Ethan Watters, Urban Tribes

Thirty-something journalist Ethan Watters discusses many things in Urban Tribes’ 200-odd pages: dating, marriage, friendship, evolutionary psychology. His scattered first book, which examines the new social patterns of young, unmarried people in cities, asks why his generation is getting married so late, and what exactly people are doing during that decade or two after college when they live on their own.

Watters’s main argument is that in the absence of marriage young people are forming tightly knit groups of friends—or “urban tribes.” Watters devotes the first half of the book to answering the obvious question: what makes urban tribes different from groups of friends formed during other stages of life?

Watters defines an urban tribe as a complex web of relationships—not just a “group of friends,” but a cohesive entity that is more than the sum of its parts. Tribes usually have their own rituals, such as weekly dinners or annual vacations, and function as surrogate families, celebrating one another’s successes and providing needed support. Though Watters admits that there is no such thing as “an average urban tribe,” or any one set of characteristics common to all tribes, you need look no further for an example than NBC’s popular TV show Friends, which depicts an almost claustrophobically tight group of six friends.

What Watters considers most important about urban tribes is the type of role they play in the lives of their members. He points out that his generation came of age in less hierarchical school systems, workplaces, and family structures than previous generations. When they left home they began their young adult lives without much guidance from or dependence on their families, and many moved far away from their hometowns. Watters contends that tribes create a structure and a support network to replace that provided by families, allowing tribe members to take risks, explore their freedom, and develop as individuals.

For Watters, tribes are a distinctly urban phenomenon, born from the dense concentration of young, creative people in cities and their need for community. He attempts to show that these tribes add vibrantly to urban life. He’s particularly eager to present his tribes as counter-evidence to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which argued that “social capital” has been declining in recent decades, much to the detriment of our cities. Putnam argues that cities are weaker and less connected today because of the decline of civic institutions such as bowling leagues and Rotary Clubs.

Watters feels “extraordinarily connected” to his city: “although the evidence that I was part of an anti-civic generation seemed, at first, unassailable, it didn’t correspond with the way I felt.”

He argues that his generation deserves credit for building community in a different way, emphasizing the barn-raising spirit of tribes, whose members help each other paint houses and move. Though Watters admits that most of the tribes he’s encountered don’t get involved in civic life as a group, he says tribes aren’t as different from Putnam’s celebrated civic groups as one would assume. While such organizations as the Lion’s Clubs and the League of Women Voters had a community-oriented mission statement, Watters charges that in reality they were as much schmoozing opportunities as anything else. He points out that they were largely homogenous, had a vested interest in preserving the status quo, and drew pretty firm lines between themselves and outsiders. They may have “given” to the community, but they weren’t really building meaningful bridges to people of other races and classes.

Though Watters isn’t a sociologist and he has no numbers to counter Putnam’s formidable armory of statistics, his unscientific observations provide an important counterpoint to Putnam. Watters gives preliminary evidence for an argument that people may be building social capital in ways other than those Putnam thought to measure. He rightly calls Putnam out for not investigating new phenomena like Ultimate Frisbee leagues and book clubs as possible new forms of social capital.

But while Watters’s criticisms of Putnam are valid, he fails to make convincing positive arguments about what tribes actually contribute to a city. He attempts to show that even though tribes don’t directly “give” to the larger community, they still help to form connections and create community in cities as a whole. Using the basics of network theory, Watters points out that while individuals in the tribe have strong ties to one another, they have a greater number of weak ties to people outside the tribe, through work, family, and other social institutions. These weak ties connect tribes to one another, creating a vast “friends of friends” network that helps individuals navigate the complexities of urban life.

Here Watters is right in tune with fellow Putnam critic Richard Florida, whose Rise of the Creative Class argues that “creative capital,” not social capital, is what drives cities today. Florida argues that because weak ties are key for finding housing and employment, a dense web of weak ties makes for a successful, creative city. Watters goes further to posit: “If our tribes were maximizing our weak ties within a city, might we be creating the social science equivalent of dark matter—a force that was invisible but was nonetheless critical to holding everything together?”

To argue that tribes—composed only of young, unmarried, and mainly professional people—are what holds “everything” in a city together demonstrates a pretty limited understanding of what cities are. Cities have children, and families, and old people. Even relatively wealthy and homogenous cities like Watters’s own San Francisco have poor people, and most cities are home to huge immigrant communities. Watters doesn’t offer any convincing demonstration of how tribes, which offer neither intergenerational connection nor connection with people of other economic classes, are truly going to connect to all parts of a city.

And while Watters is right to point out how shallow the social bridging accomplished by Putnam’s civic organizations often was, he is blind to his own tribes’ shortcomings in this area. He claims that there is economic diversity within tribes, because members of a tribe can make vastly varying amounts of money. But this is only surface diversity. The presence of a drifting college drop-out who takes odd low-level jobs and is often unemployed alongside a college graduate who is a social worker or teacher alongside an upwardly mobile lawyer is nowhere near the same as the inclusion of a Salvadoran immigrant who cleans offices or a black woman who grew up in a housing project and works in a fast food restaurant.

The phenomenal popularity of Friends points to the appeal of the tribe model. But the show has also drawn criticism for its near complete lack of minority characters and its unrealistically sanitized depiction of New York City. Likewise, there is much that is attractive in Watters’s amusing but light social commentary, which provides an ultimately reassuring look at how young people are faring in their post-college years. But like Friends, Watters presents a highly restricted view of urban life and suggests a rather anemic definition of community.

This is not to say that tribes are inherently bad for cities, or that they are not important and meaningful institutions for young people. But that doesn’t make them substitutes for other types of community involvement. Watters assumes that if a tribe is the central focus of someone’s social life, it is their only meaningful connection. He doesn’t consider how tribe members can belong to other communities through church, family, volunteer activities, and geographic neighborhoods. Groups of friends can’t take the place of more traditional types of communities, which have at least the potential to unite people who have different interests and backgrounds but share common spaces, institutions, and public amenities.

Watters himself would be a perfect poster boy for Richard Florida’s “creative class.” The lifestyles and patterns of urban tribes are the lifestyles and patterns of the new creative professional class that is coming to dominate our cities, both economically and culturally. Thus if we are to take Urban Tribes as a harbinger of the future of our cities, the picture is far from reassuring. In cities where economic disparity is growing, we should be worried by Watters’s suggestion that helping out people within one’s own tight, or even extended, group is morally equivalent to volunteering at a hospital or school, and worried by this new social structure to the degree that it facilitates such disengagement from the larger community.