Main Features of Urban Life

Introduction
Formality and Impersonality of Human Relationships
Rationality
Secularism
Increased Specialisation and Division of Labour
Decline in the Functions of Family

Introduction

A careful examination of the dominant features of urban life shows that there are significant differences between people living in cities and those living in rural areas. Louis Wirth (1938: 1-24) has described the main features of urban life. The urban values discussed by Louis Wirth and other sociologists in their urban planning studies in Western countries are not yet fully predominant in India. We can say that they are starting to take root in Indian cities. Therefore, in the Indian context, the following description is not entirely relevant. It is given here to familiarize you with the following characteristics generally associated with city life. Another goal is to inspire you to find out for yourself how well you can observe these characteristics in Indian city life.

Formality and Impersonality of Human Relationships

Large urban areas prevent intimate, face-to-face contact between all community members. In urban communities, people interact for limited, specialized purposes, such as teachers and students in a classroom, buyers and sellers in a store, and doctors and patients in clinics. City dwellers usually don't know themselves as "whole people", i.e. they usually don't deal with all aspects of a person's life. Aside from their relatives and friends, they do not normally interact with others except for limited or specialized purposes. This characteristic between citizens translates into formal, impersonal, superficial, transient, segmental and secondary contacts. This is in contrast to the primary contacts of people in villages who have personal, face-to-face, intimate and long-term relationships with each other.

Rationality

With the impersonal nature of urban relationships, urban orientations tend to be utilitarian. That is, people then enter into relationships after calculating the potential gains from these associations, rather than for the intrinsic gratification of the association. The relationships here are usually contractual in nature, where gains and losses are carefully weighed. Once the contract is over, the relationship between the people usually ends, e.g. B. hiring the services of a registered nurse for a sick person, or contracting with an agency to promote your product, etc. However, this should not give the impression that all relationships between individuals in urban settings are purely utilitarian. There is always a wide range of variation in individual relationships. We indicate here only the general character of urban relations.

Secularism

The heterogeneity of the physical, racial, social and cultural elements of urban life means that one is regularly exposed to different lifestyles and values. People become more tolerant of difference as they get used to seeing others very differently from themselves. This rational and tolerant attitude produces secular orientations in life. Although concepts such as rationality and secularism are very difficult to measure, it is believed that secular orientations, as opposed to religious orientations, were often associated with the urban social fabric. However, this trait is not always present, as Indian cities are more likely to experience communal unrest than rural areas. But in general, relatively speaking, one can say that secular values are associated with urban areas.

Increased Specialisation and Division of Labour

Population growth leads to a higher ratio of people to land, called "material density" by Emile Durkheim. He distinguished two types of density, namely
(i) material density, i.e. the simple relationship between people and land, and
(ii) dynamic or moral density, i.e. the speed of interaction or communication within a population.

In his theory of social development, Durkheim viewed tribes or families as the basic social units in pre-industrial or pre-urban societies. As they grow larger, both their material and dynamic density increase simultaneously. This results in greater interaction between previously separate social units. Trade and inter-unit trade serve as a stimulus to the division of labor. In other words, when similar but separate social units are merged into a larger and denser colony through increased interaction, the new and larger units exhibit greater specialization in terms of division of labor than some of the units. previously separated.

Decline in the Functions of Family

Many of the educational, recreational and other functions performed within a rural community family setting are taken over by other institutions such as schools, clubs and other voluntary organizations in the urban social setting. In urban society there is generally a clear demarcation between home and workplace, which is not always found in rural society. Consequently, on a psychological level, the identity of city dwellers is not necessarily linked to their family roles. And also because of the greater geographical mobility, regular contact between relatives in these families is often difficult, if not impossible. However, this does not mean that families are not vital in urban societies.

Now that we have discussed the general characteristics of urban social structure, it is not out of place to mention that the dichotomy used by many Western scholars to point out the contrasts between rural and urban is of little value for understanding urban social structure in India. Many studies completed in the 1950s and 1960s questioned the usual assumptions that the process of urbanization led to a decline in family size, a weakening of family ties, especially the joint family, and the secularization of castes and values. deeply rooted in Indian culture. We will now discuss these issues in the next section, which deals with the organizational and socio-cultural aspects of urban communities in India.