ABSTRACT
The fate of community in urban society has also been one of the main themes in modern sociology since the days of the Chicago School. This very rich sociological tradition has led to important studies on human
ecology, civic design and urban regeneration, which have all had human alienation as their theme. While avoiding extreme pessimism, the general theme in much of the Chicago School is one of the crisis and decline of community. However, these works retain a basic fate in the possibility of community and, perhaps, too, a wider fate in the promise of modernization to deliver a just society. In recent years there have been signs that these concerns of the older urban sociology and community studies have been displaced by new ones, where the emphasis is more on the impact of globalization than industralization, and with postmodernization replacing modernization. In this shift in the study of community, the big question is whether cities have totally lost their connection with community, having become absorbed into the global society, and as a result the last vestiges of locality have been destroyed in the revanchivist world of the global city and its gated communities. The older sociology of the Chicago School believes the city, despite all its problems, was the natural habitat of community and represented the human order of society. This view began to be questioned by the generation of the 1960s, as in the book by Maurice Stein, The Eclipse of Community (Stein, 1960).1 The concerns of urban sociology moved on to other issues, such as suburbia, and urban sociology itself became overshadowed by other developments in sociology. Moreover, many of the presuppositions of the Chicago School, such as the basic belief in American social institutions, the assumption that out of the urban ethnic melting pot would rise a meritocratic society and the wider fate in universal modernization, all collapsed in the 1970s. In The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West, Martin Pawley sums this all up with the announcement of the decline of community in a retreat into private lives (Pawley, 1973). In recent years, however, there has been a renaissance of urban sociology, which has become closely linked with theories of globalization, social movements and new conceptions of space.
