Foreword

Abstract

It was July 1938 when Louis Wirth published his “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in the American Journal of Sociology. The paper was seen by many as the one defining the city as a social phenomenon. Looking beyond its physical structure, economic product or cultural institutions, the author discovers those “elements of urbanism which mark it as a distinctive mode of human group life” (Wirth 1938: 4). Wirth argues that three key characteristics of cities — large population size, social heterogeneity, and population density — contribute to the development of a peculiarly “urban way of life” and a distinct “urban personality”. In his opinion, for centuries casual observers have noted deep personality differences between urban and rural people and between nature-based and machinebased styles of living.