rise and development of urban social life

Introduction:
Urban means belonging to, or relating to, a town or city and social life means the opportunities to do enjoyable things that exist in a particular place. So, urban social life is the break to live in the urban areas or the chance to do enjoyable things in the metropolitan areas. Urban social life gives genuine focus on people. The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history. Around half of the world’s population currently lives in an urban area, and the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects Report suggests that 60% of the world’s population will live in an urban area by the year 2030. As such, social scientists have paid increasing attention to the particular types of social dynamics that develop in urban environments. Social scientists have focused on social interactions in urban areas because cities have the unique capability to bring simultaneously many cultural strands. Financial problems and power dynamics are intensified in small spatial areas in which resources are insufficient due to dense populations. Therefore, cities operate as zones of meeting for financial dealings and other types of diversity as new ideas, people, and commodities are constantly flowing through urban areas. As a result, the people there have to respond to new influences, often bringing dominant strains of culture to the fore. Social scientists thus ask two sets of questions about social life in urban areas. The first set asks how social communications are shaped by urban environments and how social communications in urban environments are distinct from social relations in other contexts. (G.Simmel.1903)
Rise and development of urban social life:
The rise of urban social life:
The origin of urban life- the period when humankind was transformed from hunters and gatherers to city dwellers- is shrouded in the distant past. Yet we know that cities and urban civilizations appeared in many different areas of the world independent of one another in the recent past. The origins of urban social life is given below-
Ancient urbanization:
The best known theory of the rise of cities was proposed by V. Gordon Childe. According to Childe, the first cities developed a form of social organization that differed from rural society in many other respects and provided the social basis for modern life. City building was part of an “urban revolution” that also brought a set of special social relations that are characteristic of modern life. The first step toward an urban society occurred when hunting and gathering societies shifted to food production in relatively stable and sedentary groups. Once the urban revolution began, civilization progressed and evolved to more complex forms of social life sustained by an urban economy based on trade and craft production. It is not possible to find any one feature of the early city as an essential pre-requisite for the development of any other feature. Like other models of its day, it asserted an evolutionary view of development according to which civilization passes first through the stage of hunting and gathering, then to agriculture, and finally to urban based economies, with an ever more complex and interdependent form of social organization leading to a contemporary “modern” stage. (Childe, v. 1950, 1954)
Classical cities:
The earliest cities in Mesopotamia and in China were built according to complex belief systems and symbolic codes. In ancient Greece, cities were constructed according to a cosmological code that incorporated sacred spaces and religious symbols linked to the pantheon of Greece gods. The city of Athens was built to honor the Goddess Athena, and all buildings followed geometrical design principles in accordance with the “Golden mean”.
Classical Rome was constructed using a different model, one that developed from an imperial code that stressed grandeur, domination and excess. The construction of urban space in Rome was based not on the political equality of its citizens but on the military power of the state and, later, the ambitions of the emperors. Rome was very different from Athens and other Greece city states in that it was the capital of the first urban civilization. These cities served as centers of political power, economic control and cultural diffusion. By AD 300 the emperor Constantine moved the capital of the emperor to Constantinople, and Rome began a long period of decline. Babylon, perhaps the best known of the Old Testament cities, lay buried for centuries beneath the sands of Iraq. Baghdad, the largest and wealthiest city of the early middle ages, was destroyed in the 1300s and has never achieved the dominance and influence of the earlier era.

Urbanization after AD 1000:
After the decline of centralized control from the Roman Empire beginning in AD 500, urban space in Europe was reclaimed by the countryside and a new form of feudal relations developed. The level of urbanization was low in Europe during the middle ages, and few places exceeded 10000, in population. In contrast, the cities of Asia, the near East, and what is now Latin America proposed during this same period.
Most historians contend that the cities that emerged after AD 1000 were the products of powerful national rulers and the success of regional trade rather than the result of social relations that were uniquely urban in nature, as Childe’s theory might suggest. City life remained precarious and dependent on social relations that emanated from state power. It was not until the 17th century, with the rise of capitalism in Western Europe, that urban social life appeared to be propelled by forces emerging from within cities themselves.
Much of the same story characterized the Middle East, which also contained places with populations that eclipsed those in Europe after AD 1000. With the coming of Islamic hegemony, cities appeared that solidified the control of territory under the Muslim rulers, or caliphs. Islam also took over older cities built by the Romans, such as Constantinople. Thus Islamic society possessed a robust system of cities and communication.
The experience of India during the same period (from1000 to 1700) demonstrates the combined role of royal administration on the one hand and the importance of local trade on the other, in the sustenance of oriental cities. In Latin America, the Aztec and Inca civilizations achieved impressive heights during the same period. The principle role of the city was to serve as the centre for the Aztec rulers and their administrative functions.
It was not until the late middle ages in Europe that towns acquired political independence from the state. For Max Weber, the key to city life was the creation of an independent urban government that was elected by the citizens of the city itself. Classical Athens and early Rome were two examples. Weber believed that in the late Middle Ages, Europe also developed cities of this type. Weber’s remarks about the city were meant to suggest that there may once have been uniquely urban social relations that characterized city life and helped to transform society from a rural, agriculturally based system of social organization to one that is considered modern (Weber, 1966).
The Medieval order and the renaissance city:
Just as classical cities developed around the agora and the forum, the medieval city also included an important symbolic space in the centre of the city. Medieval cities often completed with one another for economic and political dominance, and many were protected by city walls. Because the walls prevented the cities from expanding outward, the cities built upward, and by the late middle ages, four and even five story buildings overhanging crowded streets were not uncommon. As trade prospered, cities grew more crowded- and so did the problems of poverty, crime, poor sanitation and ultimately disease. Danial Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague year (1722), described the ravages of the great plague that devastated London in the 17th century, when houses containing persons suffering from the Black Death were boarded up by city authorities with the victims still inside!
BY the mid-1500s, Rome had been restored to its position as the capital city of the Catholic world. Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590) began an ambitious plan of urban redevelopment. Edmund Bacon (1967; 117) described the plan that would create Renaissance Rome. The redevelopment of Rome served as a model for urban planning during the renaissance. The design of the new metropolis would be replicate in Renaissance cities across Europe in the 1700s and would serve as a model for urban planning in many other areas of the world, including Detroit and Washington, D.C. (Girouard, 1985).
The change in urban fortunes is clearly started from the 1200 BC. Babylon was the largest city in Mesopotamia in biblical times, Memphis the largest city in ancient Egypt, and Rome the largest city of the Roman Empire. But urban life during the Middle Ages shifted to the great Muslim empires of the Middle East and then to North Africa and Spain and then to great Chinese civilizations of the 1500s through 1700s. The rise of first European and later American cities did not occur until the advent of the industrial Revolution in the 1800s.
In retrospect, it seems clear that the force that propelled the development of cities in Europe after the late Middle Ages did not involve the same process of urban growth that led to the urban civilizations of earlier centuries. The expansion of urban civilization in Europe was a direct consequence of the rise of capitalism and industrialization. It is this change that defines the development from the relatively autonomous urban community in Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries to the large industrial and postindustrial cities that we know today.
Capitalism and the rise of the industrial city:
Throughout the world, especially in North Africa, Asia, and the near east, cities were the sites of vigorous trade and the economic activities associated with commerce. However, the trade itself did not sustain the rise of cities in Western Europe. Craft products were produced for exchange; and the owners were the producers of the products. Exchange took place among owners and could be facilitated using any service that was equivalent according to the cultural judgment of the society. This barter system prevailed for several hundred years in Europe after the fall of Rome and existed elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia.
In the later middle ages, beginning in the 12th century, the general and accepted use of money and a fully developed commodity market within the city that was regulated by local government allowed the people with capital to hire both labor and resources to produce goods. Karl Marx called the type of economy made possible by capital and city regulation of markets extended commodity production. Commercial relations supported the accumulation of capital, and cities with such economies began to prosper beyond anything experienced up to that time. In addition, social and cultural relations changed in the cities to sanction the pursuit of wealth through the accumulation of money. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation swept away these cultural and social restrictions on the free flow of investment, providing a cultural basis for capitalist development (Weber, 1958). The accumulation process spilled out into surrounding area as the new money-based capitalist economy penetrated relations in the countryside. In the early middle ages, the largest urban areas were found in the Moorish empire in Spain and in the early Italian city-states. By the 1500s the influence of the Moorish empire was declining, and the early textile manufacturing cities of the North were ascending. Soon thereafter, the port cities of the Hanseatic League made their appearance. By 1800, the metropolitan centers of the new European powers and the cities of the Industrial north predominated.
During the industrial era, cities grew rapidly and became centers of population and production. The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new, great cities, first in Europe, and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. In 1800, only 3% of the world 's population lived in cities.
Development of urban social life:
Regarding urban social life of early periods very little sociologically information is available to us. Before cities could emerge a number of pre-conditions had to be met. Only when the agricultural system was capable of producing a surplus it was possible to divert labor for other activities. The urban social life was directly related to the efficiency of agricultural production. Urbanization has intense effects on the urban social life.
Urban revolution:
The Urban Revolution is the process by which small, kin-based, nonliterate agricultural villages were transformed into large, socially complex, urban societies. Childe first discussed the Urban Revolution in his 1936 book, Man Makes Himself,[1] and then his 1950 article in the journal Town Planning Review[2] brought the concept to a much larger audience. Childe identified 10 formal criteria that, according to his system, indicate the development of urban civilization: increased settlement size, concentration of wealth, large-scale public works, writing, representational art, knowledge of science and engineering, foreign trade, full-time specialists in nonsubsistence activities, class-stratified society, and political organization based on residence rather than kinship. He saw the underlying causes of the urban revolution as the cumulative growth of technology and the increasing availability of food surpluses as capital.
Although sometimes interpreted as a model of the origins of cities and urbanism, Childe 's concept in fact describes the transition from agricultural villages to state-level, urban societies. This change, which occurred independently in several parts of the world, is recognized as one of the most significant changes in human sociocultural evolution. Although contemporary models for the origins of complex urban societies have progressed beyond Childe 's original formulation,[3] there is general agreement that he correctly identified one of the most far-reaching social transformations prior to the Industrial Revolution, as well as the major processes involved in the change.[4]
The Medieval city:
Cities began to revive in the 11th century. Crafts and trade became more and more important. A great impetus for the revival of trade came from medieval religious crusaders. They had developed a taste for the consumer goods and luxuries of the East. Trading activities accelerated despite the problems created by high way robbers and feudal taxes to merchantiles. There was overall population growth and better agricultural development.
The medieval legal system indirectly encouraged the growth of towns. The feudal lords were forbidden to sell their lands but could sell charter for new towns within their territory. The lords could collect money by selling various rights such as market, weights and measure, beer, arms etc. Cities also gave right of citizenship to urban dwellers thus attracting more skilled ambitious and intelligent rural people. Medieval cities were quite small contemporary standards. Thick walls enclosed the medieval city. Watch towers and external moats added to its military defense. Outside the medieval bourgs land was reserved for expansion. So that when the population increased new city walls can be built further. Within the medieval bourgs could be found new social class of artisans, weavers, innkeepers, money charger and metal smith known as the bourgeoisie. They were organized into guilds and their way of life was characterized by trade and functionally specialized production. A full urban community developed based on trading and commercial relations.
Industrial development:
United Kingdom was the first country which was industrially developed through the industrial revolution in the 18th century. The industrial revolution led to the development of factories for large-scale production, with consequent changes in society.[2] By the end of the 20th century, East Asia had become one of the most recently industrially developed regions of the world.[5] In the 18th and 19th centuries, the UK experienced a massive increase in agricultural productivity known as the British Agricultural Revolution. Industrial development spread to Europe and North America in the 19th century. In the 1870s, the Meiji government vigorously promoted technological and industrial development that eventually changed Japan to a powerful modern country.
The families and kinship structure changes with industrial development. These changes gave the city much greater hinterland than that of first urban revolution. Cities in several parts of the world increased in size crossing million marks. Almost half of the population of industrially developed countries moved to cities and only a minority of the people looks after agricultural activities. Cities doubled and tripled in population in few decades.
Comparison of pre-industrial and industrial city:
Pre-industrial city:
Pre-industrial cities had important political and economic functions and evolved to become well-defined political units. They offered freedom from rural obligations to lord and community. In the early modern era, larger capital cities benefited from new trade routes and grew even larger. While the city-states, or poleis, of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea languished from the 16th century, Europe 's larger capitals benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic trade. For example, London is an example of a city that was well established in the preindustrial era as a political and economic center.
Industrial city:
Industrial cities grew rapidly and became centers of population and production. Industrial cities had important manufacturing and financial functions. Industrial city was dominated by middle class people. Government functions in industrial city to provide social via police power and the courts, public services and welfare, and to impose rational taxation. Rapid growth brought urban problems, and industrial-era cities were rife with dangers to health and safety. Poor sanitation and communicable diseases were among the greatest causes of death among urban working class populations. In the 19th century, better sanitation led to improved health conditions.

Conclusion:
Urban social life is closely linked to modernization, industrialization, and the sociological process of rationalization. Urban social life can describe a specific condition at a set time, the proportion of total population or area in cities or towns, or the term can describe the increase of this proportion over time. So the term urban social life can represent the level of urban development relative to overall population, or it can represent the rate at which the urban proportion is increasing. It is not merely a modern phenomenon, but a rapid and historic transformation of human social roots on a global scale, whereby predominantly rural culture is being rapidly replaced by predominantly urban culture.

References: Gottdiener, M. and Hutchison, R. 2011. The New Urban Sociology (4th edition). Westview Press, United States of America. Jayapalan, N. 2002. Urban Sociology. Nice Printing press, Delhi. Childe, V. Gordon.1936. Man Makes Himself. Watts and Co., London. Accessed on September 26, 2013. Retrieved from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_revolution] Childe, V. Gordon (1950). The Urban Revolution. : Liverpool University Press, Liverool. Accessed on September 26, 2013. Retrieved from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_revolution] Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, the Hamilton Institute. "Urban life: Open-air computers" . National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and the Technical University of Berlin. Accessed on September 26, 2013. Retrieved from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization] Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. 2003. Urban Life. HarperCollins Publishers. Accessed on Setember 28, 2013. Retrieved from [http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/urban%20life] Simmel, G. 1903. The Metropolis and Mental Life.
More, C. 2000. Understanding the Industrial Revolution. Routledge, London

References: Gottdiener, M. and Hutchison, R. 2011. The New Urban Sociology (4th edition). Westview Press, United States of America. Jayapalan, N. 2002. Urban Sociology. Nice Printing press, Delhi. Childe, V. Gordon.1936. Man Makes Himself. Watts and Co., London. Accessed on September 26, 2013. Retrieved from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_revolution] Childe, V. Gordon (1950). The Urban Revolution. : Liverpool University Press, Liverool. Accessed on September 26, 2013. Retrieved from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_revolution] Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, the Hamilton Institute. "Urban life: Open-air computers" . National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and the Technical University of Berlin. Accessed on September 26, 2013. Retrieved from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization] Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. 2003. Urban Life. HarperCollins Publishers. Accessed on Setember 28, 2013. Retrieved from [http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/urban%20life] Simmel, G. 1903. The Metropolis and Mental Life. More, C. 2000. Understanding the Industrial Revolution. Routledge, London