The Community Course
Part 1 - The Significance of the Community
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4. Community, City, Region and Larger Units

Defining a City
A city is an aggregation of persons, families, communities, firms, congregations, and other associations for varied purposes, and with no necessary unity or harmony. The people do not undertake to know each other personally, and aside from a few elemental functions, do not feel personally responsible for each other, and do not feel the necessity of working together in unison for common ends. What they do in common is to provide a certain element of an economic basis, such as water supply, fire protection, policing, and sanitation, and certain limited cultural advantages, such as schools and musical entertainments. Beyond this minimum basis for living, individuals are left to pursue their own courses.

Community Traits in Cities
No such description of a city is fully accurate. The impulse to create communities is at work wherever men are, and we see frequent efforts to make the city into a community. Music may be furnished to the city as a whole. Educational facilities sometimes are extensive and varied, reaching from the nursery school to graduate professional schools, and sometimes extending to varied forms of adult education. Community Chest organizations undertake to develop in the whole city a community feeling of responsibility for varied needs. Park systems, museums, muni­cipal golf courses, city stadiums and city auditoriums tend to serve varied needs of the entire city. City hospitals and visiting nurses care for the sick of the entire city, city libraries with their branches give universal service. Newspapers have their "people's opinions" columns in which citizens may discuss issues with each other in a community spirit. Even in great cities like New York and Philadelphia personalities emerge who view the city as a community, and who come to be known as public-minded citizens.

Community Limits in Cities
This concept of the city as a community has a long history. It probably will continue to live and grow, and will continue to furnish able and public spirited men with great careers in public service. To ignore it would be to overlook an im­portant social reality. Yet, having paid tribute to the community spirit as expressed in cities, we must recognize the city as a difficult and none too promising field for the creation of a real community. Personal acquaintance is necessarily limited. People must deal largely with strangers. Those who govern and those who are governed cannot know each other personally. Where community spirit and activity does exist in a city it usually is restricted to a small and influential part of the population, with the general citizen taking little or no part. The major needs of life are not satisfied by the entire city planning and working together toward common ends, but rather by pursuing separate and sometimes conflicting interests, often in the spirit of getting as much as possible by giving as little as possible. Even most of the so-called community cultural activities of the city are concerns of small elements of the population.

Community (Village) vs. City

In the Source Book in Rural Sociology we have discussions of the differences between village and city, the word village being used somewhat as a synonym for community: "In its origins the village is only the prolongation of the clan. It forms a true, indivisible family, a community closely bound together by collective responsibility. Although the modern village is composed of a multiplicity of families dwelling apart, these families are unities of too limited and yet too loose a nature to constitute true social divisions. They do not affect the village organi­zation, which remains homogeneous and simple."

"The second category of social settlements includes the complex establishments, those formed from a multiplicity of distinct social groups. In this book they will be called cities. They present different degrees of complexity."

“The city is a complex society, formed from a multiplicity of secondary groups. The city is a society made up of an assembling of smaller societies: families, professional groups, etc.”

"The city is then a complex society whose geographical base is particularly restrained for the size of its population, or whose territorial element is relatively meager in amount compared to that of its human elements."

Writing of Greek and Roman cities, the authors indicate how they were natural evolutions formed by groups of smaller societies: "Thus the city was not an assemblage of individuals, it was a confederation of several groups, which were established before it, and which it permitted to remain." As the Greek boy grew up he was initiated into each of these groups in succession by formal social or religious rites. First he was initiated into the family, then into the clan, then into his tribe, and then into the city, which was a confederation of tribes.

The Modern City
An American city, like Chicago, has no such historic background, and in comparison is a sprawling, amorphous agglomeration of persons, families, firms, racial groups, social classes, congregations, and other interpenetrating units. The city wards may follow the form of the tribes which made up Greek and Roman cities, but the likeness is superficial. The modern city is blindly feeling its way into its social role, and in that fumbling it may unconsciously be more inventive than ancient cities. In following the natural tendencies of men and of groups of men something new and valuable may emerge.

Early Cities
According to these authors, early cities like Nineveh and Babylon were enormous villages, agriculturally self-supporting within their walls. The medieval European city was, also, a large village, agriculturally self-supporting. The modern city is the opposite extreme, representing far more complex social and economic organization. If Nineveh was like a jelly fish, largely stomach, and with a low order of specialization, New York is like a chief nerve center of a higher animal. From fear of the mob and of the power of wealth, and perhaps from sectional fears or jealousies, the political capital of our country was kept away from the metropolis, but that is a sort of historical accident.

A Super Community
Our modern cities are coming to be the economic, political, and social nerve centers of a great, partly evolved super-community in which the nation itself or national organizations seek to perform those community services which in most early societies were performed by local village communities. Thus our national government undertakes to feed the hungry, to care for the aged, to promote 4-H clubs for the social and economic development of rural children, to guard food supplies, and to perform numerous other community services. Nationwide private organizations such as the Boy Scouts and the Parent Teachers Association endeavor to perform similar services. The community impulse, seeking to find expression in every social unit from rural neighborhoods to nations and to associations of nations, with the help of modern technology, is creating unprecedented forms and functions. Through psychology, economics, surveys, and statistics, the modern head of a nation or of a national organization may have much of the knowledge about average individual conditions over the country than the head of a primitive village had about his fellow villagers. The people of a great nation may know almost as much about each other’s thoughts and about the general state of affairs as did ancient or medieval villagers while the press and radio give the people of a widespread nation a feel­ing of intimate personal acquaintance with their leaders.

Ancient Peru was a great nation, extending over a distance about as great as from Florida to Alaska, organized as one vast community. Through census-taking, surveys, and statistics, the central government had intimate knowledge of popula­tion, of age distribution, and of economic conditions over every part of the vast empire. The Inca and his staff spent much time in becoming acquainted with their domains. Everyone worked; even the Inca and his court plowed and cultivated land. Except for the official class, there was economic equality, everyone being furnished what was needed from the national storehouses. The nation provided house and land for every young married couple, even though this required building vast systems of high stone terraces on the steep mountain sides. Orphans, the sick, and the aged were cared for by the state.

This great super-community was formed by hierarchies of families. There was a basic community of ten families with an elected chief. Over each forty families was another chief, and over five of these groups (200 families), another. So the groups increased in size (1000 families, 4000 families, etc.) up to the pro­vinces and the Empire. This structure did not suddenly spring into being, but was the outgrowth of highly integrated and co-operative communities which were characteristic of the natives of much of South America. In this process we have an example of a normal process of social evolution. The fundamental social processes were evolved and established over a long period in small indigenous communities. Then these communities united into larger and larger groups, sometimes voluntarily, some­times by conquest. At each step they applied the earlier community methods to larger associations, until finally there emerged in one of the larger groups a great genius for idealizing, refining, and perfecting these community methods; and there emerged from that process a great empire, with the form of totalitarianism, but with much of the character of a federation, because the whole expressed the genius of its elements and emerged from them. Substantially the same process took place in England.

Limits of Technical Approaches
Today again, the community impulse in people, working through modern technical civilization, is striving to express itself in all stages and dimensions of human society. To some extent this effort to create vast communities can be successful, but to some extent it will arrive at success, if at all, only after long periods of painful effort, and perhaps after great social catastrophes. The reason for this pessimistic view is the absence in the larger units of conditions which made for the vitality and permanence of primitive community organization. These reasons will be considered under a later heading, concerning the significance of the community in human culture.

The Concept of Regionalism
The concept of regionalism is an approach to functional societies. It is a concept which sometimes will tend to promote "cumulative communities" where local self-sufficiency is desirable. Sometimes it will lead to the giving up of self-sufficient communities because wide-range functional organization is more efficient and productive.

There is a great flux of social institutions underway. Everywhere in America and in Europe the “cumulative community,” or integrated community, is fading away, and the functional or functional-regional community is growing. This movement parallels a tendency in education during the past half-century, when general higher education relatively declined and specialized education greatly increased. The result was a sudden increase in wealth-producing efficiency, and in specialized knowledge, but no corresponding increase in the general art of living. Educators everywhere are seeing this mistake, and are trying to correct it.

Achieving Integration of Community Life
Yet as to community organization, the tendency in America is still strongly toward functional or regional-functional association, with small thought for the integrating of community life and interest for general life purposes. It is doubtful whether a civilization can endure which is supported only by functional (specialized) organization. It needs total cohesion and integration, making it not just a collection of functions, but a personality. In a highly functionalized community many organizations are available to serve special needs, but there commonly is a lack of a total view which sees these special needs in relation to the whole, and which keeps in view over-all aims and purposes. How to get that integration without regimentation and without losing the values of functional organization--that is a major social problem. Its answer does not lie in giving up the values of functional organization or regional-functional organization, nor in giving up the values either of community integration or of individuality, but in achieving a vital relationship and a sense of proportion among them all.