Which social problems did Robert Redfield link to urban life?
In his folk-urban model, Robert Redfield characterized urban life as inherently impersonal, heterogeneous, secular, and disorganizing. He posited that as societies transitioned from folk communities to urban environments, they would experience a breakdown in cultural traditions.1
Redfield associated this process of cultural disorganization with higher incidences of several social pathologies, specifically:
Redfield’s perspective was heavily influenced by the Chicago school of urban ecology and suggested that these conditions were inevitable consequences of urban growth. However, subsequent scholarship has noted that this view was ethnocentric and failed to account for the diverse ways in which urban cultures and social structures function across different historical and cultural contexts.1