I want you to show that you understand the social dynamics that influence social trends.  First, write about what you have perceived to be the trend in the last ten years or so, regarding the masses

Reading Resources/References

Sociology, Urban

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr.. Vol. 8. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. p15-17.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

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Sociology, Urban

• BIBLIOGRAPHY

As the cutting edge of change, cities are important for interpreting societies. Momentous changes in nineteenth-century cities led theorists to explore their components. The French word for place (bourg), and its residents (bourgeois), became central concepts for Karl Marx (1818–1883). Markets and commerce emerged in cities where “free air” ostensibly fostered innovation. Industrial capitalists thus raised capital and built factories near cities, hiring workers “free” from the feudal legal hierarchy. For Marx, workers were proletarians and a separate economic class, whose interests conflicted with the bourgeoisie. Class conflicts drove history. Max Weber’s (1864–1920) The City (1921) built on this legacy but added legitimacy, bureaucracy, the Protestant ethic, and political parties in transforming cities. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) similarly reasoned historically, contrasting traditional villages with modern cities in his Division of Labor (1893), where multiple professional groups integrated their members by enforcing norms on them.

British and American work was more empirical. British and American churches and charitable groups that were concerned with the urban poor sponsored many early studies. When sociology entered universities around 1900, urban studies still focused on inequality and the poor. Robert Park (1864–1944) and many students at the University of Chicago thus published monographs on such topics as The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), a sociological study of Chicago’s near north side by Harvey Warren Zorbaugh (1896–1965).

The 1940s and 1950s saw many efforts to join these European theories with the British and American empirical work. Floyd Hunter published Community Power Structure (1953), an Atlanta-based monograph that stressed the business dominance of cities, broadly following Marx. Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961) was more Weberian, stressing multiple issue areas of power and influence (like mayoral elections versus schools), the indirect role of citizens via elections, and multiple types of resources (money, votes, media, coalitions) that shifted how basic economic categories influenced politics. These became the main ideas in power analyses across the social sciences.

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Parisian theorists like Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), and Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) suggested that the language and symbols of upper-status persons dominated lower-status persons. Others, such as Jean Baudrillard, pushed even further to suggest that each person was so distinct that theories should be similarly individualized. He and others labeled their perspective postmodernism to contrast with mainstream science, which they suggested reasoned in a linear, external, overly rational manner. Urban geographers like David Harvey joined postmodernist themes with concepts of space to suggest a sea change in architecture, planning, and aesthetics, as well as in theorizing, although Harvey’s main analytical driver is global capitalism.

Saskia Sassen starts from global capitalism but stresses local differences in such “world cities” as New York, London, and Tokyo. Why these? Because the headquarters of global firms are there, with “producer services” that advise major firms, and market centers where sophisticated legal and financial transactions are spawned. Individual preferences enter, via global professionals and executives who like big-city living, but hire nannies and chauffeurs, attracting global migrants, which increases (short-term, within city) inequality. Some affluent persons create gated housing, especially in areas with high crime and kidnapping, like Latin America.

These past theories stress work and production. A new conceptualization adds consumption. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) theorized that the flaneur drove the modern capitalist economy, by shopping. Typified by the top-hatted gentleman in impressionist paintings, the flaneur pursued his aesthetic sensitivities, refusing standardized products. Mall rats continue his quest.

Theories have grown more bottom-up than top-down, as have many cities, although this is controversial, as some capital and corporations are increasingly global. The father of bottom-up theory is Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), whose Democracy in America (1835–1840) stressed community associations like churches. Linked to small and autonomous local governments, these associations gave (ideally) citizens the ability to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting them. Such experiences built networks of social relations and taught values of participation, democracy, and trust.

In the late twentieth century, Tocqueville and civic groups became widely debated as nations declined and cities competed for investors, residents, and tourists. With the cold war over, globalization encourages more cross-national travel, communication, investment, and trade. Local autonomy rose. But nations declined in their delivery of egalitarian welfare benefits, since ideal standards are increasingly international. “Human rights” is a new standard. Yet the world is too large to implement the most costly specifics, even if they remain political goals.

Over the twentieth century, many organizations shifted from the hierarchical and centralized to the smaller and more participatory. The community power literature from Hunter (1953) to Dahl (1961) and beyond suggests a decline in the “monolithic” city governance pattern that Hunter described in Atlanta. Dahl documented a more participatory, “pluralistic” decision-making process, where multiple participants combine and “pyramid” their “resources” to shift decisions in separate “issue areas.”

New social movements (NSMs) emerged in the 1970s, extending past individualism and egalitarianism and joining consumption and lifestyle to the classic production issues of unions and parties. These new civic groups pressed new agendas—ecology, feminism, peace, gay rights—that older political parties ignored. In Europe, the national state and parties were the hierarchical “establishment” opposed by NSMs. In the United States, local business and political elites were more often targeted. Other aesthetic and amenity concerns have also arisen— like suburban sprawl, sports stadiums, and parks; these divide people less into rich versus poor than did class and party politics.

Comparative studies emerged after the 1980s of thousands of cities around the world. They have documented the patterns discussed above, and generally show that citizens and leaders globally are more decentralized, egalitarian, and participatory. The New Political Culture (1998), edited by Terry Nichols Clark and Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot, charts these new forms of public decisions and active citizen-leader contacts via NSMs, consumption issues, focused groups, block clubs, cabletelevision coverage of local associations, and Internet groups. Global competition among cities and weaker nations makes it harder to preserve national welfare-state benefits. This encourages more income inequalities, individualism, and frustrated egalitarianism, which is registered in higher crime rates, divorce, and low trust. As strong national governments withdraw, regional and ethnic violence rises (e.g., in the former Soviet Union or diverse cities like Miami). Voter turnout for elections organized by the classical national parties (which still control local candidate selection in most of the world) thus declined, while new issue-specific community associations mushroomed in the late twentieth century. Urbanism has become global, carried by civic groups, diffused by the Internet, and operating in more subtle ways than past theories proposed.

SEE ALSO Anthropology, Urban ; Assimilation ; Bourdieu, Pierre ; Chicago School ; Cities ; Class Conflict ; Community Power Studies ; Dahl, Robert Alan ; Elite Theory ; Foucault, Michel ; Page 17  |  Top of ArticleGeography ; Hunter, Floyd ; Marx, Karl ; Metropolis ; Pluralism ; Social Movements ; Street Culture ; Tocqueville, Alexis de ; Urban Renewal ; Urban Riots ; Urban Sprawl ; Urbanization ; Weber, Max

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Clark, Terry Nichols, and Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot, eds. 1998. The New Political Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Dahl, Robert A. [1961] 2005. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hunter, Floyd. 1953. Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers. Durham: University of North Carolina Press.

Terry Nichols Clark

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

"Sociology, Urban." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 8, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 15-17. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3045302542/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=dfc27136. Accessed 26 June 2019.

Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3045302542

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 Urban Sociology

LEE J. HAGGERTY

Encyclopedia of Sociology. Vol. 5. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Macmillan Reference USA, 2001. p3191-3198.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Macmillan Reference USA, COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

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URBAN SOCIOLOGY

Urban sociology studies human groups in a territorial frame of reference. In this field, social organization is the major focus of inquiry, with an emphasis on the interplay between social and spatial organization and the ways in which changes in spatial organization affect social and psychological well being. A wide variety of interests are tied together by a common curiosity about the changing dynamics, determinants, and consequences of urban society's most characteristic form of settlement: the city.

Scholars recognized early that urbanization is accompanied by dramatic structural, cognitive, and behavioral changes. Classic sociologists (Durkheim, Weber, Toinnes, Marx) delineated the differences in institutional forms that seemed to accompany the dual processes of urbanization and industrialization as rural-agrarian societies were transformed into urban-industrial societies (see Table 1).

Several key questions that guide contemporary research are derived from this tradition: How are human communities organized? What forces produce revolutionary transformations in human settlement patterns? What organizational forms accompany these transformations? What differences do urban living make, and why do those differences exist? What consequences does the increasing size of human concentrations have for human beings, their social worlds, and their environment?

Students of the urban scene have long been interested in the emergence of cities (Childe 1950), how cities grow and change (Weber 1899), and unique ways of life associated with city living (Wirth 1938). These classic treatments have historical value for understanding the nature of pre-twentieth-century cities, their determinants, and their human consequences, but comparative analysis of contemporary urbanization processes leads Berry (1981, p. xv) to conclude that "what is apparent is an accelerating change in the nature of change itself, speedily rendering not-yet-conventional wisdom inappropriate at best."

Urban sociologists use several different approaches to the notion of community to capture changes in how individual urbanites are tied together into meaningful social groups and how those groups are tied to other social groups in the broader territory they occupy. An interactional community is indicated by networks of routine, face-to-face primary interaction among the members of a group. This is most evident among close friends and in families, tribes, and closely knit locality groups. An ecological community is delimited by routine patterns of activity that its members engage in to meet the basic requirements of daily life. It corresponds with the territory over which the group ranges in performing necessary activities such as work, sleep, shopping, education,Page 3192  |  Top of Article

Table 1

and recreation. Compositional communities are clusters of people who share common social characteristics. People of similar race, social status, or family characteristics, for example, form a compositional community. A symbolic community is defined by a commonality of beliefs and attitudes among its members. Its members view themselves as belonging to the group and are committed to it.

Research on the general issue of how these forms of organization change as cities grow has spawned a voluminous literature. An ecological perspective and a sociocultural perspective guide two major research traditions. Ecological studies focus on the role of economic competition in shaping the urban environment. Ecological and compositional communities are analyzed in an attempt to describe and generalize about urban forms and the processes of urban growth (Hawley 1981).

Sociocultural studies emphasize the importance of cultural, psychological, and other social dimensions of urban life. These studies focus on the interactional and symbolic communities that characterize the urban setting (Wellman and Leighton 1979; Suttles 1972).

Early theoretical work suggested that the most evident consequence of the increasing size, density, and heterogeneity of human settlements was a breakdown of social ties, a decline in the family, alienation, an erosion of moral codes, and social disorganization (Wirth 1938). Later empirical research has clearly shown that in general, urbanites are integrated into meaningful social groups (Fischer 1984).

The sociocultural tradition suggests that cultural values derive from socialization into a variety of subcultures and are relatively undisturbed by changes in ecological processes. Different subcultures select, are forced into, or unwittingly drift into different areas that come to exhibit the characteristics of a particular subculture (Gans 1962). Fischer (1975) combines the ecological and subcultural perspectives by suggesting that size, density, and heterogeneity are important but that they produce integrated subcultures rather than fostering alienation and community disorganization. Size provides the critical masses necessary for viable unconventional subcultures to form. With increased variability in the subcultural mix in urban areas, subcultures become more intensified as they defend their ways of life against the broad array of others in the environment. The more subcultures, the more diffusion of cultural elements, and the greater the likelihood of new subcultures emerging, creating the ever-changing mosaic of unconventional subcultures that most distinguishes large places from small ones.

Empirical approaches to urban organization vary according to the unit of analysis and what is being observed. Patterns of activity (e.g., commuting, retail sales, crime) and characteristics of people (e.g., age, race, income, household composition) most commonly are derived from government reports for units of analysis as small as city blocks and as large as metropolitan areas. These types ofPage 3193  |  Top of Articledata are used to develop general principles of organization and change in urban systems. General questions range from how certain activities and characteristics come to be organized in particular ways in space to why certain locales exhibit particular characteristics and activities. Territorial frameworks for the analysis of urban systems include neighborhoods, community areas, cities, urban areas, metropolitan regions, nations, and the world.

Observations of networks of interaction (e.g., visiting patterns, helping networks) and symbolic meanings of people (e.g., alienation, values, worldviews) are less systematically available because social surveys are more appropriate for obtaining this kind of information. Consequently, less is known about these dimensions of community than is desirable.

It is clear that territoriality has waned as an integrative force and that new forms of extralocal community have emerged. High mobility, an expanded scale of organization, and an increased range and volume of communication flow coalesce to alter the forms of social groups and their organization in space (Greer 1962). With modern communication and transportation technology, as exists in the United States today, space becomes less of an organizing principle and new forms of territorial organization emerge that reflect the power of large-scale corporate organization and the federal government in shaping urban social and spatial organization (Gottdiener 1985).

Hawley's (1950, 1981) ecological approach to the study of urban communities serves as the major paradigm in contemporary research. This approach views social organization as developing in response to basic problems of existence that all populations face in adapting to their environments. The urban community is conceptualized as the complex system of interdependence that develops as a population collectively adapts to an environment, using whatever technology is available. Population, environment, technology, and social organization interact to produce various forms of human communities at different times and in different places (Table 2). Population is conceptualized as an organized group of humans that function routinely as a unit; the environment is defined as everything that is external to the population, including other organized social groups. Technological advances allow people to expand and redefine the nature of the relevant environment and therefore influence the forms of community organization that populations develop (Duncan 1973).

In the last half of the twentieth century, there were revolutionary transformations in the size and nature of human settlements and the nature of the interrelationships among them (Table 3). The global population "explosion" created by an unprecedented rapid decline in human mortality in less developed regions of the world after 1950 provided the additional people necessary for this population "implosion:" the rapid increase in the size and number of human agglomerations of unprecedented size. Urban sociology attempts to understand the determinants and consequences of this transformation.

The urbanization process involves an expansion in the entire system of interrelationships by which a population maintains itself in its habitat (Hawley 1981, p. 12). The most evident consequences of the process and the most common measures of it are an increase in the number of people at points of population concentration, an increase in the number of points at which population is concentrated, or both (Eldridge 1956). Theories of urbanization attempt to understand how human settlement patterns change as technology expands the scale of social systems.

Because technological regimes, population growth mechanisms, and environmental contingencies change over time and vary in different regions of the world, variations in the pattern of distribution of human settlements generally can be understood by attending to these related processes. In the literature on urbanization, an interest in the organizational forms of systems of cities is complemented by an interest in how growth is accommodated in cities through changes in density gradients, the location of socially meaningful population subgroups, and patterns of urban activities. Although the expansion of cities has been the historical focus in describing the urbanization process, revolutionary developments in transportation, communication, and information technology in the last fifty years expanded the scale of urban systems and directed attention toward the broader system of the form of organization in which cities emerge and grow.

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Table 2 SOURCE: Abstracted from Berry 1981.

Much research on the urbanization process is descriptive in nature, with an emphasis on identifying and measuring patterns of change in demographic and social organization in a territorial frame of reference. Territorially circumscribed environments employed as units of analysis include administrative units (villages, cities, counties, states, nations), population concentrations (places, agglomerations, urbanized areas), and networks of interdependency (neighborhoods, metropolitan areas, daily urban systems, city systems, the earth).

The American urban system is suburbanizing and deconcentrating. One measure of suburbanization is the ratio of the rate of growth in the ring to that in the central city over a decade (Schnore 1959). While some Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) began suburbanizing in the late 1800s, the greatest rates for the majority of places occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Widespread use of the automobile, inexpensive energy, the efficient production of materials for residential infrastructure, and federal housing policy allowed metropolitan growth to be absorbed by sprawl instead of by increased congestion at the center.

As the scale of territorial organization increased, so did the physical distances between black and white, rich and poor, young and old, and other meaningful population subgroups. The Index of Dissimilarity measures the degree of segregation between two groups by computing the percentage of one group that would have to reside on a different city block for it to have the same proportional distribution across urban space as the group to which it is being compared (Taeuber and Taeuber 1965). Although there has been some decline in indices of dissimilarity between black and white Americans since the 1960s, partly as a result of increasing black suburbanization, the index for the fifteen most segregated MSAs in 1990 remained at or above 80, meaning that 80 percent or more of the blacks would have had to live on different city blocks to have the same distribution in space as whites; thus, a very highPage 3195  |  Top of Article

Table 3 SOURCE: Adapted from Dogan and Kasarda (1988b) Table 1.2.

degree of residential segregation remains. Although there is great social status diversity in central cities and increasing diversity in suburban rings, disadvantaged and minority populations are overrepresented in central cities, while the better educated and more affluent are overrepresented in suburban rings.

A related process—deconcentration—involves a shedding of urban activities at the center and is indicated by greater growth in employment and office space in the ring than in the central city. This process was under way by the mid-1970s and continued unabated through the 1980s. A surprising turn of events in the late 1970s was signaled by mounting evidence that nonmetropolitan counties were, for the first time since the Depression of the 1930s, growing more rapidly than were metropolitan counties (Lichter and Fuguitt 1982). This process has been referred to as "deurbanization" and "the nonmetropolitan turnaround." It is unclear whether this trend represents an enlargement of the scale of metropolitan organization to encompass more remote counties or whether new growth nodes are developing in nonmetropolitan areas.

The American urban system is undergoing major changes as a result of shifts from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the aging of the population, and an expansion of organizational scale from regional and national to global decision making. Older industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest lost population as the locus of economic activity shifted from heavy manufacturing to information and residentiary services. Cities in Florida, Arizona, California, and the Northwest have received growing numbers of retirees seeking environmental, recreational, and medical amenities that are not tied to economic production. Investment decisions regarding the location of office complexes, the factories of the future, are made more on the basis of the availability of an educated labor pool, favorable tax treatment, and the availability of amenities than on the basis of the access to raw materials that underpinned the urbanization process through the middle of the twentieth century.

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The same shifts are reflected in the internal reorganization of American cities. The scale of local communities has expanded from the central business district–oriented city to the multinodal metropolis. Daily commuting patterns are shifting from radial trips between bedroom suburbs and workplaces in the central city to lateral trips among highly differentiated subareas throughout urban regions. Urban villages with affluent residences, high-end retail minimalls, and office complexes are emerging in nonmetropolitan counties beyond the reach of metropolitan political constraints, creating even greater segregation between the most and least affluent Americans

Deteriorating residential and warehousing districts adjacent to new downtown office complexes are being rehabilitated for residential use by childless professionals, or "gentry." The process of gentrification, or the invasion of lower-status deteriorating neighborhoods of absentee-owned rental housing by middle- to upper-status home or condominium owners, is driven by a desire for accessibility to nearby white-collar jobs and cultural amenities as well as by the relatively high costs of suburban housing, which have been pushed up by competing demand in these rapidly growing metropolitan areas. Although the number of people involved in gentrification is too small to have reversed the overall decline of central cities, the return of affluent middle-class residents has reduced segregation to some extent. Gentrification reclaims deteriorated neighborhoods, but it also results in the displacement of the poor, who have no place else to live at rents they can afford (Feagin and Parker 1990).

The extent to which dispersed population is involved in urban systems is quite variable. An estimated 90 percent of the American population now lives in a daily urban system (DUS). These units are constructed from counties that are allocated to economic centers on the basis of commuting patterns and economic interdependence. The residents of a DUS are closely tied together by efficient transportation and communication technology. Each DUS has a minimum population of 200,000 in its labor shed and constitutes "a multinode, multiconnective system [which] has replaced the core dominated metropolis as the basic urban unit" (Berry and Kasarda 1977, p. 304). Less than 4 percent of the American labor force is engaged in agricultural occupations. Even the residents of remote rural areas are mostly "urban" in their activities and outlook.

In contrast, many residents of uncontrolled developments on the fringes of emerging megacities in less developed countries are practically isolated from the urban center and live much as they have for generations. Over a third of the people in the largest cities in India were born elsewhere, and the maintenance of rural ways of life in those cities is common because of a lack of urban employment, the persistence of village kinship ties, and seasonal circulatory migration to rural areas. Although India has three of the ten largest cities in the world, it remains decidedly rural, with 75 percent of the population residing in agriculturally oriented villages (Nagpaul 1988).

The pace and direction of the urbanization process are closely tied to technological advances. As industrialization proceeded in western Europe and the United States over a 300-year period, an urban system emerged that reflected the interplay between the development of city-centered heavy industry and requirements for energy and raw materials from regional hinterlands. The form of city systems that emerged has been described as rank-size. Cities in that type of system form a hierarchy of places from large to small in which the number of places of a given size decreases proportionally to the size of the place. Larger places are fewer in number, are more widely spaced, and offer more specialized goods and services than do smaller places (Christaller 1933).

City systems that emerged in less industrialized nations are primate in character. In a primate system, the largest cities absorb far more than their share of societal population growth. Sharp breaks exist in the size hierarchy of places, with one or two very large, several medium-sized, and many very small places. Rapid declines in mortality beginning in the 1950s, coupled with traditionally high fertility, created unprecedented rates of population growth. Primate city systems developed with an orientation toward the exportation of raw materials to the industrialized world rather than manufacturing and the development of local markets. As economic development proceeds, it occurs primarily in the large primate cities, with very low rates of economic growth in rural areas. Consequently, nearly all the excess of births over deathsPage 3197  |  Top of Articlein the nation is absorbed by the large cities, which are more integrated into the emerging global urban system (Dogan and Kasarda 1988a).

Megacities of over 10 million population are a very recent phenomenon, and their number is increasing rapidly. Their emergence can be understood only in the context of a globally interdependent system of relationships. The territorial bounds of the relevant environment to which population collectively adapts have expanded from the immediate hinterland to the entire world in only half a century.

Convergence theory suggests that cities throughout the would will come to exhibit organizational forms increasingly similar to one another, converging on the North American pattern, as technology becomes more accessible globally (Young and Young 1962). Divergence theory suggests that increasingly divergent forms of urban organization are likely to emerge as a result of differences in the timing and pace of the urbanization process, differences in the positions of cities in the global system, and the increasing effectiveness of deliberate planning of the urbanization process by centralized governments holding differing values and therefore pursuing a variety of goals for the future (Berry 1981).

The importance of understanding this process is suggested by Hawley (1981, p. 13): "Urbanization is a transformation of society, the effects of which penetrate every sphere of personal and collective life. It affects the status of the individual and opportunities for advancement, it alters the types of social units in which people group themselves, and it sorts people into new and shifting patterns of stratification. The distribution of power is altered, normal social processes are reconstituted, and the rules and norms by which behavior is guided are redesigned."

REFERENCES

Berry, Brian J. L. 1981. Comparative Urbanization: Divergent Paths in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martins.

——, and John D. Kasarda 1977 Contemporary Urban Ecology. New York: Macmillan.

Childe, V. Gordon 1950 "The Urban Revolution." Town Planning Review 21:4–7.

Christaller, W. 1933 Central Places in Southern Germany, transl. C. W. Baskin. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Dogan, Mattei, and John D. Kasarda 1988a The Metropolis Era: A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

—— 1988b. "Introduction: How Giant Cities Will Multiply and Grow." In Mattei Dogan and John D. Kasarda, eds., The Metropolis Era: A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

Duncan, Otis Dudley 1973 "From Social System to Ecosystem." In Michael Micklin, ed., Population, Environment, and Social Organization: Current Issues in Human Ecology Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden.

Eldridge, Hope Tisdale 1956 "The Process of Urbanization." In J. J. Spengler and O. D. Duncan, eds., Demographic Analysis. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Feagin, Joe R., and Robert Parker 1990 Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Fischer, Claude S. 1975 "Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism." American Journal of Sociology80:1319–1341.

—— 1984 The Urban Experience. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Gans, Herbert J. 1962 "Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of life: A Reevaluation of Definitions." In A. M. Rose, ed., Human Behavior and Social Processes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gottdiener, Mark 1985 The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Greer, Scott 1962 The Emerging City. New York: Free Press.

Hawley, Amos H. 1950 Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald.

—— 1981 Urban Society: An Ecological Approach. New York: Wiley.

Kleniewski, Nancy 1997 Cities, Change, and Conflict: A Political Economy of Urban Life. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.

Lichter, Daniel T., and Glenn V. Fuguitt 1982 "The Transition to Nonmetropolitan Population Deconcentration." Demography 19:211–221.

Nagpaul, Hans 1988 "India's Giant Cities." In Mattei Dogan and John D. Kasarda, eds., The Metropolis Era: A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

Palen, J. John 1997 The Urban World. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schnore, Leo F. 1959 "The Timing of Metropolitan Decentralization." Journal of the American Institute of Planners 25:200–206.

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Suttles, Gerald 1972 The Social Construction of Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taeuber, Karl E., and Alma F. Taeuber 1965 Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change. Chicago: Aldine.

Weber, Adna F. 1899 The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wellman, B., and B. Leighton 1979 "Networks, Neighborhoods and Communities: Approaches to the Study of the Community Question." Urban Affairs Quarterly 15:369–393.

Wirth, Louis 1938 "Urbanism as a Way of Life." American Journal of Sociology 44:1–24.

Young, Frank, and Ruth Young 1962 "The Sequence and Direction of Community Growth: A Cross-Cultural Generalization." Rural Sociology 27:374–386.

LEE J. HAGGERTY

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

HAGGERTY, LEE J. "Urban Sociology." Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd ed., vol. 5, Macmillan Reference USA, 2001, pp. 3191-3198. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3404400404/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=1fc6cbac. Accessed 26 June 2019.

 Urbanization

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr.. Vol. 8. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. p545-548.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

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Page 545

Urbanization

• THE CONTEMPORARY SPREAD OF URBANIZATION

• DENSITY, DIVERSITY, AND URBANIZATION

• URBANISM AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Urbanization—the transformation of social life from rural to urban settings—is the seminal process in defining the course of civilization. Urban life evolved approximately ten thousand years ago as a result of sophisticated agricultural innovations that led to a food supply of sufficient magnitude to support both the cultivators and a new class of urban residents. These agricultural innovations, mainly irrigation-based public works, required a more complex social order than that of an agrarian village. Urbanization at its base is thus distinguished from the settled agrarian life that preceded it in two important respects: it embodies a multifaceted social hierarchy and relies on sophisticated technologies to support the activities of daily living (Childe 1936). These uniquely urban characteristics consistently define both urbanization and civilization from the past to the present.

Just as civilization emerged from urbanization in the past, so too does the future course of civilization hinge on our ability to incorporate the reality of contemporary urbanization into our responses to twenty-first-century challenges that include climate change, the elimination of severe poverty, ecological balance, the conquest of communicable diseases, and other pressing social and environmental problems. This is the case because since 2007 more than half of the world’s population resides in urban settings—a historic first.

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Urban life can be defined, following Louis Wirth (1938), as life in permanent dense settlements with socially diverse populations. According to Lewis Mumford (1937), the city plays a critical role in the creation and maintenance of culture and civilization. Finally, following Henri Pirenne (1925), the crucial role of trade and production should be stressed. Thus urbanization involves an ongoing threefold process: (1) urbanization geographically and spatially spreads the number and density of permanent settlements; (2) settlements become comprised of populations that are socially and ethnically differentiated; and (3) these urban populations thrive through the production and exchange of a diverse array of manufactured and cultural products.

THE CONTEMPORARY SPREAD OF URBANIZATION 

Although city life extends back at least ten millennia, the shape and size of modern urban settlements have roots that extend back only about 250 years to the Industrial Revolution, which marked a significant transformation in the role of cities as loci of critical productive activity and not just as cultural and political centers for a surrounding agrarian countryside. The present characterization of the world as predominantly urban is the cumulative result of this urbanization-industrialization trend. Industrial urbanization emerged first in the countries of the West, then in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and is now strongly evident in Asia and Africa (Garau et al. 2005).

According to United Nations projections, by 2030 the increase of 2.06 billion in net global population will occur in urban areas. Over 94 percent of that urban total (1.96 billion) will be in the world’s less-developed regions (UN Population Division 2004). This means that virtually all of the additional needs of the world’s future population will have to be addressed in the urban areas of the poorest countries.

UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency responsible for promoting sustainable urban development, estimates that roughly one-third of the current urban population of about three billion live in places that can be characterized as slums. The UN classification schema for slums is a fivefold measure: lack of access to safe drinking water, lack of access to sanitation, inadequate shelter, overcrowding, and lack of security of tenure. If a place of residence meets any one of these measures, it is classified as a slum. By the year 2030, if nothing is done, the proportion of the urban population living in slums will rise to 43 percent (1.7 billion in an urban population of 3.93 billion). All of these people will be living in the urban slums of countries in the developing world, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (UN-HABITAT and Global Urban Observatory 2003).

DENSITY, DIVERSITY, AND URBANIZATION 

Urbanization is most powerfully observed through physical density (comparatively large numbers of people living in comparatively small areas). The ratio of population size to land area is the standard metric for evaluating density. It is a precise measurement that is not easily interpreted because neither the numerator (population size) nor the denominator (land area) is static. Political boundaries are only marginally helpful in defining the effective size of an urban settlement because at any moment changes in communications and transport technology alter the size of the relevant space over which urban residents live and work. Until the end of the eighteenth century, cities were spatially compact places with a radius of about one to two miles—the distance an individual could comfortably walk in carrying out daily activities. With the arrival of industrialization, effective urban size spread rapidly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary urban or, more properly, metropolitansettlements easily encompass radii of 50 miles or more. This is a result of the continual improvement in rapid overland and even air travel modes and digital and wireless communications technology. The exact spatial configuration of any metropolitan settlement is a compromise between activities that must remain within walking distance and those for which residents are willing to travel (Schaeffer and Sclar 1980).

These spatially widening metropolises are not uniform in terms of their residential population densities. Hence density measurements alone tell us little about the quality of urban life. This quality can vary widely within the comparatively small confines of any metropolitan area. It is especially important to understand that high density per se is not an indicator of compromised living conditions. Metropolitan New York, which includes both the central city and the surrounding suburbs, has an average population density of over 5,300 people per square mile (ppm2), but the wealthiest part of the region, Manhattan Island, has a density that exceeds 66,000 ppm2. By way of comparison Nairobi, Kenya, has a city-wide density of over 1,400 ppm2, but its centrally located slum, Kibera, considered the largest in Africa, has an estimated population density of at least 100,000 ppm2. While Kibera’s density significantly exceeds Manhattan’s, the major determinant of the differences in quality of life relate to the quality of shelter and the ancillary urban services, such as water, sanitation, public safety, and most importantly transportation. Very poor urban residents must exchange life in high-density, poorly serviced places for the ability to walk to the places in the urban center where they earn a livelihood.

The major urban challenge of the twenty-first century concerns the ability of governments to effectively provide Page 547  |  Top of Articleadequate shelter and to plan and deliver services for metropolitan-wide areas in developing countries. The difficulty in meeting the challenge is rooted in part in the fact that the historical political boundaries of the central city and suburban (i.e., satellite city) subunits of government typically derive from an earlier century, before contemporary transport and communications technology redefined effective spatial relationships. The urban economies of modern metropolises now run beyond the legal jurisdictions of the subunits of government responsible for infrastructure and public services. The insistence of international financial agencies and donors on governmental decentralization in developing countries has only served to exacerbate this problem because it has left these governmental subunits with the responsibility but without either the technical ability or revenue sources. The result is that necessary regional planning and infrastructure investment to address the challenges of urbanization are often stymied.

Urban population growth is largely migration driven. On one side there is the push of rural poverty and on the other the pull of urban opportunity. This migration-driven growth is further exacerbated by natural rates of urban population increase (birth rates that exceed death rates). Social life in urban settlements is thus more complex than its village counterpart. The transactions of daily living in villages are governed by a social economy where goods and services are exchanged on the basis of social roles and rules of reciprocity rooted in longstanding customs and religious observances. The transactions of urbanization that confront the new arrivals are, in whole or in part, defined by the impersonal exchange relationships typical of a market economy. This transition is never a simple one-for-one exchange.

Because urban populations are continually in flux and often simultaneously expanding, they are often characterized by a multiplicity of informal and formal social relationships and institutions in a similar state of flux. The variations among an informal social economy and a formal market economy in any city at any moment in time are highly reflective of the larger external forces, such as globalization and migration, that are continually redefining the roles of different cities in a world of complex trading and production relationships. In the slum of Kibera, many of the activities of daily life, including the provision of vital public services such as water, sanitation, and public safety, are governed by an informal local, but powerful, social economy (Lowenthal 1975). In contrast, life in the working-class neighborhoods of cities in developed countries is typically an amalgam of informal social institutions imbedded in formal mechanisms of municipal public-service delivery. For the wealthiest residents of these same cities, virtually all the services they consume are provided via the formal institutions of government or market exchanges.

URBANISM AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT 

Many of the patterns of contemporary urban development are extensions of those set in place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These patterns were based on three assumptions: (1) energy was relatively inexpensive; (2) safe drinking water was abundant; and (3) the environment could absorb all the waste products of urbanization. None of these assumptions is any longer valid. Consequently, urbanization in the twenty-first century will have to be reconceived in both social and environmental terms. The world cannot afford the political instability and social costs of massive pockets of urban slum dwellers, nor can it accommodate urban growth through a further spatial spread that relies on urban transport powered by carbon-based energy sources and the discharge of waste products into both the local and global atmosphere. A healthy and vibrant environment is now a scarce but vital good.

Environmental problems are principally generated by the disorderly sprawl of urban settlements into the surrounding countryside. In the developed world, metropolitan areas organized around private automobile travel among low-density suburbs and tied to a central business district generate high volumes of automobile travel in the absence of tight land-use regulation and good public transport. This development pattern has led to increased mobile source pollution within the metropolitan areas and significant greenhouse gas emissions that endanger the whole planet. Sprawl requires an ever-increasing spread of impermeable (i.e., paved) ground surfaces. This in turn leads to the runoff of polluted waters into the groundwater supplies. The paved surfaces absorb heat from the sun and create urban heat islands that require more energy consumption and the emission of pollution and greenhouse gases to cool homes and offices. In addition, there are inadequate landfills to collect all the refuse of these high-consumption urban centers.

In the developing world, the problems are similar but more acute in their direct manifestation. The high rates of population growth lead to a pattern in which urban settlement runs ahead of infrastructure improvement. This leads to the establishment of informal settlements (i.e., slums) characterized by an absolute lack of safe drinking water and sanitation. The lack of adequate public transport and public health protection systems leads to a congestion of private cars and informal transports in the center of cities, which exacerbates the air quality problems and greenhouse gas emissions. The social costs of the lack of these services fall disproportionately on the poorest residents of these burgeoning metropolitan areas. These costs take the form of excessive mortality and morbidity rates, low rates of labor productivity, and the reinforcement of an ongoing trap of urban poverty.

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Climate change generated by greenhouse gas emissions adds yet another layer of special urgency to these pressing social problems. It is the very concentrated nature of cities—their population densities and their centrality in social functioning—that makes them and their residents so vulnerable to the hazards and stresses that climate change is inducing. Rising sea levels and warming water make serious climatic assaults on cities more frequent. Devastating storms and floods that hit once in a century now occur in far shorter cycles. The impacts are not equitably distributed. The poorest urban residents tend to live in the riskiest portions of the urban environments—flood plains, unstable slopes, river basins, and coastal areas.

Although the challenges of urbanization are formidable, the technical knowledge for their solutions exists. The question for the twenty-first century involves the ability of the international community, nations, and local governments to create institutions of urban planning and democratic governance that can effectively apply these solutions at a sufficiently broad scale that they can make a measurable difference.

SEE ALSO Cities

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Childe, V. Gordon. 1936. Man Makes Himself. London: Watts.

Garau, Pietro, Elliott Sclar, and Gabriella Carolini (lead authors). 2005. A Home in the City. UN Millennium Project: Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan.

Lowenthal, Martin. 1975. The Social Economy of the Urban Working Class. In The Social Economy of Cities, eds. Gary Gappert and Harold M. Rose, 447–469. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Mumford, Lewis. 1937. What Is a City? Architectural Record 82: 58–62.

Pirenne, Henri. [1925] 1948. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Trans. Frank D. Halsey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schaeffer, K. H., and Elliott Sclar. 1980. Access for All: Transportation and Urban Growth. New York: Columbia University Press.

UN-HABITAT and Global Urban Observatory. 2003. Guide to Monitoring Target 11: Improving the Lives of 100 Million Slum Dwellers. Nairobi, Kenya: Author.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Population Division. 2004. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision. New York: Author.

Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44: 1–24.

Elliott D. Sclar

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

"Urbanization." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 8, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 545-548. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3045302860/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=ba471bc7. Accessed 26 June 2019.

 Human Ecology and Environmental Analysis

LAKSHMI K. BHARADWAJ

Encyclopedia of Sociology. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Macmillan Reference USA, 2001. p1209-1233.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Macmillan Reference USA, COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

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HUMAN ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS

With the growing awareness of the critical environmental problems facing the world today, ecology, the scientific study of the complex web of interdependent relationships in ecosystems, has moved to the center stage of academic and public discourse. The term ecology comes from the Greek word oikos("house") and, significantly, has the same Greek root as the word economics, from oikonomos("household manager"). Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who coined the word ecology in 1868, viewed ecology as a body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature, highlighting its roots in economics and evolutionary theory. He defined ecology as the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.

Ecologists like to look at the environment as an ecosystem of interlocking relationships and exchanges that constitute the web of life. Populations of organisms occupying the same environment (habitat) are said to constitute a community. Together, the communities and their abiotic environments constitute an ecosystem. The various ecosystems taken together constitute the ecosphere, the largest ecological unit. Living organisms exist in the much narrower range of the biosphere, which extends a few hundred feet above the land or under the sea. On its fragile film of air, water, and soil, all life depends. For the sociologist, the most important ecological concepts are diversity and dominance, competition and cooperation, succession and adaptation, evolution and expansion, and carrying capacity and the balance of nature. Over the years, the human ecological, the neo-Malthusian, and the political economy approaches and their variants have come to characterize the field of human ecology.

CLASSICAL HUMAN ECOLOGY

The Chicago sociologists Louis Wirth, Robert Ezra Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie are recognized as the founders of the human ecological approach in sociology. In the early decades of the twentieth century, American cities were passing through a period of great turbulence due to the effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The urban commercial world, with its fierce competition for territory and survival, appeared to mirror the very life-world studied by plant ecologists. In their search for the principles of order, human ecologists turned to the fundamental process of cooperative competition and its two dependent ecological principles of dominance and succession. For classical human ecologists, such as Park (1936), these processes determine the distribution of population and the location and limits of residential areas. City development is then understood in terms of succession—an orderly series of invasion—resistance—succession cycles in the course of which a biotic community moves from a relatively unstable (primary) to a more or less permanent (climax) stage. If resistance fails and the local population withdraws, the neighborhood eventually turns over and the local group is succeeded by the invading social, economic, or racial population. Each individual and every community thus finds its appropriate niche in the physical and living environment. In the hands of the classical human ecologists, human ecology became synonymous with the ecology of space. Park and Burgess identified the natural areas of land use, which come into existence without a preconceived design. Quite influential and popular for a while was the "Burgess hypothesis" regarding the spatial order of the city as a series of concentric zones emanating from the central business district. However, Hawley (1984) has pointed out that with urban characteristics now diffused throughout society, one in effect deals with a system of cities in which the urban hierarchy is cast in terms of functional rather than spatial relations.

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Since competition among humans is regulated by culture, Park (1936) made a distinction between the biotic and cultural levels of society: above the symbiotic society based upon competition stands the cultural society based upon communication and consensus. Park identified the problematic of human ecology as the investigation of the processes by which biotic balance and social equilibrium are maintained by the interaction of the three factors constituting what he termed the social complex(population, technological culture [artifacts], and nonmaterial culture [customs and beliefs]), to which he also added a fourth, the natural resources of the habitat. However, while human ecology is here defined as the study of how the interaction of these elements helps maintain or disrupts the biotic balance and the social equilibrium, human agency and the cultural level are left out of consideration by Park and other human ecologists.

NEOCLASSICAL HUMAN ECOLOGY

Essentially the same factors reappear as the four POET variables (population, organization, environment, and technology) in Otis Dudley Duncan's (1964) ecological complex, indicating its point of contact with the early human ecological approach. In any case, it was McKenzie who, by shifting attention from spatial relations to the analysis of sustenance relations, provided the thread of continuity between the classical and the neoclassical approaches. His student Amos Hawley, who has been the "exemplar" of neoclassical human ecology since the 1940s, defines human ecology as the attempt to deal holistically with the phenomenon of organization.

Hawley (1986) views the ecosystem as the adaptive mechanism that emerges out of the interaction of population, organization, and the environment. Organization is the adaptive form that enables a population to act as a unit. The process of system adaptation involves members in relations of interdependence in order to secure sustenance from the environment. Growth is the development of the system's inner potential to the maximum size and complexity afforded by the existing technology for transportation and communication. Evolution is the creation of greater potential for resumption of system development through the incorporation of new information that enhances the capacity for the movement of people, materials, and messages. In this manner, the system moves from simple to more complex forms.

Hawley (1984) has identified the following propositions, which affirm the interdependence of the demographic and structural factors, as constituting the core of the human ecological paradigm:

1. Adaptation to environment proceeds through the formation of a system of interdependences among the members of a population,

2. system development continues, ceteris paribus, to the maximum size and complexity afforded by the existing facilities for transportation and communication,

3. system development is resumed with the introduction of new information that increases the capacity for movement of materials, people, and messages and continues until that capacity is fully utilized. (p. 905)

The four ecological principles of interdependence, key function, differentiation, and dominance define the processes of system functioning and change. A system is viewed as made up of functioning parts that are related to one another. Adaptation to the environment involves the development of interdependence among members, which increases their collective capacity for action. Differentiation then allows human populations to restore the balance between population and environment that has been upset by competition or improvements in communication and transportation technologies. As adaptation proceeds through a differentiation of environmental relationships, one or a few functions come to mediate environmental inputs to all other functions. Since power follows function in Hawley's view, dominance attaches to those units that control the flow of sustenance into the ecosystem. The productivity of the key function, which controls the flow of sustenance, determines the extent of functional differentiation. As a result, the dominant units in the system are likely to be economic rather than political.

Since the environment is always in a state of flux, every social system is continuously subject to change. Change alters the life condition of all participants, an alteration to which they must adapt in order to remain in the system. One of the mostPage 1211  |  Top of Articlesignificant nonrecurrent alterations is cumulative change, involving both endogenous and exogenous changes as complementary phases of a single process. While evolution implies a movement from simple to complex, proceeding through variation and natural selection, cumulative change refers to an increase in scale and complexity as a result of increases in population and territory. Whether the process leads to growth or evolution depends on the concurrent nature of the advances in scale and complexity.

Generalizing the process of cumulative change as a principle of expansion, Hawley (1979, 1986) applies this framework to account for growth phases that intervene between stages of development. When scale and complexity advance together, the normal conditions for growth or expansion arise from the colonization process itself. Expansion, driven by increases in population and in knowledge, involves the growth of a center of activity from which dominance is exercised. The evolution of the system takes place when its scale and complexity do not go hand in hand. Change is resumed as the system acquires new items of information, especially those that reduce the costs of movement away from its environment. Thus an imbalance between population and the carrying capacity of the environment may create external pressures for branching off into colonies and establishing niches in a new environment. Since efficiencies in transportation and communication determine the size of a population, the scope of territorial access, and the opportunity for participation in information flows, Hawley (1979) identifies the technology of movement as the most critical variable. In addition to governing accessibility and, therefore, the spread of settlements and the creation of interaction networks among them, it determines the changes in hierarchy and division of labor. In general, the above process can work on any scale and is limited only by the level of development of the technologies of communication and transportation.

Hawley (1986, pp. 104–106) points out how with the growth of a new regional and international division of labor, states now draw sustenance from a single biophysical environment and are converted to subsystems in a more inclusive world system by the expansive process. In this way, free trade and resocialization of cultures create a far more efficient and cost-effective global reach. The result is a global system thoroughly interlinked by transportation and communication networks. The key positions in this international network are occupied by the technologically advanced nations with their monopoly of information and rich resource bases. However, as larger portions of system territories are brought under their jurisdiction, the management of scale becomes highly problematic. In the absence of a supranational polity, a multipolar international pecking order is then subject to increasing instability, challenge, and change. With mounting costs of administration, the system again tends to return to scale, resulting in some degree of decentralization and local autonomy, but new information and improvements in the technologies of movement put the system back into gear and start the growth process all over again. In the modern period of "ecological transition," a large portion of the biophysical environment has progressively come under the control of the social system. Hawley, therefore, believes that the growth of social systems has now reached a point at which the evolutionary model has lost its usefulness in explaining cumulative change.

Hawley points out that while expansionism in the past relied on political domination, its modern variant aims at structural convergence along economic and cultural axes to obviate the need for direct rule by the center. The process of modernization and the activities of multinational corporations are a prime example of this type of system expansion, which undermines traditional modes of life and results in the loss of autonomy and sovereignty by individual states. Convergence of divergent patterns of urbanization is brought about by increased economic interdependence among nations and the development of compatible organizational forms and institutional arrangements. This approach, as Wilson (1984, p. 300) points out, is based on the assumption that convergence is mainly a result of market forces that allow countries to compete in the world on an equal basis. He cites evidence that shows how the subordinate status of non-Western nations has hindered their socioeconomic development, sharpened inequalities, increased rural-to-urban migration and rural–urban disparities, and led to the expansion of squatter settlements.

Human ecological theory accounts for the existence of an international hierarchy in terms of functional differences and the operation of itsPage 1212  |  Top of Articleuniversal principles of ecosystem domination and expansion. Quite understandably, underdevelopment is defined by Hawley simply in terms of inferiority in this network. Since not all can enjoy equal position on scales of size, resources, and centrality with respect to information flows, Hawley believes that the resulting "inequality among polities might well be an unavoidable condition of an international division of labor, whether built on private or state capitalist principles" (1986, pp. 106, 119).

As the process moves toward a world system, all the limiting conditions of cumulative change are reasserted at a higher level. On the one hand, a single world order with only a small tolerance for errors harbors the seeds of totalitarianism (Giddens 1990). On the other, there is also the grave danger that a fatal error may destroy the whole system. Human ecologists, however, rely on further expansion as the sure remedy for the problems created by expansion. To restore ecological balance, they put their faith in the creation of value consensus, rational planning, trickle-downs, market mechanisms, technological fixes and breakthroughs, native "know-how," and sheer luck.

The real irony of this relentless global expansion elaborated by Hawley lies, however, in the coexistence of the extreme opulence and affluence of the few with the stark poverty and misery of the majority at home and abroad. The large metropolitan centers provide a very poor quality of life. The very scale of urban decay underscores the huge problems facing the city—congestion, polluted air, untreated sewage, high crime rates, dilapidated housing, domestic violence, and broken lives. One therefore needs to ask: What prospect does this scale and level of complexity hold for the future?

HUMAN ECOLOGY AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF "CHAOS"

Chaos theory is the latest attempt to unravel the hidden structure in apparently random systems and to handle chaos within and between systems. In this view, order and disorder (chaos) are seen as two dimensions of the same process: Order generates chaos and chaos generates order (Baker 1993, p. 123). At the heart of both lies a dynamic element, an "attractor," that creates the turbulence as well as re-creates the order. In the human–social realm, Baker has identified center–periphery, or centriphery, as the attractor. Baker, however, uses the concepts of center and periphery more broadly to cover not only their application in the dependency approach (which views the exploitation and impoverishment of the non-Western peripheral societies as basic to the rise of the dominant Western capitalist center), but also to carry the connotation of humans as "world-constructors." Centriphery is, then, the universal dynamic process that creates both order and disorder, as well as accounts for the pattern of human social evolution. The center has an entropic effect on the periphery, causing increasing randomness and denuding it of its resources. But as the entropic effects mount, they are fed back to the center. Beyond a certain point, the costs of controlling the periphery become prohibitive. Should the center fail to come up with new centering strategies, it may split off into subcenters or be absorbed by another more powerful center. Baker is thus led to conclude that "although the effect of feedback is unpredictable, the iteration of a pattern leads to turbulence. The mechanism for change and evolution are endemic to the centriphery process" (Baker 1993, p. 141).

Several things need to be noted about this approach. For one, since these eruptive episodes are random, "the emergence of repeated patterns . . . must be seen as random . . . not as mechanically predictable occurrences. Among other things, the precise character of the emergent pattern cannot be predicted, even though we would no longer be surprised to find a new thing emerging" (Francis 1993, p. 239). For another, Baker's centriphery theory is essentially Hawley's human ecological theory recast in the language of chaos theory, with the important difference that a specific reference is now made both to the role of agency as "world-constructors" involved in "categorizing, controlling, dominating, manipulating, absorbing, transforming, and so on," and to their devastating impact on the peripheralized "others," the victims of progress, who suffer maximum entropy, exploitation, impoverishment, death, and devastation. Even so, Baker's is the latest, though undoubtedly unintended, attempt to generalize and rationalize Western expansionism and its "chaotic (unpredictable) . . . devastating, and now increasingly well known, impact on native peoples" (BakerPage 1213  |  Top of Article1993, p. 137). As such, the centriphery process, said to explain both order (stability) and disorder (change), is presented not only as evolutionary and irreversible, but also as natural and universal: "Thus, the Western world became a center through the peripheralization of the non-Western world. And within the Western world, particularly in North America, the city, which peripheralized the rural hinterland, became the megapolis whose peripheralizing effects were simultaneously wider and greater." (p. 136)]

Not only the recurrent iteration of this pattern but even its "unpredictable" outcomes (new strategies of control, splitting off into new subcenters, absorption into a larger center, etc.), are also prefigured in Hawley (1986). Its process is expansion, and its "attractor" is none other than the old master principle of sociology: domination or control (Gibbs 1989). While Friedmann and Wolff (1982) characterize world cities as the material manifestation of the control functions of transnational capital in its attempt to organize the world for the efficient extraction of surplus, Lechner (1985) leaves little doubt that Western "[materialism] and the emphasis on man's relation to nature are not simply analytical or philosophical devices, but are logically part of an effort to restore world-mastery" (p. 182).

"ECOLOGICAL DEMOGRAPHY"?

Since the study of organizational dynamics as well as the structure and dynamics of population are at the core of sociology, Namboodiri (1988) claims that rather than being peripheral to sociology, human ecology and demography constitute its core. As a result, he contends that the hybrid "ecological demography" promises a more systematic and comprehensive handling of a common core of sociological problems—such as the analysis of power relations, conflict processes, social stratification, societal evolution, and the like—than any other competing sociological paradigm. However, although human ecologists recognize the possibility of other pairwise interactions in addition to competition, and even highlight the points of convergence between the human ecological and the Marxist point of view (Hawley 1984), human ecology as such does not directly focus on conflict in a central way. In this connection, Namboodiri (1988) points out how the very expansionist imperative of human and social systems, identified as a central postulate by human ecologists, generates the possibility of conflict between the haves and the have-nots far more in a milieu of frustrated expectations, felt injustice, and a growing awareness of entitlements, which includes claims to their own resources by nations and to a higher standard of living by deprived populations. How these factors affect the development of and distribution of resources and the relationships among populations by sex, race, ethnicity, and other stratifiers should obviously be of concern to a socially responsible human ecology, one that moreover should be responsive to Borgatta's call for a "proactive sociology" (1989, 1996).

The general neglect of cultural factors and the role of norms and agency in human and organizational interaction has also been a cause for concern to many sociologists. While some latitude is provided for incorporating social norms in specific analyses (e.g., in the relationship between group membership and fertility behavior), their macro-orientation and focus on whole populations compels human ecologists and demographers to ignore the role of the subjective values and purposes of individual actors in ecological and demographic processes (Namboodiri 1988, pp. 625–627).

THE HUMAN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH: AN EVALUATION

While the human ecological approach has strong theoretical underpinnings and proven heuristic value in describing Western expansionism and the colonizing process in supposedly objective terms, its central problem is one of ideology. Like structural functionalism, it is a theory of the status quo that supports existing institutions and arrangements by explaining them as the outcome of invariant principles: "Its concerns are the concerns of the dominant groups in society—it talks about maximizing efficiency but has nothing to say about increasing accountability, it talks of maintaining equilibrium through gradual change and readjustment and rules out even the possibility of fundamental restructuring" (Saunders 1986, pp. 80–81). Not surprisingly, human ecologists downplay the role of social class by subsuming it under the abstract concept of a "categoric unit." They also fail to analyze the role of the state and of the interlocking power of the political, military, andPage 1214  |  Top of Articleeconomic establishment, which are centrally involved in the process of expansion and colonization of peoples and cultures. These omissions account for their total lack of concern for the fate of the "excluded others" and the "dark side of expansionism": colonial exploitation, war, genocide, poverty, pollution, environmental degradation, and ecological destruction. Hutchinson (1993) blames the human ecologists for neglecting or downplaying the role of socioeconomic practices and government policies in creating rental, economic resource, and other differentials. He claims that their analyses tend to be descriptive because they take for granted the existence of phenomena such as socioeconomic or racial and ethnic segregation rather than looking at them in terms of spatial processes that result from the competition between capital and labor.

ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE NEW HUMAN ECOLOGY

The mounting public concern since the 1970s about fuel shortages, oil spills, nuclear power plant accidents, acid rain, dying lakes, urban smog, famine and death in the Sahel, rainforest destruction, and the like has made social scientists realize that overexploitation of the ecosystem may destroy the very basis of our planetary survival. Many environmentalists have blamed the voracious appetite of industrial societies and their obsession with growth for the destruction of the fragile balance among the components of the ecological complex.

Having encountered a seemingly unlimited frontier and an expanding economy, the West has come to believe that expansion is in the nature of things. A major reason for the neglect of the physical environment by American sociologists has, therefore, been the anti-ecological worldview of the dominant social paradigm that has been shaped by this belief. At the same time, the exaggerated emphasis by human ecologists on culture, science, and technology as "exceptional" human achievements has led to the illusion that humans are "exempt" from bioecological constraints to which all species are subject. This awareness has led Catton and Dunlap (1978) to develop the fields of new human ecology (Buttel 1987) and environmental sociology to deal with the reciprocal interaction between human activities and the physical environment. They believe that the POET model, broadened to include the role of human agency and culture, provides a useful analytical framework for grounding environmental sociology in the ecological perspective.

In a comprehensive review of the new field, Buttel (1987) has pressed for shifting the focus of environmental sociology from the imbalance of population and resources, emphasized by Catton, to the reality of the unequal distribution of these resources. Allan Schnaiberg's idea of the "treadmill of production" (1980), which emerges from a dialectical relationship between economic growth and ecological structures, points to the need to focus on production institutions as the primary determinants of economic expansion and to incorporate a conflict dimension in environmental analysis. Buttel's own work in environmental sociology draws on the "political economy tradition" of the neo-Marxists and the neo-Weberians. Catton's major contributions, on the other hand, are in the neo-Malthusian tradition. While the problem of order created by the harsh realities of industrial life and expansionism had earlier defined the central problematic of sociology and human ecology, the problem of survival now defines the central problematic of environmental sociology and the neo-Malthusian new human ecology: to the earlier question of how social order is possible is now added the more urgent concern with survival itself.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY APPROACH AND THE NEW URBAN SOCIOLOGY

The conservative nature of the classical and neoclassical human ecology paradigms has also come under attack from theorists who focus on the internal contradictions and the global reach of capitalism to understand urban phenomena.

Smith (1995) has argued that a new urban sociology paradigm, which draws on neo-Marxist sociological theory, urban political economy, dependency theory, world-system analysis, and critical theory, has now become dominant and largely supplanted human ecology and the old urban sociology approach to the study of urban phenomena. The conflict between the two approaches is an aspect of the old conflict between the structural-functional and the neo-Marxist (conflict) perspectives in the field of sociology generally. WhereasPage 1215  |  Top of Articlehuman ecology's main concern is with how technological change enables population aggregates to adapt to their environment through changes in social and spatial organization, the new perspective underplays the role of technological determinants or functional imperatives in shaping the urban landscape. It focuses instead on social inequality and conflict, and highlights the role of economic and political elites, states and other institutional actors, and powerful global forces in order to analyze the problematic "underside" of modern city life: urban poverty, housing segregation by race and social class, urban fiscal crises, deindustrialization, structured inequality in the built environment, and the massive level of human misery associated with the rapid growth of megacities in the Third World (Smith 1995, p. 432.) The new approach looks at urban growth within the context of the international division of labor engendered by the global reach of the expansionary logic of competitive capitalism. This process, which translates aspects of competitive capitalism into geographic space, involves "the creation and destruction of land and built environments we term 'cities.' [Moreover,] this leads to concentrations and locational shifts of human populations, infrastructure, and buildings within the urban landscape (resulting in suburbs, neighborhoods, slums, etc.)" (Feagin 1988, p. 23, quoted in Smith 1995, p. 438).

A "new urban paradigm" in the political economy tradition has been put forward by Gottdiener and Feagin (1988) as an alternative to the human ecological and the expansionist paradigms discussed earlier. Rather than treating societies as mere population aggregates or as unified biotic communities, the new urban paradigm treats them as specified by their mode of production. In this view, crisis tendencies and profit generation constitute the core of societal development, which is seen as dominated by the process of capital accumulation. Thus, to take one example, conventional human ecologists like to regard central-city restructuring as a consequence of adaptation to increasing population size and the growing complexity of social organization. They then relate these changes to the size of the metropolitan hinterland. The new urban paradigm, on the other hand, emphasizes the impact of the global economy, multinational corporations, the shift to functional specialization in world-system financial and administrative activities, the constant subsidization by the state, the efforts of pro-growth coalitions, and changes in labor-force requirements leading to some renovation and central-city gentrification. It tends to focus on power and inequality, the production and reproduction of capital accumulation, crisis adjustment in sociospatial organizations, and such other processes. The following are some of the basic questions that the new urban sociology paradigm seeks to answer: What is the character of power and inequality? How do they relate to "ecological" patterns? How do production and reproduction processes of capital accumulation, as well as the processes of crisis adjustment, manifest themselves in sociospatial organization?

THE CRISIS OF THE NEW URBAN SOCIOLOGY

However, having apparently supplanted human ecology, the new urban sociology itself appears to be in a state of deep crisis (Hutchinson 1993). Among other things, many of its practitioners are now claiming that the new urban sociology lacks a paradigm equivalent to that of human ecology; that its contribution is critical rather than substantive; that its viewpoint is far more ideological than empirical; and that it lacks a unifying focus, there being as many new urban sociologies as there are its practitioners (La Gory 1993, p. 113). At the same time, while asserting that "what is most salient about the new approach is . . . its direct challenge to the theory and method of ecology," Gottdiener and Feagin (1988) deride the attempt "to pick and choose from some of the new literature . . . areas of compatibility, thereby turning the new approach into a mere footnote of the old" (p. 167). However, in view of the inadequacy of both approaches, La Gory (1993) suggests the use of network analysis as the preferred strategy for devising a revised urban paradigm that is informed by both the strengths and shortcomings of these two perspectives. And noting the considerable conceptual convergence between the two approaches, Smith (1995) argues for a synthesized urban theory that will require the fleshing out of Hawley's theory of social organization, technology, and population distributions by incorporating the contributions of the new urban theory regarding the nature and content of the global competitive capitalist system. Thus, Smith claims that while the newPage 1216  |  Top of Articleurban sociology can provide human ecology with a better understanding of power and dominance and how class interests play a central role in shaping urbanization, human ecology can help the new urban theory pay more attention to the demographic processes and variables in order to develop a theory of demographic change under global capitalism.

ECO-CATASTROPHE AND ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE

Industrial and industrializing nations are now beset with more or less the same devastating problems of air, land, and water pollution and environmental destruction. Large numbers of lakes and rivers that were not naturally eutrophic have now become so as a result of pollution and chemical runoffs. In the United States, Love Canal and Times Beach, Missouri, made headlines in the 1980s as much as Chernobyl did in 1986 in the Soviet Union. Sulfur dioxide emissions from industrial and power plants cause acid rain that inflicts irreparable damage on buildings, monuments, marine life, trees, and plants. More than 60,000 synthetic chemicals are now on the market, of which a sizable number contaminate the environment and pose health hazards. Over half a million tons of toxic wastes are produced each year in the United States, while the five-year cost of cleaning nuclear waste, which remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years, may well exceed $30 billion. The soil, lake water, and groundwater near nuclear power and weapons plants are heavily contaminated with such toxins as mercury, arsenic, and many types of solvents, as well as with deadly radioactive materials such as plutonium, tritium, and strontium-90. The contamination is so bad in eight states that huge tracts of land are said to be totally unfit for human habitation and pose serious health hazards for the surrounding communities. The siting of dump sites in minority communities and the international shipment of hazardous waste to non-Western nations raise serious issues of environmental justice. With an annual production of solid waste that doubled between 1960 and the late 1990s to nearly 225 million tons, the United States is producing more garbage than any other nation in the world and will soon be facing a huge problem of disposal as its 2,300 landfills run out of room and their leachates pose serious threats of toxicity.

The environmental destruction is far more serious and widespread in eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union. These countries are the sites of some of the world's worst pollution. Lakes and rivers are dead or dying. Water is so contaminated in some areas that it is undrinkable. Chemical runoff and sewage and wastewater dumping have created serious groundwater contamination. Lignite (brown coal), the major source of energy for industry and homes in some of these nations, is responsible for the heavy concentration of sulfur dioxide and dust in the air that has caused serious respiratory problems and additional health damage. The haze-covered cities are an environmental disaster. According to Worldwatch estimates, the former Soviet Union alone accounted for a fifth each of global carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions—the former are implicated in global warming; the latter are the principal ingredient of acid rain. These environmental problems thus not only span transboundaries, they also cut across ideological labels.

In non-Western nations, a million people suffer acute poisoning and 20,000 persons die every year from pesticides. Pesticides are a major source of environmental and health problems in the United States as well. But the United States alone exports more than half a billion pounds of pesticides that are restricted in or banned from domestic use. The ecology, natural environment, and resources of these non-Western nations are being destroyed and contaminated at a frightening rate. Irreversible damage is being done by large-scale destruction of rainforests and the intensive use of marginal lands, as well as by the imbalances that result from population pressures and the practices of multinational firms and national elites. Desertification now threatens a third of the earth's land surface. Poverty, hunger, starvation, famine, and death are endemic throughout much of the world.

RELATION BETWEEN POPULATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

What lends urgency to the current population–resource crisis for the West is the fact that while human numbers are declining or standing still at most in industrial societies, they are increasing disproportionately in the rest of the world, aPage 1217  |  Top of Articleworld divided today not only economically and sociopolitically, but also demographically. The technological mastery of the world has resulted in a higher material standard of living in the West, but it has also spelled economic polarization, ecological ruin, and environmental disasters worldwide. At the same time, hunger, famine, poverty, and overpopulation in the rest of the world have raised critical issues of equity, justice, security, and human survival. While the close link among poverty, population growth, and environmental degradation is invariably highlighted by the neo-Malthusians and the media, the impact of unsustainable patterns of consumption and production on the environment does not receive equal emphasis. Much more disconcerting is the fact that the use of the population argument tends to divert attention away from the role of exploitative and oppressive social institutions and arrangements. Schnaiberg and Gould (1994) find the lack of control over industrial production systems rather than population growth to be the main factor contributing to the underdevelopment of Southern societies. Without minimizing the danger of overpopulation, they find clear historical evidence that the worldwide environmental disruption has been caused not by population growth but by the enormous expansion of production, profits, and surplus in the past century. And based on available evidence, Humphrey and Buttel (1982) have been led to conclude that "[one] of the most important findings to come from the study of the relationship between population size and the environment is the misplaced importance given to world population size as cause of natural resource scarcities and pollution . . . . [We do not] imply that world population growth should be . . . neglected as a cause of environmental problems, [but] a fixation on it as the major reason for pollution and energy crises would be sociologically misguided" (p. 60).

Depending on their consensus or conflict orientation, we find that the dominant perspectives on the population–resource dynamic place differential emphasis on the alternative modes of resolving competition over scarce resources. In this respect, the modern division of labor, highlighted by Durkheim, is but one of several modes of resolving competition over scarce resources. Schnore (1965, pp. 12–13) offers a number of alternative survival strategies, which may involve one or a combination of the following: (1) demographic changes resulting in the elimination of excess numbers (increase in the death rate, decrease in the birthrate, and migration); (2) technological changes that allow for the expansion of the resource base (the exploitation of unused or existing resources, availability of new areas and new resources, resource substitutions, etc.); and (3) organizational changes that allow for the support of larger numbers (occupational and territorial differentiation, revolutionary changes that redistribute the surplus among the many, and reduction in the general level of living to support increased numbers).

For human ecology, the most salient aspect of the population–environment relationship is the way it affects human survival and the quality of human life. Under the impact of the interlocking crises of overpopulation, resource depletion, and environmental degradation, issues of sustainability and survival have come to occupy center stage. Corresponding to the main approaches in human ecology, three broad positions may be identified for discussion: the pro-growth (expansionist), the neo-Malthusian, and the political economy perspectives. Our discussion of these positions is followed by a consideration of the Brundtland Report, issued by the World Commission on Environment and Development, and of the traditional-Gandhian view of the ecological crisis. Extended treatment of the issues involved may be found in Catton (1980), de la Court (1990), Humphrey and Buttel (1982), Mellos (1988), and Schnaiberg and Gould (1994).

The Pro-Growth (Expansionist) Perspective. To explain the growth patterns of modern society, this approach builds on the foundations of "the new synthetic theory developed in the biological sciences in the last forty years, . . . mixing in elements of neo-Malthusian theory, Marx's historical materialism, and modern systems theory" (Lenski 1979, p. 14). It seems quite likely, however, that the basic elements of expansionism, now presented as a natural universal process, were derived from the fundamental American experience of abundance and an open frontier conceived as a process. As Avery O. Craven (1937) put it more than sixty years ago, the basic idea was "that American history . . . presents a series of recurring social evolutions in diverse geographical areas as a people advance to colonize a continent. The chief characteristic isPage 1218  |  Top of Articleexpansion; the chief peculiarity of institutions, constant readjustment . . . . Into . . . raw and differing areas men and institutions and ideas poured from older basins, there to return to a more or less primitive state and then to climb slowly back toward complexity . . . . The process was similar in each case, with some common results but always with 'essential differences' due to time and place" (quoted in Potter 1954, p. 145–146.)

In expansionist thinking, scale, complexity, and acceleration—that is, the constant broadening of the limits of the maximum permitted by prevailing circumstances—mark the human–environment encounter. Hawley's version of human ecology, with its focus on population growth and differentiation as significant processes of continuous change, provides a concise exposition of the pro-growth or expansionist view on the population–resource problematic. Hawley believes that industrial systems have no known upper limits on either the number of specializations or the size of the populations that can be supported. Similar pro-growth sentiments are expressed by other expansionist thinkers. Asserting that resource supplies are finite but unbounded, Hawley (1986, pp. 110–111) questions the neo-Malthusian assumption that overpopulation and overuse will soon exhaust a declining supply of fixed resources. While acknowledging the threat of overpopulation and pollution to the quality of the environment, he points to the inherently expansive nature of populations, technology, and organization that has resulted in a long history of resource expansion through more efficient extraction and use of new and existing resources, new resource development, and resource substitutions. With regard to global food-producing resources, he presents evidence to show that the size of arable land, its productivity, and its agricultural output can be increased beyond the rate of population growth. He blames poverty and the structural conditions that generate it for the chronic food shortages in parts of the world and points to the indispensability of further increments of growth and the creation of central organizations capable of tackling these and other environmental problems. Contrary to the view of the Malthusians, he holds that the expansive power of populations by itself does not cause war, resource depletion, or environmental degradation; it does so only under specific organizational circumstances. Hawley (1986, p. 26) views these outcomes as the result of the maladaptation or malfunctioning of organization, with disequilibrium opening the possibility for evolutionary change through a movement to a higher level of complexity.

While Colin Clark directly links population numbers to power, Herman Kahn (1974) views population increase as a necessary stimulus to economic growth and believes the earth can easily support 15 billion people at $20,000 per capita for a millennium. In fact, he believes that the wider the gap between the rich and the poor, the more the riches will percolate downward. In any case, he is unconvinced that the rich would agree to part with their income to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth. Roger Revelle (1974) believes the earth can actually support nearly thirty times the present population in terms of food supplies and that it would take almost 150 years to hit that mark. While economic development is necessary to provide people with the basis to control their fertility, Revelle is certain the world would drown in its own filth if most of the people in the world were to live at Western standards. Finally, the postindustrial sociologist Daniel Bell (1977) is convinced that economic growth is necessary to reduce the gap between the rich and poor nations. He has little doubt that the "super-productivity society," with less than 4 percent of its labor force devoted to agriculture, could feed the whole population of the United States, and most of the world as well. In his opinion, pollution exists because the market principle has never been applied to the use of collective goods. Actually, Bell suggests that the government itself could utilize the market to demand a public accounting from all parties on issues of public interest, levy effluent charges for pollutants, and bring effective compliance through the price mechanism.

However, while corporations have shown greater sensitivity and self-regulation, there is evidence that attempts to enforce the "polluter-pays" principle are likely to be resisted or the costs passed on to the public. The negative impact of governmental policies that alleviate energy and resource scarcities is more likely to be felt at the lower socioeconomic levels (Morrison 1976). Dunlap (1979) presents evidence to show that the effects of pollution and the costs of cleaning the environment are borne disproportionately by the poor and may actually serve to reinforce class inequalities.

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The Neo-Malthusian Perspective. Within the context of actual and perceived resource scarcities worldwide, neo-Malthusianism has gained ascendance since the 1970s over the earlier theories of demographic transition and neoclassical human ecology (expansionism), which were dominant through the 1960s. Based on the Malthusian notion that population invariably outruns food supply because of a lag between the simple arithmetical increases in resources and the exponential rates of population growth, the neo-Malthusians bring in the notion of carrying capacity to identify overpopulation as the main threat to human planetary survival. However, in spite of the fact that there is no exact or objective formula for determining the optimum population, the neo-Malthusians tie in the notion of carrying capacity—the optimum population that a given environmental resource base can support at a given time—with the idea of an acceptable quality of life that one insists on living. Sometimes the theory of demographic transition, discussed below, is also invoked to explain why Western societies have been able to avoid the Malthusian apocalypse by joining declining death rates and birthrates with increasing standards of living, while non-Western societies cannot, given the least likelihood of their ever achieving Western levels of industrial and economic development, and the sheer impossibility of the whole world living at U.S. standards within the constraints imposed by the finite nature of the earth's resources (Daly 1979).

Compounding the environmental effects of the poverty-stricken and "food-hungry" populations of the world are the impacts of massive consumption and pollution by the "energy hungry" nations (Miller 1972, p. 117). The latter rise sharply with even a slight growth in the population of Western nations, where one-quarter of the world's population is responsible for more than 85 percent of worldwide consumption of natural resources and the environmental sinks. Within the United States, a bare 6 percent of the world's population consumes more than half of the world's nonrenewable resources and more than a third of all the raw materials produced. G. Tyler Miller, Jr. (1972, p. 122) believes that the real threat to our life-support system, therefore, comes not from the poor but from the affluent megaconsumers and megapolluters who occupy more space, consume more natural resources, disturb the ecology more, and directly and indirectly pollute the land, air, and water with ever-increasing amounts of thermal, chemical, and radioactive wastes. While the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972) and the other neo-Malthusians gave a grace period of thirty or so years, Catton (1980) believes we have already overshot the maximum carrying capacity and are now on a catastrophic downward crash course. In any case, he is convinced that our best bet would be to act as if a crash were imminent and to take advance measures to minimize its impact.

However, the basic premises of Malthusian theory have not stood the test of time. With each technological breakthrough, the Western nations have so far been able to raise their carrying capacity through extending their territorial and environmental reach, which now reaches to the ends of the globe. The social and economic forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution not only telescoped the doubling of human population within a shorter time span, they also brought about ever-rising material standards of living due to astronomical increases in the scale and speed of agricultural and industrial production in the advanced nations. While the Malthusian theory predicts the fall in growth rates of population as a result of rising death rates, this prediction failed to apply during the period of industrial growth. The theory of demographic transition was proposed to cover the anomalous results. The theory specifies declining fertility as a consequence of modernization and economic development. However, in the West itself, smaller families became a clear option only after the newly affluent had suffered a major setback in higher living standards during the Great Depression. On the other hand, the downward transition of fertility worldwide appears to be the result of a complex of factors, including the declining role of tradition and religion, rising levels of income, the increasing role of women's education and outside employment, urban residence and industrialization, and the awareness and availability of fertility-control measures (Weinstein 1976, p. 85). Many of the generalizations based on the demographic-transition theory have thus proved to be culturally and historically specific.

At the same time, the "development" of poor nations has created a new set of claimants for the resources needed to maintain the high material standard of living of affluent nations. As the poor nations begin to assert control over their ownPage 1220  |  Top of Articleresources, try to set terms of their exchange, or resist outside pressures to transform them into "environmental preserves" or the "global commons," the prospects of conflict, particularly over critical water, mineral, forest, and energy resources, are greatly magnified. Amartya Sen (1981) has looked at the famine situation as essentially a "crisis of entitlement," not so much because there is lack of food but because many are denied any claims to it because of the very nature of the market economy. In the West, the entitlement revolution has entailed huge welfare expenditures, which could be financed either by economic growth or by direct redistribution of income (Bell 1976, p. 20). For Bell and the neo-Malthusians, the latter is out of the question.

To restore the population–resource balance—with global economic development, equitable distribution of resources, and the perfectibility of man and society now largely ruled out—the neo-Malthusians rely on sophisticated computer models to predict the end to development and limits to economic and demographic growth for the non-Western nations; others favor "sustained environment development". Still others despair of the effort to avert disaster through population control or the preventive checks of moral restraint proposed by Malthus. Instead, they invoke the operation of the Malthusian positive checks (wars, famines, pestilence, and natural disasters) and raise the specter of massive famines and die-offs to justify triage, war, secessionist movements, adding sterilants to drinking water, forced sterilization, violent and coercive contraceptive technologies for women, even genocide. In a piece published in 1969 in the Stanford Alumni Almanac, and appropriately titled "The Immorality of Being Softhearted," Garrett Hardin is quite clear that food would be the worst thing to send to the poor. Nothing short of the final solution will do. "Atomic bombs would be kinder. For a few moments the misery would be acute, but it would soon come to an end for most of the people, leaving a very few survivors to suffer thereafter." These solutions, which would bring about the decimation of entire populations, have been called ecofascist. Such sentiments are by no means uncommon among the neo-Malthusians.

To revert to the neo-Malthusian argument: The tragedy of numbers is compounded by the "free rider," who derives personal benefits from the collective efforts of others, and the more serious "tragedy of the commons" (Hardin 1966), where each herdsman will add cattle without limit, ignoring the costs imposed on the others and degrading the land held in common. The "tragedy of the commons" is really the tragedy of individualism run amuck, an individualism from which all constraints of private and common morality have been removed. However, others have been quick to point to the equal or far greater extent of environment pollution and ecological destruction in socialist countries as one more evidence of the inevitable convergence of capitalism and socialism!

Many environmental problems are clearly transideological and transnational. Acid rain, oil spills, the destruction of the ozone layer, the threat of global warming—all call for common responsibility and joint regulation. Ironically, it appears that the expressed concern about the destruction of the global commons through overpopulation or industrial pollution is seldom matched by a parallel commitment by powerful nations to preserve or clean up the environment or provide support for international population-control efforts. Instead, one witnesses a mad scramble to divide up the remaining oceanic and other planetary resources without regard to equity, ecology, or environment. As a result, the air and the oceans, as well as the forests and lands of other nations, are being overexploited or used as garbage and toxic dumps with impunity.

Of no small consequence globally is the environmental impact of waste, widespread corruption at all levels, hoarding and price-fixing, and poor storage, distribution, and transportation networks. Not surprisingly, "formidable mafias based on a triangular alliance between the corrupt bureaucrat, the corrupt politician and the corrupt businessman emerged in all [Indian] States and became a most powerful threat to the conservation of the country's tree cover" (Vohra 1985, p. 50). When one adds to this list the role of political and economic elites and multinational corporations, and of huge debts, huge dams, and huge arms stockpiles, it becomes clear that poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and starvation may have far more to do with political, cultural, and socioeconomic components of food shortages than with sheer numbers alone. This is not to underestimate the immensity of the population problem or to minimize the difficulty of its solution.

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The Political Economy Perspective. With the rise of the "consumer society" and the "welfare state" in the West, and the coupling of the "revolution of rising expectations" and the "entitlement revolution" with the impossibility of generalizing Western levels of consumption worldwide, the problematic nature of the relationship between consumption and production has again come to the fore. On the one hand, food aid and food supply have become powerful political weapons globally; on the other, welfare programs constitute a potentially deprivational means of control (Gibbs 1989, p. 453). Saunders points out that today the basic class divisions centered in the relations of production are increasingly being overlaid by "a division, which cuts right across the class structure, between those with access to individual forms of consumption and those who are reliant on collective provision" (1986, p. 232).

Arguing that the issues of collective consumption must be separated from issues of production and class struggle and that urban struggles develop around the question of social consumption, Saunders contends that by recognizing that consumption may generate its own effects, Castells (1985) opens up the possibility of identifying nonclass bases of power and popular mobilization, as well as nonclass forms of popular aspiration and identity (Saunders 1986, p. 226). It is precisely for this reason that the anticonsumerism of the counterculture during the 1960s was both hailed as a true "revolution without Marx or Jesus" and also seen as a threat to the very existence of a mass-production society. On the other hand, the current neo-Malthusian demands centered on the impossibility of generalizing Western standards of living (level of consumption) to the rest of the world, or on stabilizing consumption at some "optimum" level for achieving a steady state within western societies, also rest on the possibility of regulating production by manipulating mass-consumption patterns.

Barry Commoner (1974) faults socialist as much as capitalist economic theories for neglecting the biosphere as a major factor of production but regards both poverty and population growth as outcomes of colonial exploitation. The world, he believes, has enough food and resources to support nearly twice its present population. The problem, in his view, is a result of gross distributive imbalances between the rich and the poor, and requires a massive redistribution of wealth and resources to abolish poverty and raise standards of living in order to wipe out the root cause of overpopulation. The alternative to this humane solution is the unsavory one of genocide or natural destruction. A study of environmental destruction in southern Honduras by Susan Stonich (1989) illustrates the power of a perspective that combines the concerns of political economy, ecology, and demography. Her conclusion is that environmental degradation arises from fundamental social structures and is intricately connected to problems of land tenure, unemployment, poverty, and demography.

Stonich identifies political and economic factors and export-promotion policies of international lending institutions and aid agencies as the key elements of a development policy for the whole of Central America that is likely to lead to destruction of the remaining tropical forests, worsen poverty and malnutrition, and increase inequality and conflicts within and between nations. Government policies encourage commercial agriculture in order to earn foreign exchange in the face of mounting external debt, which rose by 170 percent in just seven years to equal three-fourths of the 1986 gross national product. The expansion of export-oriented agriculture and the integration of resource-poor rural households into the capitalist sector, often by ruthless and violent means, concentrates the highest population densities in the most marginal highland areas and encourages intensive land-use and adaptive strategies that accelerate ecological decline. Between 1952 and 1974, as a result of changes in land-use patterns, forest land declined by more than two-fifths and the area lying fallow by three-fifths. In the same period, food-crop production was reduced drastically while pasture area rose by more than half regionally and by more than 150 percent in the highlands, where the number of cattle rose by about 70 percent. By 1974, a third of all rural families were landless; two-fifths were below the subsistence level in 1979.

The result has been the evolution of a class of rich peasants raising export-oriented cattle and cash crops, a class of land-poor and landless peasants and wage laborers, and a class of middlemen operatives who serve as transportation links in an expanding regional and national network. The whole socioeconomic structure has an extremely deleterious effect on the regional ecology andPage 1222  |  Top of Articleenvironment. These patterns are being repeated all over Africa and Asia. Even the "green revolution," which uses the model of American agribusiness to commercialize agriculture in non-Western countries, provides only a temporary respite. Its recurrent and increasingly high capital requirements for seed, fertilizer, insecticide, water, land, and machinery wipe out the small farmers and landless laborers. It destroys peasant agriculture, exposes the monocultures to destruction by disease and pests, magnifies inequality, and sows the seeds of social instability and rural strife. To those who subscribe to the political economy perspective, the bioecological explanation thus appears to be too simplistic. It overlooks the social context of development and land distribution within which worldwide destruction of traditional agriculture and the rainforests is now occurring.

In sum, these considerations bring out the fact that debates surrounding resource distribution and the control of population and consumption patterns are neither entirely scientific nor purely ecologically inspired. As Barry Commoner (1974) points out, they are political value positions. Will the changes come voluntarily, or will they involve totalitarian nightmares? "Sustainable development" and "traditional ecology" hold out two contrasting possibilities for the future.

THE BRUNDTLAND REPORT AND THE PROMISE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

At the heart of the Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) is the idea of sustainable development that has become the rallying point for diverse agendas linking poverty, underdevelopment, and overpopulation to environmental degradation and "environmental security." The report defines sustainable development as "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Its popularity lies in its ability to accommodate the opposing idea of limits to growth within the context of economic expansion, but with a new twist. As pointed out by Gro Brundtland (1989), the "central pivot" of the notion of sustainable development remains "progress, growth, the generation of wealth, and the use of resources." The imposition of limits on consumption is then justified in order to protect the resource base of the environment both locally and globally. At the same time, continuous economic growth is considered essential to meeting the needs of the world's neediest. In fact, the Brundtland Report indicates that "a five-to-tenfold increase in world industrial output can be anticipated by the time world population stabilizes sometime in the next century" (World Commission on Environment and Development 1997).

Sustainable development is also seen as a strategy to enhance global security by reducing the threat posed by conflict and violence in an inequitable and resource-hungry world. To this end, it promotes a commitment to multilateralism, with a call for strong international institutions to ward off the new threats to security and for the collective management of global interdependence (Brundtland 1989, p. 14). As a result, the interests of economic growth and the environment are seen as mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory. The World Commission Report (1987) duly notes that ecology and economy "are becoming ever more interwoven—locally, regionally, nationally, and globally—into a seamless net of causes and effects." And the 1990 Worldwatch Institute Report predicts that the world will have a sustainable society by the year 2030 (Brown et al. 1990, p. 175). Meanwhile, the challenge, as Arnold (1989, p. 22) states, is to ensure that the sustainability vision "is not trivialized or, worse, used as one more way to legitimize the exploitation of the weak and vulnerable in the name of global interest and solidarity."

To its credit, the Brundtland Report singled out some forms of economic growth that destroy resources and the environment. The present $1 trillion expenditure on armaments, for example, constitutes "more than the total income of the poorest half of humanity." According to 1990 United Nations estimates, military expenditures in developing countries, which account for 75 percent of the arms trade, had multiplied by seven times since 1965 to almost $200 billion, compared with a doubling by the industrialized countries. In addition, burgeoning debt, adverse trade policies, and internal instability constitute the overwhelming obstacles to sustained development. The fiftytwo poorest nations of the world are now burdened with nearly a $400 billion debt. With Africa's total debt approaching $200 billion (half of its overall gross national product and three to fourPage 1223  |  Top of Articletimes its annual income from exports), its average debt repayments amount to more than half the export income. The debt burden forces the African nations to concentrate on monocrop export agriculture to the detriment of food-crop production and pushes hungry and landless farmers and nomads to marginal lands that they overgraze and overexploit in order to survive. However, with respect to fixing the responsibility for deforestation, the Brundtland Report appears to be of two minds (de la Court 1990). In asserting that to most farmers, especially the poor ones, "wood is a 'free good' until the last available tree is cut down," the report partly sides with the "tragedy of the commons" argument, accusing the poor farmers of being "both victims and agents of destruction." On the other hand, it also points to a different cause: "The fuelwood crisis and deforestation—although related—are not the same problems. Wood fuels destined for urban and industrial consumers do tend to come from the forests. But only a small proportion of that used by the rural poor comes from forests. Even in these cases, villagers rarely chop down trees; most collect dead branches or cut them from trees" (quoted in de la Court 1990, p. 68). In any case, the Brundtland Report became the focal point for global environmental efforts in the 1990s, even though in the United States it remained "America's best-kept secret." It undoubtedly played a crucial role in the United Nations conference on the global environment held in Brazil in 1992.

SOCIAL CHAOS AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL INTEGRATION

Dennis Wrong (1994, pp. 295–296) has pointed out how the globalization of the world economy and the accompanying spread of communication and transportation systems to embrace more of the world represent an unprecedented increase in the dissociation of system from social integration, and how the fear of disorder has become more acute in a greatly interdependent world suffering from persistent economic scarcity and a limited capacity for human sympathy with others.

To Scott Greer (1979), the rapid growth of American society, made possible by the increase in societal scale, has led to the following Durkheimian dilemma: "Increasing interdependence requires more cultural integration than we can manage; growth itself has undermined the cultural support system. While bureaucratization may increase order within a segment of the society, what is to guarantee order among segments?" In the absence of the spirit of consensus generated by war, economic disaster, or a universalized humanity, Greer feels that symbiosis rather than cultural integration may best remedy the fragmentation accompanying the discontinuities of societal growth. Such an approach would not only emphasize trading partners, controlled markets, and formal and informal co-optation, but "given the increasing number of role players who do not 'know their place,' from white working-class men to black college-educated women, such a system will take an awful lot of work by leaders, middlemen, and fixers, as well as some luck" (Greer 1979, pp. 315–316).

Daniel Bell (1976) has made the critical point that while the dominant nineteenth-century view of society as an interrelated web, a structured whole unified by some inner principle, still rules Marxist and functionalist thought, it is no longer applicable. On the contrary, society today is composed of three distinct realms—the technoeconomic structure, the polity, and the culture—each obedient to a different axial (value) principle, each having different rhythms of change, and each following different norms that legitimate different and even contradictory types of behavior. The discordances between these realms are responsible for various contradictions within society. Bell has proposed the creation of a "public household" to overcome the disjunctions among the family, the economy, and the state through the use of modified market mechanisms to further social goals. And given his conviction that the crisis is really a spiritual one of belief and meaning, he recommends the return in Western society of some conception of religion to restore the continuity of generations and provide a ground for humility and care for others. This presents a formidable challenge, however, for Bell is painfully aware that one can neither manufacture such a continuity nor engineer a cultural revolution.

It is doubtful that the problems of order created by the "normal" but dangerous nonrelation between the life-sustaining (ecology–economy) andPage 1224  |  Top of Articleorder-maintaining (sociopolitical) systems of contemporary society can be corrected, as Bell believes, by the creation of a miraculous hybrid—a "public household"—protected and nurtured by both the polity and the household to serve the interests of the technoeconomic structure and by the side-door entry of the "religious" to provide for the integrative and "higher"-order needs of a socially disjointed and spiritually vacuous society. Even the frantic use of a "holistic" ecological approach is bound to fail if its actual goal is somehow to dominate or desperately hold on to a sundered reality in which everything is so hopelessly unrelated to everything else. Since a dependent part cannot grow infinitely at the expense of the others, or usurp the whole for its own purposes without undermining the very conditions of its own existence, the high-powered technoeconomic structure, driven by the insatiable demand for energy, resources, and markets, is inherently disorder-producing and anti-ecological. Its immensity of scale and utilitarian thrust not only destroy traditional structures and sociocultural diversity but also set in motion irreversible and ecologically damaging global processes whose attempted solutions greatly magnify the problems.

That the philosophy and ideology of progress may promote activities inconsistent with sound ecological management and the prospects of human survival is also increasingly being recognized (Peck 1987). But the fact that "'history' is not on our side, has no teleology, and supplies us with no guarantees" does not mean to Giddens (1990) "that we should, or that we can, give up in our attempts to steer the juggernaut . . . . For we can envisage alternative futures whose very propogation might help them be realised. What is needed is the creation of models of utopian realism" (p. 154). Unwilling and unable to abandon the world-constructionist project, he offers a "post-scarcity" system as perhaps the only possibility but is also bothered by the "dark side of modernity," the creation of totalitarian power, based on his original insight that totalitarianism and modernity are not just contingently but inherently connected (Giddens 1990, p. 172).

In the stark asymmetry between the disorderproducing and the order-creating powers of the centriphery lies the real "nightmare of reason" and the roots of the current crisis and worldwide chaos. The process is not only incomprehensible ("complex"), but totally out of control. In this state of affairs, "what is there to love or preserve in a universe of chaos? How are people supposed to behave in such a universe? If that is the kind of place we inhabit, why not go ahead with all our private ambitions, free of any fear that we may be doing special damage" (Worster 1994, p. A3).

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Patterns of human social organization and technology use reflect the vision a people have of themselves and of their place in the universe. According to Karl Polanyi ([1947] 1974), the question of how to organize human life in a machine society confronts us with a new urgency:

Behind the fading fabric of competitive capitalism there looms the portent of an industrial civilization with its paralyzing division of labor, standardization of life, supremacy of mechanism over organism, and organization over spontaneity. Science itself is haunted by insanity. This is the abiding concern." (pp. 213–214)

A. K. Saran (1978) does not doubt in the least that the ecological crisis is a self-inflicted one, because an entropic environmental system and an infinitely expanding economy and technology are mutually incompatible. His main argument is that the modern system does not provide a coherent worldview or the proper regulative principle to satisfy the needs of the different orders in a unitive way. In such a system, only a technological solution to the problem of order in the sociopolitical realm can be contemplated, and a piecemeal approach will be relied on to deal with the consequences of a discordant and disharmonious order. In addition to generating tremendous violence, universal disorder, and planetary destruction in the desperate attempt to hold the parts together under its hegemony, such an approach is bound to fail. Since the symbolic is not an integral part of the modern literal consciousness, the attempt to appropriate Mother Earth or other symbols, such as that by the proponents of Gaia, may be ideologically seductive but is both scientifically irrelevant and spiritually vacuous. Neo-Malthusian disclaimers notwithstanding, since evolution has been the master concept to organize and rearrange the world in human terms, the ontology of modernPage 1225  |  Top of Articlescience is necessarily anthropocentric. Saran's conclusion, therefore, is that there can be no ecological science unless it is grounded in traditional cosmology.

In a study of the Tukano Indians of the northwest Amazon, G. Reichel-Dolmatoff (1977) shows how aboriginal cosmologies, myths, and rituals

represent in all respects a set of ecological principles . . . that formulate a system of social and economic rules that have a highly adaptive value in the continuous endeavor to maintain a viable equilibrium between the resources of the environment and the demands of society. The cosmological myths which express the Tukano world-view do not describe Man's Place in Nature in terms of dominion, or mastery over a subordinate environment, nor do they in any way express the notion of what some of us might call a sense of "harmony with nature". Nature, in their view, is not a physical entity apart from man and, therefore, he cannot confront it or oppose it or harmonize with it as a separate entity. Occasionally man can unbalance it by his personal malfunctioning as a component, but he never stands apart from it. Man is taken to be a part of a set of supraindividual systems which—be they biological or cultural—transcend our individual lives and within which survival and maintenance of a certain quality of life are possible only if all other life forms too are allowed to evolve according to their specific needs, as stated in cosmological myths and traditions. . . . This cosmological model . . . constitutes a religious proposition which is ultimately connected with the social and economic organization of the group. In this way, the general balance of energy flow becomes a religious objective in which native ecological concepts play a dominant organizational role. To understand the structure and functioning of the ecosystem becomes therefore a vital task to the Tukano. (pp. 9–11)

However, modernity in its essence has been totally destructive of the traditional vision of human nature, our proper place in the "web of life," and our conception of the ultimate good. Polanyi ([1947] 1974) points out how with the modern separation of "economy" as the realm of hunger and gain,

[our] animal dependence upon food has been bared and the naked fear of starvation permitted to run loose. Our humiliating enslavement to the "material", which all human culture is designed to mitigate, was deliberately made more rigorous. This is the root of the "sickness" of an acquisitive society that Tawney warned of . . . . [The task of] adapting life in such surroundings to the requirements of human existence must be resolved if man is to continue on earth. (p. 219)

The post–World War II creation of the global economy through the idea of "development" is the other half of the story. As pointed out by Wolfgang Sachs (1990), and in line with Hawley's observation, the concept of development provided the United States with the vision of a new global order in which the former colonies were held together not through political domination but through economic interdependence. But to "define the economic exploitation of the land and its treasures as 'development' was a heritage of the productivist arrogance of the 19th century. Through the trick of a biological metaphor, a simple economic activity turns into a natural and evolutionary process. [Soon] traditions, hierarchies, mental habits—the whole texture Of societies—were all dissolved in the planner's mechanistic models . . . patterned on the American way of life" (p. 42).

However, even after nearly two decades of development work, the results were far from heartening. Instead of declining, inequality, poverty, unemployment, hunger, and squalor actually increased manyfold in all "developing" countries. To summarize: While the expansionist vision tries to tie ecology, economy, and polity together, and the neo-Malthusians add biology to the list, it is in sustainable development that all these orders are firmly knit together—but at a price. The paradoxical nature of the term sustainable development arises from the fact that it attempts to combine the contradictory notions of limits to growth and active growth promotion. However, if the key to maintaining ecological integrity is economic self-sufficiency and production for use, then the problem today is surely one of the inhuman scale of enterprise based on the "techniques of degradation" (Marcel 1952), which serve nothing higher than human self-interest, and of the concept ofPage 1226  |  Top of Articleman as having an economically rather than a spiritually determined nature (Coomaraswamy 1946, p. 2).

Roy Rappaport (1976) has documented how the Maring of New Guinea support as many as 200 people per square mile by cultivating nearly forty-five acres of cleared forest at a time without damaging the environment. But then they look at the world and its "resources" through very different eyes!

A PROACTIVE ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY

Heightened concern with ecology and the environment has now moved into the mainstream of public life as a major priority at the national and international levels. This provides important opportunities for environmental sociologists to contribute to the understanding and solution of these problems. Constance Holden (1989) has highlighted the report of the National Academy of Sciences that outlines an agenda for both micro and macro social scientific studies of "anthropogenic" stresses on the resources and the environment in the north circumpolar region and that has general application. The fragile Arctic region has a great wealth of natural resources. It comprises one-tenth of the earth's area and has a population of 8 million people, of whom a quarter are natives. The report placed major emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, particularly those linking the social and physical sciences and basic and applied research. It emphasized the need for drawing on native knowledge and put urgent priority on issues such as cultural survival and the allocation of scarce resources. It also asked the social scientists to come up with models generalizable to other areas.

An interesting insight concerns how each of the several identities of the Arctic (e.g., as homeland for the natives, as a "colony" exploited for its natural resources, and as the last wilderness) results in a distinctive approach to human–environment relationships. "These approaches have come increasingly into conflict as subsistence hunters and commercial interests vie for limited stocks of fish and game; communities are shaken by boom and bust cycles in scrambles for mineral resources; and rapid modernization has inflicted trauma on native cultures" (Holden 1989, p. 883). The committee identified three areas of interest to the social scientist. In the area of human–environment relationships, there is a need for studies on conflict resolution to strike a balance between commercial needs and the interests of subsistence hunters, sportsmen, and conservation. The second area pertains to community viability, for which a systematic approach is needed to help develop a physical and social services infrastructure to meet the special climatic needs of the region. A final area pertains to the study of the impact of rapid social change (single-industry cash economy, the snowmobile revolution), which is exacting a heavy price from the local inhabitants in terms of higher rates of alcoholism, suicide, stress, loneliness, accidents, and violence.

The shift from expansionist to neo-Malthusian thinking seemingly implies an attempt to come to terms with the finitude of the total ecosphere and changed global realities, but the underlying assumptions and contradictions are again not made explicit. The overriding concern has been with the protection of industrial and commercial interests, even where these interests clearly come in conflict with the interests of individuals, communities, and their environment. The commitment to protect growth or a certain way of life at any cost has led human ecologists and neo-Malthusians to disregard the minimum well-being or sheer survival of the rest of humankind. In fact, Hawley (1986) admits that while "competition," resulting from demand exceeding the carrying capacity, may account for the exclusion of some contestants from access to their share of a limited resource, it does not shed "any light on what happens to the excluded members of a population after their exclusion" (p. 127). This serious neglect of the concern for the underdog and the undermined is matched by the self admitted tendency of the human ecologists "not [to] confront policy matters directly" (Hawley 1986, p. 127). Given its reliance on large-scale macro forces to explain other macro-level phenomena, the human ecological approach does not readily lend itself to policy considerations. Even otherwise, since it views spatial patterns as the natural outcome of ecological processes rather than the result of power relations, it becomes a conservative force in policy applications (La Gory 1993, p. 112).

Edgar Borgatta (1989, 1996) has sought to develop an important field called "proactive sociology," with a view to closing the wide gap between sociological theory and practice and to savePage 1227  |  Top of Articlesociology from sheer irrelevance. Sociological approaches, even when application-oriented, have been largely timid, inactive, or merely reactive. They have restricted their focus to studying how changes in social policy may alter behavior and social situations, but they have refrained from making policy recommendations for designing social structures to serve accepted values. Proactive sociologists, on the other hand, would have the task not only of clarifying values and specifying their meaning but also of assuming the responsibility for making policy recommendations based on an understanding of appropriate models of change. In stark contrast to the pretended value-neutral and value-free stance of mainstream sociology, Borgatta (1996) would, therefore, push to include the consideration of values, as well as the examination of possible structures to implement preferred values, among the central tasks for proactive sociologists.

In human ecology, for instance, it is with reference to the population–consumption problematic that questions of value and their interpretation become evident. Rather than waiting to study only the aftereffects of "all in the path"—the Three Mile Island radiation leak or the Exxon Valdez oil spill—or stepping in at the end of the "issue-attention" cycle, when the problem is historically interesting but socially irrelevant, a proactive sociology would concern itself with the dynamics out of which problems arise, anticipating potential problem areas and their alternative solutions as the means to translate desired values into effective policy. This would involve identifying possible futures and the consequences of action or inaction for their attainment—a policy dimension ignored by sociologists, despite their belief that this may make all the difference in a fast-changing and turbulent world in which the ability to handle and manage change requires the ability to anticipate change and to adapt social structures to changing requirements. To this end, the sociologist would need to ask whether what he or she was doing would make an impact and be useful to society. The fundamental assumption here is that if we know something about the impact of social structure on behavior, we should be able to propose models for changes in social structures that will effectively implement values that have priority status in society (Borgatta 1989, p. 15). Sociologists would then be obligated to "address societal values more directly by providing alternate models of potential changes and exploring the consequences these changes may produce if identified values are implemented" (Borgatta and Hatch 1988, p. 354).

Following this lead, a "proactive environmental sociology" would have particular application to the "sociology of environmental issues," which is concerned with the study of environmental movements, resource management problems, and the like. It would broaden the scope of the sociology of environmental issues by focusing specifically on the changes that are required to effectively implement stated values such as equity, environmental justice, rights of the deprived and of "future generations," resource conservation, equitable sharing of the global commons, the right to clean and healthy environment, sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns, and the like, and by exploring the possible consequences of these changes. Thus David Mahar, an adviser to the World Bank, has argued that blaming peasant colonists for deforestation is "tantamount to blaming the victim" for "misguided public policies" that promote road building, official colonization of the forest, and extensive live-stock development, and that "purposely or inadvertently encourage rapid depletion of the forest." This definition of the situation led Mahar to propose an "alternative development model" that would put government action on hold so that, based on land-use surveys, lands "found to have limited agricultural potential—virtually whole of terra firme [sic] of Amazonia—would be held in perpetuity as forest reserves." These and other unconventional conclusions are stated by Mahar as his own and carry the disclaimer that they do not necessarily represent the views and policies of the World Bank itself (cited in Hildyard 1989).

This example also brings out Borgatta's point that a proactive stance may involve the espousing of unpopular positions. It may lead a proactive environmental sociologist to examine the role of established institutions and values (crass individualism and the impact of "anthropocentric," "cowboy," "superpower," and "commercialized conservation" approaches to the use of finite resources and a fragile environment; wasteful consumption patterns; draconian measures of population control; corporate nonaccountability and the global impact of multinationals, the state, and the like) inPage 1228  |  Top of Articleorder to facilitate the creation of ecologically sustainable social structures that implement positive environmental values. On this basis, a systematic concern with morality and the application of knowledge would lead to a "proactive environmental sociology" that would prompt the sociologist to formulate alternative policies with respect to the set of environmental values or goals that are to be implemented (Borgatta and Cook 1988, p. 17). This approach would also ensure that the applied aspects of "environmental sociology" would flourish within the discipline and not become detached from sociology, as has been the fate of industrial sociology and many other areas in the past (Borgatta 1989).

OVERVIEW

Environmental sociologists have complained of the lack of a unifying focus within the field and have noted its specialized, fragmented, and dualistic tendencies, which hinder concept and theory development (Buttel 1987, p. 466). This should be a cause for serious concern insofar as the new human ecology is supposed to provide a holistic, integrated understanding of human–environment interactions. In addition to the problems surrounding functionalist as well as Marxist categories and assumptions is the difficulty of adapting bioecological concepts to the human context. Notions such as ecosystem, niche, succession, climax communities, balance of nature, even evolution—none have clear social referents and all pose formidable problems of inappropriate or illegitimate transferal of concepts. Thus, while one finds constant reference to urban or social "ecosystems" in the literature, the wide-ranging, even global, energy-exchange patterns make the boundaries so diffuse that it becomes impossible to locate an urban ecosystem in time and space, at least in biological terms (Young 1983, p. 195). Or, if humans are defined as niche dwellers, the term niche, "if adopted directly from biology would produce only one worldwide niche for the entire global species, a result that would render the concept useless. How can the species problem be overcome in adapting such a concept to human ecology?" (Young 1983, p. 795).

Terms such as the environment are not easy to define or conceptualize; nor are ecological chain reactions, multiple causal paths, and feedback mechanisms in complex ecosystems easy to delineate. In recognition of the substantial difference between human and bioecological orders, some human ecologists, such as Hawley, have moved away from bioecological models. Thus, Hawley (1986) is highly critical of the neo-Malthusian application of the "carrying-capacity" notion, on the ground that "while the argument may be suitable for plants and animals, its transfer to the human species is highly questionable" (p. 53). While still shying away from assigning a critical role to human agency, or even a policy-making role to the human ecologist, Hawley has nonetheless broadened the scope of his theory by incorporating culture and norms as ecosystem variables. However, as a commentary on Western-style development and its total disregard for limits, Rappaport has raised more basic objections: To treat the components of the environment as if they were mere resources is to view them exclusively in economic terms and invite "the use and abuse of biological systems of all classes and the neglect of moral and aesthetic considerations in general. Whatever may be meant by the phrase 'quality of life,' exploitation does not enhance it" (1978, pp. 266–267).

Human ecologists, in general, have not dealt adequately with such concerns, nor with the problems of power, domination, and the role of the state and of "values" in human–environmental relationships. At a minimum, one needs to know the role of the state in the regulation, maintenance, expansion, suppression, and "resocialization" of peoples and societies. If ecosystems are constituted of interdependent parts, one needs to know the nature of the reciprocal relationships among the parts and among the parts and the ecosystem. Rappaport (1978) has drawn attention to the maladaptive tendency of subsystems to become increasingly powerful and to dominate and use the larger system for their own benefit, to the detriment of the general interest and the adaptive flexibility of the system. He mentions the dominating positions occupied by huge corporations and the "military industrial complex" as examples. More broadly, Rappaport ties pollution, "resource" depletion, and the diminution of the quality of life and the destruction of its meanings to the scale of modern societies and the voracious appetites of their industrial metabolisms. Thus, while he doesPage 1229  |  Top of Articlenot deny that population increase may have a negative impact on the quality of life, he has little doubt that the real cause of ecosystem destruction and the deterioration of the quality of life is to be found in the way societies are organized, not in their population trends. If that is so, what alternative do humans have?

Within the human ecological perspectives, environmental problems are seen as arising either from the unplanned nature of growth and expansionism, from its attendant externalities and "commons" tragedies, from growth and market restrictions (the pro-growth, expansionist perspective), or from the excess of population over the carrying capacity of the environment (the neo-Malthusian perspective). To restore ecological balance and environmental health, human ecologists place their faith in value consensus, rational planning, systems theory, computer models, economic growth, trickle-downs, market mechanisms, and technological fixes (the pro-growth perspective) or in limits to growth, sustainable development, sticks and carrots, benign neglect, triage, die-offs, outright compulsion, and even genocide (the neo-Malthusian perspective). Within the political economy perspective, on the other hand, the emphasis is on internal contradictions, uneven development, center–periphery relations, capitalist exploitation, the role of multinationals and the state, trade imbalances, and the treadmill of production. To ensure environmental and ecological protection, equitable distribution, and social justice, the proposals from a political economy standpoint range from social revolution to conflict and confrontation, from redistribution to social welfarism and mixed economies.

The political economy perspective is critical of the basic assumption of the Chicago ecologists that changes in population, organization, and the technologies of movement explain expansionary movements and territorial arrangements. By allowing planners to alter spatial forms to dissipate class conflict and social unrest, Smith (1979, p. 255) believes, the perspective becomes a powerful depoliticizing weapon in their hands. He favors "client-centered" planning, which does not assume that "physical structure determines social structure," but holds that both are shaped by the economic and political structures of society, which provide selective access to opportunities and further discriminatory patterns of land use and investment. Smith therefore offers "conflictual planning" on behalf of the poor and the powerless in order to call attention to the hidden social costs of development and to increase the political costs of pursuing repressive policies disguised as rationally planned allocational, locational, and investment choices. This approach poses three basic questions: "Whose values, interests, and social actions will determine the purpose, pace, and direction of historical change? Can the costs and benefits of historical change be distributed fairly? Can the changes that do occur further the cause of social justice?" (Smith 1979, p. 288).

Schnaiberg (1980) has identified three responses to the contradiction between production expansion and ecological limits: (1) the expansionist, which will be temporary, increasingly unequal, environmentally stressful, and authoritarian; (2) the business-as-usual, which will be unstable, socially regressive, unequal, and of limited environmental value; and (3) the ecological, involving appropriate technology, reduced consumption, and reduced inequality, which will be the most durable but also the most socially disruptive and the least desirable. Schnaiberg's own preference, short of a social revolution, is for a mixed social democratic system like Sweden's, with some production expansion and improved welfare distribution under close state supervision.

However, this solution does not quite address the critical concerns of the environment or the needs of three-fourths of humanity. It presents to the world the anti-ecological model of the "treadmill of production" under a more benign form. It ignores the reality of global inequity, environmental injustice, and global-resource wars—the fact that behind every environmental struggle of today lies a struggle over the expansion of the treadmill of production. It is worth noting that at least in the case of sustainable-yield forestry, Schnaiberg and Gould (1994) no longer look to Sweden as the model. With more than 90 percent of Sweden's native forest now extinct, and its native species replaced by North American tree species, the authors decry that "native plants and animals have been exterminated, sacrificed for an economically-sustainable industry. The Swedish treadmill isPage 1230  |  Top of Articlesustained at the expense of the Swedish environment" (1994, p. 210). The real thrust, therefore, is not sustainable development at all but what Vandana Shiva (1990) has called commercialized conservation, which puts a dollar value on biodiversity and "justifies conservation in terms of present or future commercial returns" (p. 14). Smith (1979) believes that the environmental problem, like the problem of poverty, has arisen and remains insoluble because of our commitment to existing economic arrangements and institutions and because wealth and power are valued over persons and human need. In fact, the global treadmill operates in such a way that the poor countries often end up financing the development of the rich ones. Thus, during the period from 1982 to 1990, Foster (1995) reports how Third World nations became a net exporter of hard currency to developed countries to the tune of about $30 billion per year, while also remitting almost $12.5 billion in monthly payments on debt alone to their creditors in wealthy nations.

While the West is busy presiding over a general reorganization of the global economy and the ways of living throughout the world, the common problem, as Hilary French (1990) points out, is that of finding the proper balance between sufficiency and excess, which she says will be as difficult for the former socialist nations as it has been for the West. In this context, she points out how Czechoslovakia's president, Vaclav Havel, has identified the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, and consumer culture as the common enemy.

The uncontrolled greed of the global treadmill has been blamed for the frightening global environmental degradation and for overpowering our sense of responsibility to future generations. "How much is enough" for living a good life (Durning 1992) has become the critical issue today. This concern with sufficiency should lead us to question the equation of consumption with meaningful existence and of the good life with the material standard of living. But such an equation cannot be avoided in a society of abundance, which has to follow the imperative of consumption if its expanding productive capacities are to be put to use. However, since redistribution or any real systemic changes are ruled out, Daly (1979) recommends a control from within based on obedience to objective value, warning that "if interior restraints on will and appetite diminish, then exterior restraints, coercive police powers, and Malthusian positive checks must increase." (p. 53)

Gandhi, aware both of the fatal attraction and the destructive potential of wanton materialism, saw it as constituting the gravest threat to human freedom, survival, and environmental security. He therefore opted for a simple, nonexploitative, and ecologically sustainable social order. Such a decentralized social order, based on truth and nonviolence, was to be governed by the metaphysically determined optimum levels of wants, technology, and resource use fitted to the requirements of the human scale. In the interim, he demanded that the rich become trustees of the poor in order to serve justice, to mitigate the negative impacts of the differentials of wealth and power, and to avoid class conflicts. His radical vision of a normal social order, nowhere realized as yet, provides a useful yardstick for measuring how ecologically sound and environmentally sustainable a society is in its actual operation. Noting that the world has enough for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed, Gandhi was convinced that such a social order would come about

only if the means of production of the elementary necessaries of life remain in the control of the masses. These should be freely available to all as God's air and water are or ought to be; they should not be made a vehicle of traffic for the exploitation of others. Their monopolization by any country, nation or group of persons would be unjust. The neglect of this simple principle is the cause of the destitution that we witness today not only in this unhappy land but in other parts of the world too. (quoted in Sinha 1976, p. 81.)

From this point of view, while there is little disagreement that overpopulation aggravates environmental and other problems, the attempts to eradicate the root causes of social instability, inequality, and poverty are bound to be far more effective in the long run than the impressive but partially effective approaches to population control. Brian Tokar (1988) has pointed out that, historically, rapid increases in population occur when people become dislocated from their traditional land base and become less secure about their personal and family survival. On the otherPage 1231  |  Top of Articlehand, populations become stable when the future is secure, the infant mortality rate is low, social choices for women are expanding, and parents are not worried about who will support them in their old age.

How to effect the radical changes required to restore the proper ecological balance and preserve the biocultural integrity and diversity of the global "household," but "without the most fantastic 'bust' of all time" (Ehrlich 1968, p. 169), is the formidable challenge and the urgent task facing humankind. This will involve a redirection of the vast, creative human energies away from a self-defeating and ecodestructive expansionist and wasteful orientation, and their rechanneling into life-giving and life-promoting forms of human action and human social organization.

REFERENCES

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Bell, Daniel 1976 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

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Borgatta, Edgar F. 1989 "Towards a Proactive Sociology." Paper presented at the 29th International Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, Rome.

——1996 "Proactive Sociology: The Need for Relevance in Sociology." The Annals of the InternationalInstitute of Sociology (New Series, vol. 5). Trieste, Italy: University of Trieste.

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——, and Laurie R. Hatch 1988 "Social Stratification." In Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, eds., The Future of Sociology. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

Brown, Lester R., Christopher Flavin, and Sandra Postel 1990 "Picturing a Sustainable Society." In Lester R. Brown and associates, State of the World 1990: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. New York: W. W. Norton.

Brundtland, Gro Harlem 1989 "Sustainable Development: An Overview." Development, Journal of SID2/3:13–14.

Buttel, Frederick H. 1987 "New Directions in environmental Sociology." Annual Review of Sociology13:465–488.

Castells, Manuel 1985 "From the Urban Question to the City and the Grassroots." Urban and Regional Studies (Working Paper No. 47). University of Sussex, U.K.

Catton, William R., Jr. 1980 Overshoot. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

——, and Riley E. Dunlap 1978 "Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm." American Sociologist13:41–49.

Commoner, Barry 1974 "Interview on Growth." In Willem L. Oltmans, ed., On Growth: The Crisis ofExploding Population and Resource Depletion. New York: Capricorn Books.

Coomaraswamy, A. K. 1946 The Religious Basis of the Forms of Indian Society. New York: Orientalia.

Craven, Avery O. 1937 "Frederick Jackson Turner." In William T. Hutchinson, ed., Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Daly, Herman E. 1979 "Ethical Implications of Limits to Global Development." In William M. Finnin, Jr. and Gerald A. Smith, eds., The Morality of Scarcity: Limited Resources and Social Policy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

de la Court, Thijs 1990 Beyond Brundtland: Green Developments in the 1990s. New York: New Horizon Press.

Duncan, Otis Dudley 1964 "Social Organization and the Ecosystem." In Robert E. L. Faris, ed., Handbook of Modern Sociology. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Dunlap, Riley E. 1979 "Environmental Sociology." Annual Review of Sociology 5:243–273.

Durning, Alan 1992 How Much Is Enough. New York: W.W. Norton.

Ehrlich, Paul R. 1968 The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books.

Feagin, Joe R. 1988 The Free Enterprise City: Houston in Political-Economic Perspective. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Foster, John Bellamy 1995 "Global Ecology and the Common Good." Monthly Review 46(9):1–10.

Francis, Roy 1993 "Chaos, Order, and Sociological Theory: A Comment." Sociological Inquiry 63:239–241.

French, Hilary F. 1990 Green Revolution: Environmental Reconstruction in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Worldwatch Paper No. 99). Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute.

Friedmann, J., and G. Wolff 1982 "World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6:309–344.

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Gibbs, Jack P. 1989 Control: Sociology's Central Notion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Giddens, Anthony 1990 The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Gottdiener, M., and Joe Feagin 1988 "The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology." Urban Affairs Quarterly24:163–187.

Greer, Scott 1979 "Discontinuities and Fragmentation in Societal Growth." In Amos H. Hawley, ed., Societal Growth: Processes and Implications. New York: Free Press.

Hardin, Garrett 1968 "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162:1243–1248.

Hawley, Amos H. 1979 "Cumulative Change in Theory and in History." In Amos H. Hawley, ed., Societal Growth: Processes and Implications. New York: Free Press.

——1984 "Sociological Human Ecology: Past, Present, and Future." In Michael Micklin and Harvey M. Choldin, eds., Sociological Human Ecology: Contemporary Issues and Applications. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

——1986 Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hildyard, Nicholas B. 1989 "Adios Amazonia? A Report from Altimira Gathering." The Ecologist 19:53–67.

Holden, Constance 1989 "Environment, Culture, and Change in the Arctic." Science 243:883.

Humphrey, Craig R., and Frederick H. Buttel 1982 Environment, Energy, and Society. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.

Hutchinson, Ray 1993 "The Crisis of Urban Sociology." In Ray Hutchinson, ed., Urban Sociology in Transition: Research in Urban Sociology 3. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.

Kahn, Herman 1974 "Interview on Growth." In Willem L. Oltmans, ed., On Growth: The Crisis of Exploding Population and Resource Depletion. New York: Capricorn Books.

La Gory, Mark 1993 "Spatial Structure and the Urban Experience: Ecology and the New Urban Sociology." In Ray Hutchinson, ed., Urban Sociology in Transition: Research in Urban Sociology 3. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.

Lechner, Frank, J. 1985 "Modernity and its Discontents." In Jeffrey C. Alexander, ed., Neofunctionalism. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.

Lenski, Gerhard 1979 "Directions and Continuities in Social Growth." In Amos H. Hawley, ed., SocietalGrowth: Process and Implications. New York: Free Press.

Marcel, Gabriel 1952 Men Against Humanity. London: Harvill Press.

Meadows, Donella, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens 1972 The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Mellos, Koula 1988 Perspectives on Ecology: A Critical Essay. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Miller, G. Tyler, Jr. 1972 Replenish the Earth: A Primer in Human Ecology. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.

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Park, Robert E. 1936 "Human Ecology." American Journal of Sociology 42:1–15.

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Schnore, Leo F. 1965 The Urban Scene: Human Ecology and Demography. New York: The Free Press.

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LAKSHMI K. BHARADWAJ

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

BHARADWAJ, LAKSHMI K. "Human Ecology and Environmental Analysis." Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Macmillan Reference USA, 2001, pp. 1209-1233. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3404400161/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=0982e943. Accessed 26 June 2019.

 Park, Robert E.

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr.. Vol. 6. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. p140-142.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

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Park, Robert E. 1864-1944

• BIBLIOGRAPHY

The American sociologist Robert Ezra Park was a leading figure in the “Chicago school” of sociology. He was born February 14, 1864 in Harveyville, Pennsylvania. His Page 141  |  Top of Articlemother, Theodosia Warner, was a schoolteacher and his father, Hiram Asa Park, was a soldier in the Union army. Soon after the Civil War the family moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, where Park grew up.

Park attended the University of Michigan and received a Ph.B. in philosophy in 1887, studying under the young John Dewey (1859–1952). From 1887 until 1898 he was a reporter on daily newspapers in Minneapolis, Detroit, Denver, New York, and Chicago. In 1894 Park married Clara Cahill, and they had four children: Edward, Theodosia, Robert, Jr., and Margaret (Raushenbush 1979).

In 1899 Park entered Harvard University, where he studied under William James (1842–1910) and Josiah Royce (1855–1916). He then took his family to Germany, where he studied with Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and took the only formal course on sociology he ever had. He completed his Ph.D. in 1904 at Heidelberg with his dissertation, “Masse und Publikum” (The Crowd and the Public). He returned to Harvard for a year, but soon became bored with academic life and accepted the position of secretary of the Congo Reform Association. He later met Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and worked for seven years at Tuskegee Institute studying the American Negro.

At the invitation of W. I. Thomas (1863–1947), Park joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1914 and remained there until he retired in 1929. Between 1929 and 1932 he traveled extensively, researching race relations in other countries and teaching. He was a guest professor at Yenching University in Peking and at the University of Hawaii. From 1936 until his death in 1944 he lectured at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee (Hughes 1968).

Park was not a prolific writer, but he produced several books and numerous articles. His articles have been published in three volumes by his students as The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park, vol. 1: Race and Culture (1950), vol. 2: Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology (1952), and vol. 3: Societies (1955). Perhaps his most influential publication was the pathbreaking Introduction to the Science of Sociology, published with Ernest W. Burgess in 1921, which has been described as the most influential sociological textbook ever produced in the United States (Martindale 1960; Coser 1971).

In Park’s view, society is best seen as the interactions of individuals controlled by traditions and norms. Park was keenly interested in social psychology, and his favorite topics were collective behavior, news, race relations, cities, and human ecology (Raushenbush 1979). Park defined sociology as “the science of collective behavior,” which suggests the need for analysis of social structures with the study of more fluid social processes (Coser 1971, p. 358).

These processes are divided into four major categories: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Park held that “competition is the elementary universal and fundamental form of social interaction” (Park and Burgess 1921, p. 507). It is as universal and continuous in human society as it is in nature, and it assigns persons their position in the division of labor. Conflict is intermittent and personal. Competition determines the position of the individual in the community; conflict fixes his place in society (Coser 1971, p. 359). Accommodation is a cessation of conflict that is fragile and easily upset. Assimilation “is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and, by sharing their experiences and history, are incorporated with them in a common culture” (Park and Burgess 1921, p. 735). Then when assimilation is achieved it does not mean that individual differences are eliminated or that competition and conflict end, but that there is enough unity of experience so that a “community of purpose and action can emerge” (Coser 1971, p. 360). Social distance refers to “the degree of intimacy that prevails between groups and individuals. The degree of intimacy measures the influence which each has over the other” (Park 1950, p. 357). The greater the social distance between individuals and groups, the less they influence each other.

Although Park’s theory fit with the prevailing assimilationist view of his time, there are several criticisms of his race-relations cycle: (1) Park did not set a time frame for the completion of the assimilation process—making it essentially untestable; (2) Park could not cite any racial group that had passed through all four stages of his cycle—instead, he and other assimilation theorists explained the lack of assimilation as the result of interference in the process, resulting in a tautological theory that can neither be proved nor disproved; (3) Park did not describe the assimilation process in much detail (Healey 2007; Parrillo 2005).

Park described sociology as the “abstract science of human nature and experience” that included the “applied science” of his four social process to analyze “those modifications in human beings that are due to the human environment.”

The same social forces which are found organized in public opinion, in religious symbols, in social conversation, in fashion, and in science … are constantly recreating the old order, making new heroes, overthrowing old gods, creating new myths, and imposing new ideals. And this is the nature of the cultural process of which sociology is a description and an explanation (Park and Burgess 1921, quoted in Raushenbush 1979, p. 82).

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Park’s sociology “always focused analytical attention on those processes or situations which foster the emergence of novel forms that upset or render obsolete previous adjustments and accommodations” (Coser 1971, p. 366).

Although Park has sometimes been accused of making racist remarks, his interest in the problem of race relations stems from a desire for a deeper understanding of the human situation. In a letter to Horace R. Cayton, another Chicago school sociologist, Park elaborated on his work with Negroes, demonstrating his broader analytical views of the problems involved:

Democracy is not something that some people in a country can have and others not have, something to be shared and divided like a pie—some getting a small and some getting a large piece. Democracy is an integral thing. If any part of the country doesn’t have it, the rest of the country doesn’t have it (quoted in Raushenbush 1979, p. 177).

Park stimulated his students to learn from their own experiences and observations: “Park’s teaching always gave the sense of something in the making” (Raushenbush 1979, p. 184).

There is no better testimony to the impact of Park’s teaching than the imposing roster of his students. Everett C. Hughes, Herbert Blumer, Stuart Queen, Leonard Cottrell, Edward Reuter, Robert Faris, Louis Wirth, and E. Franklin Frazier all became presidents of the American Sociological Society. Helen McGill Hughes, John Dollard, Robert Redfield, Ernest Hiller, Clifford Shaw, Willard Waller, Walter C. Reckless, Joseph Lohman and many other students of Park became leading social scientists. It is hard to imagine the field of sociology without the contribution of the cohort of gifted men whom Park trained at Chicago. What higher tribute can be paid to a teacher? (Coser 1971, p. 372).

Charles S. Johnson, one of Park’s students, noted that “his mind never ceased to work with ideas and he had not lost his zest for life and work and the still uncharted frontiers of human behavior even when, in his final illness, he could no longer speak” (Raushenbush 1979, p. 176). Park died at his home on February 7, 1944, seven days before his eightieth birthday.

SEE ALSO Assimilation ; Blumer, Herbert ; Chicago School ; Cox, Oliver C. ; Drake, St. Clair ; Frazier, E. Franklin ; Park School, The ; Sociology, American ; Sociology, Urban

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

PRIMARY WORKS

Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Park, Robert E. 1950. Race and Culture: The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park, vol. 1, ed. Everett C. Hughes, et al. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

SECONDARY WORKS

Coser, Lewis A. 1971. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Healey, Joseph F. 2007. Race, Ethnicity, and Gender. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Hughes, Helen MacGill. 1968. Robert E. Park. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 11, ed. David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, 416–419. New York: Macmillan.

Martindale, Don. 1960. The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Parrillo, Vincent N. 2005. Strangers to These Shores: Race and Ethnic Relations in the United States. 8th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Raushenbush, Winifred. 1979. Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Larry R. Ridener

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

"Park, Robert E." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 6, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 140-142. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3045301875/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=a959d3ab. Accessed 26 June 2019.

 Immigrants, Black

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr.. Vol. 3. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. p564-567.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

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Immigrants, Black

• THE FIRST GENERATION OF BLACK IMMIGRANTS

• BLACK IMMIGRANTS TODAY

• SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EXPERIENCES

• THE FUTURE FOR BLACK IMMIGRANTS

• BIBLIOGRAPHY

The black population in the United States has always been diverse in terms of national origins. A sizeable influx of black immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa added to that diversity in the second half of the twentieth century. Significant differences in the factors that stimulated migration, characteristics of the migrants, and the contexts they encountered make it possible to speak of two generations of black immigrants: the pre–World War II wave that arrived primarily between 1900 and 1930, and the post-1965 wave that swelled after the Hart-Celler Act (Immigration Reform Act of 1965) and other immigration-policy changes in the United States and Europe.

THE FIRST GENERATION OF BLACK IMMIGRANTS 

Although the number of black immigrants historically has been quite small, their presence in the United States dates back to the turn of the last century. According to Ira A. Reid, at a time when U.S. immigration was at its peak (between 1880 and 1930), foreign-born blacks comprised Page 565  |  Top of Articleonly 1 percent of the total black population (Reid 1939). By the end of this era of mass migration, nearly 28 million immigrants had entered the United States; of that number approximately 100,000 persons were socially defined as “Negro immigrants.”

The first generation of black immigrants came primarily from the Caribbean region, Canada, and the Cape Verde Islands (a Portuguese colony off the west coast of Africa). The forces that prompted and sustained the migrant flows were fundamentally political and economic. In the British or anglophone Caribbean, oppressive colonial policies, economic distress, and natural disasters, together with opportunities abroad, occasioned mass migration to the Panama Canal zone, to sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and most notably to the industrializing United States. Similarly, Cape Verdeans fleeing drought, famine, and a lack of rewarding employment migrated to southeastern New England in search of lucrative, short-term employment.

The immigrants were mostly males in their wage-earning years; over 36 percent were between the ages of sixteen and thirty-seven years old; and the majority was not married. Many had been skilled artisans, bankers, merchants, colonial civil servants, and professional persons in their countries of origin. Because immigrant laws selected for literacy, more than 98 percent were literate when they arrived and, with the exception of less than 2 percent, they spoke English. Although the migrants represented a select segment of their home societies, in general they were future male industrial workers and female domestic servants.

These foreign-born blacks tended to settle in urban areas—especially New York, Miami, and Boston, which served as primary ports of entry. Cambridge and New Bedford, Massachusetts, Tampa, and Detroit also had sizeable black immigrant populations. Cigar manufacturing in Florida pulled migrants to Tampa; and black immigrants found work fishing, whaling, and, later, in the cranberry industry in New Bedford. Where certain groups settled had as much to do with the economic opportunities there as how they were located or perceived in the social hierarchies of each city or region. Notably, with the exception of Florida, few black immigrants settled in the U.S. South.

For the black immigrants who arrived at the turn of the last century, their hyperracialization as blacks had the most profound impact on their experiences. For the most part, distinctions of color, language, education, economic status, religious practice, and nationality mattered little in a society with a racial hierarchy held together by an ideology of biological inferiority. Whether or not they lived their lives as Haitians, Jamaicans, Nigerians, West Indians, or Africans, what the historian F. James Davis calls “the one-drop rule” of racial classification consigned black people of all classes to the bottom of the social ladder and was the basis for their exclusion from economic and educational opportunities (Davis 1991). Not only did they suffer from the same rigid segregation and blanket discrimination as native-born black Americans, in addition, they were rarely considered as part of the British or Portuguese immigrant communities. In a seminal essay, Roy S. Bryce-Laporte argued that for black immigrants, incorporation into the larger African American community generated an additional layer of social marginality; they were invisible both as blacks and as immigrants (Bryce-Laporte 1972).

BLACK IMMIGRANTS TODAY 

The visibility of black immigrants has dramatically increased since the 1970s. In the ten years following the Hart-Celler Act, the number of black immigrants exceeded the total from the previous seventy years. Black immigration continued to grow in volume after that. Demographer John Logan and his colleagues show that black immigrant groups are growing faster than well-established ethnic minorities such as Cubans and Koreans (Logan 2003).

Unlike the first generation of black immigrants, the post-1965 wave is much more diverse in terms of both country of origin and type. In addition to the 1,393,000 newcomers from the Caribbean (primarily Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago), in 2000 there were nearly 600,000 African immigrants living in the United States. (Notably, there is no consensus in the scholarship about how to count black immigrants. The U.S. Census and the Immigration and Naturalization Service report the foreign-born by place of birth. Because not all African immigrants are black—consider the case of Egyptians or South Africans—and a considerable number of Latin American immigrants—from Cuba or Puerto Rico, for instance—identify as black, all enumerations of the population of black immigrants are estimates. The estimates reported here are based on sample data from the U. S. Census Bureau for the foreign-born population born in all nations of the Caribbean except Cuba and Dominican Republic, eastern Africa, and western Africa.)

The end of World War II produced significant political changes in many African countries, and in some cases political instability, economic mismanagement, and civil unrest in the wake of independence triggered migration. The main sources of African immigration are Nigeria, Ghana, Cape Verde, and more recently, the Horn of Africa—including Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and the Sudan.

According to John Arthur’s Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States(2000), post-1965 migration created a brain drain from Africa— Page 566  |  Top of Articlean exodus of the educated, the professional class, and civil servants. This perspective mirrors that of earlier scholars who argued that black immigrants were more successful than native-born blacks because migrants represent a select segment of the populations of their countries of origin (Reid 1939). Across racial groups, immigrants tend to be self-selected with respect to human capital characteristics, such as education and occupational status. However, because the immigration reforms facilitated family reunification, those with relatives or contacts abroad could more easily migrate despite having lower skills and levels of education. Further, civil war and famine in northeast Africa have added a large flow of political refugees and asylum seekers to the number of voluntary migrants who come to the United States for educational and economic opportunities. The diversity of languages spoken and reasons for migrating combine to further dilute the selectivity of the contemporary wave of foreign-born blacks.

The level of geographic dispersion among black immigrants today is unique. Destinations such as Miami, New York City, and Boston continue to attract large numbers, but the residential landscape of post-1965 foreign-born blacks is decidedly metropolitan; that is, immigrant ports have expanded beyond the central cities. Rather than settling exclusively in urban areas, black immigrants have also formed communities in suburban and rural areas. African immigrants are concentrated in the Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan areas.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EXPERIENCES 

Comparison to African Americans has been a constant feature of the social scientific literature on black immigrants. Since the publication of Reid’s pioneering work in 1939, scholars have been most concerned with what the experiences of black immigrants tell us about race in the United States. One noteworthy debate concerns the relative importance of race and ethnicity in determining socioeconomic success.

As Table 1 summarizes, contemporary immigrant blacks seem to fare better than native-born blacks on a number of socioeconomic indicators (Logan 2003): They have higher education and income levels, and a substantially lower percentage are unemployed or below the poverty line. Analyses of U.S. Census data also reveal that in the metropolitan areas where they live in largest numbers, black immigrants tend to reside in neighborhoods with higher median incomes, higher education levels, and higher proportions of homeowners than do African Americans. Some researchers have used such indicators to argue that race and discrimination are no longer significant determinants of life chances.

Moreover, recent research shows that the representation of blacks with immigrant-origins at selective colleges and universities is roughly double their share in the population (Massey et al 2007). Whereas only 13 percent of all black Americans between the ages of 18–19 were either foreign-born or the children of migrants, sociologist Douglas Massey and his colleagues found that among the black college freshman entering selective institutions in 1999, 27 percent were first- or second-generation immigrants. Their research, along with previous work which suggests favoritism toward black immigrants by white employers, calls into question, not only the efficacy of affirmative action programs, but also whether black immigrants are the appropriate beneficiaries of such policies in

Table 1

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education and employment designed to ameliorate the past exclusion of native-born, African Americans.

However, beneath the apparent differences between the majority of blacks with historical origins in slavery and in the rural South and black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa is a shared experience of race-based discrimination. The relative success of foreign-born blacks is partly due to the size of the black immigrant population: Even with the current rate of growth, they comprise less than 1 percent of the total population of the United States and only 6 percent of the non-Hispanic black population. For this reason, it is important to note how black immigrants are doing relative to whites and other immigrants. Compared to Asian immigrants, for instance, foreign-born blacks have appreciably lower median household incomes ($42,000 compared to $62,500), higher rates of unemployment (6.5% and 5.8%, respectively), and a larger proportion living in poverty (15.9% compared to 12.7%). Moreover, black immigrants, like African Americans, are highly segregated from whites; and regardless of nativity, non-Hispanic blacks live in worse neighborhoods than do non-Hispanic whites. With respect to academic achievement on college campuses, black students of all backgrounds do not perform as well as whites with similar characteristics. So far, the empirical evidence suggests that institutional and societal processes have a differential effect on black immigrants, compared to native-born blacks, not that there are discernible cultural differences at work. As Mary Waters concluded in Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities(1998), race still shapes everyday life for black immigrants and their offspring.

THE FUTURE FOR BLACK IMMIGRANTS 

Black immigrant communities will continue to be part of the U.S. ethnic mosaic. Contemporary black immigrants encounter a U.S. context that is more diverse, with considerably more recognition of the diverse national origins of blacks than ever before. According to Philip Kasinitz (1992), the racial structure of the United States prevented cultural self-determination and self-representation among black immigrants for most of the twentieth century. Within the black community, attempts by black immigrants to distinguish themselves from the native-born were considered divisive and ethnocentric. Today, the larger numbers of black immigrants, the uninterrupted flow of newcomers, and the new U.S. context have created a space for the consolidation of distinct black ethnic communities, subjectivities, and social identities.

SEE ALSO Blackness ; Caribbean, The ; Discrimination, Racial ; Immigrants to North America ; Marginalization ; Migration ; Mobility ; Mobility, Lateral ; Model Minority ; Race ; Racism

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Arthur, John A. 2000. Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Bryce-Laporte, Roy S. 1972. Black Immigrants: The Experience of Invisibility and Inequality. Journal of Black Studies 3: 29–56.

Davis, F. James. 1991. Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Kasinitz, Philip. 1992. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Logan, John. 2003. America’s Newcomers. Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research. University at Albany, State University of New York. http://mumford.albany.edu/census/NewComersReport/NewComer01.htm .

Massey, Douglas, Margarita Mooney, Kimberly Torres, and Camille Z. Charles. 2007. Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States. American Journal of Education 113: 243–271.

Reid, Ira D. A. 1939. The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937. New York: Columbia University Press.

Waters, Mary C. 1998. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Regine O. Jackson

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

"Immigrants, Black." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 3, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 564-567. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3045301082/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=132c9635. Accessed 26 June 2019.

Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3045301082

 Environmental Sociology

Riley E. Dunlap

Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy. Ed. J. Baird Callicott and Robert Frodeman. Vol. 1. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2009. p395-396.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning

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Environmental sociology emerged as a field of study in the 1970s in response to widespread societal awareness of environmental problems and the resulting social mobilization on behalf of environmental protection. Early sociological analyses focused on the rise of environmental degradation as a social problem, including the origins, composition, and activities of the environmental movement; the levels and social bases of public support for environmental protection; and the dynamics of governmental policy making. These efforts involved applying traditional sociological perspectives (e.g., social movements theory) to environmental issues and constituted a “sociology of environmental issues.”

The energy crisis of 1973–1974 reinforced escalating claims of “limits to growth” and stimulated a new dimension in sociological work on environmental topics. The increased salience of resource-based limits to growth, along with rapidly mounting evidence of the seriousness of environmental pollution, led some sociologists to examine the relationships between modern industrial societies and their physical environments. Concern with how modern societies were affecting their environments and with how these societies could in turn be affected by changing environmental conditions (from polluted communities to resource shortages) stimulated analyses of societal-environmental relations and heightened recognition of the need for a true “environmental sociology.” Sociological examinations of societal-environmental relations, however, involved a major deviation from disciplinary norms.

Sociology became a distinct discipline about a century ago and subsequently evolved during an era of resource abundance, technological progress, and economic growth. As a result, sociology became grounded in a cultural worldview that assumed that scientific and technological developments had freed industrial societies from ecological limits and that environmental factors were no longer relevant for understanding social change. This assumption was reinforced by negative reactions to earlier excesses of “environmental determinism,” such as geographers' efforts to explain cultural differences via climatic variation. Consequently, mainstream sociology came to ignore the physical environment. For sociologists “the environment” typically signified the social context of the phenomenon being studied.

Sociological interest in the societal impacts of energy shortages and the long-term implications of limits-to-growth thus represented a significant disciplinary development. Work on these topics was quickly supplemented by research on the social impacts of toxic contamination and other forms of pollution, as well as examinations of the societal factors that contribute to environmental degradation and excessive resource use. By the 1980s increasing numbers of sociologists were analyzing the societal causes and effects of environmental problems, and environmental sociology was well established as a distinct area of specialization despite its departure from disciplinary norms.

Because inequality is a core sociological concern, it is not surprising that environmental sociologists emphasize the equity dimensions of environmental problems: the unequal contributions of different sectors of society to environmental degradation and the inequitable impacts of such degradation on different social strata. Evidence that lower socioeconomic strata and minority groups often experience disproportionate exposure to environmental contamination has led to environmental justice becoming a major focus of environmental sociology, encompassing analyses of the “EJ Movement” that has arisen in response to these inequities. Increasing attention is being given to the international dimension of environmental inequality, with numerous studies examining the unequal contributions of rich and poor nations to global environmental degradation and the inequitable burden the resulting impacts are likely to have on poor nations.

Although empirical research on societal-environmental relations has increased dramatically, often in the form of highly quantitative studies, analyses of the factors influencing societal awareness of environmental problems and actions designed to ameliorate them remain popular among environmental sociologists. Continuing work on public opinion, mobilization of environmental activism, and policy making has been supplemented by studies of the use of scientific information by environmental advocates in framing their claims for media and public consumption. Studies investigating the bases of support, ideologies, and tactics of antienvironmental interests are also becoming more common.

Analyses of the social construction of environmental problems were revitalized by the popularity of postmodern approaches in sociology in the 1990s. Efforts to “deconstruct” climate change and other problems stimulated a

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vigorous debate between proponents of established realist and newer constructivist approaches. Realists argued that deconstructing the concept of nature, an obvious human construction, fails to challenge the reality of human-induced changes in ecosystems that cause problems for human societies. Constructivists responded that they were not denying the “reality” of environmental problems in their efforts to problematize environmental claims and knowledge, whereas realists acknowledged the role of social processes in transforming environmental conditions into “problems.” Consequently, the debate has subsided.

There is continuing examination of the processes by which various conditions are constructed as problematic, including analyses of the claims and tactics used by both promoters and deniers of problems such as global climate change. Besides analyzing the competing discourses of the two camps and their relative success in gaining media and public attention, environmental sociologists continue to rely on traditional approaches such as surveys of the public and relevant interest groups in order to understand societal attention to environmental issues. Using both original and secondary survey data, sociologists have tracked trends in public concern about environmental problems and the distribution of such concern across various sectors of society. Along with other behavioral scientists, sociologists have contributed to the conceptualization and measurement of “environmental concern,” as well as to theoretical models designed to predict pro-environmental behaviors (including environmental activism) based on a combination of social-structural and social-psychological variables.

While attempts to measure endorsement of an environmental ethic by means of survey research are rare, recent efforts to identify the value bases of environmental concern have examined the relative impact of biospheric, altruistic, and egoistic values. Since there is a loose correspondence between biospheric values and an environmental ethic, this work sheds light on the degree to which such an ethic is emerging among various sectors of society and seeks to understand its impact on relevant attitudes and behaviors.

In contrast to the 1970s, currently there is widespread recognition that environmental problems are “people problems” : They are caused by human behavior, are deemed problematic primarily because of their potential harm for humans (and other species), and collective human action is required for solving them. Environmental sociology has made major progress in understanding these crucial issues, and this knowledge is relevant for other disciplines and policy-makers interested in environmental issues.

SEE ALSO Energy ; Environmental Activism ; Environmental Justice ; Limits to Growth ; Social Constructivism .

Dietz, Thomas; Amy Fitzgerald; and Rachael Shwom. 2005. “Environmental Values.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30: 335–372.

Dunlap, Riley E, and Robert Emmet Jones. 2002. “Environmental Concern: Conceptual and Measurement Issues.” In Handbook of Environmental Sociology, ed. Riley E. Dunlap and William Michelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Dunlap, Riley E., and Brent K. Marshall. 2007. “Environmental Sociology.” In 21st-Century Sociology: A Reference Handbook, ed. Clifton D. Bryant and Dennis L. Peck. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Harper, Charles L. 2008. Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall.

Pellow, David Naguib, and Robert J. Brulle, eds. 2005. Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Riley E. Dunlap

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

Dunlap, Riley E. "Environmental Sociology." Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Robert Frodeman, vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2009, pp. 395-396. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3234100123/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=6687f359. Accessed 26 June 2019.

Suburbs

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr.. Vol. 8. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. p210-212.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

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Suburbs

• BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Every true suburb is the outcome of two opposing forces, an attraction toward the opportunities of the great city and a simultaneous repulsion against urban life” (Fishman 1987, p. 26). Though suburbs are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as any territory within a metropolitan area yet outside of the central city, the formation of suburbs is not simply based on geographic location. Suburbs are largely the product of people’s desire for separation based on social factors. These factors vary between instances of suburb formation, but frequently include separation of class, religious, cultural, ethnic, or racial groups. The traditional pattern of white populations and wealth found in U.S. suburbs is not mirrored internationally, although the common feature of suburbs around the world is separation of populations. For instance, the suburbs of Mumbai, India, house many of the city’s poor, while in Paris the suburbs are ethnically stratified, with suburban ethnic minority populations suffering from high rates of unemployment and other forms of discrimination.

The early suburbs of London, as well as several in the United States, were built around the separation of different economic classes. During the eighteenth century, wealthy business owners in London began to use landholdings around Westminster as a way to avoid the lower classes within urban areas. A century later, the same happened in the United States around the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Suburbs such as these, based on class separation, can best be described as bourgeois enclaves. Here the wealthy could establish communities that reflected their own values and beliefs (Fishman 1987).

The formation of middle-class suburbs in the United States beginning in the early twentieth century and expanding rapidly after World War II (1939–1945) is the result of a number of factors. A strong economy at the beginning of the century made the suburban lifestyle more accessible to many Americans. The development of lower-cost homogenized housing, such as the Sears Catalog home, made purchasing a house a realistic prospect for the middle class. In the 1920s, U.S. suburban growth surpassed urban growth for the first time (Weeks 1981). Economic factors during the Great Depression caused the growth of suburbs to decline drastically. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, suburban growth rates resurged and reached their highest levels (Rothblatt and Garr 1986). This resurgence is frequently attributed to strong economic growth and social programs like the GI Bill that provided opportunities to service members after the war.

In 1947 construction began on Levittown on Long Island, New York, a project considered the start of the middle-class suburban revolution in America. The rapid expansion of the freeway system during the early 1950s made possible the development of many similar communities, as is evident in the expansion of freeways and homes in the Los Angeles area (Fishman 1987; Weeks 1981). Levittownhas since become a term used to describe various social problems accompanying the formation of suburbs, including white flight, cultural wasteland, and separate spheres of family and economic life (Keller 1998).

Home ownership, achieved through the development of suburbs, is the most important factor of wealth accumulation in American society. While economic factors played a significant role in the formation of suburbs, they do not explain why middle-class Americans felt the need to escape urban areas that had previously been acceptable to them. In fact, economic factors have helped constrain suburban growth that has been driven by other factors, such as race. Prior to the twentieth century, there had been a relatively small African American population in U.S. cities. However, the migration of African Americansfrom rural areas in the early twentieth century brought significant white resistance and a push for racially segregated housing areas (Massey and Denton 1998). White flight, the mass migration of whites out of the cities, was hindered by economic factors during the Great Depression. Following World War II, however, the movement of whites to the peripheral areas around cities, coupled with social and institutional policies of racially restrictive housing, resulted in high degrees of racial segregation. White flight became a major factor in school desegregation policy; in the mid-1970s a debate arose over whether busing for the purpose of school desegregation would lead to increases in white flight.

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School desegregation has had numerous effects on the formation and structure of America’s suburbs. In the midst of the period of white flight, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) led to the integration of many schools in neighborhoods that had previously been white enclaves. A number of measures were taken by white communities and conservative local and state governments to resist school integration. School busing during the 1960s and 1970s became a strongly debated issue, and residents of suburbs found they could maintain racial segregation of schools more effectively than had been possible in inner-city areas. Due to the effectiveness of suburbs as residential enclaves, white residents could gerrymander school districts in order to halt integration (James 1989). By the late 1970s, school busing had become a less pressing issue (Woodard 1998). While affirmative action policies remained in effect, opposition to such policies rose during the 1980s with the idea that the United States had transcended racial issues. As a result, there has been an increase in school segregation in suburban areas since 1989 (Reardon et al. 2000). In addition, policies still in place to aid school integration are being challenged throughout the country, despite the fact that public schools remain heavily segregated. In 2006 the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases regarding school integration policies that some parents considered discriminatory. Cases from Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky, reviewed whether public schools can take race into consideration in campus assignments in order to achieve racial integration. In a 5–4 decision the Court declared that schools attempting to achieve or maintain racial integration cannot do so by measures that take explicit account of the students’ race (Greenhouse 2007).

Despite the passage in 1968 of the Fair Housing Act, little progress has been made toward racial integration of suburbs (Orser 1998). The Fair Housing Act prohibited owners, real-estate agents, and renters from denying access to housing on the basis of race. The act also outlawed lying about the availability of a dwelling, and prevented blockbusting (telling white residents that minorities are moving into a neighborhood in an effort to convince them to sell) (Sidney 2003). As of 1990, only 20 percent of Americans lived in desegregated neighborhoods (Darden 1998). Housing segregation between whites and Hispanics, as well as between whites and Asians, has risen since 1980. However, studies have shown that suburbanization is tied to socioeconomic status among Hispanics and Asians, but suburbs have remained mostly closed to blacks whatever their socioeconomic status (Darden 1998). Housing discrimination has also contributed to higher levels of poverty, a lower average income, and lower life chances for those trapped in declining inner-city neighborhoods.

One result of the formation of suburbs was that people who were left behind in urban neighborhoods were forced to deal with urban decay brought about by the flight of millions out of the cities. Buildings were left empty, and businesses were forced to close and move to more profitable areas. Resources previously available within cities were shifted to peripheral areas as suburbs grew. The 1949 Housing Act was designed to facilitate redevelopment in areas that had been affected by urban decay; this process came to be known as urban renewal . The act sparked a debate over how to handle such renewal. Federal subsides were given to private developers in order to generate new business within urban areas. But development was centered heavily around the interests of those in suburban areas, and little attention was paid to the needs of those living within urban areas. In addition, most urban development took place in residential areas, forcing many out of their homes. Eventually, a compromise was reached, and developers were required to find alternative housing for those displaced by urban renewal (Hays 1995). Urban-renewal plans have consistently favored the interests of the suburbs. As far back as 1766 an urban-renewal plan for London was designed around the needs of business owners with little regard for workers and lower-class citizens (Fishman 1987). Today, urban renewal still often functions in the interests of suburban residents over the poor and minorities who remain in inner cities.

From 1970 to 1990, the number of high-poverty metropolitan areas doubled; these areas are more likely to be home to traditionally disadvantaged minorities (Sidney 2003). American suburbs formed out of a desire for racial segregation. In the twenty-first century, continuing housing discrimination in America’s suburbs leads to a continuation of racial segregation with increases in economic stratification.

SEE ALSO Segregation, Residential ; Sociology, Urban ; Towns

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Barnes, Robert. 2006. Supreme Court to Review Tw o School Integration Plans. Washington Post,December 3: A3.

Darden, Joe T. 1998. Desegregation of Housing. In Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs, ed. Neil Larry Shumsky, 247–249. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Fishman, Robert. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias the Rise and Fall of Suburbia . New York: Basic Books.

Greenhouse, Linda. 2007. Justices Limit the Use of Race in School Plans for Integration. New York Times, June 29.

Hays, R. Allen. 1995. The Federal Government and Urban Housing: Ideology and Change in Public Policy . 2nd ed. Albany: State University of New York Press.

James, David R. 1989. City Limits on Racial Equality: The Effects of City-Suburb Boundaries on Public-School Page 212  |  Top of ArticleDesegregation, 1968–1976. American Sociological Review 54 (6): 963–985.

Keller, Mollie. 1998. Levittown. In Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs, ed. Neil Larry Shumsky, 431–432. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Orser, W. Edward. 1998. White Flight. In Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs, ed. Neil Larry Shumsky, 877–878. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Reardon, Sean F., John T. Yun, and Tamela Mcnulty Eitle. 2000. The Changing Structure of School Segregation: Measurement and Evidence of Multiracial Metropolitan-Area School Segregation, 1989–1995. Demography 37 (3): 351–364.

Rothblatt, Donald N., and Daniel J. Garr. 1986. Suburbia an International Assessment . New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Sidney, Mara S. 2003. Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Weeks, John R. 1981. Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues . 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Thomason Wadsworth. 9th ed., 2005.

Woodard, J. David. 1998. Busing. In Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs, ed. Neil Larry Shumsky, 113–114. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Ben Snyder

Paul Ketchum

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) 

"Suburbs." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 8, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 210-212. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3045302661/GVRL?u=umd_umuc&sid=GVRL&xid=92689ee5. Accessed 26 June 2019.

Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3045302661