The City: Urbanism and Everyday Life

Abstract

Consider again at this point the recency of the changes that have transformed the contemporary world. Capitalist enterprise upon a broad scale dates from only the sixteenth century or so, and industrial capitalism from only the late eighteenth century — and first of all in an isolated pocket of the world at that. But the two hundred years since 1780 have witnessed more far-reaching transmutations in social life than occurred in the vast span of human history prior to that date. Nowhere is this more evident, as I indicated in the first chapter of the book, than in the character and spread of contemporary urbanism. In grasping the impact of modern urbanism, the historical aspect of the sociological imagination is especially significant. There is an important sense, as I shall try to indicate below, in which urbanism has become the milieu in which all of us, in the advanced capitalist societies, live. Hence it is very difficult for us to recapture a sense of how social life used to be for human beings even two centuries ago — although there remain large parts of the world in which traditional styles of life continue to prevail.