Week 3: Urbanism as a Way of Life

Published in 1938, Wirth’s essay on urbanism, and the factors of size, density, and heterogeneity, is one of the foundational statements of the Chicago School of urban sociology. It is clearly influenced by Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and Robert E. Park. Like Tönnies, he views the theory of urbanism as an ideal type. Wirth’s concept of the “schizoid” urban personality, beset by “segmental roles,” is akin to Simmel’s blasé and reserved metropolitan man. Simmel felt, however, that the cosmopolitanism of city life liberated urbanites from the prejudices and provincialities of rural life. Wirth was less impressed by the positive benefits of this emancipation from primary group controls. He drew our attention to the growth of Durkheimian anomie, which consequently engendered a host of modern social problems, including crime, deviance, and various kinds of mental illness that were seen to proliferate in the city. Wirth also informed our understanding of Robert Park’s concept of the city as a “mosaic of social worlds” that increases social distance between people. He viewed this as an outcome of urban density and specialization. He was more sensitive to the practical implications of a theory of urbanism than Tönnies or Simmel, as he suggested that knowledge of the causes of urban social problems were important to apply to a range of social policy and urban planning practices.

Louis Wirth was born August 28, 1897, in Gemünden, a small village in the Rhineland district of Germany to a Jewish rural cattle farming family. He followed his maternal uncle to Omaha, Nebraska, in the United States, to take advantage of educational opportunities. He was a successful high school debater and even- tually won a scholarship to the University of Chicago. He flirted for a while with leftist anti-war causes during World War I, and then worked with delinquent boys with the Jewish Charities of Chicago after college. He obtained a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1925. His doctoral thesis on the Jewish quarter of Chicago was published as The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928). After various teach- ing posts and fellowships, he joined the Chicago faculty under the chairmanship of Robert E. Park in 1931. In The Ghetto, Wirth examined the consequences of centuries of discrimination on Jewish community life, ranging from Renaissance Italy to Chicago’s Maxwell Street. The book served as a model for the university’s researchers in ethnicity, many of whom later studied under Wirth when he joined the university’s faculty.