On Urban Alienations and Anomie: Powerlessness and Social Isolation

It is found that knowing one's neighbors was substantially negatively related to community size, which the authors attribute to the relative unimportance of proximity in the urban setting which reduces neighborhood contacts in favor of trans-local ones.

Abstract

We tested the hypothesis derived from Louis Wirth (1938) that urban life, all else equal, leads to alienation by secondary analysis of three large surveys. We examined two dimensions: powerlessness, operationalized with a sense of personal competence scale, and social isolation, operationalized by scales and items reflecting a distrust of others (and interpretable as a sense of anomie). Results (1) show no association of size of Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area with powerlessness. (2) Felt social isolation (i.e., distrust) was weakly but consistently (r .07) associated. We explore explanations for this relationship and favor one based orn the social composition of the community. Also, we found that knowing one's neighbors was substantially negatively related to community size. This we attribute to the relative unimportance of proximity in the urban setting which reduces neighborhood contacts in favor of trans-local ones.