Published in 1/2019 - Urbanity

Editorial

Editorial 1/19: Urban Treshold

Mika Savela

In 1938, American sociologist Louis Wirth wrote a widely circulated article on urbanism. He defined the then rarely used word as an increasingly common way of life observed in the growing cities. According to Wirth, city dwellers were different from the rural population in that they had replaced their traditional networks based on family ties and place of birth with anonymous counterparts offered by urban environments. For a long time, urban lifestyle has been considered rootless, but the difference is that today, the country girl that moved to Helsinki in the 1980s milk commercial is a Chinese migrant worker.