The Evolution of the American City and the Emergence of Anomie: A Culture Case Study of Buffalo, New York: 1810-1910

Abstract

pOCIOLOGISTS have often postulated a relationship between _urbanism and anomie.l The city is pictured as a 'motely of social worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate' (Park), as a 'society of strangers' (Meyer). More a population aggregate than a community the city is functionally integrated through the cash nexus, but there is 'no communication and no consensus. . . [and] human relations are symbiotic rather than social' (Park). Men are isolated from one another and alienated from the larger society; anomie is reflected in social pathologies as well as in the decay of public life (de Grazia). Lewis Mumford describes the modern megalopolis in four words: 'external regularity; internal disruption'.2 Seeking an explanation for the character of urban life sociologists first turned to demography and ecology. For R. E. Park human society consisted of an ecological base and a cultural superstructure, and the former determined the latter.3 Following Simmel and Durkheim, Louis Wirth reasoned that 'as the number of people interacting [dynamic density] increase, social relations become superficial and segmentalized, producing the schizoid character of the urban personality '. The anonymity and transience of urban life engenders a sophisticated and calculating self-centredness. 'No single group has the undivided allegiance of the individual... and there is little opportunity for the individual to obtain a conception of the city as a whole or to survey his place in the total scheme of things.' 4 Or, as Park put it, 'man gains his freedom but loses his direction'.5 The demographic-ecologica] thesis can be represented schematically as follows: