Cities, Inner

The Chicago School of Community Studies

Scholarly studies of inner-city communities generally begin with the Chicago School of urban sociology, dating to the early 1900s. This turn-of-the-century period marked the United States' transition from a rural to an urban country, with traditional lifestyles and agrarian [Page 148]culture giving way to modern urban diversity and eclecticism. Witnessing the social upheaval associated with this urban revolution, Chicago School scholars characterized urban life as an agent of abrupt change and dislocation—especially in the dense, heterogeneous, anonymous, and transient inner city.

Using inner-city Chicago as their main object of study, scholars like Robert Park and Louis Wirth noted that inner-city communities concentrated the most challenging effects of urban life: diversity, anonymity, transience, disorder, immorality, and a loss of tradition and kinship. Whereas many areas of the city could exclude undesirable groups (such as the poor, the recently immigrated, or the homeless) and undesirable elements (such as factories), by means of policing practices, zoning codes, and expensively priced housing, the innercity community could exclude no one. Consequently, society's least attractive elements concentrated there, with the result that these areas became crime-ridden, poor, polluted, and dangerous. In 1906 Upton Sinclair described Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards community as “the jungle” in his novel of the same name.

Redeeming and Redeveloping the Inner City

From the early 1900s until the 1960s, negative public attitudes about life in the inner city led to dramatic efforts to transform, elevate, or eliminate the inner-city community. Inspired by the settlement house movement begun in Great Britain by Samuel Augustus Barnett (1844–1913) and led in the United States by Jane Addams (1860–1935), educated reformers established inner-city centers to provide education, health care, English instruction, and skills training to the immigrants and impoverished classes that were concentrated there. By the mid-1900s, these reform efforts coalesced into a growing social work profession.

While social workers sought to lift the inner-city community out of its degraded condition, the early 1900s also saw efforts to eliminate the inner city altogether. Utopian city planners such as Daniel Burnham (1846–1912), Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), and Le Corbusier (1887–1965) created holistic plans to uproot and rebuild the inner city in ways that would prevent the return of such a concentration of diversity, poverty, and vice. Daniel Burnham's vision of a “city beautiful” inspired cities to eliminate inner-city areas in favor of well-designed districts filled with public monuments such as grand city halls, wide parkways, and landscaped central parks. Howard's suburb-inspiring plans called for the creation of “garden cities”—smaller, welllandscaped communities surrounded by greenbelts. Le Corbusier's vision of a “radiant city” called for the destruction of inner cities in favor of expanding districts of sparkling skyscrapers, linked to bedroom suburbs by a vast freeway system.

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