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36 Soc. F. 141 (1957-1958)
The City, Technology, and History

handle is hein.journals/josf36 and id is 157 raw text is: THE CITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND HISTORY ban environment. Their frequency diminishes, though, at greater distance from the residence of the person in question. Of various characteristics, only the ownership of a car and its price are significantly related to the distance of different contacts from the family home. Car ownership increases the radius of urban contacts. We, also, now see that the city dweller travels farther for social as compared to commer- cial contacts. Anyway, he does not tend to neigh- bor in close proximity to the family home. Not all, not even the majority of his social and commer- cial contacts are confined within the walking- distance neighborhood. We have negative evidence about a significant association between the following characteristics and the average distance of social and commer- cial contacts from the family home: (1) age, (2) family size, (3) sex composition of the family, (4) length of residence in Los Angeles, (5) length of residence at present address, (6) status as home owner or renter. THE CITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND HISTORY* PAUL MEADOWS Universit of Nebraska THE APPROACH THROUGH INTRA-UR ANISM VER two decades ago a leading United States urban sociologist, Professor Niles Carpenter, opened a discussion of urban sociology with this statement: Recent trends in the field of sociology might be epitomized in a four-word phrase-'the quest for data.' 1 In retrospect, one might, while accepting the im- portance of this empirical bent, still ask the ele- mentary question, data about what? So far as urban sociology is concerned, it is perfectly obvious that so long as it is data about some relationship concerning social life within the American city- whether trend, stage, cause-effect, fact-implica- tion, problem-policy-which is to be discovered, nothing else has ever seemed to count. Urban sociology has been and is yet literally (and with- out reservation apparently) the sociology of life within the city. This approach to urban sociology, which we may designate as the sociology of intra-urbanism be- cause of the manner in which social phenomena are interpreted solely in terms of the city itself, has been characterized by both purely intellectual as well as markedly pragmatic interests. As an intellectual curiosity, urban sociology represents * Read at the Seventh Annual Congress of Sociology of the Mexican Association of Sociology, December 3-7, 1956, Universidad de Nuevo Leon, Monterrey, Mexico. 1 In L. L. Bernard (ed.), Fields and Methods of Soci- ology (New York: Long and Smith, 1934), p. 328. the emergence of the city as in itself a legitimate object of sociological study. The city is sui generis: hence, the sociology of city life. This perspective was proclaimed in an extraordinarily influential volume of papers published by the University of Chicago Press in 1924: The City, edited by R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie. The theoretical position taken by these authors is indi- cated in the initial paper by Professor Park: The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. The sub- sequent ecological, personality, and institutional investigations of a generation of urban sociologists are foreshadowed in some of the other papers in this volume: McKenzie's The Ecological Ap- proach to the Study of the Human Community; Park's The Mind of the Hobo, and his famous paper on the metropolitan daily newspaper. Since then, the classroom texts in urban sociology2 follow rather closely this thematic organization of this field. The much later, masterful essay by Professor Louis Wirth, summarizing and organiz- ing the theory of a sociology devoted to the study of intra-urbanism and significantly titled Ur- banism as a Way of Life,'3 has been one of the 'For example, compare Nels Anderson and E. C. Lindeman, Urban Sociology (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1930) and T. L. Smith and C. A. McMahon, The Sociology of Urban Life (New York: Dryden Press, 1941). 3American Journal of Sociology, 44 (July 1938), pp. 1-25.

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