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New Meanings of Community in the Metropolitan Context
New Meanings of Community in the Metropolitan Context
Pages 47-66
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From page 47... ...
Similarly, the population and its interests become more diverse. The effective daily environment for more and more urban people is the metropolitan macrocommunity.
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From page 48... ...
In Western societies, that is most likely because of the numerous economic opportunities offered in cities and their position on transportation paths. These features attract diverse people and activities.
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From page 49... ...
For this dispersed population, the concentrated Italian colonies functioned as a cultural center where they could visit, buy ethnic goods, and maintain cultural, connections. Many areas of the metropolis -- for example, Chicago's Chinatown -- continue to function as an initial settlement point for migrants and immigrants but also serve a much wider population.
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From page 50... ...
Personal Relationships Certain types of social interaction are presumed to be more frequent in urban settings. The long-standing distinction between primary 50 TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF METROPOLITAN AMERICA
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From page 51... ...
Urban life offers a large number of potential secondary relationships in addition to, rather than in substitution for, primary ones. One effect of urban people's mobility and wider range of social interaction may be that they are less strange to one another than is commonly believed.
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From page 52... ...
While the average crime rate is lower in the suburbs than in the city, it is increasing in the former at a more rapid rate. Criminals, like other urban people, are becoming increasingly mobile, and attempts to deal effectively with urban crime will have to be made at the metropolitan level, not by fragmented local governments.
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From page 53... ...
We do not know to what extent people actually spend time in crowds, but the real picture can be nowhere near the stereotypic image. The assumption behind much of the current literature on urban life -- that city people spend a significant part of their lives crowded -- is questionable.
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From page 54... ...
There is very little support, however, for the theory that city life impairs mental functioning in ways that can be termed psychiatric disorders. CITY-SUBURBAN DIFFERENCES IN BEHAVIOR City and suburban residents who are otherwise similar probably have the same degree of personal involvement in their respective communities.
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From page 55... ...
For example, when suburbs are compared to the large urban residential areas beyond the downtown and inner districts, culture and social structure are virtually the same among people of similar age and class. Young lower middle class families in these areas live much like their peers in the suburbs, but quite unlike older, upper middle class ones, in either urban or suburban neighborhoods.
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From page 56... ...
Inner-city residential areas are home to the rich, the poor, and the nonwhite, as well as the unmarried and the childless middle class. Their ways of life differ from those of suburbanites and people in the outer city, but because they are not young working or lower or upper middle class families.
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From page 57... ...
Residential environment is another factor, although its boundaries are often uncertain in the minds of the occupants. Residential satisfaction is affected, for example, by the public services provided by local governments.
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From page 58... ...
(The attributes included public schools, police protection, parks and playgrounds, garbage collection, police-community relations, public transportation, streets and roads, and taxation.) Site Design One of the paradoxes of the expansion of urban life is that as the residential neighborhood has waned as a social unit, it has gained 58 TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF METROPOLITAN AMERICA
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From page 59... ...
Moreover, it has been asserted that the neighborhood unit tended to crystallize or worsen existing patterns of segregation. In recent years, a few private builders who seek to construct total communities rather than merely subdivisions of marketable homes have set new directions in urban planning.
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From page 60... ...
Recently, there have been efforts to assess the relationship between various degrees of site planning and resident satisfaction with the community. Levels of resident satisfaction in self-contained new towns, redeveloped central city neighborhoods, and sections of incorporated suburban communities have been compared in relation to the extent of planning.
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From page 61... ...
This may help to explain why, although there is a tendency for higher levels of satisfaction to be associated with a higher degree of residential planning, no clear patterns of liked or disliked attributes are associated with different levels of planning. Moreover, studies of the quality of life indicate residential satisfaction is partially based on assessments of such nonsite attributes as public schools, police-community relations, and local taxes.
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From page 62... ...
Similar, though less striking, differences may occur among groups within a nation. A recent comparison of satisfaction levels of black and white respondents in 15 cities in the United States found that the blacks generally expressed considerably less satisfaction with their situation than did whites (Campbell, 1971)
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From page 63... ...
convenience. Multivariate analysis using both objective measures and respondent assessments leads to the conclusion that the explanatory power of the objective indicators relative to neighborhood satisfaction is modified by the intervention of subjective factors; the assessments of specific neighborhood characteristics reflect the objective characteristics, and the specific assessments in turn affect the level of expressed satisfaction with the neighborhood as a whole.
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From page 64... ...
UNDIFFERENTIATED LIVING SPACE Some people do not seem to differentiate much between their microneighborhoods, consisting of the houses in the immediate vicinities of their dwellings, and the macroneighborhood, by which is often meant grade school districts or areas bounded by major thoroughfares. Indeed, the various residential environments -- microneighborhood, macroneighborhood, metropolitan area -- may simply represent a set of interacting domains that comprise an individual's life space.
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From page 65... ...
Whether residence is in the city or the suburbs does not affect behavior, although socioeconomic differences that are likely to exist between city and suburb do exert an influence. In the metropolitan context, many factors influence people's evaluations of their residential environments.
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