Lifestyle Differences
Rural Areas: Have high levels of homogeneous people, self-dependence, mechanical solidarity, and similarity in work. Urban areas have relatively low levels in each of these.
Urban Areas: Have high levels of heterogeneous people, inter-dependence, organic solidarity, diversity in work, higher cost of living, formalized rules, organizational complexity, numbers of people, and anomie.
A nationally coordinated numbering system was put into place and after 1956, billions of dollars was earmarked to fund the asphalt and concrete paving of a new highway system. Today, we have over 4 million miles of roads that require tens of billions per year in construction and maintenance costs. You can also guess that car ownership has increased dramatically once the roads were built.
Rural areas have relatively low levels in each of these.
Suburban Areas: Have a relative mix of all of these traits, some higher and some lower depending on other structural, cultural, and historical factors. What do all of these terms mean?
Homogeneous implies similar types of people.
Heterogeneous implies diverse types of people.
GemeinschaftGemeinschaft (pronounced Guh-mine-shoft) means intimate community
Gesellschaft (pronounced Guh-zell-shoft) means impersonal associations.
Mechanical solidarity is a shared conscious among society's members who each has a similar form of livelihood
Organic solidarity is a sense of interdependence on the specializations of occupations in modern society.
Anomie is a state of social normlessness which occurs when our lives or society has vague norms.
Look at the image to see NASA's amazing time-lapsed, night time photograph of the Americas, Western Europe, and Western Africa. From this satellite photograph you can see the population concentrations throughout the U.S., South America and Western Europe in contrast to the relatively sparsely lit Africa.
This not only represents population distribution throughout urban and rural areas, but also utilization of rather expensive electrical lights in the urban areas. You can barely distinguish Canada from the U.S. This is because most Canadians live in the lower portion of the country where the climate is more conducive to human existence.
Now view the the rest of the world.
It becomes obvious that most of Africa is very dark compared to the rest of the world. There are nearly 800 million people currently living in Africa. Electricity and city lights are very expensive based on the standard of living there.
Notice the lights of Europe, Russia, The Middle East, India, Eastern China and Asia, the Island nations and the outer boundary of Australia. These light concentrations are in and near major cities and photographically distinguish the differences in socio-economic status between these regions of the world.
Look again at the United States. You can see a massive cluster in the North-eastern region.
The clusters represent what sociologists call a Megalopolis. Some of the larger ones today include: Boston, Washington, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York-New Jersey.
Metropolitan areas are large population concentrations in cities which have influence of the city's various zones. A megalopolis is an overspill of one urban area into another, often where many small towns grow into one huge urban area connected by a major transportation corridor.
Obviously, not all cities are megalopolises. In fact, many cities in America are under 50,000 people. In 2006, an article entitled, "Growth and Change in U.S. Micropolitan Areas" was published by G.F. Mulligan and A. C. Vias. It developed a relatively new concept of micropolitan. Mulligan and Vias reported about 581 micropolitans counted in the 1990 U.S. Census. A micropolitan is an urban area with 10,000-49,000 inhabitants.
