ABSTRACT
In our familiarity and our modernity urban life may appear only too natural. But urbanism terrified Rousseau in the 17th century, and this fear was strong in the writers of the 19th century grappling to understand urban life and predict its consequences. Take, for example, the German social theorist Tönnies who constructed two opposing models of Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). The growing urban life developed its own culture which was radically opposed to the pre-modern one focused on the village and feudalism. The pre-modern, or Gemeinschaft society, was founded on the living experiencing of a notion of a settled order of nature which ran through the organisation of kinship, neighbourhood and friendship.
