Connections between Overcrowding and Inequality in the Social Sciences in the 1960s and the 1970s
Abstract
In the 1960s, old concerns intensified over the detrimental effects of high density on human health and well-being. This article examines the reasons and results of the intense scientific interest in and research on human crowding in the United States in the 1960s and the 1970s, with an emphasis on the connection between overcrowding and inequality. Using published research of the era as source material it analyses interdisciplinary hypotheses, theories, and debates connecting them with topical societal problems and concerns.
Human crowding was researched particularly intensely in environmental psychology and urban sociology. New research led to new theories, ideas, and conceptualizations, and ultimately to the moderation of crowding fears in the 1970s. Environmental psychologists partially detached crowding from physical measures. Even though they connected status and control with the experience of crowding, their views and solutions did not take societal inequalities into account. Urban sociologists instead emphasized the role of socioeconomic, racial, and discriminatory factors in the development of social and health problems, promoted planning aiming at desegregation and argued against spatial solutions that only benefitted the white middle class.
Keywords: crowding, density, urban space, inequality, environmental psychology, urban sociology
