"Urbanism As A Way Of Life"

 In Wirths’ article, he makes the point that a city must include 3 different characteristics in order to be called a city. “For sociological purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals.” I definitely agree that this description of a city still holds true today, but it is a somewhat vague definition and does not give someone of maybe a rural area a very clean image of what a city consists of. It does not give any specific examples of different parts of the city being more dense or heterogeneous than others which I think would help distinguish the difference better between cities and rural areas.

Something that Wirth fails to elaborate on in his article that I believe is a very vital part of city life is its diversity. I not only think that this is an obvious observation about a city, but also an important one. Chicago’s diversity makes up its culture and makes up how people interact and why neighborhoods change so drastically from block to block. This to me is the most fascinating part of a city, that you can find any type of person living in a city, variation in race, social class, ages, background, ethnic group, etc. you name it. Although in the article he mentions that differences are not only tolerated but rewarded, which I believe is a pretty bold statement considering that there are ongoing problems of segregation throughout the entire city. I believe that if the diversity and segregation problem was discussed more in what makes up a city, issues could be better dealt with.

Something that we talked about in class after reading this article was how media plays such a large role on how outsiders might perceive the city to be like. We talked about how the media more often than not is amplifying the problems of certain parts of the city that may already have a preconceived notion or stereotype as being a place to stay away from. If this was not already in our heads through the media maybe more things could be done to better our city instead of thinking that there is no hope or a place to completely avoid. I think this could have been elaborated more in Wirth's article to let people know that what they see through the media might be staged to look more dramatic than it actually is.

Overall this was a very interesting article and I never really took time to actually come up with a definition of what a city is myself, but it was cool to be able to piece together what makes up a city, especially a city that is so close in proximity to me.