Cultural Attributes of American Society

Cultural Attributes of American Society

by Yudo Anggoro, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The social and spatial structure of American urban regions reflects attributes of its economic and cultural systems. However, some of the American cultures may contribute to the difficulty, as a society, in facing up to the problems of a widening circle of decline that affects the aging metropolis. According to Berry (1975), the cultural attributes of American are:

1. The Love of newness. This culture implies that American people like the new things, including for their place of living in the American metropolitan area. The establishment of new residential area on the periphery of the city tends to draw population from older houses to the new ones, because Americans love the newness. This condition causes all social groups to move up a step, leaving the oldest and cheapest residential areas to be occupied by the poorest families, or to be vacated. The pattern of this urban shift is that the high grade areas tend to preempt the most desirable residential place, followed by the intermediate rental social groups that tend to occupy the areas that are adjacent to the high grade area. As a consequence, the people from the cheapest rent categories tend to move out in bands from the center of the city by filtering up.
2. Nearness to Nature. This cultural characteristic implies that American people have the desire to be near natural environment. As mentioned by Wells (1902) in Berry (1975), the city will diffuse itself until it has taken upon considerable areas and many of the characteristics of what is now country. This culture is a result of the modern era that brings complexity, population boom, disaster, and congestion that erode the quality of human life.
3. Freedom to Move. This culture is related to the previous culture, nearness to nature. As American people want to be as close as possible to the nature, they tend to move often. According to Berry (1975), American people are the world’s most mobile people, where forty million Americans change their residential address annually. Many factors may contribute to this culture, such as marriage, military service, high education, and changes of employer. Migration is also an assortative mechanism for American people, filtering and sifting the population as the members of the population undergo social mobility.
4. Individualism. Individualism probably is the most important characteristic that explains the development of urban region in the United States. This characteristic implies that cities in the US depend for their wages, employment, and prosperity on the rise and fall of individual enterprises, not on the community action. This perhaps what distinguish cities in the US and cities in, say, Asia whose culture heavily depends on collective action. Cities in the US are the reflection of the profit-seeking characteristics of their individual actors, such as realtors, land speculators, and large investors.  As a consequence, local politics of American cities depend on their actors, or often referred as their urban regimes. As Berry (1975) notes, privatism has prevailed throughout America’s urban history.
5. The Melting Pot. This cultural characteristic implies that as individuals gain more welfare, these upwardly mobile individuals from a variety of background melted into the achievement-oriented mainstream of the society. In this respect, assimilation of culture among immigrants is inevitable in the urban areas.
6. Violence. In this respect, while the city reflects the success of its citizens, crime and violence become common things in urban area. Even, as Berry (1975) quotes President Johnson’s Commission on Crimes of Violence report, it is normal to expect the establishment of the “defensive city” consisting of n economically declining central business district in the inner city protected by people shopping or working in buildings during working hours and “sealed off” by police during nighttime hours.
7. The Sense of Destiny. This cultural characteristics is calling for American people’s responsibility to work together to win the wars on poverty, under privilege, and urban decay in the urban area, because if the city fails, America fails (Berry, 1975). In this effort, city planning, county planning, rural planning, state planning, regional planning, must be linked together in the higher strategy of American national planning and policy, to the end that American national and local resources may best be conserved and developed for its own human use.

In his thesis, Berry (1975) argues that American people are unable to contend with the aging metropolis because what is embedded in the American culture is the feeling that it is an effluent, an inevitable discard with no enduring value.

In assessing the impact of cultural values on the social and spatial structure of urban areas, there are some main factors that need to consider. These factors may include combination of widespread automobile ownership, the building of high-speed expressway, and much more favorable terms for financing new property that make living in suburbia looks more interesting. The factors that support this movement are the rising incomes, the unavailability of developable land within the city, coupled with its abundance at lower cost in the suburbs; the closeness to nature, and the pull of jobs as industries take advantage of the increasing ease of access as the highway grid is perfected. Higgens and Savoie (1995) also add that distribution of income and property may also contribute to the changes of social and spatial structure in urban areas.

The evidence for this impact of cultural values on the social and spatial structure of urban areas is clearly seen in the case of St. Louis (Berry, 1975). In St. Louis, during the last two decades, there was a shift of urban structure from central-city concentration to a regional metropolis characterized by low density. A major contributing factor for this shift was the age of St. Louis housing which did not reflect the aspirations or the lifestyle of postwar affluence. This also confirms one of the characteristics of American people, the love if newness. Some other factors that we need to (re)consider to analyze the impact of culture on urban spatial and structure are socioeconomic, demographic, racial, and ethnic composition factors.

References

Berry, B.J.L. (1975). “The Decline of the Aging Metropolis: Cultural Bases and Social Processes,” in G. Sternlieb and J. Hughes (ed) Post Industrial America: Metropolitan Decline and Inter-Regional Job Shifts, Rutgers: Center for Urban Policy Research, p. 175-185.

Higgens, B. and D. Savoie (1995) “Regional Development and Their Theories,” New Brunswick: Transactions Pub.