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I'm currently reading Paris In The Middle Ages by Simone Roux, which I'm finding to be an interesting book on the social aspects of that city in medieval/early renaissance times. I read non-fiction books like this because they occasionally spark 'other thoughts' which might lead to fictional work or give me little scenes which will fit into the current work-in-process.
But sometimes they just spark thoughts... Roux talks about how being a large city led people to shed their differences and blend into a more cosmopolitan mix -- that this was the characteristic of all large cities: go there, and you become a "Parisian" or a "Londoner" or a "Venetian", shedding your former habits and identifications.
That strikes me as true enough in the past. You come to the big city as a rural dweller, a villager, or a foreigner, and you are assimilated into the greater whole that is the community of the city. In the city, it was nearly impossible to escape that larger identity and retain your previous one. But...
What struck me as a potential theory is that while this was true for cities in the past, it may no longer be the case. When Paris had a population of a few hundred thousand, no, you couldn't easily retain your old identity and customs, because you came into contact with all these other people all the time as you walked about the city. You were thrown into the social cauldron, and the spice of your own life was added to the general blend of what was already there.
But now cities are behemoths with populations of millions that spread over huge areas of land... and thus it is now possible to find an enclave within the city with people like you. It is possible to retain your customs and your self-identity as "other" because there are enough "others" just like you to sustain that. You can continue to speak your own language if you like; you can keep to the old habits because the city has a microcosm of your old place there within it. You don't have to enter the greater cauldron if you don't wish to do so.
Rather than a melting pot, the new Great Cities are instead patchwork quilts, where neighborhoods remain separate and never quite blend. It's a function of size: once the cities reaches a certain critical population (probably in the region between 500,000 and a million) the dynamics begin to shift, and cities no longer subsume the 'foreign' but only contain it.
Any sociologists/anthropologist out there? Does this sound reasonable? Untenable? What do you think?
But sometimes they just spark thoughts... Roux talks about how being a large city led people to shed their differences and blend into a more cosmopolitan mix -- that this was the characteristic of all large cities: go there, and you become a "Parisian" or a "Londoner" or a "Venetian", shedding your former habits and identifications.
That strikes me as true enough in the past. You come to the big city as a rural dweller, a villager, or a foreigner, and you are assimilated into the greater whole that is the community of the city. In the city, it was nearly impossible to escape that larger identity and retain your previous one. But...
What struck me as a potential theory is that while this was true for cities in the past, it may no longer be the case. When Paris had a population of a few hundred thousand, no, you couldn't easily retain your old identity and customs, because you came into contact with all these other people all the time as you walked about the city. You were thrown into the social cauldron, and the spice of your own life was added to the general blend of what was already there.
But now cities are behemoths with populations of millions that spread over huge areas of land... and thus it is now possible to find an enclave within the city with people like you. It is possible to retain your customs and your self-identity as "other" because there are enough "others" just like you to sustain that. You can continue to speak your own language if you like; you can keep to the old habits because the city has a microcosm of your old place there within it. You don't have to enter the greater cauldron if you don't wish to do so.
Rather than a melting pot, the new Great Cities are instead patchwork quilts, where neighborhoods remain separate and never quite blend. It's a function of size: once the cities reaches a certain critical population (probably in the region between 500,000 and a million) the dynamics begin to shift, and cities no longer subsume the 'foreign' but only contain it.
Any sociologists/anthropologist out there? Does this sound reasonable? Untenable? What do you think?
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From:
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I can fake it.
Physicist and systems theorist Cesare Marchetti (http://cesaremarchetti.org/) has shown that, throughout history, the maximum distance people want to travel regularly is one hour. Multiply that by an average walking speed, and you get a maximum city size (from the edge into the center) of about seven square miles -- which is how large cities were before the invention of horse trams. Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Chinese cities, European Cities: all of them. Cities have only grown larger with the invention of faster travel technologies.
Where cities have seemed larger -- London, Boston, New York -- they were really multiple "cities" stuck together. So London is the city of London and Westminster and etc. Boston is Boston and Cambridge and etc. New York has always had multiple downtowns. Tokyo has neighborhoods, and until recently many people lived their whole lives in the particular neighborhood of Tokyo they were born. Modern cities -- Phoenix comes to mind -- are much larger, because they were designed after the automobile was invented.
This relates to your question. The melting pot phenomenon is real, but it only works within your particular pot. If there is a large enough community in a city -- I am thinking of Chinatown in Manhattan, or the Russian immigrant neighborhood in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn -- someone can only interact with their particular tribe and never assimilate. This has long been true in New York; it's often the children of these immigrants that assimilate. But cars make pots larger, so they take more people to fill. From which we can conclude that your theory is incorrect -- that it's harder today to stay separate, because it takes more people.
B