"Traditional Working-Class Neighborhoods": An Inquiry into the Emergence of a Sociological Model in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

City districts that had been commonly called "slums" or "disorganized areas" came to be described as "communities" by a number of sociologists in the 1950s and early 1960s. The paper identifies the descriptive model that then took shape: "the traditional working-class neighborhood." In spite of variations in scientific vocabulary and style, a surprisingly similar view emerged from inquiries by Willmott and Young in London (1957), Gans in Boston (1962), and Coing in Paris (1965). The paper takes this convergence as an issue and explores the cognitive and social conditions that may account for it. Stress is placed on the common distance of the inquirers from the academic sociological establishment, their concern for making sociology both critical and useful to planning, and a similar situation of wholesale destruction of popular neighborhoods by urban renewal. "Working-class neighborhoods" were thus "discovered" at the very time they were about to vanish.