ABSTRACT
Social scientists have noted that variations in residence — city, suburb, small town, open country — tend to be associated with different patterns of behavior. The late Louis Wirth, who undoubtedly would have contributed to this volume were he still alive, described urbanism as a way of life in a classic article published in 1938. Professor Gans now reviews Wirth’s theory in the light of subsequent research. He argues that residence is less a source of variation in behavior than an index (not always useful) to other sources, that no single urban — or suburban — way of life can be identified, and that differences in ways of life between the big city and the suburb can be explained more adequately by the class and life-cycle variations of their respective inhabitants.
