A hypothesis...

[sleigh]

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?

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Many cities are patchwork quilts of neighborhoods, but those neighborhoods are each larger than Paris in the middle ages. First generation Hmong here in the Twin Cities still speak their own language and mainly hang out with themselves, but they still get to interact with much of the rest of the city. Their stores don't only cater to Hmong and the Hmong still shop at Walmart and Ace Hardware. Their kids go to the local schools.

As a percentage of the total populace, any individual deals with fewer inhabitants of a city than they would a large town. They are still part of the city, and are affected by it. The transit system, the weather, the shared pollution/water/politics guarantee some cultural intermingling.

The dynamics of a large city are different than the dynamics of a small city, but it's still a city.

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

Putting on my Anthropologist hat, I think another reason why big modern cities tend to be patchwork quilts instead of melting pots is because of immigration waves. When a huge group of people moves to a new local, they tend to seek familiar things. So we had huge Irish ghettos during the potato famine immigration wave, and Polish ghettos, and Russian ones, Chinatowns during the railroad era, Jewish ghettos pretty much forever. We have newer ones now, Vietnamese ones, Muslim ones in the Scandinavian countries, etc.

After a while some of the patchwork starts to blend. There are no more Irish ghettos on Galveston Island in Texas, for example and no one seems to talk too much about Italian boroughs in NY these days. I think it depends on how easily the incoming population assimilates, and how much they want to assimilate.

There were Jewish ghettos in Spanish cities in the middle ages, probably because cultural identity is very much treasured by Sephardic Jews, and probably because of discrimination. And if you think on the Norman invasion of England, for some time the nobles spoke French and lived a life almost completely separate from their new subjects. Eventually they assimilated, though, and ended up speaking English and adopting some local customs.

Going to stop rambling now. :)

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

gotta ramble some more to stick a vague thesis like thing on--

patchwork versus melting pot is probably dependent not only on the size of the city but on the group size of the immigrants, and their desire/ability to assimilate. I think barondave is saying something similar.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You might consider the Canadian model, here, too. Canadians loudly and proudly insist that their government allows new immigrants to keep their culture, language, and heritage, and how different this is from the American Melting Pot model of immigration.

I have done a couple of days Internet surfing, looking for exactly what this means, and what the difference between the two country's established immigrant populations is, but I haven't turned up anything illuminating. No doubt I didn't look in the right places.

K.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Any sociologists/anthropologist out there?"

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

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

I think there is merit in your notion, however, I have a different theory that may also contribute:

Travel is a lot easier now.

Back when my grandparents' generation came to the US (specifically, NYC), there was no thought of going home. "Home" was a two-week boat trip in steerage away. They were going to be Americans now. The nice thing about America was that they would be allowed to keep their home customs, but they held no belief that they would someday return.

I contrast that to the students I taught at a community college in NY back in the early 90s. Every single one of them (who had been at least fifteen years old when they arrived in the US) believed that they would someday return home--even the ones whose home country didn't exist anymore, or had been taken over by an evil dictator.

There's something to the "size makes it possible to recreate home" theory, but sometimes smaller towns have their ethnic enclaves.

I would like to compare to ancient Rome. One million people, heavily stratified social structure...Did ethnic neighborhoods form?

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Sorta like fandom over the last generation or so . . .

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

I think there are multiple answers to this question, all of which shed some light on the subject.

I think that to some extent, still, immigrants to a city become "City-ians of X descent." Certainly if one looks at, say, the ChinaTown of San Francisco and compares it to the ChinaTown of New York, the residents still speak their native language, but they also have many characteristics of anyone who lives in the target city that the other group doesn't. In a generation, the "City-ian" characteristics will outweigh the "X descent" characteristics. Certain ethnic groups (Jews in particular) have fought this tendency, and have managed to retain a cultural identity despite living in metropolitan areas. Other groups have been less dedicated, and while there is a definite ethnic flavor to certain second-generation neighborhoods, the children are citizens of the city first, and members of the descendant ethnic group second. It takes real work for an immigrant population to maintain an ethnic identity separate from the greater city around them, and chances are that their children will marry someone from outside the ethnic group anyway.

I think you're wrong about the neighborhoods remaining fixed and separate and not blending. A given neighborhood is lucky if it retains an ethnic identity for more than a couple of decades, and it takes some pointed effort on the part of neighborhood members to achieve that. They have to convince their children to stay in the area. They have to assert a "pro-ethnicism" (for lack of a better term) that is frankly out of style. The most dedicated ethnic neighborhood still winds up having McDonald's, Taco Bell and a Chinese take-out place. Drill down, and one typically finds that the given area in fact barely has a majority of the naming ethnic group living there.

And it all tends to boil down to a human instinct to hang with "People like me", which first sorts by ethnic heritage, but that breaks down, and the individuals find that common interests will outweigh the ethnic component.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

My grandparents' generation (Irish immigrants fleeing the Troubles after WWI) settled in the South Bronx.

As their fortunes improved, many of them moved to the neighborhoods of northern Queens, just over the bridges. Well, Astoria eventually went Greek, so much so that people now tend to think of it as having always been a Greek neighborhood. Flushing went pan-Asian (mostly Chinese, Korean, and Indian), though Auburndale (the eastern edge of Flushing) has an enclave of Greeks. Bayside has been steadily becoming more Korean each year.

Where have the Irish descendants gone? Moved up and moved to other neighborhoods, perhaps out of NY altogether. No one was fleeing--they were taking jobs, or getting married, or any of the hundred reasons people have for not living next door to their parents. I have no doubt that the same will happen to the subsequent generations of the Greek and Asian families.