Chicago School

Between the two world wars, Chicago emerged as the epicenter of American social science, particularly with regards to urban analysis. As the prototype of the rapidly growing, industrialized city populated by streams of immigrants, Chicago became the prototypical example of American urbanization. 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 and was enormously influential in sociology and geography for the next several decades.

The origins and success of the Chicago School lay largely with its nominal leader, Robert E. Park, a former journalist turned teacher. The Chicago School is credited with the first systematic attempt to understand the dynamics of urban areas, including social change, urban planning, and territoriality. In 1925, Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie published The City, a series of interpretive essays about the cultural patterns of urban life, a volume that both summarized and inspired a long tradition of urban ethnography. Chicago School practitioners, who inaugurated the creation of the tradition of detailed case studies, ranged far and wide over the city, studying the wealthy, immigrants, hobos, the destitute, dance halls, criminals, prostitutes, and anyone else they could in an attempt to draw as rich and detailed a portrait of the city as possible. 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 a biological metaphor of the city as an urban jungle, a view derived in large part from the social Darwinism prevalent during the early 20th century. Thus, for example, the displacement of one ethnic group by another in a given neighborhood was framed as a process of invasion and succession, a model that drew directly from studies of how one plant species displaced another through successive stages in the evolution of ecosystems. Later, this biological metaphor would be dropped in the face of stinging criticisms 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.

Chicago School theorists also drew on the urban sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies and notions such as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to examine the phenomenology of urbanization in light of the massive rural-to-urban migration that was then characteristic of most U.S. cities. In this reading, urbanization represented the annihilation of mythologized rural communities in which everyone knew everyone else. In contrast to 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 three major axes: 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 were the norm in large cities. Density, he argued, led people to be close physically but not emotionally; indeed, alienation was the norm. Finally, social and cultural heterogeneity, manifested in the diverse lifestyles found in large cities, generated few of the common values necessary to the success of healthy communities. The result was allegedly the widespread presence of crime and other social pathologies ranging from suicide to psychoses. (Subsequent work, it should be noted, has rectified this stereotype[Page 34] by pointing to the high crime rates in many small cities and the presence of healthy, vibrant urban neighborhoods.)

Figure 1 Burgess's Concentric Ring

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