Comment by sinkasapa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sinkasapa | Hacker News Reader

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As a non-specialist, I think a surprising statement is that in this particular field, there is an expectation that large, dense cities encourage socioeconomic mixing. That seems counter to everyday experience and policies that are sometimes enacted in cities to counter the trend, like bussing kids in poor neighborhoods into richer school districts. The term "ghetto" famously describes an urban trend to cut off poor enclaves, generally with some racial or ethnic component. I guess I felt like it was "common knowledge" that urbanization increased social stratification, whether in ancient times as agricultural societies developed, as I was taught in high school social studies, or in more modern cases where people leave the land to find opportunities, as in Latin America, for instance, where terms like favela are familiar even to English speakers to describe the cut-off, under-serviced and impoverished neighborhoods that have developed. Common knowledge being what it is, that isn't to say that anyone should believe that cities necessarily increase or decrease stratification without making measurements but stories of urban inequality seems to be so prevalent in popular culture that it seems strange that one would state that the opposite is a popular expectation but they have citations so I'm not questioning that the idea is out there, only that it is surprising that it is so prevalent that they need to open their article as though they are bucking a trend in the literature.

I think you are misunderstanding the argument. Yes, there have always been rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods in cities, but the idea was that with everyone "packed in" together and making use of shared resources like sidewalks, stores, and subways, that people would essentially be forced to come into contact with others from different socio-economic levels.

I agree with AnimalMuppet's comment - car-centric behavior kills this. For example, if you go to older cities that were developed "pre-car" in the US like NYC or Boston, I feel like you get more interaction just because you're likely to interact with more people on the sidewalks or subway/T. Living in a car-centric city like Austin is totally different. As much as Austin likes to promote its progressive ethos, this is definitely one of the most segregated cities I've ever experienced, even more so now that housing prices have gotten insane - poorer people live further out, and the public transportation system is pretty abysmal and there is much more of a socioeconomic divide in people who use it (primarily because, and I see this all over the US, but many people love to talk about the need and benefits of light rail, but buses are often seen as "for the poors").

But in cities that aren't car centric you commonly have stores embedded into the neighborhood at walkable distance. For everyday needs like groceries you just go to whatever shop is closest, which will be a posh Whole Foods in a rich neighborhood and a cheap discounter in a poor neighborhood.

You share sidewalks, public transportation, etc when going for work or shopping for something that isn't a daily necessity. But the same could be said about less urbanized places.

The counter argument are towns and villages that only really contain one socio-economic group. You can have small towns that are basically only rich people, or only poor people. Cities provide less segregation than that.

Nothing makes you hate people like interacting with them on public transit.

Try interacting with them via the button on your steering wheel.

I can't speak for the whole country but having lived most of my life around dense parts of California I'd choose dealing with fighting traffic over the dregs on public transit every single time. I still distinctly remember back when I'd take the the bus to the local community college for my pre-transfer credits where a few times I had to intervene to help women who were being harassed. And that's just one problem type! It's not counting all the other enjoyable public transit experiences like when I'd stand for the entirety of my bus ride because the only open seats were beside some junkie mumbling erratically or even sometimes inaccessible because a hobo had brought a literal sack of trash to fill the space beside them.

I’ve never been to Boston or Austin, but here in Paris many people take the public transit, be it metro or buses: rich, poor, and in-betweens.

Talking to random strangers when out and about is very much not the norm. Being forced to come into contact with the others is seen more as a negative than a positive.

The only places where I see some kind of mingling is where that’s the goal, such as bars, and possibly “hobbies”. Although, IME, even those tend to have people from similar “categories”.

In the US, there used to be the idea of "sidewalk culture" - deliberately structuring cities so that different kinds and classes of people would meet, literally on the sidewalk, and from that would form, at least to some degree, a shared culture. There was the idea of deliberately breaking the silos that separate people. And maybe that even worked.

Worked. Past tense. In most of the US, it's now a car culture. And even in cities where people walk, it's now an earbud culture.

I'm not sure GP is accurate, even without that. The privileged descending to the lower quarters to hobnob with the masses is as old as civilization, and of course the working lower class generally have to go where everyone else is to serve them. If segregation is increasing, there are plenty of mechanisms to point to, also: anti-poor urban design protocol (including law enforcement-related), low/no-contact resource delivery, WFH, the increased cost of transportation and housing, etc.

It's not actually a surprise that society is bifurcating, is it? Not after the anaphasing of school demographics, voter behavior, and so on.

> In the US, there used to be the idea of "sidewalk culture"

> In most of the US, it's now a car culture.

In my experience cars have nothing to do with this. I grew up outside the US in a very car-required area.

And yet what you call sidewalk culture was and is the norm of daily life. You go outside, meet the neighbors, play board games on the sidewalks, have beers with them deep into the evening, simply hang out outside a lot. I miss this a lot.

In the US they invented an actual fake crime for the idea of hanging out outside - loitering. You try your sidewalk culture in the US and the police will show up to break up your illicit activity (eyeroll).

In the US you must be at home or at work or commuting between them, or spending money shopping or in some corporate-sanctioned entertainment venue.

Even take out the cars sidewalk culture is dead when the rich people are buying coffee for $7 and the working class are getting it from the self serve pitcher in the gas station. A lot of places today are highly economically stratified thanks to the prices of goods and services offered. It also doesn’t help that when people close their eyes and imagine “third place” somewhere that obligates you to spend money to be there comes up.

I was definitely taken back by that statement. Marginalized groups, for example, have always noted how cities offer increased isolation away from bigots as compared to smaller towns and rural areas. It may be a prevalent idea in academia, but I'm not sure anyone thinks that way on the streets.

Actually i do agree with the statement. I live near the biggest city in my state and my friends are different in ideas, political opinions and preferences (also kinda different in economic possibilities) due to the fact that we all went to the same highschool, and there are few places where the young can socialize. on the contrary my brother lives in that big city and its friends are ALL coming from the same cultural background, with the same ideas and the same political leaning (that he chooses during university)

A lot of that has to do with the fact that you chose your friend group during public high school and he chose his during university, which itself already selects for the upper socioeconomic statuses.

> urbanization increased social stratification

Urbanization increases social stratification in that the upper class and the upper middle class tend to live in or near cities. As far as the poor and working class, the majority live outside cities in agricultural societies, and in or near cities in modern societies.

It is worth saying what you describe is the classic European view of things. In English-speaking countries post industrialisation the reverse was the case, with inner cities being the regions of notorious poverty, with the upper classes engaged in rural pursuits as a pure leisure activity.

It's important here to differentiate between the big cities and the next tier. The big, dense cities (SF, NYC, Boston, London, Tokyo, etc) have accumulated wealth and privilege within the city and lower income folks are on the perimeter. In second tier cities, it's more common for suburban sprawl to have led to "white flight" and wealth accumulation outside city centers... but those cities frequently don't have near the economic draw in their downtowns anyway so it doesn't matter.

IMO, the GP was perfectly clear, and there's no need to misunderstand it on purpose to insist on some unverified narrative.

You could just as easily disagree, with a valid point.

(And anyway, the phenomenon you are talking about stopped on most of the world at around the middle of the last century. The very few exceptions where it is still happening do not support you claiming it's a rule.)

> the upper class and the upper middle class tend to live in or near cities. As far as the poor and working class, the majority live outside cities in agricultural societies

I'm not sure that tracks. Farmers are the epitome of the upper to upper-middle class, deriving their living wholly or mostly from land and capital ownership.

Perhaps you meant upper to upper-middle income rather than class?

> Farmers are the epitome of the upper to upper-middle class

This must be why in the 1950’s large swathes of Europe saw so many farmers fleeing their land to go live in the city and take up those new fangled factory jobs. Same for Britain in the 1850’s. Or China in the 2000’s.

Usually when people talk about “farmers” in the context of social class migrations, they mean subsistence farmers eeking out a living from the land. Not the modern American or European industrial farmer who in effect owns and runs a multimillion dollar business. Although I hear margins are razor thin even for those.

>This must be why in the 1950’s large swathes of Europe saw so many farmers fleeing their land to go live in the city and take up those new fangled factory jobs.

Did they though? Doesn't match my knowledge.

Most farmers at the time who owned plots of fertile land would rather break their backs working the land themselves (even if for thin margins of subsistence farming) rather than move to the cities to live in cramped conditions and break their backs working factory jobs for low pay.

The only country folk who migrated to cities to take factory jobs were mostly people who didn't own much land or any at all, making them relatively poor, so a factory job in the city was a better prospect than poverty in the country side working someone else's land. But land owning farmers would never downgrade by going to work factory jobs.

> This must be why in the 1950’s large swathes of Europe saw so many farmers fleeing their land to go live in the city and take up those new fangled factory jobs.

Sure? There is nothing about upperclass-hood that implies that it is desirable or infinitely maintainable. In fact, beyond the romanticizing of the upper-class we see in popular culture, I suspect most actually prefer to be working class, especially when coupled with an upper income. There are way fewer nightmares when your only concern is showing up to work.

It depends on what you mean by "farmers." Even small individually- or family-owned farms are going to depend to a large extent on seasonal agricultural labor. It's worth being clear when you talk about this whether by "farmers" you mean those laborers, who are often poor, or the landowners, who usually aren't.

I have never heard of a definition of farmer that refers to hired labourers. Perhaps you are thinking of farmhand?

Farmers (farm owners) are middle (petit bourgeois) class for small fanily farms dependent largely on the labor of the owners, and upper class for large farms, but are a small share of the rural population and, in modern society, the latter are not necessarily rural at all, whereas the bulk of rural population are farm or farm-supporting laborers.

The bulk of the modern upper class are non-farm-specific capitalists, who tend to be urban-dwellers, and bulk of fhe petit bourgeoisie (middle class) are non-farm-specific small business owners and elite urban laborers whose wages have sufficed ti give them a capital nest egg sufficient to be a significant share of their economic support mechanism.

> dependent largely on the labor of the owners

The modern farm, even small family farms, relies on capital to do the work. The farm owner's input is into the management of the operation. If management is considered labour then there is no such thing as upper-class. You can't own land and capital without some management.

> The modern farm, even small family farms, relies on capital to do the work.

All businesses rely on the application of labor to capital; if that labor is largely that of the owners, the owners are petit bourgeois, if it is predominantly rented labor of the proletariat, the owners are haut bourgeois. (In the simple case where the owners derive their support exclusively from that property.)

> If management is considered labour then there is no such thing as upper-class.

Management is labor, but that fact does not mean that there aren't a distinct class of people who, while they may incidentally do some labor in the marketplace, relate to the economy and derive support within it primarily through the returns of capital whose value is realized primarily by renting labor from the proletariat.

> that fact does not mean that there aren't a distinct class of people who, while they may incidentally do some labor in the marketplace, relate to the economy and derive support within it primarily through the returns of capital whose value is realized primarily by renting labor from the proletariat.

Yes, we call them retirees. Who, incidentally, as a group have a slight preference towards small town living.

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