Chicago School

In the 1920s and 1930s, Chicago emerged at the forefront of American urban analysis. As the model of the rapidly growing, industrialized city populated by streams of immigrants, Chicago became the prototypical example of the industrial American city. The University of Chicago played a major role in disciplines such as economics, sociology, and geography. Within this context, the Chicago School of urban studies arose, which was enormously influential in sociology and geography for the next several decades. The Chicago School is credited with the first systematic attempt to understand the dynamics of urban areas, including social change, urban planning, and territoriality.

The origins of the Chicago school lay largely with Robert E. Park, a former journalist turned teacher. In 1925, Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie published The City, a famous collection of interpretive essays about urban life, a volume that both summarized and inspired a long tradition of urban ethnography. Chicago School practitioners inaugurated the tradition of detailed case studies, ranged far and wide over the city, studying, among other things, the wealthy, immigrants, the destitute and homeless, dance halls, gangs, criminals, and prostitutes in an attempt to draw rich and detailed portraits of urban life. In the process, they irrevocably fused the study of space and the study of society.

The first paradigm of urban structure offered by Chicago School theorists, particularly McKenzie, centered on the metaphor of the city as urban jungle, a view derived from the social Darwinism prevalent in the early 20th century. For example, the displacement of one ethnic group by another in a given neighborhood was framed as a process of invasion and succession, a view that drew directly from ecological studies of how one plant species displaced another through successive stages in the evolution of ecosystems. Later, this biological metaphor was dropped in the face of criticism that it lacked a coherent account of social relations and naturalized the inequality of urban areas. Throughout the Chicago School's worldview, competition appears repeatedly as a driving force behind ethnic and class segregation.

Figure 1 Concentric ring model. Burgess's concentric ring model focused on socioeconomic differences that arose with distance from the CBD.

Source: Author.

Chicago School theorists also drew on the urban sociology of Frederick Tönnies and notions such as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to examine daily life in light of the massive rural-to-urban migration then characteristic of most U.S. cities. In this view, urbanization represented the annihilation of mythologized rural communities, in which everyone knew everyone else. In contrast to the idealized image of small towns in which everyone ostensibly was intimately connected to everyone else and presented the same sense of self under all contexts, urbanization was held to decompose these traditional bonds and erode the foundations of mutual trust. Cities, it was held, were not conducive to the formation of a sense of community. Louis Wirth, in particular, advocated a desolate but compelling view of city life as structured around population size, density, and heterogeneity. Size or total population, he held, created a climate that was inherently predatory, utilitarian, uncaring, and commodified: Strangers were rare in small towns but the norm in large cities. Density, he argued, led people to be physically but not emotionally close; indeed, alienation was the norm. Finally, social and cultural heterogeneity, manifested in the diverse lifestyles found in large cities, undermined the common values necessary to the success of healthy communities. Wirth concluded that these factors were responsible for the high rates of urban crime and other social pathologies ranging from suicide to psychoses. (Subsequent work has rectified this stereotype by pointing to the high crime rates often found in many small cities and that large cities often have healthy, vibrant urban neighborhoods.)

...