M. S. A. Rao points out in the Indian context that although both village and town formed part of the same civilization characterized by institution of kinship and caste system in pre-British India, there were certain specific institutional forms and organizational ways distinguishing social and cultural life in towns form that in village.

G. S. Ghurye believes that urbanization is migration of people from village to city and the impact it has on the migrants and their families.

Maclver remarks that though the communities are normally divided into rural and urban the line of demarcation is not always clear between these two types of communities. There is no sharp demarcation to tell where the city ends and country begins. Every village possesses some elements of the city and every city carries some features of the village.

Ramkrishna Mukherjee prefers the continuum model by talking of the degree of urbanization as a useful conceptual tool for understanding rural-urban relations.

P. A. Sorokin and Zimmerman, in 'Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology’, have stated that the factors distinguishing rural from urban communities include occupation, size and density of population as well as mobility, differentiation and stratification.

However, subsequent research largely undermined that idea. Spatial arrangements themselves are not determinant of social relations; even if some parts of cities are rather anarchic, more, for instance the suburbs, do not conform to the model. One can also find traditional and interpersonally intimate relationships in cities, as exemplified by the working class community of Bethnal Green by Michael Young, and conflicts and isolation in the countryside. Moreover, both city and village contain culturally distinct groups, suggesting that there are no dominant cultural forms typical of settlement type and that settlement type does not determine the character of interpersonal social ties.

References

Redfield, Robert. 1941. The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Sorokin, Pitrim; and Carle Clark Zimmerman. 1929. Principles of Rural and Urban Sociology. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Tonnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft). New York: Harper & Row, 1963; orig. 1887.

Wirth, Louis. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 44, No 2 (July 1938).