Based on urbanization and the growth of cities, elaborate on the symbolic interactionist perspective as it relates to the experience of city life

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Symbolic interactionists examine the experience of urban life. According to sociologist Georg Simmel, urban life is highly stimulating, and it shapes people's thoughts and actions. Urban residents are influenced by the quick pace of the city and the pervasiveness of economic relations in everyday life.

He suggests that attributes such as punctuality and exactness are rewarded but that friendliness and warmth in interpersonal relations are viewed as personal weaknesses. Sociologist Louis Wirth suggested that urbanism is a "way of life." Urbanism refers to the distinctive social and psychological patterns of life typically found in the city. According to Wirth, the size, density, and heterogeneity of urban populations typically result in an elaborate division of labor and in spatial segregation of people by race/ethnicity, social class, religion, and/or lifestyle.

From Wirth's perspective, people who live in urban areas are alienated, powerless, and lonely. A sense of community is obliterated and replaced by the "mass society"— a large-scale, highly institutionalized society in which individuality is supplanted by mass messages, faceless bureaucrats, and corporate interests.

Sociologist Herbert Gans suggested that not everyone experiences the city in the same way. According to Gans, there are five major categories of adaptation among urban dwellers: cosmopolites, unmarried people and childless couples, ethnic villagers, the deprived, and the trapped.