Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

URBAN SOCIOLOGY

Classic Contrasts Between Urban and Rural Societies

Institution	Urban-Industrial	Rural-Agrarian
Agreements	Contractual	Personal
Authority	Bureaucratic	Paternalistic
Communication	Secondary	Primary
Integrative mechanism	Specialization	Common experience
Normative standards	Universalistic	Particularistic
Normative structure	Anomic	Integrated
Problem solution	Rational	Traditional
Production	Manufacturing	Agriculture
Social control	Restitutive	Repressive
Social relations	Segmentalized	All encompassing
Socialization	Formal	Informal
Stratification	Achieved status	Ascribed status
Values	Money and power	Family
World views	Secular	Sacred

Table 1

and recreation. Compositional communities are clusters of people who share common social characteristics. People of similar race, social status, or family characteristics, for example, form a compositional community. A symbolic community is defined by a commonality of beliefs and attitudes among its members. Its members view themselves as belonging to the group and are committed to it.

Research on the general issue of how these forms of organization change as cities grow has spawned a voluminous literature. An ecological perspective and a sociocultural perspective guide two major research traditions. Ecological studies focus on the role of economic competition in shaping the urban environment. Ecological and compositional communities are analyzed in an attempt to describe and generalize about urban forms and the processes of urban growth (Hawley 1981).

Sociocultural studies emphasize the importance of cultural, psychological, and other social dimensions of urban life. These studies focus on the interactional and symbolic communities that characterize the urban setting (Wellman and Leighton 1979; Suttles 1972).

Early theoretical work suggested that the most evident consequence of the increasing size, density, and heterogeneity of human settlements was a breakdown of social ties, a decline in the family, alienation, an erosion of moral codes, and social disorganization (Wirth 1938). Later empirical research has clearly shown that in general, urbanites

are integrated into meaningful social groups (Fischer 1984).

The sociocultural tradition suggests that cultural values derive from socialization into a variety of subcultures and are relatively undisturbed by changes in ecological processes. Different subcultures select, are forced into, or unwittingly drift into different areas that come to exhibit the characteristics of a particular subculture (Gans 1962). Fischer (1975) combines the ecological and subcultural perspectives by suggesting that size, density, and heterogeneity are important but that they produce integrated subcultures rather than fostering alienation and community disorganization. Size provides the critical masses necessary for viable unconventional subcultures to form. With increased variability in the subcultural mix in urban areas, subcultures become more intensified as they defend their ways of life against the broad array of others in the environment. The more subcultures, the more diffusion of cultural elements, and the greater the likelihood of new subcultures emerging, creating the ever-changing mosaic of unconventional subcultures that most distinguishes large places from small ones.

Empirical approaches to urban organization vary according to the unit of analysis and what is being observed. Patterns of activity (e.g., commuting, retail sales, crime) and characteristics of people (e.g., age, race, income, household composition) most commonly are derived from government reports for units of analysis as small as city blocks and as large as metropolitan areas. These types of

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data are used to develop general principles of organization and change in urban systems. General questions range from how certain activities and characteristics come to be organized in particular ways in space to why certain locales exhibit particular characteristics and activities. Territorial frameworks for the analysis of urban systems include neighborhoods, community areas, cities, urban areas, metropolitan regions, nations, and the world.

Observations of networks of interaction (e.g., visiting patterns, helping networks) and symbolic meanings of people (e.g., alienation, values, worldviews) are less systematically available because social surveys are more appropriate for obtaining this kind of information. Consequently, less is known about these dimensions of community than is desirable.

It is clear that territoriality has waned as an integrative force and that new forms of extralocal community have emerged. High mobility, an expanded scale of organization, and an increased range and volume of communication flow coalesce to alter the forms of social groups and their organization in space (Greer 1962). With modern communication and transportation technology, as exists in the United States today, space becomes less of an organizing principle and new forms of territorial organization emerge that reflect the power of large-scale corporate organization and the federal government in shaping urban social and spatial organization (Gottdiener 1985).

Hawley’s (1950, 1981) ecological approach to the study of urban communities serves as the major paradigm in contemporary research. This approach views social organization as developing in response to basic problems of existence that all populations face in adapting to their environments. The urban community is conceptualized as the complex system of interdependence that develops as a population collectively adapts to an environment, using whatever technology is available. Population, environment, technology, and social organization interact to produce various forms of human communities at different times and in different places (Table 2). Population is conceptualized as an organized group of humans that function routinely as a unit; the environment is defined as everything that is external to the population, including other organized social groups.

Technological advances allow people to expand and redefine the nature of the relevant environment and therefore influence the forms of community organization that populations develop (Duncan 1973).

In the last half of the twentieth century, there were revolutionary transformations in the size and nature of human settlements and the nature of the interrelationships among them (Table 3). The global population ‘‘explosion’’ created by an unprecedented rapid decline in human mortality in less developed regions of the world after 1950 provided the additional people necessary for this population ‘‘implosion:’’ the rapid increase in the size and number of human agglomerations of unprecedented size. Urban sociology attempts to understand the determinants and consequences of this transformation.

The urbanization process involves an expansion in the entire system of interrelationships by which a population maintains itself in its habitat (Hawley 1981, p. 12). The most evident consequences of the process and the most common measures of it are an increase in the number of people at points of population concentration, an increase in the number of points at which population is concentrated, or both (Eldridge 1956). Theories of urbanization attempt to understand how human settlement patterns change as technology expands the scale of social systems.

Because technological regimes, population growth mechanisms, and environmental contingencies change over time and vary in different regions of the world, variations in the pattern of distribution of human settlements generally can be understood by attending to these related processes. In the literature on urbanization, an interest in the organizational forms of systems of cities is complemented by an interest in how growth is accommodated in cities through changes in density gradients, the location of socially meaningful population subgroups, and patterns of urban activities. Although the expansion of cities has been the historical focus in describing the urbanization process, revolutionary developments in transportation, communication, and information technology in the last fifty years expanded the scale of urban systems and directed attention toward the broader system of the form of organization in which cities emerge and grow.

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Comparative Urban Features of Major World Regions

Basic	Nineteenth Century	Twentieth Century	Third	Postwar
Feature	North America	North America	World	Europe
Summary	Concentrated	Spread out	Constrained	Planned
Size	1–2 million	14 million	19 million	8 million
Density	High	Low	Medium	High
Timing	250 years	Emergent	Very rapid	Very slow
	long period	no pressure	since 1950s	stationary
Scale	Regional	Inter-metro	Global and	National
	and local	and global	local	and local
City system	Rank size	Daily urban	Primate	Rank size
	regional	national	national	national
Occupations	Secondary	Tertiary	Family	Diverse
	manufacture	services	and corporate	mixture
Spatial mix	Zone-sector	Mutlinodal	Reverse	Overlayed
	core focus	mosaic	zonal	mixed use
Rural–urban differences	Great	Narrow	Medium	Narrow
	in all areas	and declining	and growing	except work
Status mix	Diverse	High overall	Bifurcated	Medium
	hierarchical	poor pockets	high % poor	compacted
Migration	Heavy rural-urban	Inter-metro	Heavy rural-urban	Foreign
	and foreign	and foreign	circulation	skilled
Planning	Laissez-faire	Decentral,	Centralized,	Decentral,
	capitalism	ineffective	ineffective	effective

Table 2

SOURCE: Abstracted from Berry 1981.

Much research on the urbanization process is descriptive in nature, with an emphasis on identifying and measuring patterns of change in demographic and social organization in a territorial frame of reference. Territorially circumscribed environments employed as units of analysis include administrative units (villages, cities, counties, states, nations), population concentrations (places, agglomerations, urbanized areas), and networks of interdependency (neighborhoods, metropolitan areas, daily urban systems, city systems, the earth).

The American urban system is suburbanizing and deconcentrating. One measure of suburbanization is the ratio of the rate of growth in the ring to that in the central city over a decade (Schnore 1959). While some Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) began suburbanizing in the late 1800s, the greatest rates for the majority of places occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Widespread use of the automobile, inexpensive energy, the efficient production of materials for residential infrastructure,

and federal housing policy allowed metropolitan growth to be absorbed by sprawl instead of by increased congestion at the center.

As the scale of territorial organization increased, so did the physical distances between black and white, rich and poor, young and old, and other meaningful population subgroups. The Index of Dissimilarity measures the degree of segregation between two groups by computing the percentage of one group that would have to reside on a different city block for it to have the same proportional distribution across urban space as the group to which it is being compared (Taeuber and Taeuber 1965). Although there has been some decline in indices of dissimilarity between black and white Americans since the 1960s, partly as a result of increasing black suburbanization, the index for the fifteen most segregated MSAs in 1990 remained at or above 80, meaning that 80 percent or more of the blacks would have had to live on different city blocks to have the same distribution in space as whites; thus, a very high

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Population of World's Largest Metropolises

(in millions), 1950–2000 and Percent Change, 1950–2000

Metropolis	1950	2000	% Change
Mexico City, Mexico	3.1	26.3	748
Sao Paulo, Brazil	2.8	24.0	757
Tokyo/Yokohama, Japan	6.7	17.1	155
Calcutta, India	4.4	16.6	277
Greater Bombay, India	2.9	16.0	452
New York/northeastern N.J., USA	12.4	15.5	25
Seoul, Republic of Korea	1.1	13.5	113
Shanghai, China	10.3	13.5	31
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil	3.5	13.3	280
Delhi, India	1.4	13.2	843
Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina	5.3	13.2	149
Cairo/Giza/Imbaba, Egypt	2.5	13.2	428
Jakarta, Indonesia	1.8	12.8	611
Baghdad, Iraq	0.6	12.8	2033
Teheran, Iran	0.9	12.7	1311
Karachi, Pakistan	1.0	12.1	1110
Istanbul, Turkey	1.0	11.9	1090
Los Angeles/Long Beach, Cailf., USA	4.1	11.2	173
Dacca, Bangladesh	0.4	11.2	2700
Manila, Philippines	1.6	11.1	594
Beijing (Peking), China	6.7	10.8	61
Moscow, USSR	4.8	10.1	110
Total world population	2,500	6,300	152

Table 3

SOURCE: Adapted from Dogan and Kasarda (1988b) Table 1.2.

degree of residential segregation remains. Although there is great social status diversity in central cities and increasing diversity in suburban rings, disadvantaged and minority populations are overrepresented in central cities, while the better educated and more affluent are overrepresented in suburban rings.

A related process—deconcentration—involves a shedding of urban activities at the center and is indicated by greater growth in employment and office space in the ring than in the central city. This process was under way by the mid-1970s and continued unabated through the 1980s. A surprising turn of events in the late 1970s was signaled by mounting evidence that nonmetropolitan counties were, for the first time since the Depression of the 1930s, growing more rapidly than were metropolitan counties (Lichter and Fuguitt 1982). This process has been referred to as ‘‘deurbanization’’ and ‘‘the nonmetropolitan turnaround.’’ It is unclear whether this trend represents an enlargement of the scale of metropolitan organization to encompass more remote counties or

whether new growth nodes are developing in nonmetropolitan areas.

The American urban system is undergoing major changes as a result of shifts from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the aging of the population, and an expansion of organizational scale from regional and national to global decision making. Older industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest lost population as the locus of economic activity shifted from heavy manufacturing to information and residentiary services. Cities in Florida, Arizona, California, and the Northwest have received growing numbers of retirees seeking environmental, recreational, and medical amenities that are not tied to economic production. Investment decisions regarding the location of office complexes, the factories of the future, are made more on the basis of the availability of an educated labor pool, favorable tax treatment, and the availability of amenities than on the basis of the access to raw materials that underpinned the urbanization process through the middle of the twentieth century.

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The same shifts are reflected in the internal reorganization of American cities. The scale of local communities has expanded from the central business district–oriented city to the multinodal metropolis. Daily commuting patterns are shifting from radial trips between bedroom suburbs and workplaces in the central city to lateral trips among highly differentiated subareas throughout urban regions. Urban villages with affluent residences, high-end retail minimalls, and office complexes are emerging in nonmetropolitan counties beyond the reach of metropolitan political constraints, creating even greater segregation between the most and least affluent Americans

Deteriorating residential and warehousing districts adjacent to new downtown office complexes are being rehabilitated for residential use by childless professionals, or ‘‘gentry.’’ The process of gentrification, or the invasion of lower-status deteriorating neighborhoods of absentee-owned rental housing by middleto upper-status home or condominium owners, is driven by a desire for accessibility to nearby white-collar jobs and cultural amenities as well as by the relatively high costs of suburban housing, which have been pushed up by competing demand in these rapidly growing metropolitan areas. Although the number of people involved in gentrification is too small to have reversed the overall decline of central cities, the return of affluent middle-class residents has reduced segregation to some extent. Gentrification reclaims deteriorated neighborhoods, but it also results in the displacement of the poor, who have no place else to live at rents they can afford (Feagin and Parker 1990).

The extent to which dispersed population is involved in urban systems is quite variable. An estimated 90 percent of the American population now lives in a daily urban system (DUS). These units are constructed from counties that are allocated to economic centers on the basis of commuting patterns and economic interdependence. The residents of a DUS are closely tied together by efficient transportation and communication technology. Each DUS has a minimum population of 200,000 in its labor shed and constitutes ‘‘a multinode, multiconnective system [which] has replaced the core dominated metropolis as the basic urban unit’’ (Berry and Kasarda 1977, p. 304). Less than 4 percent of the American labor force is engaged in agricultural occupations. Even

the residents of remote rural areas are mostly ‘‘urban’’ in their activities and outlook.

In contrast, many residents of uncontrolled developments on the fringes of emerging megacities in less developed countries are practically isolated from the urban center and live much as they have for generations. Over a third of the people in the largest cities in India were born elsewhere, and the maintenance of rural ways of life in those cities is common because of a lack of urban employment, the persistence of village kinship ties, and seasonal circulatory migration to rural areas. Although India has three of the ten largest cities in the world, it remains decidedly rural, with 75 percent of the population residing in agriculturally oriented villages (Nagpaul 1988).

The pace and direction of the urbanization process are closely tied to technological advances. As industrialization proceeded in western Europe and the United States over a 300-year period, an urban system emerged that reflected the interplay between the development of city-centered heavy industry and requirements for energy and raw materials from regional hinterlands. The form of city systems that emerged has been described as rank-size. Cities in that type of system form a hierarchy of places from large to small in which the number of places of a given size decreases proportionally to the size of the place. Larger places are fewer in number, are more widely spaced, and offer more specialized goods and services than do smaller places (Christaller 1933).

City systems that emerged in less industrialized nations are primate in character. In a primate system, the largest cities absorb far more than their share of societal population growth. Sharp breaks exist in the size hierarchy of places, with one or two very large, several medium-sized, and many very small places. Rapid declines in mortality beginning in the 1950s, coupled with traditionally high fertility, created unprecedented rates of population growth. Primate city systems developed with an orientation toward the exportation of raw materials to the industrialized world rather than manufacturing and the development of local markets. As economic development proceeds, it occurs primarily in the large primate cities, with very low rates of economic growth in rural areas. Consequently, nearly all the excess of births over deaths

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in the nation is absorbed by the large cities, which are more integrated into the emerging global urban system (Dogan and Kasarda 1988a).

Megacities of over 10 million population are a very recent phenomenon, and their number is increasing rapidly. Their emergence can be understood only in the context of a globally interdependent system of relationships. The territorial bounds of the relevant environment to which population collectively adapts have expanded from the immediate hinterland to the entire world in only half a century.

Convergence theory suggests that cities throughout the would will come to exhibit organizational forms increasingly similar to one another, converging on the North American pattern, as technology becomes more accessible globally (Young and Young 1962). Divergence theory suggests that increasingly divergent forms of urban organization are likely to emerge as a result of differences in the timing and pace of the urbanization process, differences in the positions of cities in the global system, and the increasing effectiveness of deliberate planning of the urbanization process by centralized governments holding differing values and therefore pursuing a variety of goals for the future (Berry 1981).

The importance of understanding this process is suggested by Hawley (1981, p. 13): ‘‘Urbanization is a transformation of society, the effects of which penetrate every sphere of personal and collective life. It affects the status of the individual and opportunities for advancement, it alters the types of social units in which people group themselves, and it sorts people into new and shifting patterns of stratification. The distribution of power is altered, normal social processes are reconstituted, and the rules and norms by which behavior is guided are redesigned.’’

REFERENCES

Berry, Brian J. L. 1981. Comparative Urbanization: Divergent Paths in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martins.

———, and John D. Kasarda 1977 Contemporary Urban Ecology. New York: Macmillan.

Childe, V. Gordon 1950 ‘‘The Urban Revolution.’’ Town Planning Review 21:4–7.

Christaller, W. 1933 Central Places in Southern Germany, transl. C. W. Baskin. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren- tice-Hall.

Dogan, Mattei, and John D. Kasarda 1988a The Metropolis Era: A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

——— 1988b. ‘‘Introduction: How Giant Cities Will Multiply and Grow.’’ In Mattei Dogan and John D. Kasarda, eds., The Metropolis Era: A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

Duncan, Otis Dudley 1973 ‘‘From Social System to Ecosystem.’’ In Michael Micklin, ed., Population, Environment, and Social Organization: Current Issues in Human Ecology Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden.

Eldridge, Hope Tisdale 1956 ‘‘The Process of Urbanization.’’ In J. J. Spengler and O. D. Duncan, eds., Demographic Analysis. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Feagin, Joe R., and Robert Parker 1990 Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Fischer, Claude S. 1975 ‘‘Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism.’’ American Journal of Sociology

80:1319–1341.

——— 1984 The Urban Experience. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Gans, Herbert J. 1962 ‘‘Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of life: A Reevaluation of Definitions.’’ In A. M. Rose, ed., Human Behavior and Social Processes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gottdiener, Mark 1985 The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Greer, Scott 1962 The Emerging City. New York: Free Press.

Hawley, Amos H. 1950 Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald.

——— 1981 Urban Society: An Ecological Approach. New York: Wiley.

Kleniewski, Nancy 1997 Cities, Change, and Conflict: A

Political Economy of Urban Life. Belmont, Calif.:

Wadsworth.

Lichter, Daniel T., and Glenn V. Fuguitt 1982 ‘‘The Transition to Nonmetropolitan Population Deconcentration.’’ Demography 19:211–221.

Nagpaul, Hans 1988 ‘‘India’s Giant Cities.’’ In Mattei Dogan and John D. Kasarda, eds., The Metropolis Era: A World of Giant Cities, vol. 1. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

Palen, J. John 1997 The Urban World. New York: Mc- Graw-Hill.

Schnore, Leo F. 1959 ‘‘The Timing of Metropolitan Decentralization.’’ Journal of the American Institute of Planners 25:200–206.

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Suttles, Gerald 1972 The Social Construction of Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taeuber, Karl E., and Alma F. Taeuber 1965 Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change. Chicago: Aldine.

Weber, Adna F. 1899 The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wellman, B., and B. Leighton 1979 ‘‘Networks, Neighborhoods and Communities: Approaches to the Study of the Community Question.’’ Urban Affairs Quarterly 15:369–393.

Wirth, Louis 1938 ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life.’’ American Journal of Sociology 44:1–24.

Young, Frank, and Ruth Young 1962 ‘‘The Sequence and Direction of Community Growth: A Cross-Cul- tural Generalization.’’ Rural Sociology 27:374–386.

LEE J. HAGGERTY

URBAN UNDERCLASS

No social science concept has generated more discussion and controversy in recent years than that of the urban underclass. Some argue that it is little more than a pithy and stigmatizing term for the poor people who have always existed in stratified societies (Gans 1990; Jencks 1989; Katz 1989; McGahey 1982). Others contend that the underclass is a distinct and recent phenomenon, reflecting extreme marginalization from mainstream economic institutions and aberrant behavior (drug abuse, violent crime, out-of-wedlock births), that reached catastrophic proportions in the inner cities by the early 1980s (Glasow 1980; Auletta 1982; Reischauer 1987; Nathan 1987; Wilson 1987, 1996). Among the multifaceted, subjective, and often ambiguous definitions of the urban underclass, most all include the notions of weak labor-force attachment and persistently low income ( Jencks and Peterson 1991; Sjoquist 1990). Indeed, the first scholar who introduced the term ‘‘underclass’’ in literature characterized its members as an emergent substratum of the permanently unemployed, the unemployable and the underemployed (Myrdal 1962).

Widely differing interpretations of the causes of the presence of an underclass have been offered, ranging from Marxist to social Darwinist. The most influential contemporary analysis of the urban underclass is Wilson’s (1996) When Work

Disappears. Building on his earlier treatise The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), Wilson links the origins and growth of the urban underclass to the structure of opportunities and constraints in American society. Its roots are hypothesized to lie in historical discrimination and the mass migration of African-Americans to northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Its more recent growth and experiences are posited to have resulted from industrial restructuring and geographic changes in metropolitan economies since the 1960s, in particular the economic transformation of major cities from centers of goods processing to centers of information processing and the relocation of blue-collar jobs to the suburbs. These changes led to sharp increases in joblessness among racially and economically segregated African-Ameri- cans who had neither the skills to participate in new urban growth industries nor the transportation or financial means to commute or relocate to the suburbs. Rapidly rising joblessness among in- ner-city African-Americans, together with selective outmigration of the nonpoor, in turn caused the high concentrations of poverty and related social problems that characterize the urban underclass (see also Kasarda 1985, 1989; Wilson 1991; Hughes, 1993).

Alternative views on the cause of the underclass appear in the works of Murray (1984), Mead (1988), and Magnet (1993). These conservative scholars view underclass behaviors as rational adaptations to the perverse incentives offered by government welfare programs that discourage work and a lack of personal responsibility among many for actions harmful to themselves and others. Abetted by wellintentioned but misguided public programs, joblessness and persistent poverty are seen more as the consequences of deviant behaviors than as the causes of those behaviors. For an elaboration of these competing views and a partial empirical assessment, see Kasarda and Ting (1996).

Measurement of the size of the underclass varies as much as explanations of its causes. A number of researchers have focused on individuallevel indicators of persistent poverty, defined as those who are poor for spells from n to n + x years (Levy 1977; Duncan et al. 1984; Bane and Ellwood 1986) and long-term Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients (Gottschalk and Danziger 1987). In an empirical study, Levy (1977) estimated that approximately eleven million Ameri-

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cans were persistently poor for at least five years. When the underclass was defined as those who were not need persistently poor for eight or more years, six million people were found in that category (Duncan et al. 1984). This represented approximately one-fifth of the thirty-two million Americans living in poor households in 1988 (Mincy et al. 1990).

Another measurement strategy focuses on the geographic concentration of the poor. Using the U.S. Bureau of the Census tract-level definitions of local poverty areas, Reischauer (1987) reported that among the population living in such poverty areas, the central cities housed over half in 1985, up from one-third in 1972. Jargowsky (1997) documented that along with the growth of poverty populations in metropolitan areas, the number of high poverty areas (defined as census tracts containing at least 40 percent poor people) more than doubled between 1970 and 1990. The number of African-Americans living in high-poverty areas, mostly segregated ghettos, climbed from 2.4 million to 4.2 million in that period, far outpacing other minority groups. By 1990, 34 percent of poor African-Americans in metropolitan areas resided in high-poverty census tracts (see also Kasarda 1993).

Massey and Denton (1993) present an analysis and simulations that lead them to conclude that concentrated poverty can be explained largely by two basic factors: the degree of spatial segregation of a racial group and the group’s overall poverty rate. Their analysis and conclusion sparked heated debates over racial versus economic segregation explanations ( Jargowsky 1997).

As was noted above, the concept of the underclass typically is considered to entail more than poverty. It also is posited to incorporate geographically concentrated behavioral characteristics that conflict with mainstream values: joblessness, out-of- wedlock births, welfare dependency, dropping out of school, drug abuse, and illicit activities.

While considerable debate continues to surround definitions and even the existence of the underclass, attempts have been made to measure its size by using aggregated ‘‘behavioral’’ indicators derived from census tract data. Ricketts and Sawhill (1988) measured the underclass as people living in neighborhoods whose residents in 1980 exhibited disproportionately high rates of school

dropout, joblessness, female-headed families, and welfare dependency. Using a composite definition in which tracts must fall at least one standard deviation above the national mean on all four characteristics, they found that approximately 2.5 million people lived in those tracts in 1980 and that those tracts were disproportionately located in major cities in the Northeast and Midwest. They reported that in underclass tracts, on average, 63 percent of the resident adults had less than a high school education, 60 percent of the families with children were headed by women, 56 percent of the adult men were not regularly employed, and 34 percent of the households received public assistance. Their research also revealed that although the total poverty population grew only 8 percent between 1970 and 1980, the number of people living in underclass areas grew 230 percent, from 752,000 to 2,484,000.

Mincy and Wiener (1993) and Kasarda (1993) updated Ricketts and Sawhill’s analysis by using 1990 census tract data. Both found that the number and concentration of persons living in tracts with disproportionately high rates of problem attributes continued to rise in the 1980s, although not nearly as much as it did in the 1970s.

These location-based aggregate measures of underclass populations have been criticized on the grounds that aside from race, most urban census tracts are quite heterogeneous along economic and social dimensions. Jencks (1989; Jencks and Peterson 1991), for example, observes that with the exception of tracts made up of public housing projects, there is considerable diversity in residents’ income and education levels, joblessness, and public assistance recipiency in even the poorest urban neighborhoods. Conversely, considerable numbers of urban residents who are poor, jobless, and welfare-dependent live in census tracts where fewer than 20 percent of the families fall below the poverty line.

Nevertheless, while most scholars concur that behaviors linked to underclass definitions and measurements are found throughout society, it is the concentration of these behaviors in economically declining inner-city areas that is said to distinguish the underclass from previously impoverished urban subgroups. Geographic concentration is argued to magnify social problems and accelerate their spread to nearby households through social

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contagion, peer pressure, and imitative behavior (Wilson 1987, 1996). The members of economically stable households selectively flee the neighborhood to avoid these problems. Left behind in increasingly isolated concentrations are those with the least to offer in terms of marketable skills, role models, and familial stability. The result is a spiral of negative social and economic outcomes for those neighborhoods and the households that remain.

Incorporating the effects of neighborhoods and social transmission processes means that the future research agenda on the urban underclass will be qualitative as well as quantitative in approach. Ethnographic studies of underclass neighborhoods, family structures, and individual behaviors will complement growing numbers of surveys on and sophisticated statistical analyses of the persistence and intergenerational transfer of urban poverty (see Anderson 1990, 1994; Furstenberg et al. 1999). Additionally more comparative studies will assess similarities to and differences from the American case in European, Latin American, and Asian cities. The root of this work stretches deep, building on classic culture of poverty (Lewis 1966) and social and economic marginalization theses (Clark 1965).

Success. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Gans, Herbert J. 1990 ‘‘Deconstructing the Underclass: The Term’s Danger as a Planning Concept.’’ Journal of the American Planning Association, pp. 271–277.

Glasgow, Douglas G. 1980 The Black Underclass: Poverty, Unemployment, and Entrapment of Ghetto Youth. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gottschalk, P., and S. Danziger 1987 Testimony on poverty, hunger, and the welfare system, August 5, 1986. Hearing before the Select Committee on Hunger, House of Representatives, 99th Cong., 2nd Sess., Ser. No. 23. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Hughes, Mark Alan 1993 Over the Horizon: Jobs in the Suburbs of Major Metropolitan Areas. Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures.

Jargowsky, Paul A. 1997 Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Jencks, Christopher 1989 ‘‘What Is the Underclass— and Is It Growing?’’ Focus 12:14–31.

———, and Paul Peterson, eds. 1991 The Urban Underclass. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

Kasarda, John D. 1985 ‘‘Urban Change and Minority Opportunities.’’ In Paul Peterson, ed., The New Urban Reality. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

(SEE ALSO: Cities; Community; Poverty; Segregation and Desegregation; Urbanization; Urban Sociology)

REFERENCES

Anderson, Elijah 1990 Street Wise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 1994 ‘‘The Code on the Streets.’’ Atlantic Monthly, May, pp. 81–94.

Auletta, Ken 1982 The Underclass. New York: Ran-

dom House.

Bane, Mary Jo, and David Ellwood 1986 ‘‘Slipping into and out of Poverty: The Dynamics of Spells.’’ Journal of Human Resources 21:1–23.

Clark, Kenneth B. 1965 Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. New York: Harper & Row.

Duncan, G. J., R. D. Coe, and M. S. Hill 1984 In Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty. Ann Arbor: Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan.

Furstenberg, Frank F., Jr., Thomas D Cook, Jacquelynne Eccles, Glen H. Elder, Jr., and Arnold Sameroff 1999

Managing to Make It: Urban Families an Adolescent

———1989 ‘‘Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 501:26–47.

———1993 ‘‘Inner City Concentrated Poverty and Neighborhood Distress: 1970 to 1990.’’ Housing Policy Debate 4(3):253–302.

———, and Kwok-Fai Ting 1996 ‘‘Joblessness and Poverty in America’s Central Cities: Causes and Policy Prescriptions.’’ Housing Policy Debate 7(2):387–419.

Katz, Michael 1989 The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon.

Levy, Frank 1977 ‘‘How Big Is the American Underclass?’’ Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute.

Lewis, Oscar 1966 La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York. New York: Random House.

Magnet, Myron 1993 The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass. New York: Morrow.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy Denton 1993 American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

McGahay, R. 1982 ‘‘Poverty’s Voguish Stigma.’’ New York Times, March 12:29.

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Mead, Lawrence M. 1988 ‘‘The Hidden Jobs Debate.’’

Public Interest, spring: 40–59.

Mincy, Ronald B., Isabel V. Sawhill, and Douglas A. Wolf 1990 ‘‘The Underclass: Definition and Measurement.’’ Science 248:450–453.

———, and Susan J. Wiener 1993 The Under Class in the 1980s: Changing Concepts, Changing Realty. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute.

Murray, Charles A. 1984. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books

Myrdal, Gunner 1962 Challenge to Affluence. New York: Pantheon.

Nathan, Richard P. 1987 ‘‘Will the Underclass Always Be with Us?’’ Society 24:57–62.

Reischauer, Robert D. 1987 The Geographic Concentration of Poverty: What Do We Know? Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

Ricketts, Erol, and Isabel Sawhill 1988 ‘‘Defining and Measuring the Underclass.’’ Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 7:316–325.

and no latter-day scholars should presume to dispel the fog, polluting utopia’s natural environment with an excess of clarity and definition’’ (Manuel and Manuel 1979, p. 5).

But this ambiguity extends well beyond simple obscurity or murkiness; it reaches to unqualified contradiction. Many utopian visionaries have been denounced for their meticulous delineation of details as they constructed models of social worlds bearing no resemblance to existing, potential, or possible reality. Utopias, it would seem, suffer from the twin infirmities of ambiguity and excessive efforts to achieve clarity and definition. Our dictionaries tell us they are, on the one hand, ideally perfect places but, on the other hand, are simply impractical thought or theory. Utopians are customarily viewed as zealous but quixotic reformers. The books in which they describe their societies may be praised as fascinating, fanciful literature but not as scientific tomes.

Sjoquist, David 1990 ‘‘Concepts, Measurements, and Analysis of the Underclass: A Review of the Literature.’’ Atlanta: Georgia State University, typescript.

Wilson, William Julius 1996 When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.

———1991 ‘‘Studying Inner-City Social Dislocations.’’

American Sociological Review 56:1–14.

———1987 The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

JOHN D. KASARDA

UTILITY THEORY

See Decision-Making Theory and Research;

Rational Choice Theory.

UTOPIAN ANALYSIS AND DESIGN

NOTE: Although the following article has not been revised for this edition of the Encyclopedia, the substantive coverage is currently appropriate. The editors have provided a list of recent works at the end of the article to facilitate research and exploration of the topic.

‘‘From the time of its first discovery, the island of King Utopus has been shrouded in ambiguity,

It is quite possible as well as reasonable to view utopians as model builders. Models are quite different objects from what is being modeled and have properties not shared by their counterparts. ‘‘The aim of a model is precisely not to reproduce reality in all its complexity. It is, rather, to capture in a vivid, often formal way what is essential to understanding some aspect of its structure or behavior’’ (Weizenbaum 1976, pp. 149–150).

One occupational disability of model builders everywhere is a sort of pathological obsession with a single element, or at most a strictly circumscribed set of elements, of reality, along with an unwavering refusal to examine the larger milieu in which they are found.

In Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1965), a central value or societal goal is the concept of economic equality; but this does not include the notion of social equality. There exists in Utopia a large underclass of slaves who are assigned the more distasteful but necessary tasks of the society. This class is composed of war prisoners (More’s society is not free of war), persons born into slavery (it is not free of slavery), condemned criminals from other countries who are purchased from foreign slave markets (crime has not been eliminated), and working-class foreigners (class distinctions persist) who volunteer for slavery in Utopia rather than suffer the unpleasant conditions in their home countries (ethnic and immigration difficulties con-

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