You are on page 1of 14

Urban Sociology

Iuliana Farcas , 20168022

Teacher: Maria Manuela Mendes

Lisbon, 9.12.2016
Aims :

-To study the social relations between people reffering to different types of living, communities;

-The link between types of living- cultural values- economics of the society, now and then;

-How an idea can be integrated into the city, creating or not creating an impact on the people.

Research question:

- Can the society be improved by the habitation itself ? Can urbanists help with the develop of
the social relations between people?

Methodology:

-Articles and books related with the idea of community;

-Internet;

-Study cases;
Habitation as a social phenomenon

Abstract : The urban inhabitation is the result of the socio-economical complex functions
at the individual and collective level which occur in the city territory. The urban quality consists
in the comfort degree of the city population, higher than the exterior of the city, this being the
result of the endowments (technical, socio-cultural) for the satisfaction of the preferences and the
aspirations of the community members. Therefore, the inhabitation problems arent only a
functional and utilitarian character, but a social and political marked character.

Keywords : community, inhabitation, policy, diversity, evolution.


Introduction

The house linked the man to the space, always and everywhere, transforming the place
of living in habitation, and the house in home, and the animal in Human being. Home is not an
exterior space; it is an interior place, a place inside our beliefs. Tell me how you live and I am
going to tell you who you are!- (Vintila Mihailescu-Locuire,urban,oras)

The most important element in the human existence is the way of living. Inhabitation
represents the process of complex cohabitation in cities, and the relations between the human and
the nature. It is the fundamental factor for harmony, social durability and for the quality of life,
being the key element of the evolving of the human settlements.

The phenomenon of habitation is not defined only by his spatial and technological
dimension. It is the product of complex relations that are social, economical , cultural, all of them
circumscribed to historic coordinates that are in relation with the territory.

A structured analyse of habitation must take into consideration the social, political,
administrative and legislative circumstances, the elements of the psicho-sociological context, the
conceptual circumstance, defined by the cultural models already existing at a moment in history,
or also in the field of the material manifestation in the habitation.

The quality of habitation is determined by all of this factors, the results being analyzed in
sociological plan.

If we talk about the urban habitation (habitation in the city) we can say that the urban
quality consists in the amount of comfort that is used by the inhabitants, more high than in the
rest of the territory, being the result of the complex equipment degree of this settlements.

The urban habitation is different from the rural habitation by integration in the urban
functional structures, at the level of the unity of habitation itself but also in the residential
assembly; the houses (apartments), the equipment, and the developments that are part of this
residential field are in dynamic and interdependent relations with the systems of the economical,
psiho-social, institutional and cultural structures of the city.

Habitation presuppose also the link between houses, technical equipment, and social-
cultural field, all of this being used as an exclusive purpose of satisfying the preferences and the
aspirations of the community members.

So that being said, the problems of the habitation, dont have anymore just an utilitarian
and functional purpose, but also a pronounced social and political character.

The way of living is not statical, but it is in a continuous transformation. The principal
factor of habitation is the subject of the habitation, respectivly the human.
The human habitation is in close relationship with the natural environment. It can be said
that, on the surface, the living is simple; in fact it is complex creating strong relations with the
nature. When the habitation is united inseparably with the environment, it tries to balance the
comfort conditions, it is searching for the same path with the ones of the environmental
development.

In the vocabulary of the social scientist and the social worker there must be few words
used with either the frequency or looseness of the community. It is one of those terms which,
as Le Bon said, are uttered with solemnity, and as soon as they are pronounced an expression of
respect is visible on every countenance, and all heads are bowed. The following uses of the term
can be distinguished, though they are not mutually exclusive.

The community may denote merely the houses and people located in given area, even
where there are few relationships of any kind, whether institutionalized or informal, manifest or
latent.

Habitation a psychological perspective

The human condition, as well as the entire living world, is interdependent. This implies
that the world and its components are presented as a system of connections, forming a coherent
whole unit. In the broader interdependencies, interaction appears as one of the forms of the latter.

It is in its essence the link between objects and phenomena, manifested through a mutual
influence. Interactions designates forms of synergy of actions that may occur at different
functional levels. We are talking about coaction and social interaction. It refers to reciprocity
mechanisms established in the course of certain processes.

Regarding the human being, it involves interactions with the environment or life in all its
bio-psycho manifestation levels. The effects of this interaction can be positive or negative. The
environment of an individual or living space includes the physical, natural and social
environment.

Social interaction, a basic behavior is a fundamental process by which individuals in


contact change their behavior toward each other, temporary or for a long period, through
continuous mutual stimulation. For AN Leontiev, social interaction appears as a network of
activities generated by the group in which the individual develops and is organized. Human
beings develop and organize themselves in groups, their behaviors are carried out in collective
situations, in contact with objects that have social significance.

Habitat and housing are two concepts that permeate rapidly in environmental psychology
research topics. Habitat, a biological term has several meanings: residential area where there is a
uniform complexity of social life and biological conditions in which an individual or group will
adapt; assembly of forms, characteristics related to human residence, natural and artificial
conditions in which the human habitates; conditions that refer to human habitation.
Despite its ambiguity, the term habitat describes discussions towards housing and the
human need of habitation. The habitat becomes a series of natural and artificial conditions in
which the events, are related to individual and community habitation.

Housing has both an objective and a subjective dimension. The subjective dimension
gives additional determinations, as human living experience, as the subjective reflection of
objective environment. As a human experience, housing is not a passive reflection of a
continuous mode and spatial transformation in which the existence of the individual, the
community, the ongoing business of processing and creation, storage, use and passing on values
take place.

When living ceases to have that purpose, the experience degrades and becomes survival,
biological inertia of basic vital functions. Therefore, in such conditions, housing becomes a safe
place, depersonalized living space, as do many of psychiatric hospitals, detention centers,
shelters for people of different ages and so on, when its devoid of permanent intent, materialized
or not, in an act of planning and modeling living space.

Housing can be defined as human location with both objective and subjective
dimensions relatively stable in natural space, designed to meet the material and spiritual needs of
man, considered as an individual or as a community.

Preocupation in what concerns the planning, redevelopment, organization, structure,


spatial modeling based on human needs, with also an important architectural role lies in
environment psychology in relation with designing human, economic and social assemblies.

The housing unit, HOME , can be defined as a set of areas for protection and human
existence development; family is the most important element and it facilitates its relations with
all social relations and activities designed to meet housing programs. A home is both a living
space and a shelter. It describes the best the human situation.
We can understand the human settlements as ways of organizing and fitting populations
assemblies structured according to specific criteria as the one of age, sex, nationality, etc.
Housing has different implication for inter-human relations and influence individual and
collective behavior in social groups.
The house is not a purely objective given, a space in itself, but at the same time a space
for us, meaning that the living environment emanates evocative effects pushing emotional
nature beyond teleological conditioning contained in itself.
Classical vision of the community

The most provoking question raised by social sciences remains probably this: what
determines people to make actions in common, why they are systematically going together to
realize something, but also why, after all of this, they are falling apart? In other words, what
gives power to the social creativity of the people, in that way that they are capable to group in
different ways, guiding themselves by a lot of fundamentals and ideals? But, a thing is sure: the
humanity has always carried with her the instinct of the community, of association and living in
community.

Comradery and society can be bad or good, but community is not one of them. The
community seems to be always something good! (Zygmunt Baumann ;Comunitatea cutarea
siguranei ntr-o lume nesigur)

Different ways of living - The difference between urban and rural

The community as a spatial unit where tradition, family, and religion structures the
existence, and the society, commanded by impersonal and detached relations. A distinction to
which another is superposed: the urban (the mechanical) and the rural (the organic).

While the rural life is seen as an natural system, the urban settlements are frozen,
deprived of the chance to evolve. The logic, stated by Vicenzo Ruggiero, is the following:
Organisms evolve, while machines can only break down . In other words, he makes a clear
distinction between organic and mechanical. The same author remarks that the interpretations of
the classical writings belonging to Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel tend to accentuate the
bipolar distinctions between urban life and rural life, or between simple societies and complex
societies.

In this context, the urban existence appears to be conceptualized as the embodiment of


personal interest and more over of the
irremediably solitariness.

The Community (Gemeinschaft) is much powerful in the rural medium, which represents,
in Tonniess point of view a strong and intelligent form of living together , but in the same
time Society (Gesellschaft), specific to urban existence is transitory and superficial, remaining,
as it has been said, an mechanical aggregate.

It is very clear that these theories understand the modernity as a breach, and Tonnies is
the one who starts more of this kind of theories. The two big achievements of the modernity are
industrialization but also the sentiment of misplacement of the traditional communities and
pushing away the people from the natural links that are specific for a human being. In his book
Community, the searching for security in an insecure world , Baumann remakes the path of
that break. In his vision, the industrial revolution takes out in a forced way the mass of people
from the old and rigid customs, meaning the one of the community interactions ruled by the
custom, so that it can be placed into a new and rigid routine, the one from the job in a factory,
ruled by duty.

In the name of setting free the human from the mass inertia, the power of the local
communities has been gradually expelled, and the people have been agglomerated under other
force: the working force. For this purpose, how the author says, the old routines were not good-
were too autonomous, leaded by their own tacitly and negotiable logic and too resistant to
manipulation and change, because too many human interactions were connected in every act,
and to change one, you needed to budge or to break a lot more ().

Max Weber, mentioned by Baumann, consider that the constituent act of capitalism is
marked by the separation of the establishments affairs. Once separated, the producers from their
own means of production, the work is also emptied by its anterior meaning. The work rhythms
controlled by nature are replaced by the austere monitoring of the tasks in factories, while the
smith instinct (named like this by Thorstein Veblen), meaning a natural bend toward work
and disgust over the futile effort, becomes annihilated by the routine. And when all of this are
installed irremediable, the break of the community network and of old work rhythms becomes
irreversible.

On his turn, Max Weber contests the association of a community with a period of time
from the history of peoples social organization. The mechanism of his thinking postulate the
idea as a community has nothing to do neither with the proximity, nor with coexistence, but more
with a sentiment of being part of something. The people are the ones who give a symbol to a
community, and not necessary a closeness, a blood relation or a coexistence. This, in the
absence of a characteristic sentiment, doesnt form necessary communities. Also Max Weber is
the one who introduced the term to comunitize (to form a community). So, we observe that the
community is seen as a process. A group of people can make a community, but also, in the same
time they can undo it. So, as a conclusion, we see that the ideas of making a community, have
existed and will exist always and forever.

In what consist the modern society, the modern times, we can see that the world today is
the world of mobile capital, of transnational companies, of digital technology, of virtual
environment. Is the world presented by some as a global village meaning a huge human
collectivity, from which, unfortunately, doesnt disappear the borders and also the inequalities. A
society of risk raised at the degree of principle, or Risikogesellschaft, how Ulrich Beck, teacher
at School of Economics fom London, has named it, and in which, as Zygmunt Baumann
observes, three authorities command: the authority of numbers, of experts, and of celebrities.

Other types of contemporary communities, that Baumann observed , are the closed
communities, well guarded and with electronic surveillance, meaning residential zones, of
which the most important effects are division, segregation, and keeping distance, the virtues
that appear the most in the booklets of community zones presentation.

The right to difference but also to indifference to one to each other has been observed
also by Baumann: When mutual tolerance is joined with carelessness, the community cultures
can live one next to each other, but they are rarely talking one to the other, and if they do, they
have the tendency of using a gun instead of a phone. In a world of multiculturalism, the cultures
can coexist, but it comes hard for them to have a shared life.

The suburbs of today are the graveyards of the community. People packed separately in
boxes, the same as the products from supermarkets sold for their <<freshness>>. Having thick
walls between us and our neighbours, between friends and our families spreaded through cities
and nations, it is hard to have any kind of community, not speaking about share spaces in
common, where people can take advantage of the shared creativity. (AlieNation:The map of
Despair).

But what means community today? Apparently, the idea of community as a split
among space, time, environment, ideas, sentiments, creativity, chores is about to be disintegrated
in this times, or, at least , today it is very hard to realize or construct. The actual priorities of
people, the time that they have, but also the values that are promoted in this times, are different
than the one that is related with the idea of experimenting the community or the idea of
constructing it. The principals fears became only the one related to the personal development, or
not loosing an opportunity of evolving their one person.

Also the idea of the community is no longer staying in the spatial unity, but more in the
different social networks and structures. The individuals from the contemporary cities and
suburbs prefers a limited affiliation in multiple social networks than a full affiliation into a
physical closeness.

Ways of organizing the community and their importance

Private and public space in the community

The establishment of a social structure and corresponding physical structure with


communal spaces at various levels permits movement from small groups and spaces toward
larger ones and from the more private to the gradually more public spaces, giving a greater
feeling of security and a stronger sense of belonging to the areas outside the private residence.-
Jan Gehl, Life between buildings.

The area perceived by the individual person as being their house , can extend. This helps
in a greater use of public spaces (or semi-private spaces becoming the link between community,
between neighbours) such as parents permitting young children to play outdoors at an earlier
age than they otherwise might. This is the result of community !

Establishing residential areas so there can be a graduation between the existing outdoor
spaces (semipublic, intimate, and familiar spaces nearest the residence), can help people in the
neighbourhood to know one with each other better, and also to make the experience of outdoor
spaces as belonging to the residential area results in a greater degree of surveillance and
collective responsibility for the community and its residences.

To anssemble or disperse

How Jan Gehl explained, when we analise the types of habitation, for observing their
importance and also how the community is formed, we observe that one of the biggest factor is
the distance.

At the large scale, in city planning, there is an effective dispersal of people and events,
when residences, public services, industries and trade functions are placed separately on large
individual tracts of land in a functionally segregated city structure that is dependent on the
automobile as the means of transportation between units. Dispersal of events and people is a
phenomenom common to nearly all suburban areas worldwide, and in the sprawling city of Los
Angeles it attains its most consistent and disturbing form. Jan Gehl, Life between buildings.

In contrast to this is the city structure that consistently assembles events and people in a
clear pattern, in which the public spaces are the most important elements in the city. This city
structure can be found in nearly all old cities, and are, in most recent years again gaining a
foothold in new projects in European cities.

At a medium scale, when buildings are placed at a great distance from one to the other
with entrance areas and residences oriented away from each other , than we can observe the
phenomenom of dispersion. The pattern is common in traditional single-family housing areas
and functionalistic detached apartment blocks. In both of this cases a maximum of sidewalk and
path connections occur, with overdimensioned open areas and a consequent thinning out of
outdoor activities.

For this problems that the community is facing Jan Gehl said that if the individual
buildings and functions are placed so that the system of public spaces is as compact as possible
so that the distances for pedestrian traffic and sensory experiences are as short as possible.

This principle can be found in nearly all pre-1930 areas and in a growing number of more
recent building projects. In its simplest and most well-arranged form it can be found also in small
towns where all the buildings are assembled around a square.

One of this type of small towns is San Vittorino Romano, in east of Rome, or Tele in
Czech Republic. A modern transformation of this type of city are the Cohousing projects, or the
clusters housing projects. This type of organization is one of the oldest, and also one that kept its
values through time, showing to us that the best way to create a strong community are the small
distances between the people living in it.

Taking into consideration the way that spatial organizing can be made in the city we can
find different possibilities.

The first possibility is organizing the community around a plaza. The buildings,
entrances, are assembled around a public space and turned toward one another like people that
are engaging in the same conversation. Here the community is stronger, and with greater values.

The second one, that permits a larger number of inhabitants is the town that is a street. In
this situation the street lined with low buildings becomes the natural organizational form as a
logical consequence of the limitation of human movement and a frontally and horizontally
oriented sensory system. Having this type of organization, the people are capable with less effort,
just by walking a short period of time, to find out what is happening in their community. This
type of organization was used mainly in Scandinavian housing areas, where the town becomes a
street with houses along it.

The problems of contemporan urban habitation

The relation of the habitation with the surrounding areas.

To live in the city is most of the time an art that we need to know how to aquire. It is not
an easy thing for a lot of people to live together and to share the same urban spaces. Here we can
identify only some problems that are minor: the tension that we feel when we walk to a street in
an agitated city, the infernal sound made by cars, or the inconveniences that we meet in the
public transport.

But the urban living and using a city presents in general problematic aspects that are far
more complex than the one mentioned above. Those are consisting almost always the subject of
urban studies, articles and legislative nomination.

Some of the principal problems of living in the city today:

Precariously character . In these days, the majority of the people can be find living in
cities or in the big, over-populated urban conglomerations from the poor countries. The
habitation problem is evolving year by year: the population of the cities is rising constantly, but
is not followed by an adequate infrastructure. From this point of view the city represents a field
of conflict, of inequality, a space ordained for negotiation for territories and resources. The
house, as a vital space, a right for every living human being, becames a precious and hard to get
resource.
So this is why the settlements composed by ghettos (known by different names all over
the world : shanty towns, favelas, bustees, barriadas, poblaciones, villas miserias, bidonvilles,
kampungs) are covering more than 30 % of the urban population of the world.

Almost always, this poor settlements remains isolated and detached by the rest of the
city, not only phisiqualy but also from the sociological point of view. Apart from the
disadvantages caused by the low economical capital and the precarious way of living, the people
from the ghetto are also under-privileged in what consists the acces to the facilities offered by the
city. So, every of this things creates a mechanism of poverty, on the social plan but also on the
spatial one. The elements that charge it are: bad conditions of working, low access for good jobs,
marginalization, low of social interactions, high level of criminal records.

Habitation politics

The politics of living represents medium and long term orientations, and reflects the
social directions and demands. They consists from concomitant objectives, necessary for
accomplishing the strategy, reflecting the declared intention of the government and they are
achieved through concrete programs.

The habitation politics can be :

- Global;
- Sectorial;
- Social;
- Technology;
- Urbanistic;
- Ecological;

The politics of living are almost always influenced by the degree of stability/instability of
the economy, by the level of inflation and the level of the loan interest.

The objectives of the politics of living must be formulated taking into consideration the
following: the economical possibilities, the financial resources that can be used, the material,
technical, manpower and terrain fields resources.

This politics must take into consideration the character of the living, that of the long term
using, that is usually transmissible from a generation to the other.
Conclusions

The natural conditions have been always the elementary element in development of the
society, so also, in the development of the habitation.

The big exodus that is happening now, in our times, every weekend with the people
living in cities, and at some point also in almost every night to the places with more green spaces
(parks) and also with cleaner air it is the most evident sign that today urban living has low
performances.

In conclusion, I think that habitation along with the community is and will be the most
important key element for our development, being capable of influencing the people behavior
and so, make them better.
References:

- Romanian Journal of experimental applied psychology-


The Relation between habitation density and school adaptive social behaviors;
- Jan Gehl (2011)-Life between buildings, Using public space;
- Radu Laurian Urbanismul;
- Miruna Tirca Squatul ca nucleu social si spatiu de locuire;
- Cristina Alpopi- Urban Housing;
- Dumitrescu Diana Maria- Procesul de gentrificare in cadrul orasului Bucuresti;
- Cole, I. i Goodchild B., Social Mix and the Balanced Community in British housing
policy a tale of two epochs, 2001, GeoJournal.
- Baumann, Zygmunt, Comunitatea cutarea siguranei ntr-o lume nesigur, 2001
- http://www.crimethinc.com/library/english/alien.html

You might also like