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JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DISTRESS AND THE HOMELESS

Special issue: Social psychology of city life

Volume 14, number 1 (January-March 2005)

Guest Editor: Harold Takooshian

"What impact has city life on its individual residents--personality, values, behavior?"

George Simmel's 1905 publication of "The metropolis and mental life" remains a seminal essay

on this central yet neglected question. To salute the centenary of Simmel's essay, theJournal of

Social Distress and the Homeless is offering a special issue in 2005, to gather data-based reviews

on diverse aspects of city living.

Introduction: Urban psychology: Its history and current status

Harold Takooshian,Fordham University

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Thomas Blass, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

An increase in noise and a decline in civility

Arline L. Bronzaft,Lehman College CUNY

Urban stress and mental health: The impact of social context on resilience

Keva M. Miller & Michael H. Phillips,

Fordham Graduate School of Social Service

Human settlements and urban life: AUnited Nations perspective

Peter R. Walker, United Nations

Remembering Catherine "Kitty" Genovese 40 years later: Apublic forum

Harold Takooshian, Darren Bedrosian, John J. Cecero, Lynn Chancer,

Andrew Karmen, Jim Rasenberger, Abraham M. Rosenthal, Charles E.

Skoller, Curtis Sliwa, Joyce Stephen.

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Urban psychology: Its history and current status

Harold Takooshian , PhD1

"What impact has city life on the individual--our behavior, personality, values, relationships?"

George Simmel's 1905 publication of "The metropolis and mental life" remains a seminal essay on

this central yet neglected question which we now term "urban psychology." The centenary of

Simmel's essay in 2005 is an apt time to take stock of the history and current status of urban psy-

chology, with a special issue of this journal gathering data-based articles on diverse aspects of

urban psychology. This four-part article (a) summarizes Simmel's 1905 essay, (b) comments on

the dramatic population trends since 1905, (c) elaborates on 10 remarkable points about urban

psychology, past and present, and (d) previews the five urban pychology reports in this special

issue.

KEY WORDS: Urban psychology, George Simmel, Stanley Milgram, nervous energy

1Harold Takooshian, PhD, is a psycholog ist and sociologist on the facult y of Fordham University since 1975, and the Director

of FIRST, the Fordham. Correspondence should be directed to Harold Takooshian, PhD

Institute for Research, Service, Teaching. Address any inquiries to: [email protected]


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social sciences, shaping the early field of urban sociology. It followed on the heels of the

previous generation' s classic by Ferdinand Tnnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesselschaft

(1887), and in turn segued into the next generation's Chicago School of Sociology (Park,

1916), which championed an empirical approach to urban life. A generation later

Simmel's ideas were cited in Louis Wirth's classic 1938 essay on "urbanism as a way of

life," and then the seminal 1970 essay on "The experience of living in cities" by Stanley

Milgram (1933-1984).

The 1900s: A century like no other. Since Simmel's 1905 essay, the Twentieth

Century was one of unprecedented growth and urbanization. In terms of population, it

took all of human history to pass the 1 billion mark in 1804, which became 2 billion in

1927 (123 years), 3 billion in 1960 (33 years), 4 billion in 1974 (14 years), 5 billion in

1987 (13 years), and 6 billion in 1999 (12 years). So the world population more than

tripled from 2 to 6 billions within the century since Simmel's essay.

Moreover, this population growth has exploded unevenly, shifting dramatically

from rural into urban areas. Like metal particles in a magnetic field, this population has

ineffably flowed away from sparse rural areas and into already crowded cities. One can

hardly visit any large city in the developing world today without noticing its perimeter of

temporary shanty towns, with poor rural migrants seeking to enter where there is no room

Table 1

Urban trends: World cities of 100,000+.

Year number % of population

1850 2%

1950 962 16%

1970 1725 24%

1975 1950 26%

2000 3500? 40%?


"What impact has city life on the individual--our behavior, personality, values, rela-

tionships?" This is the central question today of the specialty of urban psychology. It was

100 years ago, in 1905, that Georg Simmel (1858-1918) published his classic essay on

"the metropolis and mental life," an acclaimed 1903 speech delivered in Berlin, in which

he squarely addressed this question. The centenary of Simmel's essay is an apt time for

this special issue of the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless to take stock of

Simmel's question, the current status of urban psychology in 2005, and some current

behavioral research findings. This introductory essay offers a summary of Simmel's

essay, followed by an overview of the status of "urban psychology" a century later--its his-

tory and current status.

Simmel's 1905 essay. Simmel was one of a few contemporaneous European

scholars who forged the modern discipline of sociology, along with Emile Durkheim

(1859-1917), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Ferdinand Tnnies (1855-1936), Max Weber

(1864-1920).

In 1905, Simmel was writing at a time of rapid urbanization, when feudal

Prussian regions had been coalescing into a new German nation, and villagers by the tens

of thousands flooded into cities. Simmel's essay raised his simple question, What impact

has this new external environment on our inner life? His answer hinges on his concept of

nervous energy, "the intensification of nervous stimulation" once we move from the

bucolic village to the bust ling city. This nervous energy in turn leads to a few specific

adaptations. One is intellectualization, in which metropolitan man "reacts more with his

head than his heart" (p.564). Another is the blas attitude, by which urbanites naturally

mute their responses to the steady flow of urban stimuli. Third is a reserve, or cool rela-

tions with others, by which "we often do not even know by sight those who have been our

neighbors for years. And it is this reserve which in the eyes of villagers makes us appear

to be cold and heartless" (p. 568). Metropolitans are also more "free in a spiritualized and

refined sense, in contrast to the pettiness and prejudices which hem in the small-town

man" (p. 570). Though Simmel reports these inner adaptations with some concern, he

concludes "it is not our task either to accuse or pardon, but only to understand" (p. 574).

This insightful 1905 essay has become one of the most-cited in the history of the

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attitudes), people are also pouring into cities in record numbers (pro-urban behavior).

7. Density. With the invention of light-weight new high-rise construction materials

and other technologies (such as transportation, communications, elevators), cities are now

shedding any past limits in size and density.

8. Urbanology. Though several behavioral sciences are part of modern urbanology,

psychology is conspicuous by its near-total absence.

9. Homo urbanus. Though "Homo urbanus" is clearly the person of the future, what

little behavioral research has been done on us urbanites to date finds cities strongly shaped

us on all levels--our outward behavior, inner personality, personal values, interpersonal

relations.

10. Urban psychology. Since 1970, systematic research and teaching on urban psy-

chology is actually decreasing, not increasing.

If our speciesHomo Sapiens Sapiens has walked the earth for roughly 100,000

years, human settlements that we can term cities have existed for less than 5,000 of these

years. Yet even these ancient cities were few, impermanent, and tiny by modern stan-

dards. Similarly, the largest medieval cities prior to 1800 are dwarfed by the rise of mod-

ern mega-cities. It is only in the past 0.4% of the human experience (starting with London

in 1800) that any human has lived in a large city of 1 million. Each animal species has its

natural group size, numbering in the dozens or hundreds-- elephant herds, rat packs, prides

of lions, flocks of birds. For humans, the first 99.6% of the human experience has been

in clans or tribes of a few hundred or less. Human nature was formed almost entirely in

these small hunter-gatherer settlements, where all knew one another their entire lives, and

many were kin--a situation that remains common among bill ions around the world today.

No animal species (ants, bees, birds, and fish included) forms large settlements that come

close in size to human cities of one million or more. Yet the history of humanity is one

of steadily accelerated urbanization, as more and more individuals are drawn ineffably

into less and less space, and this process is occuring most rapidly in the rural nations of

East Asia and black Africa. In AD 2000, a total of 200 million people live in the world's

10 largest cities, a number that could not have been imagined in 1905, yet still rises apace.

One need not be a psychologist to notice the bizarre paradox here, the direct


This tale is told in the concise yet telling data in table 1, compiled by urbanologist

Kingsley Davis in 1973. It documents the breath-taking shift into cities, which have

shown explosive growth in four distinctive ways. (a) Cities are growing in number, as

more top the 100,000 mark. (b) They are growing in size, as existing cities continue to

expand. (c) They are growing in density, with the development of new building materi-

als and other technologies. (d) They are growing in urbanization--or the percentage of

each nation's population which is housed in cities--which likely crossed the 50% mark

around the turn of the millenium. When London became the first city in history to top the

1 million mark in 1800, one could traverse the entire city on foot in less than one hour

(Mercer, 1975). In 2000, London's population of 7.3 million now makes it only #26

among world cities--dwarfed by the mega-cities of 26 million in Tokyo, 18 million in

Mexico City, Mumbai, and Sao Paulo, and 17 million in New York. Clearly the popula-

tion shift Simmel spotted so early in the century has made the question addressed in his

1905 essay all the more compelling (if not urgent) 100 years later.

Urban psychology redux. So what is the current status of urban psychology in

2005? This might be most concisely stated by elaborating on this series of ten statements

about urban life and the study of this by scientific psychology.

1. Origins. Humans have lived in large cities for less than 0.4 percent of their his-

tory on the planet.

2. Growth. Even the largest ancient and medieval cities were small and fragile by

modern standards.

3. Size. No insect or animal species collects in communities nearly as large as mod-

ern human cities that top one million.

4. Trends. Throughout modern history, cities have ineffably grown around the plan-

et, and in every way--number, size, density, permanence, and the percentage of the popu-

lation they contain.

5. Ubiquity. While the urban nations of the West become even more urbanized, the

least urban nations of Africa and East Asia are the ones most rapidly urbanizing today,

without exception.

6. Paradox. At the same time people voice negative views of city life (anti-urban

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that fails to transport, and constant crises in jobs, housing, sanitation, taxation--to the

point that the title of one major article in the 1990s bluntly asked "Are cities obsolete?"

(Morganthau, McCormick, & Levinson, 1991).

Milgram's seminal 1970 essay quickly became a "citation classic," widely cited

by other authors and researchers, inside and outside of psychology (Blass, this issue).

Milgram was already known widely as a scientist who combined an alert eye, a creative

mind, and a fine pen--a combination that readied him for the task to create a much-need-

ed new specialty within psychology (Blass, 2004). Within three years of his arrival from

Harvard to the Manhattan campus of the CUNY Graduate Center in 1967, Milgram

engaged his cadre of doctoral student researchers to empirically test the impact of the

urban environment around them. While others opined on sensational urban phenomena

like the 1964 torture-murder of Kitty Genovese in the presence of 38 New Yorkers

(Rosenthal, 1965), Milgram innovated empirical field methods to objectively study the

behaviors underlying such urban phenomena. Quickly following his 1970 manifesto and

its accompanying 1972 film, The city and the self (Milgram & From, 1972), a spate of

publications on urban psychology appeared through the 1970s, including special issues of

theJournal of Social Issues (Krupat, 1980) andEnvironment & Behavior(Sadalla & Stea,

1978); edited collections on "urbanman" (Helmer & Eddington, 1973), "the urban envi-

ronment" (Baum, Singer & Valins, 1978), "the individual in a social world" (Milgram,

1977); and books on "Living in cities" (Mercer, 1975), "Being urban" (Karp, Stone &

Yoels, 1977), "The urban experience" (Fischer, 1976) and later "People in cities" (Krupat,

1985). This wave of research charted like never before the multiple and clear impacts of

city life on the individual's outer behavior, inner personality, personal values, and inter-

personal relationships. Oddly, in the 1980s, the upward momentum of the seventies,

spawned by Milgram's article, suddenly peaked into a downward momentum, as urban

psychology declined. For some reason the few college courses that emerged in the seven-

ties disappeared, as did new urban psychology books, journals, and researchers. Though

college students remain drawn to do field research in urban psychology (Solomon, 2004),

and the public seems highly interested in the findings of this research in the U.S.

(Takooshian & Solomon, 2004) and overseas (Levine, 2003), the current trajectory of

urban psychology is one of sharp decline, at the very time when the need for it is greater

than ever. This is the same paradox that describes the kindred specialty of "environmen-


clash between people's inner attitudes and outward behaviors. While public opinion sur-

veys routinely find many people voicing anti-urban attitudes about the poor quality of city

life (crowding, poverty, crime, cost of living, etc.), the behavior of people clearly is to

flow from the countryside into cities by the tens of millions. With the on-going develop-

ment of new technologies and building materials in recent decades, the size and density

of future cities are no longer limited by natural forces, just as the vertical cities of today

were unthinkable a century earlier. When students in a tenth-floor classroom at Fordham

University in Manhattan were asked recently to use their imagination to answer this ques-

tion--"Would you agree to live on the 1,000th floor of a building?"--half of these students

said they would do so if this were feasible. Only time will tell if such units someday will

be in demand, and whether their occupants might even have to pay extra for the "luxury"

to live on these higher floor (as high-rise dwellers today must pay extra).

The field of urbanology--the interdisciplinary study of cities--has grown in pro-

portion to this urban explosion of the Twentieth Century. For most of the century, each

social science has assumed its large share of this emerging field of urbanology, so we see

well-developed specialties of urban anthropology, urban economics, urban history, urban

politics, urban sociology--each wi th it s own established journals, books, theor ists, and

college curricula. Psychology alone--with its dual emphases on the individual, and on

experimental methods--has been conspicuous by its absence among the urbanology spe-

cialties. Until 1970.

Stanley Milgram's 1970 article on "the experience of living in cities" was the first

enunciation of modern urban psychology, in a few novel ways. (a) In his focus as a psy-

chologist, he went beyond Simmel's sociological analysis to adapt the concept of stimu-

lus "overload" from cybernetics, to link the urban environment with individual experi-

ence. (b) In his method, Milgram entirely based his many urban psychology concepts

(anonymity, incivility, selectivity, trust, etc.) squarely on data produced by field experi-

mentation and other empirical methods, rather than anecdote and simple observation. (c)

In his goal, Milgram aimed for an objective, nonjudgmental description of urban life,

much in contrast to the urbanology that leaned toward the negative in its view of the city

as a collection of problems. Rightly or not, many urbanologists have come to view the

city as a cloaca, full of failing institutions rife with social distress--schools that fail to

teach, health care that fails to heal, law enforcement that fails to protect, transportation

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Nations, offers the forward-looking United Nations terminology and perspectives on

"Human settlements and urban life." Finally, this issue offers a summary of an unusual

public forum hosted by Fordham University in Manhattan on March 9, 2004 to mark the

fortieth anniversary of the Kitty Genovese tragedy on March 13, 1964, an event that cer-

tainly spurred the formation of urban psychology. The forum brought together a diverse

group of experts to examine this event and its impact: student Darren Bedrosian, jour-

nalist and author Jim Rasenberger, attorney and author Charles E. Skoller, psychologist

Harold Takooshian, priest and psychologist John J. Cecero, SJ, NYPD police com-

mander Joyce Stephen, victimologist Andrew Karmen, sociologist Lynn Chancer,

community organizer Curtis Sliwa, and editor and author A.M. Rosenthal.

REFERENCES

Baum, A., Singer, J.E., & Valins, S. (1978). (Eds.). Advances in environmental psychology 1:The urban environment.

Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.

Blass, T. (2004). The man who shocked the world: The life and legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic.

Davis, K. (1973). (Ed.). Cities: Their origin, growth, and human impact. San Francisco: Freeman.

Fischer, C.S. (1984). The urban experience (2 ed.). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (Orig inally 1976)

Helmer, J., & Eddington, N.A. (1973). (Eds.). Urbanman: The psychology of urban survival. New York: Free Press.

Ittelson, W.H., Proshansky, H.M., Rivlin, L.G., & Winkel, G.H. (1974) . An introduction to environmental psychology. Ne w

York: Holt Rinehart Winston.

Karp, D.A., Stone, G.P., & Yoels, W.C. (1977). Being urban: A social psych ological vie w of cty life. Lexington MA: D.C.

Heath.

Karp, D.A., Stone, G.P., & Yoels, W.C. (1991). Being urban: A sociology of city life (2 ed.). Westport CT: Praeger.

Krupat, E. (1985). People in citie s: The urban environment and its effect s. New York: Cambridge.

Krupat, E. (1980). (Ed.). Urban life: Applying a social psychological perspective. (Special issue) Journal of Socia l Issues, 36

r an psyc o ogy: s s ory an curren s a usaro a oos an

tal psychology" (Stokols, 1995).

We can summarize the many details above into this concise picture. In

1905, who could have foreseen the meteoric growth of cities in the next 100

years? Yet Georg Simmel was prescient to open our eyes early to a question that

would dramatically increase in relevance, as our human settlements increasing-

ly top 10 million and more today. Since 99.6% of the human experience has

been in small clans or tribes where all know one another, we truly have little

idea what long-term impact our big-city life of the future will have on us as indi-

viduals or a species in the century ahead. The urban psychology field research

conducted since Milgram's 1970 article has empirically documented the city's

many impacts on the individual, yet it is up to the behavioral scientists of today

and tomorrow not to drop the precious baton that Milgram and others have held

up high for their grasp.

This special issue2, marking the centenary of Simmel's 1905 essay,

brings together a diverse array of data-based articles by an interdisciplina ry

group of researchers, to reflect the current status of urban psychology in the

Simmel centenary. Social psychologist Thomas Blass of the University of

Maryland, an authority on the work of Stanley Milgram, describes "The urban

psychology of Stanley Milgram ," and his creation of this new field .

Environmental psychologist Arline Bronzaft of Lehman College CUNY, a

long-time activist and expert on din, describes the link between "increasing

noise and declining civility" in our sonorous cities. Social work researchers

Keva Miller and Michael Phillips of the Fordham Graduate School of Social

Service review the extensive research linking "Urban stress and mental health."

Environmental psychologist Peter Walker, a long-time consultant to the United

2

This special issue also benefitted in diverse ways from the helpful behavior of some gracious urbanites: Editor Robert Rieber and

Domenick Filopei of Fordham UNIVERSITY, RICHARD VELAYO OF PACE UNIVERSITY, OGBEBOR EGHOSA AND ERIN

STEWART OF JOHN JAY COLLEGE CUNY.


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(3).

Levine, R.V. (2003) . The kindness of strangers. American Scientist, 91, 226-233.

Mercer, C. (1975). Living in cities: Psychology and the urban environment. Middlesex UK: Penguin.

Milgram, S. (1970). The experience of living in cities. Science, 167, 1461-1468.

Milgram, S. (1992). The individual in a social world (2 ed.). New York: McGraw Hill. (Originally 1977)

Milgram, S., & From, H. The city and the se lf. NewYork: McGraw Hill.

Morganthau, T., McCormick, J., & Levinson, M. (1991, Sept. 9). Are cities obs olete? Newsweek, 42-44.

Park, R.E. (1916). The city: suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment. In R.E. Park and

E.W. Burgess (1967) . (Eds.), The city (pages 1-46). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rosenthal, A.M. (1965). 38 witn esses. New York: McGaw Hill.

Sadalla, E.K., & Stea, D. (1978, June). Psychology of urban life. Special issue of Environment & Behavior, 10 (2), 139- 291.

Simmel, G. (1905) . The metropolis and mental life. In P.K. Hatt and A.J. Reiss (1951). (Eds.) Reader in urban sociology

(pages 562-574). Glencoe IL: Free Press.

Solomon, H. (2004, October 25 ). Teaching about cities. In H. Takooshian (Chair), Symposium on the Social Psychology of

City Life. New York, Fordham University.

Srole, L., et al. (1978). (rev. ed.). Mental health in the metropolis. NewYork: NYU Press.

Stokols, D. (1995). The paradox of environmental psychology. American Psychologist, 50, 821-837.

Takooshian, H. & Solomon, H. (2004, April 24). Who wants urban psychology? Keynote presentation to the 32nd Hunter

College Psychology Convention, New York City.

Tnnies, F. (1963). Community and society. New York: Harper & Row. (orig. 1887)

Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. Ametican Journal of Sociology, 44, 3-24.

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Takooshian-2005