Theories from urban sociology and urban anthropology that influence our understanding of urban missiology

1. Urban Theology
• Values, ethics, meaning,
purpose
Urban Sociology
• Social structure
Urban Anthropology
• Culture
Urban Geography
• Place
Missiological
Tools for
Analyzing
Urban Realities
Viv Grigg (1996, 2017, 2022) and Fletcher Tink (2014,5)
Today
Today

2. Urban Theology
• Values, ethics, meaning, purpose
Urban Geography
• Place
Missiological
Tools for
Analyzing
Urban Realities
Last Weeks

3. Urban Sociology
• Social structure
Urban Anthropology
• Culture
Missiological
Tools for
Analyzing
Urban Realities
Today
Today

4. Preparing for Prophetic Envisioning
Prophets call us to a new
imagination of possibilities

5. Preparing for Prophetic Envisioning
Prophets do not hear God in a vacuum
• Their perceptions and phrases are
based on ideas already in their
minds
• Thus, the academic prophet seeks
both an inner spirituality and an
academic depth of understanding

6. Anthropology: the study of cultures
Traditionally, the study of primitive
populations, relying on being
embedded.
1. Anthropology

7. Studies
1. Cultures in the City
2. The Culture of the City
Urban Anthropology

8. How Does Anthropology Discern
Truth?
Studies Culture
• Cognition (Why?)
• Micro (Interacting in
the street)
• Comparative between
Societies/Cultures
• Qualitative approach
(Narrative ethnographies)
• Participant-Observation
• Describes primarily
“Life”
• Involvement
• “Emic”----Categorized
from Within
• Tries to examine the
whole

9. 2. Urban Sociology
• Sociology studies societies
• Normally a large population
sample
• Macro-perspectives based
on
• Quantitative analysis

10. Truth Searching in Sociology
Sociaology Studies. . .
• Group and social
organization
• Behavior (What?)
• Macro (Examining
from the balcony)
• Quantitative approach
(Statistics)
• Questionnaires
• Describes “Laboratory”
and “Life”
• Detached observation
• “Etic”---Categorized
from Outside

11. Essential Methodology: Journal +
Analysis
• Are you journaling, detailing
your observation where you
are?
• What are you noting that
serves as anthropological
data?

12. Significant Early Sociologists
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
For Marx, the primary moving force in society and the city:
• Was the economic-political component
• Economic/Political drives Social Organizational Change
which drives Belief Systems

13. Significant Early Sociologists
Emil Durkheim (1858-1917): Considered the
“Father” of French sociology.
• Saw the city as a social organization out of
which its economic and ideological
development and structure were derived.
• Social Organization drives Economic
Systemic Change which drives Belief
Systems

14. Weber on Calvin &
Urban Mindset
• Max Weber (1864-1920): Posited that mind-set
was the motor driving the City from which social
organizational change and economic structural
change occur.
• Weber would say that the City is a mind-set; ideology
causes people to behave the way they do. Changes in
belief, over time change social organization. The
Church is shaped by its theology, and its theology
shapes society.

15. The Influence of Calvinism,
according to Max Weber
• New theological ideas allowed for
individualism, activity and valuing work,
certainty of “election”
• New Christian personality now valued as
entrepreneurism, delayed gratification
• New godly values such as industry,
frugality, punctuality, justice, honesty,
fairness
• These are the basic tenets of modern industrial
capitalism.

16. Q1: Which is the chicken?
• Question: What is the relationship
between economics and religious
orientation?
• Do we change ideas first, or
economics, or social context?

17. Q2: Are people in the city different?
• Migratory Selection: Those who come to
the City are the most motivated,
inventive
• The City reshapes people, i.e. sensory
overload
• The City allows for critical masses
which affirm aberrations
• The City involves the jostling of cultural
groups which influence each other

18. Q3: Are Urban Values Different?
Harvey Cox:
• “anonymity” and “mobility”
• The City as “locus of power”
• The City as “change agent”
Louis Worth
• The City as a “Way of Life” (Louis Wirth)
• The City as pathological (“culture of
poverty”--Oscar Lewis), crime, anomie

19. Q#4: Is there an “urban culture”?
How do sub-cultures interact with each other in the City?
• Demographics versus Geodemographics
• e.g. search for Claritas Prism that segments society for marketing
• 66 Segmentations: “Movers and Shakers”; “Money and Brains”; “Sunset
Blues”
• Moving from relationships based on geography, genes and
generations to vocation and voluntary associations
• From multiplex roles (countryside) to simplex roles (City)
• In Missiology: From People Groups to Hybridization of Peoples….
The debates are between “Lumpers” and the “Splitters”; Urban
Culture or Cultures within the city; People Groups or Reaching Cities

20. Urbanism vs Urbanization
• Urbanism is the lifestyle of a city, the values
of the urbanites.
• (Urbanization is the process of urban growth).
• The early major theories of urbanism are
products of the Chicago School, that reflect
the experience of American cities.
• Study of Majority World cities has produced
quite different models.

21. “Organization” versus “Organism”
Viewing systems in interaction with each other
(like the systems of the body)
• “Limited good” (the pizza gets divided more
ways) versus “Unlimited good”, (gets
bigger).
• Tonnies (1887): Gemeinschaft (community)--
-intimate relationships and collective
activities of the feudal community; versus
Gesellschaft (society), with impersonal,
contractual bonds in the capitalistic society.

22. Transformation of Relationships
• You are in a big city. How do you
build meaningful relationships?
• How many of your relationships are
“transactional” rather than
“transformational”?
• How does your target group process
this progression?
• How do they contrast their style of
relationships with the oppressor
culture?

23. Significant Names and Movements
in Early Anthropology
• 19th Century: Armchair Anthropologist, James Frazer,
The Golden Bough
• 19th Century: The influence of Christian Missionaries
(Livingston, Stanley, etc)
• 1938: Louis Wirth’s essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life
• 1930s-40s: The Chicago School of Urban Ecology:
Robert Park, focusing on urban social problems based on
residential succession. Looked at shapes of cities
• 1960s: The Emergence of Urban Anthropologists:
Robert Kemper, Eames, Claude Fisher, George Foster

24. Organic Theory - Robert Park
• A journalist, firsthand experience reporting.
• Studied under the German sociologist George Simmel,
• Moved to the University of Chicago in 1914, taught in the
Department of Sociology.
• Drawing on the insights of Darwin, Park drew analogies between
plant communities and human communities.
• His ideas were first promoted in a 1916 article: 'The City -
Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban
Environment’.
• Called the Organic Model of the city, Park's analysis drew on
extensive study of different groups within the city.
• Focussed on interaction between humans and their environment,
comparing this to the evolutionary process in the world of plants.

25. i. Competition
• As with plant species, people in the city compete for
limited space and access to the most desirable location for
residence and business.
• Such competition is marked by land values, which sort
urban dwellers into separate types occupying specific
areas.
• The slum represents the area of minimum choice; that
which is left over. Competition thus leads to segregation.

26. ii. Dominance
• Within different varieties of plants growing in one area, a
certain species will exert a dominant influence in that it
controls the environmental conditions which encourage or
discourage other species. In the city as a whole, the
Central Business District will play such a dominating
role. In local areas of the city, certain activities will
dominate the environment.

27. Park: Cities as Organisms (contd)
iii. Invasion and Succession
• Plants change the micro-environment in which they live, and
make it possible for other less tolerant species to thrive under
the new conditions. Park applied this concept to urban
communities, noting the way in which an ethnic area could
be invaded by people from a different ethnic group who
would eventually establish dominance.
• Park's work was seminal, and established the Chicago
School' of urban sociology, which has itself been dominant in
the field for most of this century.
Park, R.E. (1952). Human Communities, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. A later summary of his work.

28. The Original Theory of Urbanism -
Lewis Wirth
Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938)
A theory of urban life as a universal model of the
city.
The three major factors which affect the significant
demography of the city are:
• (i) large size
• (ii) high density
• (iii) heterogeneity.

29. Wirth: Polar Models
• Tribal to Peasant to Urban
• urban society is impersonal, heterogenous and secular
• folk society is peaceful, well integrated and
comparatively free of strife.
• The city was increasingly perceived as negative,
the rural life as idyllic. (Refuted by others)
• Hiebert’s application to Missiology: Clan, Tribal,
Peasant, Urban
• Grigg: Modern Urban, Postmodern Megacity

30. Peasants in Cities
• Oscar Lewis, an anthropologist, reacted to this definition
by studying migrants into Mexico City and denied that
everyday life in the city is largely the product of
urbanism. The villagers kept their religious ties and
familial ties in the migration.
• "Social life is not a mass phenomenon. It occurs for the
most part in small groups, within the family, within
neighbourhoods, within the church, formal and informal
groups and so on. Consequently, the variables of
number, density and heterogeneity are not crucial
determinants of social life or personality".

31. Peasants in Cities (Contd)
i. Social Worlds
Lewis, Rotenberg and Hannerz have argued that the primary social groups is not the
city as a whole, but smaller intimate circles based on kinship, ethnicity,
neighbourhood, occupation, lifestyle, or similar factors.
ii. Social Dynamics
Formative factors for people in a city are not primarily those of size, density, and
heterogeneity, according to these writers. Rather the dynamics of social life are
controlled by socio-economic class, culture, and stage in the life cycle. Thus the
broad strokes of any person's social position can be determined by their occupation
and wealth, their ethnic background and culture, and their marital and family status.
It is easily seen that these factors are relatively independent of the size of the
community. All urban context is relevant only insofar as it affects the social
categories. For example, large cities may provide better-paying jobs, or attract
more immigrant male workers than females. It will in turn affect the social worlds
of that particular city, but the effects of cities on the individual are indirect rather
than direct.

32. Gulick (Connectedness)
Gulick (1989) integrates these opposing poles into a
schemata examining
• disconnectedness
• minimal connectedness
• connectedness

33. Sub-cultural Theory - Claude
Fischer
• A middle way between these views is suggested
by Fischer (To Dwell Among Friends: 1982).
He agrees that urbanism has a direct effect on
social life, but not by destroying social worlds.
Rather it creates and strengthens them.
• Herbert Gans (The Urban Villagers) described
an Italian-American neighbouhood in Boston as
an “urban village”.

34. Sub-cultural Theory - Claude Fischer
(1975,1995)
i. Sub-cultures
• The single most important social effect in the growth in size
of a given community is the promotion of diverse sub-
cultures. Subcultural theory identifies
• social solidarity
• sociabilility
• mutual assistance
• Street kids, punks, yuppies and psych patients are all
examples of subcultures which provide the basic community
for groups of urban residents.
• share distinctive traits
• interact primarily with each other
• and have a relatively distinct set of beliefs and behaviour.

35. ii. The Shaping of Sub-cultures
• Subcultural theory sees an important role of the urban
environment in shaping new sub-cultures.
• As communities grow in size, they begin to create new
sub-cultures, modify existing ones, and promote contact
between them.
• Integral in this is the emergence of networks (a set of
links between individuals or groups)
• and associations.

36. ii. The Shape of New Communities
• Large communities attract migrants from wider areas
than do smaller towns. These migrants have a wide
variety of cultural and social backgrounds, and so provide
for a diverse set of social worlds.
• The bigger the city, the more differentiation and
specialisation takes place. Structural differentiation
provides the basis for new subcultures, based around
occupation or special interest.
• Once the loose boundaries of a new subculture have been
formed, the urban environment acts to consolidate and
intensify the grouping.

37. Technology in Rural - Urban
Culture Change
• Gideon Sjoberg developed a theory about the
preindustrial city seeking to distil the essential elements
from pre-industrial cities in Europe and parts of the third
world today.
• Nels Anderson (1962) analysed modern industrial
society as a whole demonstrating the driving power of
technology in the development of these urban values.
• This is similar to the sociologist, Jacques Ellul in his
study of Technique as determinant of modern
personhood.

38. Economics and Urbanism
• More recent anthropological studies have looked at
cities as part of the larger socio-economic systems
in which they are embedded. Jane Jacobs
published on the economics of interrelated cities
(Cities and the Wealth of Nations) Others have
looked at such relationships from Marxist
categories..
• More recent urban analyses may be found related
to postmodernism vs urbanism (See Dear and
Soja), and in Urban Planning discussions linked to
UNHabitat.

39. Sociologist: Peter Berger
The Homeless Mind
• Berger, in developing the concept of an urban world
view, defines the two components of modernity as
technological production and bureaucratic organization.
He claims that the following patterns develop in the
urban situation:
• a. Componentiality, or the breakdown of something into
basic or atomic interchangeable parts that can be
manipulated;
• b. Interdependence of components and their sequences
and consequences, producing a formula approach to
events (The same events are seen as
producing the same results); and
• c. Separation of means and ends.

40. Sociologist: Peter Berger
The Homeless Mind
• These bring about a mechanistic view of the
world and of social organization. The
consequences in social organization, as seen in
the factory and bureaucracy, are a mechanistic
approach and an engineering mentality. They
result in human control and manipulation of
both nature and the social order—

41. Sociologist: Peter Berger
The Homeless Mind
According to Berger, we find standardization and
reproducibility of thought patterns in the urban world-
view. Tasks are broken down into subtasks in a linear
fashion. Measurability, production and profit orientation
are seen in speech patterns, emerging vocabulary, and new
relationships.
My experience indicates that the above outcomes described
by Berger, while evident in urban middle classes, are not
evident in the slums. They occasionally intrude, but are not
significant in the culture of the urban poor.

42. Berger: The Urban Mindsent
• Berger describes the urban personality using
terms like componentialization of self in public
(anonymous self roles) and in private (personal
self), alienation between components, emotional
management, multi-relationalism (a sense of
“Everything’s happening to me at once”),
dissociation (“It’s not my problem”), and
meaninglessness, anomaly (“I see no order”).

43. Slumdewllers: Transitions from Oscar Lewis
to Peter Berger urban mindset
Why should these characteristics occur in the slums
and not the ones listed earlier derived from the Culture
of Poverty and peasant culture analyses?
These latter personality traits develop mainly because
of the breakdown in the closely-knit rural family.
Loss is felt not as the migrant family moves into the
technology and industrialization of the city, but as
they lose personal, face-to-face relationships.

44. Broken Community: New Community
• Many families in the slums live in isolation from each
other, afraid of all relationships outside of their rural
clan. They have a public self that they bring to the
church, but unless the church contains a number of
people from those old clan relationships, they will be
hesitant to reveal their private selves.
• To break down these walls, the successful church in
the slums must develop patterns that match the old
community relationships as much as possible.
• One key to success in this is the migrant’s sense of
long-term loyalty. Another is the sense of “in-
groupness.”

45. Grigg: Judging? the Traditional Mindset
• What many might call “lack of management skills”
among the peasants in the city may be viewed positively
as the persistence of effective “folk culture” traits of
relating and decision-making.
• The new skills of urban life described by Berger are not
better than the old in coping with life in the city, so we
are wise not to make value judgments about the ability of
those in the slums to manage.
• Modern management skills are largely inappropriate in
coping with the culture of the slums.
•

46. Generational Mindset Change
It will be frustrating for the Christian
worker to enter the slums expecting to
impart such management skills without
studying the long transitional periods
required to move from one pattern of
thought process to another. It is doubtful
whether this transition can be made in a
generation—except perhaps by a small
handful out of each ten thousand migrants.

47. References
• Mumford, Lewis. (1969) The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects,
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
• Sjoberg, Gideon (1966). “The Rural-Urban Dimension” in Handbook of Modern Sociology, Robert
L Faris,ed
• Park, R.E. (1952) Human Communities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A later summary
of his work.
• Berger, Peter L., Berger, Brigitte & Kellner, Hansfried. (1973). The Homeless Mind: Modernization
and Consciousness. New York: Random House.
• Grigg, Viv. (2004) An Insiders Perspective. In Cry of the Urban Poor. Authentic.
• Gulick, John. (1989) The Humanity of Cities: An Introduction to Human Societies. Bergin and
Garvey.
• Jocano, Landa C. Round the Clock Activities. In Slums as a Way of Life. Manila: NewDay.
• Lewis, Oscar. (1966). "The Culture of Poverty." Scientific American, 215 (4), 3-9.
• Sjoberg, Gideon. (1960). The Preindustrial City, Past and Present. New York: Free Press of
Glencoe.
• Mayer, Egon (1979). From Suburb to Shtetl: the Jews of Boro Park. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, p16.
• Miner, Horace (1953). The Primitive City of Timbuctoo. Princeton NJ: Princetone University Press.
• Bascom, William (1955) Urbanisation Among the Yoruba. American Journal of Sociology. 60:446-
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