In 1900 living in the city for most people meant slum-dwelling, poor working conditions with long hours and poor pay, high infant mortality, squalor and infectious diseases in overcrowded ghettoes, while the rich rolled past in their carriages, twirling their parasols. By the 1920s, conditions for urban dwellers were beginning to improve. Movies, dances, outings to the seaside, wonderful clothes, parties, sport - an increasing number of city dwellers had more leisure time and more disposable income than before. The terrible spectre of the war was exorcised by swooning over Rudolf Valentino, dancing the Charleston, wearing tight cloche hats or billowing Oxford bags, listening to jazz music, or swimming in a daring one-piece bathing suit.
More and more people were leaving their villages and rural townlands to flock to the city. An increase in industrial production, combined with a growing amount of public and private bureaucratic administration, meant more jobs. New public health measures meant the city was a less unhealthy place to live. Cheaper and more capacious transport meant both goods and people could move around more freely. More people could gather in the city, eating food produced in and transported from the countryside. And the movies depicted the city as a glamorous and exciting place to be, enticing many rural young people to find out for themselves.
In 1900 the world was a predominantly rural place, populated by those who worked at producing food. Subsistence agriculture had defined our ancestors' way of life since neolithic times. In the next 100 years, over half the world's population would become urbanised. The division between city and country is now a grey area of suburban development, urban sprawl, shopping malls, factories, and massive, overburdened road and rail systems.
Food production was mechanised (in 1901 the first commercially successful tractor was introduced in Iowa in the US), agriculture transformed by specialist production, and rural populations gradually incorporated into urban-managed economic and information networks. Even where human labour continued to prevail in the rice paddies of Asia, new seeds, fertilisers and small gasoline-powered cultivators transformed traditional methods of cultivation.
Villagers accustomed to knowing their neighbours, to shared beliefs and a single cultural heritage, found themselves on the streets of New York or in the cabarets of Berlin, and encountered a whole new way of life, characterised by anonymity, cultural multiplicity and often, amorality. Alternatives emerged to replace the old village community: religious sects, political movements, social clubs, and informal gatherings at taverns and water taps.
However the combination of the sensory blitz of the fast-paced city streets with the alienation of knowing nobody frequently led to tension and instability. There was racial friction in the competition for jobs and housing. The older denizens of the city were often unwelcoming to newcomers. Those who could afford it moved out to affluent, impersonal suburbs. In the resulting ghettoes, street gangs formed.
To this day the ideal of assimilation remains unrealised in American cities, where disaffected black and latino youths roam the streets, many ending up in prison. In German cities, as a result of the "guest worker" policy started in the 1960s, large numbers of Turkish migrant workers and their offspring are still denied German citizenship.
