Park, Robert Ezra (1864–1944)

U.S. sociologist

Robert Ezra Park was born in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. He studied German and philosophy at the University of Michigan, and his subsequent time as a journalist, which included stints at the Minneapolis Journal, the New York Journal, and the Chicago Journal, gave him firsthand experiences of city life that influenced his later career in sociology. In his thirties, he returned to academia and studied psychology at Harvard with the philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910). He also studied sociology in Berlin with the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and pursued interests in political economy and geography. Park completed a Ph.D., but declined offers of academic employment. Instead, he worked for the educator Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he experienced life and race relations in the South. It was in Tuskegee that Park met the sociologist W. I. Thomas (1863–1947), who persuaded Park to join him at the University of Chicago. Park was a member of the Department of Sociology from 1913 to 1934 and was a founding member of the Chicago School of sociology.

Although some historians have considered the Chicago School Park's personal project, it included a number of other sociologists, including Thomas, Albion Small, Ernest Burgess, Herbert Blumer, and Louis Wirth. Conceptually, the Chicago School is characterized by its concern with social psychology, social organization, and ecology. However, it may be the intense focus on the city—Chicago almost exclusively—that defines both its approach to sociology and Robert Park's career.

In his essay The City, Park made a programmatic statement on the sociology of cities that sustained the research associated with the Chicago School. He famously referred to Chicago as the social laboratory of the sociologist. His pioneering approach to the study of the city and its communities borrowed from anthropological methods and from Park's own experiences as a journalist. Skeptical of experimentation and social surveys, Park promoted a sociology that required going out to observe people in their natural environment and conducting life histories that captured the meanings of people's lives. He balanced this concern with the experience of city and community life with an interest in the ecology of cities. When he was a city reporter, Park had begun developing a conception of the city as a social organism made up of interdependent communities. He theorized that within cities there arose natural social areas such as immigrant colonies, ghettos, or bohemias. Park's sociology proposed examining the processes that led to the emergence of these areas, their relationship to other parts of the city, and the experiences of their inhabitants. Under his supervision, and in collaboration with Ernest Burgess, students went out into Chicago, immersed themselves in the ecology of the city, and wrote wellknown monographs such as The Ghetto (Wirth, 1928) and The Gold Coast and the Slum (Zorbaugh, 1929).