Park, Robert Ezra

Urban Research in Chicago

During Park's time in Chicago, the University's department of sociology began to focus on the surrounding urban environment as a laboratory for social research. Along with his faculty colleagues Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, and Homer Hoyt, as well as numerous students, Park developed an orientation to urban ecology that became known as the “Chicago School of Sociology.”

His essay “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” originally published in 1915, served as the introductory chapter for the influential essays collected in The City (1925). Park's other essays in the volume include “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” “Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency,” “Community Organization and the Romantic Temper,” “Magic, Mentality, and City Life,” and “The Mind of the Hobo: Reflections Upon the Relation Between Mentality and Locomotion.”

Through his studies in Chicago and his visits to cities around the world, Park developed his concept of natural areas. For Park, the relationship between individuals and groups within such areas involved mobility among urban spaces and across social classes. Mobility, in turn, often resulted in social disorganization and individualization, as formulated in his famous article “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” (1928). Throughout his career, Park related his theories about assimilation, community structure, and mobility to the plight of ethnic populations.