must have functions to narrow the freedom of people. He often alluded to the restriction of freedom under the state of “crisis”. (“the City”, III.) On the other hand, under another context, he used the term “secondary contact” relating to the acquisition of freedom by modern citizens. (“the City”, IV.) Above two usages are indeed contradict each other, but both meanings reflect the social conditions of his days. He lived in the age of STADT LUFT, when the “capitalistic million cities” (Okui) were coming to the world ; and also he was able to observe the capitalistic growth of economic monopoly, which might have been regarded and expressed that the American economy had established the social “consensus”. For all the contradiction of his concept, we might estimate the fact that he, by using the term secondary contact, explained the function of deviators for the maintenance of urban freedom, as a byproduct of the description for STADT LUFT MACHT FREI. Park's logic concerning the deviation is simillar to that of the functional analysis of Merton, who regards the rebellion as a conformity to the norms of another reference groups. When Park referred to the function of deviators, he used the term “secondary contacts” to show the state of “the imposition of one primary group upon another, ” (Introduction, p. 50). It seems to me that it might be fruitful for the further development of urban sociology and human ecology, to confirm the secondary contact concept on this context.