Urban Planning & Suburb Growth: Anchoring Relationships & Home.

Urban planning and suburb growth in these modern times is an excellent reminder that cities besides being viewed as trading centers and cultural centers, they are also a place where people live and take as homes. It is important to note that as the cities are becoming a growing ground for mass society, it is thus critical to acknowledge how the towns have become a place where real neighborhoods and personal relationships can be anchored where an individual has close ties and where they can feel attached to their surroundings. In the reading by the Italian sociologist, Mr. Gan presents a similar surrounding, the West End of Boston, which is a more elusive Italian-American community of that time. The reading is both a presentation of an ethnic community and a precise critique of the urban renewal program of West End. The civic center West End no longer exists as it was demolished to create space for a high rent housing development. The developments of the community in the area and how it diminished represents the author's main ideas in the story.

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Gans an American sociologist managed to capture all the events in the city, and he tries to bring out the various impacts of the relocation of the community, how it affected them socially and mentally because these were low-income people who had been relocated from their home. The West End, as presented in the reading was mostly, and Italian based community and the author tells of the story of the Italian-Americans right after leaving the Little Italy they had in America. Not similar to other Immigrants in the United States, the Italian as Gans describes in the reading, less frequently ended up in the middle class. He terms this as a "peer group" society because he believes that the most active social unit is not the one comprised of a father, mother, children or the extended unit of generations but instead the boys with less of girls where one grew (Gans, H. 1976).

He points out that the girls and boys separate for marriage and when they revert, and as life pleases on them, their primary delight is getting g back together and having to narrate to each other the stories when they were young and the few episodes of adulthood. It is a society that is adult-centered and where kids are often tolerated and rarely disciplined growing up, in the same manner, taking the few blows of life and constant hard work. The kids never understand settlement employees who ask them to want something out of the ordinary in life. The kids are ever suspicious of strangers, convinced that state administration is a bunch of crooks, and besides occasional show of anger, they have minimal capacity to make a change and influence their society.

Only the outsiders could save West End fro destruction by the bulldozers, but the natives felt the most pain in the process. "Is it an Italian world or a working-class world" As the author would present it, it Italian; Gans argues, however, in its nature it is a presentation of a general Western Working Class culture where the middle class rarely understands and does not recognize. The Italian- American society was different from the negroes and the Puerto Ricans, but whatever it may be, the author had presented enough culture and a way of life at that time.

References

Gans, H. (1976). The West End: An Urban Village. The Research Experience. MP Golden, ed. Itasca, Illinois: FE Peacock Publishers, Inc.