Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
_Colonies and segregated areas._—In the city environment the
neighborhood tends to lose much of the significance which it possessed
in simpler and more primitive forms of society. The easy means of
communication and of transportation, which enable individuals to
distribute their attention and to live at the same time in several
different worlds, tend to destroy the permanency and intimacy of the
neighborhood. On the other hand, the isolation of the immigrant and
racial colonies of the so-called ghettos and areas of population
segregation tend to preserve and, where there is racial prejudice, to
intensify the intimacies and solidarity of the local and neighborhood
groups. Where individuals of the same race or of the same vocation live
together in segregated groups, neighborhood sentiment tends to fuse
together with racial antagonisms and class interests.
Physical and sentimental distances reinforce each other, and the
influences of local distribution of the population participate with the
influences of class and race in the evolution of the social
organization. Every great city has its racial colonies, like the
Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York, the Little Sicily of Chicago,
and various other less pronounced types. In addition to these, most
cities have their segregated vice districts, like that which until
recently existed in Chicago, their rendezvous for criminals of various
sorts. Every large city has its occupational suburbs, like the
Stockyards in Chicago, and its residential enclaves, like Brookline in
Boston, the so-called “Gold Coast” in Chicago, Greenwich Village in New
York, each of which has the size and the character of a complete
separate town, village, or city, except that its population is a
selected one. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of these cities within
cities, of which the most interesting characteristic is that they are
composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races
but of the same social class, is East London, with a population of
2,000,000 laborers.
The people of the original East London have now overflowed and crossed
the Lea, and spread themselves over the marshes and meadows beyond.
This population has created new towns which were formerly rural
villages, West Ham, with a population of nearly 300,000; East Ham,
with 90,000; Stratford, with its “daughters,” 150,000; and other
“hamlets” similarly overgrown. Including these new populations, we
have an aggregate of nearly two millions of people. The population is
greater than that of Berlin or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or
Philadelphia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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