"Urban Danger" by Merry

   Merry, reflects back on Wirth's article on how the city is a place of disorder with strangers who just live in it. Wirth, argues that "the ecological conditions of size, density, permanency, and heterogeneity create a social world of impersonal, superficial, transitory relationships in which individuals are detached from close ties to social groups such as families, and are freed from the social group". Many studies have been done on the social life of cities ever since Wirth's article has been published. Some researchers agree with his theory, and some do not. Merry has taken it upon herself to conduct a cultural study of Urban danger. She has moved in a couple blocks away of a subsidized housing project located deep in a neighborhood with one of the highest crime rates in a major northeastern city. The housing contained 300 Whites, blacks, spanish, and chinese people. With one year of research conduct on the housing residents she has managed to find out that the residents of different races did not socialize with one another, but with their race only. Despite them sharing the same housing with stoop, land and all they refuse to socialize with one another guess because they do not feel comfortable unless is with their own people.