Urbanism as a Way of Life

Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”

Large Size (Law of Interaction; overmanning)

Density (Crowding & overstimulation)

Heterogeneity (insecurity, sophistication, multiple group identitites)

• Lauman—“like seeks like”
• Lofland—“World of strangers” (categorization based on appearance and spatial ordering)
• Gans—“Balanced community” (heterogeneous sectors—neighborhoods—composed of homogeneous blocks)

Neighborhood Concept

Ebenezer Howard—“Garden Cities” (1898)

Clarence Perry—“Neighborhood Concept” (1929)

Gerald Suttles—“Social Order of the Slum” (1968)—ordered segmentation

Terence Lee—“Neighborhood Concept” (1968)—neighborhood is a mental construct

• Personal (idiosyncratic, built up from activity patterns)
• Homogeneous (shared overlap of personal neighborhoods)
• Social acquaintance (largest area, may have blank spaces within it)

Oscar Newman—“Defensible space” (1973)

• Eyes on the street (casual surveillance)

• Hierarchy of space (private, semi-private, public)