Content area
Abstract
This study is an investigation of primary social networks of people in Canberra - that is, their collections of kin, neighbors, workmates, and other friends. The study sets out with certain expectations about the nature of primary social networks in a modern urban society, and the way in which networks vary between different social strata, age-groups, areas, etc., within such a society. The study delves deeply into a particular situation - Canberra - but it is looking ultimately to adding to our understanding of an aspect of societies generally. The study does have a subsidiary aim which is more immediately practical, however. Some variations in primary social networks may be the result of differences in neighborhood social composition, and this is a matter over which the planners of Canberra have had a very large measure of control; an attempt is made to evaluate their policies of mixing social classes in each neighborhood.
Primary Relations in the City
Classical sociological theories of the city suggested that primary relations were eroded in the city, and replaced by contacts that were impersonal, transitory, superficial, segmentalized, and often predatory.
"Sociologists" were not the first to adopt this point of view: a common reaction against the industrial revolution was to yearn for the old rural order . Thus Disraeli wrote: "Modern society acknowledges no neighbor", and Balzac said: "There is no kin but the thousand-franc note". Within the sociological tradition it is sufficient to mention Durkheim, concerned about solidarity and anomie in modern society, and Sim 1, analysing the anonymity and calculation of relationships in the city. More recently, in America, Wirth (1938) presented a st reotyped summary of urban life, explaining it in terms of three key v a riables: size, density and hetereogeneity. In another influential article Parsons (1943) maintained that the isolation of the nuclear family was functional for industrialized, urbanized society.
Lately, however, a number of sociologists have discovered, somewhat to their astonishment, that personal ties do survive in the urban situation, that city people do have links with extended kin, friends, neighbors, and workmates.
Several American surveys carried out in the mid-1950's - e.g. Gr e r (1956), Bell and Boat (1957) - provided some initial evidence of informal contacts existing in major cities; they suggested that usually relatives were most important in providing informal contacts, followed by friends, then neighbors, and finally co-workers; and that relatives and neighbors tended to be more important in familial areas, while friends and workmates were more important in high socio-economic status areas. There have been a number of more anthropological works, starting with W.F.Whyte's (1943) study of an Italian slum in Boston. Gans (1962) coined the term "urban villagers!' for ethnic inner-city dwellers who were shielded from the supposedly depersonalising effects of the urban environment. Supporting evidence come from studies of urbanization in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile W.H.Whyte (1956) described social life in a middle-class suburb on the edge of Chicago as "a hotbed of Participation" (p.276) - though such
commentators on suburbia did seem rather loth to accept that this sort of socia lizing might have possessed a genuinely primary quality. Young and Willmott (1957) "were surprised to discover that the wider family, far from having disappeared, was still very much alive in the middle of London'' (p.120). Martin's (1967) study in Adelaide is a recent Australian demonstration of the significant part which extended kinship ties retain in modern urban life.
Nevertheless, although there may indeed still be some kind of community in cities, it is not necessarily the traditional, localized one - where kin, workmates and other friends were all neighbors. In the case of an ethnic enclave or a working-class slum, most of a person's primary relations may be concentrated in the neighborhood, but this is not normally so.