Social Polarisation and Anomie: The Effects of a New Urban Form

This paper takes as its starting point the apparent chaotic nature of a great deal of social life in the final years of the twentieth century. The breakdown of many nation states in Eastern Europe, uncontrolled urban growth and the expanding number of homeless refugees all suggest reasons why “chaos theory” has been attractive to social scientists. Providing its metaphoric nature is realized it may be helpful in providing an organizing principle for research. The concept of social polarization on the other hand, while addressing a number of the same issues, has the advantage perhaps of being more empirically grounded.