ABSTRACT
A central intellectual question since the original days of urban sociology is: “What are the effects of urbanization on community?” The European founders of the field of sociology such as Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies were witness to rapid urbanization coupled with the locomotive onrush of industrialization in the capitalist societies of the late nineteenth century. The decline of primary, sentimental relationships and small group solidarities with the absorption of the rural into the urban world seemed quite inevitable at the time. Sociology originated as a positivistic science that compared the progress from rural societies to urban societies, to the biological maturation of natural organisms from infancy to maturity. The belief in the Enlightenment and the idea of progress underlay the theory of evolution and species development from simple to complex organisms. Classic urban sociology linked the phenomenon of specialization in the division of labor to the phenomenon of social differentiation in urban society.
