Watch these videos
,
https://lehmancollege.yuja.com/V/Video?z=1&u=22759…
, and
https://youtu.be/aohXOpKtns0
choose one of the early urban sociologists (i.e., George Simmel; Louis Wirth; Robert Park/The Chicago School of Sociology; Ernest Burgess; Roderick McKenzie); 2. explain their importance and why their ideas are relevant to the field; 3. explain their limitations and what is lacking in their framework according to the authors of the textbook.
C H A P TE R
2
Copyright 2019. Routledge.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
THE ORIGINS OF URBAN LIFE AND
URBAN SOCIOLOGY
T
he rise of urban sociology as a distinct field within the broader discipline of sociology corresponded with the ascendance of capitalism and the dominance of the
industrial city. The scale of and concentration of social groups in the nineteenth century city was historically unprecedented. The collection of scholars from a wide
array of intellectual backgrounds that eventually made up the foundational
thinkers of sociology wrote about cities the way they wrote about modern life.
Modern urban life was typically contrasted to feudal life. The city was modern
and complex while feudal life was premodern and simple. Inherent in this distinction were the assumptions of progress represented by the modern city, and the
accompanying social problems of isolation and disorder that could be solved
through rational planning and scientific advancements. Yet urbanization, in various forms and reflecting different cultural and economic systems, existed well
before the industrial city and does not fit into the neat modern/premodern binary.
What can we learn about ancient and medieval cities, how their cultures and
economies organized distinct urban forms and created issues of security and autonomy that helped give rise to monarchies, empires, and ultimately nation-states?
This also raises the bigger question of just how modern is contemporary urban
life and what are the limitations of the early Chicago School of Urban Sociology?
THE BEGINNING OF URBAN CIVILIZATIONS
Urbanization, or the building of and living in compact, densely populated places,
appeared as early as 10,000 years ago. Continuously used, densely populated
settlements can be found in the Middle East dating back over 6,000 years, the
Indus River Valley in India dating back over 4,000 years, and the Yellow River
Valley of China (circa 2000 BC). Lewis Mumford (1961:10) suggested that the
first human settlements were cities of the dead—the thanatopolis. The dead were
the first to have a permanent dwelling, in the caverns and mounds where
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
Paleolithic hunters buried them. Men and women would return to these ritual
spaces to worship their ancestors, and it is here that humankind first drew pictographs and paintings of not only animals for the hunt but also formalized figures
of men and women. Archeologists have known for some time that signs of civilization, such as the production of pottery in quantity or the use of writing, coexisted with the development of agriculture. Because of the need to create a
livelihood on marginal agricultural lands, early residents of towns innovated alternative economic activities, including trade, full-time craft work, and even religion, yielding products that could be exchanged for essential goods, thereby
providing the basis for a city-based economy that could survive on trade. And
many early cities disappeared when the natural resources required to support concentrated populations became depleted. The origins of the earliest urban settlements are shown in Table 2.1.
Ancient cities did not simply appear because certain fundamental economic activities had matured. Cities had to be produced, or constructed, by humans through the
conscious intent of individuals and groups. In addition to being the locus of agriculture, trade, and hand craft manufacturing, ancient cities were social spaces that had
religious meaning and significance, and were held together by impressive feats of
engineering. In ancient societies, urban settlements were built using a shared set of
symbols and a model of space that was inherently meaningful to each group (Lagopoulos, 1986). Religious codes distinguished between sacred and profane spaces and
endowed particular structures and spaces with the protection of the gods. Around
500 BC, the Etruscans, ancestors of the Romans, built cities by first plowing a “sacred
furrow” as a large enclosure in a religious ceremony. The city could be built only
within this space, signifying the sacred domain, separated from the profane space of
the rest of the world. In this way, the built environment of even the earliest urban
settlements had important social, political, and religious connections that created a
sense of shared history and identity among the urban inhabitants.
Several ancient cities possessed remarkable structural features that made urban
living not only possible but also quite comfortable. The residential space of
TABLE 2.1 World’s Earliest Cities
Region
Location
Approximate date
Mesopotamia
Tigris and Euphrates rivers
3900 BC
Egypt
Nile River Valley
3200 BC
India
Indus River Valley
2400 BC
China
Yellow River Valley
1600 BC
Mexico
Yucatan Peninsula
SOURCE: Adapted from Ivan Light, Cities in World Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
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200 BC
C LA S SI C A L C I T I E S
31
Mohenjo Daro in ancient India was built on a grid street system that made maximum use of space and included an open sewer system to carry away waste and
rainwater. The baked clay sewer pipes and roofing tiles that have been unearthed
at the site of this early city are identical to the materials used in modern construction. Two-story houses were built around a central courtyard with balconies on
the second floor. The courtyard provided private space for families but also
allowed air to circulate through the building—important for the hot climate of
the region. Perhaps the oldest, continually inhabited city in the world is Jericho,
located on the West Bank in Palestinian territory. Millenia ago it possessed a
system of canals that facilitated the irrigation of fields outside the city and which
are still used today.
It is easy to overemphasize these special cases. The population of ancient cities
was small by present-day standards. The great city of Ur, home of Abraham, likely
had a population of 65,000 in 2000 BC, when it was the largest city in the world.
At its peak in the fifth century BC, Athens, Greece, had no more than 150,000
inhabitants. In spite of technological and organizational advancements to support
and govern the urban populations, the citizens of the early towns lived an urban life
that was fragile. Unsanitary housing conditions and streets plagued many ancient
cities. These problems increased as cities grew in size. There was also a greater need
for security as the wealth and power of cities flourished. The domination of urban
settlements by rulers in search of wealth and treasure led, in turn, to increased trade
and commerce, as well as continued conflict as the new city-states sought to exercise
power over the countryside. According to Gideon Sjoberg, ancient cities were the
sites of power. In order to be secure, it was necessary for early cities to exercise their
strength and dominate the hinterland (the relatively less developed area outside the
boundaries of the large city). Then, in order to prosper, it was necessary to expand
the hinterland sphere of domination. As sites of wealth, ancient cities were protected by fortifications, and warfare between cities was quite common (Sjoberg,
1960). The average citizen in every urban location lived under the constant threat
of attack by bands of warriors or armies from other towns. Often victors simply
killed off or enslaved defeated city populations and then burned the city to the
ground. Thus, early urban existence constituted a drama involving such interwoven
spheres of everyday life as agricultural production, regional and foreign trade, military conquest and rule, and the pursuit of arts and sciences based on the relative
success of economic and political activities.
CLASSICAL CITIES
The earliest cities in Mesopotamia and in China were built according to complex
belief systems and symbolic codes, as shown by city gates devoted to specific
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
FIGURE 2.1 Restoration of the Acropolis at Athens. Following the destruction of Athens by
the Persian army in 480 BC, the temples on the Acropolis were rebuilt, and a ceremonial
entrance (the propylea) was added. Pieces of the earlier temples were used in reconstructing the
north wall, visible to to Athenians from the city below. The entire structure became a monument to the city’s history. SOURCE: P.V.N. Mayes, A General History for Colleges and High
Schools, Rev. Ed. (New York: Giunn & Co., 1906).
deities that were oriented to the cardinal points of the compass (north, east,
south, and west), and a street layout that would prevent spirits from moving directly to the center of the city. In ancient Greece, cities were constructed according
to a cosmological code that incorporated sacred spaces and religious symbols
linked to the pantheon of Greek gods. The city of Athens was built to honor the
goddess Athena, and all buildings followed geometrical design principles in
accordance with the “golden mean.” In the center of the circle that encompassed
the city was the agora, which was not simply the marketplace but the public
hearth or hestia koine, the center of the community. Over a period of 200 years,
the agora at the base of the acropolis took form as public buildings—courts,
libraries, temples, a gymnasium—gradually surrounded the open area, creating an
enclosed space where the public life of the city was focused. The public hearth
was considered to be the omphalos, the center of the world. The radial street network emanating from the center of the omphalos would connect all citizens to the
central public space. This development is very different from both the early grid
network found in cities in the Indus Valley and the haphazard organic growth of
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C LA S SI C A L C I T I E S
33
urban settlements in Mesopotamia. Radial development was dictated not by the
economic concern of easy access to the market but by the political principle that
all homes should be equidistant from the center because all Athenian citizens
were equal.
Classical Rome was constructed on a model developed from an imperial
code that stressed grandeur, domination, and (eventually) excess. The construction of urban space in Rome was based not on the political equality of
its citizens but on the military power of the state and, later, the ambitions
of the emperors. Functional space within the Roman Forum was embedded
in a larger, meaningful space governed by political and cultural symbols.
The city of Rome became a physical representation of the empire itself.
Monuments and public buildings were constructed to honor the personal
accomplishments of each emperor. At its height in the third century, imperial Rome contained a population of more than 1 million people, many of
them slaves. It encompassed a total area of eight square miles, much of
which was given over to public space. The majority of the population lived
in the 46,000 insulae (apartment buildings). These buildings were typically
three stories tall and contained five apartments, housing five to six people
each. There were only 4,000 private homes within the city. Eight aqueducts
brought the more than 200 million gallons of water needed to service 1,200
public fountains, 926 public baths, and the public latrines. The streets were
narrow, twisting, and dark, averaging six to fifteen feet wide; the largest
street was just twenty feet wide. The city fire department consisted of some
7,000 men. The Circus Maximus, where chariot races took place, seated more
than 100,000 people and was surrounded by taverns, shops, and eating
places. The famous Colosseum rose more than 180 feet above the city and
seated more than 80,000 people.
Rome differed from Athens and other Greek city-states in that it was the
capital of the first urban civilization, with roads linking the city to administrative centers across Europe and the Middle East. These cities served as centers of political power, economic control, and cultural diffusion. By AD 200,
more than 5 million people lived in Roman cities. As the empire prospered,
the 1 million or more residents of Rome lived off the great wealth that
poured into the city. Eventually the center became known for decadence and
idleness. At one time, a full 159 days out of the Roman year were declared
public holidays! Of these, ninety-three days, or one-quarter of the entire year,
were devoted to games at the emperor’s expense. Alongside this parasitic existence emerged immense urban problems that we commonly associate with the
modern city: the deterioration of housing, widespread poverty, and public
corruption.
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
TABLE 2.2 Population History of Selected Cities
Location/Date
Population
Notes
Rome
100
650,000
600–800
50,000
Invasion by German tribes
1300
15,000
Exile of popes to Avignon
1500
35,000
1600
120,000
AD
World’s largest city
Pope Sixtus V and the rebirth of Rome
Mexico City
1500
80,000
Capital of Aztec Empire
1524
30,000
Destruction by Spanish conquistadors
1600
75,000
Colonial center of Spanish empire
Baghdad
765
480,000
900
1,100,000
1400
125,000
1650
30,000
Establishment of caliphate
First city of 1 million persons
Sacked by Tamerlane, 1401
Peking
1200
150,000
1350
400,000
Capital of Ming dynasty
1500
670,000
World’s largest city
1800
1,100,000
World’s largest city
London
1500
120,000
1700
350,000
1800
1,000,000
Second largest city in the world
1900
6,480,000
Largest city in the world
SOURCE: Adapted from Ivan Light, Cities in World Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1983). Population
estimates rounded to the nearest 10,000.
THE MEDIEVAL ORDER AND THE RENAISSANCE CITY
After the decline of centralized control from the Roman Empire beginning in AD
500, urban space in Europe was reclaimed by the countryside and a new form of
feudal relations developed. Just as classical cities developed around the agora and the
forum, the medieval city also included an important symbolic space in the center.
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TH E ME D I E V A L O R D E R A N D T HE R E N A I S S A N C E C I T Y
35
Buildings on each side of the central square represented the dominant social, economic, and political interests in medieval society: the cathedral, the town hall, and
the merchants’ hall and trade guilds. Towns needed to defend themselves in the
absence of a central authority. Many became small, fortified settlements—like the
walled hill towns of central Italy—while in northern Europe, small towns survived
only in the shadow of the medieval castle. Because the walls prevented the cities from
expanding outward, the cities built upward, and by the late Middle Ages, four- and
even five-story buildings overhanging crowded streets were not uncommon. As trade
prospered, overcrowding in cities grew—and so did the problems of poverty, crime,
poor sanitation, and ultimately disease.
The level of urbanization was low in Europe during the Middle Ages, and few
places exceeded 10,000 in population. In contrast, the cities in Asia, the Near
East, and what is now Latin America prospered during this same period, but
FIGURE 2.2 Creating Renaissance Rome. Pope Sixtus V’s plan for the redesign of Rome
involved linking the four major basilicas (St. Peter, S. Maria Magiore, St. John Lateran, and S.
Maria del Popolo) with new boulevards and installing obelisks to guide pilgrims from one site
to another; the plan is based upon a semiotic approach to the city and to urban design.
SOURCE: Print by Giovanni Francesco Bordini (1588).
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36
2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
these cities remained precarious and depended on social relations emanating from
state power. It was not until the late Middle Ages in Europe that towns acquired
political independence from the state. Max Weber believed that Europe only
developed independent cities in the late Middle Ages. The medieval urban community consisted of three elements: 1) a fusion of the fortress and the marketplace
where trade and commercial relations predominated; 2) a legal court of its own
that had the authority to settle local disputes; and 3) a partial political autonomy
that allowed residents to elect authorities who could administer daily affairs
(Weber, 1966). If European cities of the later Middle Ages enjoyed some degree
of political autonomy, it was relatively short-lived. By the eighteenth century,
nation-states had acquired control of territory, and the commercial-trading economy was global in scale, thereby making individual places dependent on one
another.
Rome represented the model for the renaissance city. By the mid-1500s,
Rome had been restored to its position as the capital city of the Catholic
world. It grew in size and significance as trade and commerce in cities across
Europe produced a new merchant class with the wealth and leisure time necessary to support pilgrimages to the holy sites for Catholics. Rome’s continued
growth and its aging infrastructure produced a medieval city of narrow streets,
overcrowded housing, and massive traffic problems. Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590)
began an ambitious plan of urban redevelopment. Edmund Bacon (1967:117)
described the Pope’s plan that would create Renaissance Rome as “a city
worthy of the church” where the “basic overall design structure in the form of
a movement system as an idea, and at the same time the need to tie down its
critical parts in positive physical forms which could not easily be removed.”
The seven holy pilgrimage sites within the city were linked by broad boulevards, providing for a new sense of movement and spatial ordering within the
city. New squares were built and monuments erected to symbolize the power
of the church. This plan for urban redevelopment was celebrated in engravings
by the leading artists of the day. Implementing this plan would take more
than sixty years and result in the destruction of neighborhoods of crowded
medieval housing, but it produced a new city that would attract pilgrims from
across Europe (Figure 2.2).
CAPITALISM AND THE RISE OF THE INDUSTRIAL CITY
Throughout the world, especially in North Africa, Asia, and the Near East, cities
were the sites of vigorous trade and the economic activities associated with commerce across state or national boundaries. However, trade by itself did not sustain
the rise of cities in Western Europe. Distinguishing the developing towns of the
late Middle Ages from other such places was the emergence of capitalism based
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CAP ITAL IS M AND TH E RIS E OF TH E INDU S TR IAL CIT Y
37
TABLE 2.3 World’s Largest Cities, 1200 BC to AD 1900
Date
BC
AD
City
Present location
Estimated population
1200
Memphis
Egypt
50,000
600
Nineveh
Iraq
120,000
450
Babylon
Iraq
200,000
200
Patna
India
400,000
100
Rome
Italy
650,000
350
Constantinople
Turkey
300,000
600
Constantinople
Turkey
500,000
800
Changan
China
700,000
900
Baghdad
Iraq
1000
Cordoba
Spain
1,100,000
450,000
1100
Kaifeng
China
440,000
1200
Hangchow
China
250,000
1300
Hangchow
China
430,000
1400
Nanking
China
490,000
1500
Peking
China
670,000
1600
Peking
China
710,000
1800
Peking
China
1,100,000
1850
London
Great Britain
2,320,000
1900
London
Great Britain
6,480,000
SOURCE: Adapted from Ivan Light, Cities in World Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
on a money economy. Social and cultural values changed in the cities to sanction
the pursuit of wealth through the accumulation of money.
Industrial capitalism would forever alter the nature of social relations and set
in motion the powerful economic forces that would transform human society.
Occupations became specialized, and the division of labor grew ever more complex
as mercantile capitalism, based on trade, was replaced by industrial capitalism,
based on manufacturing and wage labor. Aided by emergent nation-states, the
political and legal relations of capitalism began to dominate the countryside in
Europe. Land, for example, once held only by the nobility and the church, became
a commodity that could be purchased by anyone with money. A real estate
market developed that divided up and parceled out land for sale. A second
market, this one for labor, emerged as the serfs, who had been bound to their
masters by feudal traditions, were freed only to become commodities as workers
in the new system of wage labor.
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120
90
50
45
40
37
35
35
33
Palermo
Seville
Salerno
Venice
Regensburg
Toledo
Rome
Barbastro
Cartagena
Ypres
Leon
Cologne
Cordoba
Grenada
Florence
Venice
Seville
Paris
Palermo
1200
40
40
50
60
60
60
70
80
110
150
Cologne
Naples
Cordoba
Seville
Florence
Milan
Genoa
Venice
Paris
Grenada
1330
54
60
60
90
95
100
100
110
150
150
Ghent
Genoa
Tours
Lisbon
Prague
Granada
Venice
Milan
Naples
Paris
1500
55
58
60
65
70
70
100
100
125
225
1650
Palermo
Madrid
Rome
Amsterdam
Milan
Venice
Lisbon
Naples
London
Paris
SOURCE: Adapted from Delong and Shleifer (1992) and based upon the work of Bairoch et al. (1988) and Russell (1972).
Population shown in thousands.
150
Cordoba
1050
TABLE 2.4 Largest Cities in Europe, 1050 to 1800
100
100
110
120
120
140
150
300
350
400
Rome
Madrid
Berlin
Lisbon
Dublin
Amsterdam
Vienna
Naples
Paris
London
1800
153
168
172
195
200
217
247
430
550
948
CAP ITAL IS M AND TH E RIS E OF TH E INDU S TR IAL CIT Y
39
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, this “urban implosion,” or
shift of population from rural to urban places, reached truly astounding proportions. According to Lewis Mumford (1961), the cities of the late eighteenth century contained relatively few people, numbering less than 600,000. By the middle
of the nineteenth century, capitalist industrialization had created cities of a million or more across Western Europe. The most dramatic changes were experienced
in England and Wales, where the scale of industrialization and capitalist development was most advanced. According to Geruson and McGrath (1977:25), urban
counties in Britain grew by 30% between 1780 and 1800, and again by approximately 300% between 1801 and 1831. Commercial and industrial counties
experienced a net population increase of 378,000 between 1781 and 1800 and an
additional 720,000 between 1801 and 1831. At the same time, agricultural counties lost 252,000 people during the first period and 379,000 between 1801 and
1831.
By the middle 1800s, Western Europe possessed many industrialized cities.
What was life like there? The cities that emerged in the nineteenth century,
unlike the ancient places, were not conceived according to some overarching symbolic meaning, such as religious or cosmological codes. Development was a haphazard affair. Individual capitalists did what they willed, and real estate interests
operated unchecked by either legal code or cultural prescription. Land was traded
like other goods. About the only clear pattern that emerged involved the spatial
separation of rich and poor. Friedrich Engels, Marx’s close friend, documented in
graphic terms the pathological nature of uneven development characterizing urban
growth under capitalism in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
(Engels, 1973 [1845]). In a chapter titled “The Great Towns,” Engels describes
the typical slum found in the industrial city:
Every great city has one or more slums, where the working class is crowded
together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the
rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where,
removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can.
These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the
worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one- or two-storied
cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always
irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchen form,
throughout England, some parts of London excepted, the general dwellings of
the working class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with
vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul,
stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused
method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
Box 2.1
The Urban Revolution
In “The Urban Revolution,” V. Gordon Childe noted that the development of
the first cities was marked by a number of important innovations, including the
following:
Increased population size and density: By 3000 BC Nineveh, Ur, Uruk,
and other Sumerian cities each had as many as 20,000 persons, larger than
other human settlements up to that time.
Concentration of agricultural surplus: Farmers living in the region controlled by the city paid a tithe, or tax, to an “imaginary deity or a divine
king” to support soldiers, priests, and other officials.
Public works and monuments: Irrigation projects built by the state
(through labor required of all citizens) allowed farmers to produce an agricultural surplus; the cities were dominated by temples (ziggurats) rising
from a stepped brick platform.
Specialization of labor: The production of an agricultural surplus freed individuals to perform the specialized tasks required of artists, craftspeople,
merchants, soldiers, and priests.
Invention of writing: Systems of writing and numerical notation were necessary to keep track of commercial accounts and tax payments.
Social stratification: Priests, military leaders, and other officials formed a
ruling class and were exempt from manual labor; workers and craftspeople
were “relieved from intellectual tasks” but were guaranteed safety within
the city.
Development of the arts: Artists and craftspeople developed sophisticated
styles and traditions in the decorative and fine arts with the depiction of
persons and animals.
Development of sciences: Sciences were developed to predict, measure, and
standardize to assist in the production of agriculture and the keeping of tax
records (arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy).
Membership: Participation in the community was based on residence and was
no longer dependent on kinship.
Long-distance trade: Raw materials not available in the local area were
imported for craft production and religious ceremonies.
SOURCE: Childe (1950)
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TH E O R I G I N S O F U R B A N S O C I O LO G Y
41
FIGURE 2.3 Manchester from Kersal Moor (1852). Many engravings were made of William
Wyld’s famous painting showing the first industrial city. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of
the city: the smoke from the factories was so thick that you could not see the sun at midday.
SOURCE: Courtesy of The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY. Used with permission.
live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these workingmen’s quarters may readily be imagined.
Engels was not alone in his condemnation of conditions in the industrial city.
Many books were written in the nineteenth century cataloging the hardships
caused by industrialization, including Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the
London Poor (1851–1862) and Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in
London (1891). These works, and many more, described what Booth called “the
problem of poverty in the midst of wealth.”
THE ORIGINS OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY
A special inquiry devoted to urban phenomena was the premier achievement of
early US sociology. Albion Small founded the first sociology department in the
US at the University of Chicago in 1893. Robert Park joined the department in
1914 and quickly took on a prominent role. Albion Small and Robert Park had
something in common: both had traveled to Germany as graduate students to
take courses with Georg Simmel. In the 1890s only France and Germany had professional sociologists. Emile Durkheim, a sociologist at the Sorbonne in Paris, had
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42
2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
developed a growing reputation in France. Max Weber, the German scholar who
wrote on law, politics, religion, society, and much more, was acknowledged as the
leading social thinker of his day. And another important sociologist, Georg
Simmel, had a growing reputation as the most innovative social philosopher on
the continent.
The first generation of sociologists shared a special concern with the impact of
urbanization on European society. The political revolutions of the 1800s brought
an end to earlier ideas that the social and political order reflected a divine plan.
What exactly would the new social order, created by widespread changes in the
economic and social structure, look like? In the wake of the social and political
changes brought about by the French Revolution, questions about how social
order could be maintained were not simply a matter of idle speculation. These
societal issues were essential to understanding the very nature of the new industrial order, a stage of capitalism, that was transforming European cities.
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) was one of the early German social philosophers who addressed these questions. In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (published
in 1887 and often translated as “Community and Society,” although “Community
and Association” more accurately reflects the original meaning), Tönnies sketched
out an evolutionary view of the development of human society. The great period
of industrialization that transformed European societies beginning in the late
1700s signified a change from community to association. Tönnies saw that the
transition from community (where individual families have long histories, individuals interact with one another on a personal basis because they often work
together or are related to one another, and all jobs are interdependent on one
another) to society (where individuals often interact with others whom they do
not personally know and work at jobs that seem unrelated to one another) resulted
in a weakening of social ties and the loss of a shared sense of belonging to a
meaningful community. His ideas (summarized in Box 2.2) are often used to
highlight differences between village life of the preindustrial period and urban life
of the capitalist industrial period, and between small-town life and that of the
large, modern city more generally.
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who was the first chair of sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1883, also wrote about the changes brought about by industrialization without mentioning its capitalist nature. In The Division of Labor in
Society (1933 [1893]), Durkheim discussed many of the same issues presented in
Tönnies’s earlier essay, this time under the labels of mechanical solidarity and
organic solidarity. In the preindustrial village, individuals were held together by
the mechanical bonds of kinship and social interdependence—mechanical because
they were predetermined and could not be changed as long as the individual
remained within the local village. In the industrial city, individuals were no
longer bound by the mechanical bonds of kinship. Now, they could work at new
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TH E O R I G I N S O F U R B A N S O C I O LO G Y
Box 2.2
43
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
In his seminal work analyzing the social changes that accompany the transition from the
traditional community to the modern urban society, Ferdinand Tönnies described the forms
of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in the following terms:
The very existence of Gemeinschaft rests in the consciousness of belonging
together and the affirmation of the condition of mutual dependence which
is posed by that affirmation. Living together may be called the animal soul
of Gemeinschaft, for it is the condition of its active life, of a shared feeling of
pleasure and pain, of a shared enjoyment of the commonly possessed goods,
by which one is surrounded, and by the cooperation in teamwork as well as
in divided labor. Working together may be conceived of as the rational or
human soul of Gemeinschaft. It is higher, more conscious cooperation in the
unity of spirit and purpose, including, therefore, a striving for common or
shared ideals, as invisible goods that are knowable only to thought. Regarding being together it is descent (blood), regarding living together it is soil
(land), regarding working together it is occupation (Beruf) that is substance
as it were, by which the wills of men, which otherwise are far apart from
and even antagonistic to each other, are essentially united.
The city is typical of Gesellschaft in general. It is essentially a commercial
town and, in so far as commerce dominates its productive labor, a factory town.
Its wealth is capital wealth which, in the form of trade, usury, or industrial capital, is used and multiplies. Capital is the means for the appropriation of products of labor or for the exploitation of workers. The city is also the center of
science and culture, which always goes hand in hand with commerce and industry. Here the arts must make a living; they are exploited in a capitalist way.
Thoughts spread with astonishing rapidity.
SOURCE: Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1957 [1887]
types of jobs and have greater opportunities for interaction with a wider range of
people. These were organic bonds that flowed naturally from the increased social
differentiation brought about by the division of labor. If these terms seem to be
counterintuitive (we often think of work in factories as being mechanical), it is
important to realize that Durkheim was convinced that the new industrial economy was an improvement over the limited opportunities of feudal society, and he
may have deliberately chosen words with a positive connotation to represent the
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
modern city. Durkheim was certain that the new industrial order would replace
the earlier ways of life: “With the coming of the industrial economy, village society has disappeared, never to come again.” Later, especially in the US during a
period of conservative thinking that avoided the approach of Karl Marx, Durkheim’s perspective was widely accepted.
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the German scholar, saw things very differently. Engels’s father was a wealthy industrialist, and he sent his son to Manchester, England, to manage the family’s business interests in the new industrial city.
Engels’s observations on everyday life under industrial capitalism are found in The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. This seminal work in urban
sociology devoted a chapter to “The Great Towns.” According to Engels, the evils
of industrialization and capitalism were intensified by the space of the city. We
will return to this perspective in the next chapter, when we turn back to an analysis of capitalism and space, and rightfully so.
The European thinker who had the greatest influence on urban sociologists in
the United States during this early period was Georg Simmel (1858–1918).
Simmel viewed the city in cultural terms and as a product of “modernism.” He
wrote about how urban life transformed individual consciousness. Everyday existence within the city altered the way people thought and acted compared to traditional society. Robert Park and Albion Small were familiar with Simmel’s work
and brought this “interactive” perspective back to the University of Chicago. In
the United States, the work of the early Chicago School was less concerned with
historical and comparative studies in the manner of Weber, and more focused on
social behavior and interaction within the urban milieu in the manner of Simmel.
Any thorough discussion of the development of urban sociology in the United
States must begin by explaining the important difference between the two organizing topics in the field: urbanization and urbanism. Urbanization refers to the origins of cities and the process of city building. It studies the way social activities
locate themselves in space and according to interdependent processes of societal
development and change. The analyses are often historical and comparative. When
we study the process of urbanization, we are interested in charting the rise and
fall of great cities and urban civilizations. Urbanism, in contrast, studies the ways
of life that may be found within an urbanized space. It deals with culture, with
meanings, symbols, patterns of daily life, individual lived experiences, and processes of adjustment to the environment of the city, but also with social conflict
and political organization at the street, neighborhood, and city levels.
While both Max Weber and Friedrich Engels emphasized the relation between
the historical development of the city and its ways of life, Georg Simmel was
more concerned with patterns of activity and cultural ways of thinking found in
the city. The work of the early Chicago School followed Simmel closely and
focused on patterns of activity within cities rather than addressing the topic of
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GEORG SIMMEL ON THE CITY
45
city formation or US urbanization. Yet for Simmel, the study of life within the
city was not meant as an “urban sociology.” Simmel was instead concerned with
modernity, or the transition from a traditional society characterized by social relations based on intimacy or kinship (known as “primary” relations) and by a feudal
economy based on barter to an industrial society situated within cities and dominated by impersonal, specialized social relations based on compartmentalized roles
(known as “secondary” relations), and by a money economy based on rational calculations of profit and loss. For Simmel, the subtle aspects of modernity were displayed most clearly within the large city or metropolis and through consciously
directed behaviors. Simmel gives us a social psychology of modernity that Robert
Park took to be the sociology of urbanism, or “urban sociology.” Most importantly, Simmel opposed the Marxian view that society progressed historically
through political-economic stages of development in favor of a culturally determined analysis focused on historical changes in social interaction, societal organization, and the individual’s inner life. For this reason, and due to the antiMarxism of early-1900s America, Simmel was much more influential in the creation of urban sociology.
GEORG SIMMEL ON THE CITY
What was it like to confront modernity and why was Simmel so impressed with
the city as the vehicle for change? Consider if you will, a German farmer from
Bavaria. His life was tuned to the daily rhythms of agriculture. Nature and his
physical labor provided the boundaries within which the farming endeavor was
framed. The regime of labor on the land was early to bed because darkness meant
little work could be done, and early to rise because it was necessary to use every
second of daylight for work—even dawn and twilight. This farmer was immersed
in a social world of primary kinship relations. His principal contacts were members of his family, both immediate and extended. Perhaps several generations and
families lived together in the same location and worked the land. Beyond this
primary network, the farmer would interact with individuals who aided his enterprise. He typically visited a local service center, perhaps in a small town. There
he was involved in a network of people who knew him well. In this kind of traditional society, it was entirely possible that no money changed hands while farm
produce and needed commodities were exchanged. Barter, credit, and informal
agreements among known persons characterized the social relations of this world.
As Simmel might suggest, suppose this individual, let’s call him Hans, lost
the farm and his family in some personal tragedy. With a small amount of
money, he now traveled to Berlin to begin a new life. He went to this modern
city precisely because it offered him an alternative to the traditional rural
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46
Box 2.3
2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel was born on March 1, 1858, in the very heart of Berlin, at the intersection of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse. This was a curious birthplace—it
would correspond to Times Square in New York—but it seems symbolically fitting
for a man who lived at the intersection of many movements, intensely affected by
the crosscurrents of intellectual traffic and by a multiplicity of moral directions. Like
“the stranger” he described in his brilliant essay of the same name, he was near and
far at the same time; a potential wanderer who had not quite overcome the freedom
of coming and going. Simmel was a modern urban man, without roots in traditional
folk culture.
After graduating from Gymnasium, Simmel studied history and philosophy at the University of Berlin with some of the most important academic
figures of the day. By the time he received his doctorate in 1881, Simmel
was familiar with a vast field of knowledge extending from history to philosophy and from psychology to the social sciences. Deeply tied to the intellectual milieu of Berlin, he played an active part in the intellectual and
cultural life of the capital, frequenting many fashionable salons and participating in various cultural circles. He attended the meetings of philosophers
and sociologists and was a cofounder, with Weber and Tönnies, of the
German Society for Sociology.
Simmel taught at the University of Berlin, where he became a Privatdozent
(an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) in 1885. His courses ranged from
logic and the history of philosophy, to ethics, social psychology, and sociology.
He was a very popular speaker, and his lectures became leading intellectual
events, not only for students but for the cultural elite of Berlin. Simmel was
something of a showman, punctuating the air with abrupt gestures and stabs,
dramatically halting, and then releasing a torrent of dazzling ideas. In spite of
the fascination he called forth, however, his academic career turned out to be
unfortunate, even tragic. Many of Simmel’s peers and elders, especially those of
secondary rank, felt threatened and unsettled by his erratic brilliance. Whenever
Simmel sought an academic promotion, he was rebuffed.
Simmel was a prolific writer. More than 200 of his articles appeared in a
great variety of journals, newspapers, and magazines during his lifetime, and several more were published posthumously. He published fifteen major works in the
fields of philosophy, ethics, sociology, and cultural criticism, including his seminal work, The Philosophy of Money, in 1900. His influence on the further
continues
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GEORG SIMMEL ON THE CITY
47
continued
development of both philosophy and sociology, whether acknowledged or not,
has been diffuse yet pervasive, even during those periods when his fame seemed
to have been eclipsed. Among Americans who sat at his feet was Robert Park.
No one who reads Park’s work can overlook Simmel’s profound impact.
SOURCE: Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought, 1971
existence of farming. Karl Marx, writing in the nineteenth century, would have
focused on Hans’s conversion to an industrial worker. He would have taken us
into the factory with Hans and described his encounter with abstract capital (the
machine), with the relations of production (the factory building, the assembly
line, and the daily schedule of work), and with class relations (interaction with
the workers and the boss). Simmel, writing in the early twentieth century, virtually ignored this entire domain of the factory, which could be termed the immediate environment of capitalism, and focused instead on the larger context of daily
life, the extended environment—the city.
Hans stands on the corner of a large boulevard in Berlin teeming with daytime auto traffic. He has to dodge the steady stream of pedestrians just to stand
still and watch, since everything else is in constant motion. At first, Hans would
be paralyzed by the “excess of nervous stimulation,” according to Simmel. Haven’t
we all had a similar experience when visiting a large city? Loud noises from traffic, people in the crowds calling after one another, strangers bumping us as they
pass without an acknowledgment, and more—noise, noise, and noise. Hans would
find himself in a totally new environment that demanded an adjustment and a
response.
According to Simmel, small-town life required Hans to develop strong, intimate ties to those with whom he interacted. In the city, the excess of stimulation
requires a defensive response. There are eight characteristics of urbanism noted by
Simmel. Hans would 1) develop what Simmel called a “blasé” attitude—a blurring of the senses, a filtering out of all that was loud and impinging but also
irrelevant to Hans’s own personal needs. Emotional reserve and indifference bordering on hostility replace acute attention to the details of the environment. This
concept is very close to Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of the everyday and everydayness-alienated individual experience; although Lefebvre also saw the possibility for
transcending this alienated, lived experience as freely constructed moments of
communion or festival.
Hans would require the satisfaction of his needs. Yes, he would encounter capitalism and sell his labor for a wage, as Marx had observed. Here Simmel agreed
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
FIGURE 2.4 Victoria Hotel, Unter den Linden, Berlin, Germany, between 1890 and 1900.
SOURCE: Library of Congress.
with Marx about the necessity of that transaction, which would 2) reduce the
quality of Hans’s capabilities simply to the quantity of his labor time—the time
he spent at work for a wage. It would make his work equivalent to a sum of
money, no more, no less. That sum of money exchanged for Hans’s labor time
would be all the employing capitalist would provide. Hans would quickly see
that absolutely no concern for his health, spiritual, communal, sexual, or any
other type of human need would be involved in his relationship with his
employer. In short, for Simmel’s cultural way of framing issues of change, the
stage of capitalism created 3) an impersonal world of pure monetary exchange.
Yet, Simmel, unlike Marx, showed how the impersonal money economy
extended outside the factory to characterize all other interpersonal transactions in
the city. That is, he focused more on the sociological aspects of relationships. Hans
would use his paycheck to buy the necessities of life, but in these transactions,
too, impersonal or secondary social relations prevailed. Unless he went to a small
store and frequented it every day, he would simply be viewed as 4) an anonymous
customer being provided with mass-produced items for purchase. As a city
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GEORG SIMMEL ON THE CITY
49
dweller, he might find himself more frequently going to a department store
where 5) a mass spectacle of consumption would be on display.
In all these transactions, Hans would have to be very careful. His weekly paycheck
could go only so far. He would have to count how much each item cost and then
budget accordingly. This 6) rational calculation would be at the heart of his daily life.
Everything would be measured by him; just as costs were carefully measured at the
factory. Rational calculation of money would require knowledge and technique. If
Hans mastered it successfully along with gaining mastery over the consumer world of
the city, he could look down at his country-bumpkin cousins. City life, for Simmel,
was a life of the intellect, and everywhere, the culture was dominated by the relation
between the money economy and the rational calculation needed to survive in the
world of capitalism that prevailed. Those in the city who could not master modern,
impersonal culture and the technique of money management would surely be lost.
We are not finished with the example of Hans. In the traditional society of
the country, the rhythm of life was provided by nature. The city environment
required 7) adjustment to a second nature—the orchestration of daily activities as
governed by clock time and as played out within a constructed space; everydayness
in Lefebvre’s analysis. All life in the city followed the schedule of capitalist industrialization or modernity. If Hans didn’t own a watch before coming to the city,
he now needed one. Time and money constituted the two types of calculation
necessary for survival in the second nature of the urban milieu—the built environment of concrete, steel, and glass that is the city.
Finally, Simmel also commented on the qualitative value of an experience like
Hans’s. He did not see the transformation as something that was necessarily bad.
Hans would be cast in a calculating and impersonal world, but he would also be
8) freed from the restrictions of traditional society and its time-bound dictates.
He would be free to discriminate about the types of friends he chose, about the
job he took (within strong constraints, of course), and about where he lived. To
Simmel, modernity meant the possibility of immense individual freedom in addition to constraint.
For Simmel, the freedom of the city meant, above all else, that Hans would be
free to pursue and even create his own individuality. Provided he had the money,
of course—an actuality that Marx would doubt—Hans could cultivate himself.
He could dress according to some distinct fashion, develop hobbies he could share
with others, perhaps take up the violin and join a neighborhood string quartet.
Hans could enjoy a certain brand of cigar or shoes, or attend night classes at the
university—even Simmel’s own lectures! Could Hans and Simmel eventually have
met? The city allowed for the possibility of attaining such cultural freedom, and
the signs of individual cultivation—the clothes, cigars, friends, lovers, discussion
groups, opera, art, novels—were collectively the signs of modernity that we may
also call the way of life or culture of “urbanism.”
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
LOUIS WIRTH AND URBANISM AS A WAY OF LIFE
As we have seen, Georg Simmel had an important impact on the development
of urban sociology in the United States. Albion Small and Robert Park attended
lectures by Simmel while they were studying in Germany, and Park included
some of the first English translations of Simmel’s work in the sociology textbook
(titled The Science of Society) used at the University of Chicago. Louis Wirth was
born in Germany but was sent to live with relatives in Omaha, Nebraska,
where he attended high school before going to the University of Chicago.
Wirth’s doctoral research reflected his knowledge of the development of Chicago’s Jewish community. Published in 1928 as The Ghetto, Wirth’s work
describes the Maxwell Street neighborhood where recently arrived Russian
Jewish immigrants had settled (the ghetto) and the area of second settlement
where the older German Jewish immigrants had moved (Deutschland). Wirth
became a faculty member in the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago and was one of the important figures in the later development of the Chicago School.
Louis Wirth was inspired by the work of Simmel. The Chicago sociologists
came to view spatial patterns in the city as the result of powerful biologically
based “ecological” factors, such as competition and the struggle for survival
among individuals and groups within the city. Thus, Robert Park and his associates viewed urban space as a container, a built environment that encloses the
action. Wirth’s idea was different. Following Simmel, he emphasized the way the
city, as a spatial environment, influenced individual behavior. Wirth wanted to
know what it was about the city that produced unique behaviors that might be
called an “urban way of life” in contrast to existence in rural society. Given his
study emphasis, Wirth naturally returned to Simmel. However, while Simmel
(along with Weber and Marx) attributed much of the city way of life to the influence of larger systemic forces, especially capitalism and its money economy,
Wirth aimed for a general theory that ignored forces having origins outside the
city. He studied the characteristics of people in the city and how life there might
produce a distinct “urban” culture. Furthermore, Wirth had adopted the AngloAmerican social science approach of empiricism that sought to explain social facts
by statistical measurements. Hence, “urbanism,” or an urban way of life, became
the dependent variable to be explained using larger societal factors as causes, or
independent variables.
In his important essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), Wirth focused
on three factors. Urbanism was produced in relatively large and densely populated settlements containing groups of persons of different backgrounds; that
is, the phenomenon, urbanism, was a product of large population size, density,
and heterogeneity. Wirth’s approach was a major leap in sociological thinking
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L O U I S WI R T H A N D U R B A N I S M AS A W A Y O F LI F E
51
up to that point, because he provided a set of factors that could be analyzed
statistically according to their effects. It was a theory with true predictive
power. Given a sample of cities, the higher each one scored on the three factors of size, density, and heterogeneity, the more one could expect it to house
a true urban culture.
Wirth’s theory was impressive for the time because of its predictive potential.
Problems arose when he tried to define what precisely an urban culture would be
like. Recall the example of Hans. Simmel gave us a detailed picture that contained both negative and positive aspects. Essentially, Simmel viewed the city as
simply different. In his formulation, Wirth stressed the dark side of Simmel’s
vision: aspects of social disorganization would characterize urbanism as a culture.
Central to Wirth’s view was the shift from primary to secondary social relations.
Wirth tended to see urban anonymity as debilitating. More specifically, the effects
of the three factors on social life can be expressed as a series of propositions, as
indicated in Box 2.4.
Wirth’s work has been exhaustively tested, mainly because it was so clearly
stated (Fischer, 1975). The core assertion—that size, density, and heterogeneity
cause a specific set of behaviors considered urban—has not been borne out. If we
look at the propositions presented in Box 2.4, many of the assertions appear to be
accurate descriptions of social interaction in the large city, and they help to provide a more detailed picture of what urbanism as a culture is like. However,
while the theory contains some truth, we cannot be certain that these factors produce specific results. Cities merely concentrate the effects of societal forces producing urban culture. Surely we know that small towns are affected by many of the
same social forces as the central city and urban-style social problems also affect
rural areas, although the types of behaviors that we observe in these environments
may differ in type and intensity.
Finally, Louis Wirth held strongly to the view that the true effects of
urbanism would occur as a matter of evolution as cities operated on immigrant
groups to break down traditional ways of interacting over time. He did not
see the larger city acting as an environment to bring about immediately the
change he predicted. These things would take time, perhaps a generation.
“Urbanism as a Way of Life” would inspire other urban sociologists to analyze
the development of new suburban lifestyles (“Suburbanism as a Way of Life”;
Fava, 1980) and to compare urban and suburban lifestyles (“Urbanism and
Suburbanism as Ways of Life”; Gans, 1968). Wirth’s work also inspired a subsequent generation to plow through census data and derive the statistical regularities of urban living. Much urban research is similarly conducted today.
Consequently, although his theory was not borne out, Louis Wirth is clearly a
true pioneer of contemporary urban sociology.
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52
Box 2.4
2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
Urbanism as a Way of Life
Louis Wirth did not believe that there was a specific number that magically created an urban space (compare this idea with the definitions of urban from Chapter
1). Instead, he believed that cities differ from rural areas because of three factors—
the size, density, and heterogeneity of the population—that interact with one
another to produce a specific urban way of life. Here are some of the effects of the
variables as Wirth described them:
The effect of size: The greater the size of the population, the greater the specialization and diversity of social roles we find within the city—and so too the
diversity of the population itself. Because the population lacks a common identity,
competition and formal mechanisms of social control would replace primary relations of kinship as a means of organizing society. Because human relationships are
highly segmented, there is increased anonymity and fragmentation of social interaction. These effects can be liberating (one has greater anonymity and can do as
one likes) but they may also lead to anomie and social disorganization.
The effect of density: The increased density of the urban population intensifies
the effects of large population size, increases competition among individuals and
groups, and thereby creates a need for specialization. Greater density produces
greater tolerance for living closely with strangers but also creates greater stress as
groups that do not share a common identity come into contact with one another.
Increased competition leads to mutual exploitation, while greater density leads to
the need to tune out excessive stimulation.
The effect of heterogeneity: Individuals in the city have regular contact with
persons and groups that differ from them in many ways: ethnicity, race, and social
status, as described above. Increased heterogeneity leads to greater tolerance among
groups as ethnic and class barriers are broken down. But the effect also is to compartmentalize individual roles and contacts, and, as a result, anonymity and depersonalization in public life increase.
The increased size, density, and heterogeneity of urban areas leave us with an
urban environment where individuals are alienated and alone, where primary groups
have been splintered. The individual is now subject to the influence of the mass
media and mass social movements where the individual must “subordinate some of
this individuality to the demands of the larger community.”
SOURCE: Adapted from Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (American Journal of
Sociology, 1938)
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TH E C H I C A G O S C H OO L O F U R B A N S O C I O LO G Y
53
THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY
While it is common to date the origin of urban sociology at Chicago to Robert
Park’s arrival in 1914 and his subsequent work with Ernest Burgess, the idea of
the city as a laboratory for social research came much earlier (Hutchison, 2009).
Charles Henderson, one of the founding members of the department, applied for
funds for a systematic study of the city in the 1890s, and W. I. Thomas began
his research on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America in 1908. An early (1902)
description of the graduate program in the American Journal of Sociology stated:
The city of Chicago is one of the most complete social laboratories in the
world. While the elements of sociology may be studied in smaller communities, … the most serious problems of modern society are presented by the
great cities, and must be studied as they are encountered in concrete form in
large populations. No city in the world presents a wider variety of typical
social problems than Chicago. (Tolman, 1902:116)
Robert Park and Human Ecology
Robert Park (1864–1944) attended the University of Michigan and began his
career as a newspaper reporter, first for the Minneapolis Journal and later for the
New York Journal. Because he was assigned to the police beat at the newspapers,
he would have to pound the streets to develop leads and check facts for his
news articles. He returned to graduate school at Harvard University and traveled
to Germany, where he took courses with Georg Simmel and received a degree
from the University of Heidelberg. In 1912 Park organized a conference on race
relations at Tuskegee Institute. W. I. Thomas, who taught at the University of
Chicago, approached him to ask if Park would come to the university and join
other scholars in the newly formed department of sociology (Blumer, 1984;
Mathews, 1977).
In 1914, at age forty-nine, Park joined the faculty of the University of
Chicago on a part-time basis. Park’s approach to the sociological study of the
urban environment was clear. He urged his students to “get the seat of their
pants dirty” by going out into the neighborhoods of the city, studying the
many different groups of people who had come there. While Park worked
with W. I. Thomas on a study of immigrant adaptation to the urban environment and on his own study of the development of the immigrant press in the
United States, he and Ernest Burgess conducted undergraduate classes and
graduate seminars that required students to go into the community, collect
data from businesspeople, interview area residents, and report back with their
information.
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54
Box 2.5
2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
Robert Park’s Fascinating Career
Robert Park was born in Red Wing, Minnesota, in 1864. His father did not
want to send him to college, insisting that he was not “the studious type,” but
Park saved money from a summer job working with a railroad crew to pay for
his college tuition. He graduated from the University of Michigan, where he
took courses with John Dewey, and began his career as a newspaper reporter,
first in Minneapolis and later in Denver, New York, and Chicago. Despite a successful career in the newspaper business, including serving as city editor for two
Detroit newspapers, Park decided to return to graduate school.
He received his MA in philosophy from Harvard University in 1899 and then
moved his family to Berlin, where he attended lectures by Georg Simmel, and
later received his PhD from Heidelberg University. Returning to the United
States in 1903, he became secretary of the Congo Reform Association and wrote
a series of articles that exposed the atrocities of the Belgian government in its
African colony.
While working with the Congo Reform Association, Park met Booker T.
Washington, the most influential black American leader of the day and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, and decided that he was sick and tired of the academic world and wanted to “get back into the world of men.” Washington
invited Park to become the publicist for the institute, and for the next decade
Park served as Washington’s personal secretary, revising papers and speeches.
Park used his spare time to investigate lynching in the American South and to
write about race relations in the United States.
In 1912 Park organized the International Conference on the Negro at Tuskegee. One of the scholars he invited was W. I. Thomas from the University of
Chicago. The two became friends, and Thomas invited Park to come to Chicago
to teach. Park arrived in Chicago in 1914 and began the work that we are familiar with from the Chicago School of Urban Sociology. Because of Park’s connections with Washington and Tuskegee, the University of Chicago attracted a
number of black students and produced the first generation of African American
sociologists in the United States, including E. Franklin Frazer, Horace Cayton,
and St. Clair Drake (this at a time when black students were not allowed to
attend many universities). Another of Park’s students, Charles Johnson, wrote
the final commission report on the Chicago race riots of 1919.
Charles Johnson moved to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he
would serve as president of the historically all-black school. When it came time
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TH E C H I C A G O S C H OO L O F U R B A N S O C I O LO G Y
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continued
for Park to retire from the University of Chicago (in 1936 at the age of 72),
Johnson invited Park to come to Fisk, and together they established an urban
laboratory to conduct studies of race relations in American cities. Park died in
Nashville in 1944, and in 1955, Fisk University named a new dormitory ParkJohnson Hall in honor of his work.
Robert Park’s contributions before and after his years at the University of
Chicago have largely been overlooked, as if he discovered urban sociology there
and left it behind when he retired. But in reality he spent his long and exciting
career engaged with the city, with sociological study, and with the African
American community before and after his years in Chicago.
From the very first, the Chicago School sociologists adopted a conceptual position that we know as human ecology—the study of the process of human group
adjustment to the environment, which was inspired by the biologist, Charles
Darwin. Whereas European thinkers such as Weber, Marx, and Simmel viewed
the city as an environment where larger social and economic forces of capitalism
played themselves out in a human drama, Chicago School sociologists avoided the
study of capitalism per se, preferring instead a biologically based way of conceptualizing urban life. For them urban analysis was a branch of human ecology. Their
ideas brought them closest to the work of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, a
social Darwinist, who also viewed society as dominated by biological rather than
economic laws of development. Economic competition, in this view, was a special
case of the struggle for survival. All individuals in the city were caught up in this
species competition and adjusted to it in various ways.
According to Park, the social organization of the city resulted from the struggle for survival that then produced a distinct and highly complex division of
labor, because people tried to do what they were best at in order to compete.
Urban life was organized on two distinct levels: the biotic and the cultural. The
biotic level refers to the forms of organization produced by the competition of species over scarce environmental resources. The cultural level refers to the symbolic
and psychological adjustment processes and to the organization of urban life
according to shared sentiments, much like the qualities Simmel studied.
In Park’s work, the biotic level stressed the importance of biological factors
for understanding social organization and the urban effects of economic competition. In contrast, the cultural component of urban life operated in neighborhoods
that were held together by cooperative ties involving shared cultural values
among people with similar backgrounds. Hence, local community life was
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organized around what Park called a “moral order” of cooperative, symbolic ties,
whereas the larger city composed of separate communities was organized through
competition and functional differentiation. In his later work, however, the complex notion of urbanism as combining competition and cooperation, or the biotic
and the cultural levels, was dropped in favor of an emphasis on the biotic level
alone as the basic premise of urban ecology. This led to some of the earliest critiques of the ecological perspective; faulting it for ignoring the role of culture in
the city, or what Simmel would call the important influence of modernity, and
for neglecting the basis of community (Alihan, 1938), which was social and not
biological.
Other members of the early Chicago School translated the social Darwinism
implicit in this model into a spatially attuned analysis. In 1924, Roderick
McKenzie (one of Park’s students) published an article titled “The Ecological
Approach to the Study of the Human Community” that gives the definitive statement of this approach. The fundamental quality of the struggle for existence was
position, or location, for the individual, the group, or institutions such as business
firms. Spatial position would be determined by economic competition and the
struggle for survival. Groups or individuals that were successful took over the
better positions in the city, such as the choicest business locations, or the preferred
neighborhoods. The less successful would have to make do with less desirable locations. In this way the urban population, under pressure of economic competition,
sorted itself out within the city space. McKenzie explained land-use patterns as the
product of competition and an economic division of labor, which deployed objects
and activities in space according to the roles they played in society. Thus, if a firm
needed a particular location to perform its function, it competed with others for
that site. The study of urban patterns resulting from that competitive process
would be studied by a new group of sociologists known as human ecologists.
BURGESS’S MODEL OF URBAN GROWTH
Ernest Burgess developed a theory of city growth and differentiation based on the
social Darwinist or biologically derived principles common in the work of Park
and McKenzie. According to Burgess, the city constantly grew because of population pressure. This, in turn, triggered a dual process of central agglomeration and
commercial decentralization; that is, spatial competition attracted new business
and commercial activities to the center of the city but also repelled other activities
to the fringe area. This process forced other activities out and away from the core,
and so the fringe itself was pushed farther out from the city, and so on.
The city continually grew outward as activities that lost out in the competition for space in the central city relocated to peripheral areas. This sorting and
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B U R G E S S ’S MO D E L O F URB A N GR O W TH
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survival of the fittest led, in turn, to further spatial and functional differentiation as activities were deployed according to competitive advantages. In Burgess’s theory, the city would eventually take on the form of a highly
concentrated central business district that would dominate the region and be the
site for the highest competitive land prices as well as the main organizing functions of the society, while the surrounding area would comprise four distinct
concentric rings. A copy of Burgess’s map for the city of Chicago is shown in
Figure 2.5 (the original map is displayed in the office of the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago).
The importance of Burgess’s model cannot be overemphasized. First, he
explained the pattern of homes, neighborhoods, and industrial and commercial
locations in terms of the ecological theory of competition over spatial “position.”
Competition produced a certain ordering of space as well as a certain social organization in space. Both of these dimensions were pictured in the concentric zone
model. Those who could afford it lived near the center; those who could not,
arranged themselves in concentric zones around the city center.
Second, Burgess’s model explained the shifting of population and activities
within the space of the city according to two distinct but related processes: centralization and decentralization. His theory explicitly related social processes to
spatial patterns—a most important link for all theorizing about the city that was
to follow and a view that is quite compatible with the aims of the new urban
sociology.
Finally, Burgess revealed that the characteristics of the social organization of
the urban population were spatially deployed. A gradient running from the center
to the periphery characterized the attributes of the urban population. Individual
traits such as mental illness, gang membership, criminal behavior, and racial
background were found to be clustered along the center/periphery gradient of the
city. Cutting across the urban form from the central business district (known as
the CBD) to the outskirts, Chicago School researchers, using census data, found
that the incidence of social pathology decreased, while homeownership and the
number of nuclear families increased. The inner zones, therefore, were discovered
to be the sites of crime, illness, gang warfare, broken homes, and many other
indicators of social disorganization or problems.
In practice, however, research on the internal structure of cities would contradict
Burgess’s view of concentric zones. The first critique of Burgess’s model was proposed by Homer Hoyt (1933) and was called “sector theory.” Hoyt argued that
cities were carved up, not by concentric zones, but by unevenly shaped sectors
within which different economic activities tended to congregate together; that is,
agglomerate. Hoyt suggested that all activities, but especially manufacturing and
retailing, had the tendency to spin off away from the center and agglomerate in
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FIGURE 2.5 Burgess’s Model of Concentric Zones. Ernest Burgess’s model of the growth of the
city shows concentric zones moving away from the central area; it also takes into account natural features (the lakefront) as well as areas of concentrated activities (such as the Bright Light
Area on the north) and the location of ethnic communities (such as Little Sicily on the north
and the Black Belt on the south). SOURCE: Reprinted courtesy of University of Chicago Press.
sectors that expanded outward. Thus, the city grew in irregular blobs rather than in
Burgess’s neat circles.
Other models argued that cities had multiple centers rather than a single urban
core. Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman (1945) suggested that within any city,
there existed separate functions and particular needs that were concentrated within
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T HE C H I C A G O S C H O O L S T UD I ES
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specific and specialized districts. Thus, within cities, similar activities often locate
in the same area, forming agglomerations, or minicenters. Cities often grow asymmetrically around these multiple nuclei. The idea of multiple nuclei as the shape of
the city further developed Hoyt’s break from Burgess and is similar to the current
multicentered (MCMR) approach used in this book.
A common assumption of all of these models, however, and unlike the sociospatial
approach of this text, is that the city remains the central place that dominates all other
areas. In recent years this way of thinking about urbanized areas has been replaced by
the regional perspective, which stresses the relative independence of multiple centers
within the larger metropolitan region. While ecologists were concerned with location
and with thinking of social activities as located in space, their biologically based explanation for perceived activities and spatial patterns has been rejected in favor of the new
urban sociology with characteristics emphasized in this book (see Gottdiener and
Feagin [1988] for an earlier analysis of this change in theoretical paradigms).
THE CHICAGO SCHOOL STUDIES
The work of the early Chicago School dominated urban sociology in the pre-war
years. For about a decade, beginning in the early 1920s, a veritable flood of work
poured out of the sociology department. Surveying the books alone (that is, not
including MA and PhD theses produced at that time), the following list gives
some idea of the range of studies and accomplishments of the Chicago School.
Many of these works are classics in our field of study:
Roderick D. McKenzie, The Neighborhood: A Study of Columbus, Ohio (1923)
Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (1923)
Frederick Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (1927)
Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (1928)
Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929)
Clifford R. Shaw, The Jackroller (1930)
Paul G. Cressey, The Taxi-Dance Hall (1932)
Walter C. Reckless, Vice in Chicago (1933)
Norman Hayner, Hotel Life (1936)
This marvelous output was produced with a similar stamp. It took an important
social phenomenon, such as suicide, and located the distribution of its incidence in
the space of the city. Chicago researchers then analyzed it in terms of the relation
between the individual and the larger social forces of integration/disintegration.
Most often this meant that social phenomena were explained as products of social
disorganization, particularly the breaking up of primary social relations through
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city living, as Wirth’s theory suggested. As a result, the Chicago School would later
be criticized for reinforcing a negative view of city life. Yet, the marvelous field
studies produced are often as inspiring academically and as interesting today as they
were when first published.
Despite their limitations, we can appreciate the importance of these early
efforts. First, Chicago School researchers explicitly connected social phenomena
with spatial patterns; that is, they thought in sociospatial terms. Second, they
took an interactionist perspective following the thought of Simmel. Individuals
were studied in interaction with others, and the emergent forms of association
coming out of that interaction were observed closely. Finally, they tried to show
the patterns of adjustment to sociospatial location and developed a rudimentary
way of speaking about the role of individual attributes in explaining urban phenomena. Nevertheless, they focused almost exclusively on social disorganization
and pathology; the breakup of family relationships, for example, was given much
more attention than questions of race or class. Now urban sociology perceives
important phenomena differently, although nothing can be taken away from these
earlier efforts.
One substantial project of the Chicago School was the creation of mappings of
the city of Chicago that divided the city into seventy distinct community areas.
The importance of spatial analysis in the Chicago School studies can be seen in
the map shown in Figure 2.6, which shows the location of taxi (i.e., pay-to-play)
dance halls in Chicago in the period from 1927 to 1930. Most of the Chicago
School studies made use of a common base map of Chicago or Ernest Burgess’s
map of concentric zones, while some, such as the gang delinquency areas (Shaw et
al., 1929) would overlay the concentric zones on the base map. Paul Cressey’s The
Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life
examined a particular social institution—the taxi-dance hall—that developed to
provide entertainment for single men in the industrial cities. It included not just
the mapping of the location of the pay-to-play dance halls (shown in Figure 2.6)
but also maps that showed where the customers who frequented the dance halls
lived, and where the young women who worked in the dance halls lived. The forfee dance halls were located in rooming house areas of the city, as were the
patrons of the dance halls, while the taxi dancers (the young women) lived in
immigrant neighborhoods on the north side of the city. Cressey’s own ethnographic work in the dance halls further explains that the patrons were recent
immigrants who lived in the single-room apartments of the rooming house districts. These were social facts discovered by Cressey’s meticulous and inspiring
field research.
Other studies took a similar spatial approach to the study of urban phenomena. Harvey Zorbaugh’s study, The Gold Coast and the Slum, made extensive use of
maps to show where wealthy households (measured by persons listed in the social
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FIGURE 2.6 Location of Taxi-Dance Halls in Chicago, 1927–1930. Many of the
Chicago School studies used the Base Map of Chicago to locate the groups and
institutions that were discussed in the research; in this example, Paul Cressey
mapped the location of Taxi-Dance Halls in Chicago. SOURCE: Reprinted courtesy
of University of Chicago Press.
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register in one case) lived along the Chicago lakefront (known as the Gold Coast),
and areas where there were high delinquency rates and criminal activity (in the
Slum) (Figure 2.7). Interestingly, one of Zorbaugh’s maps shows a street intersection labeled Death Corner—the same location where the Cabrini-Green public
housing project would be constructed over a twenty-year period beginning in the
1940s (Francis Cabrini Rowhouses in 1942, the Cabrini Extension in 1958, and
the William Green Houses in 1962). These public housing experiments became
notorious for their ill effects on residents and their social disorganization.
Another way to appreciate the achievements of the Chicago School is by
returning to the original case studies. A particularly vivid ethnography is Frederick M. Thrasher’s 1927 study, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago.
Thrasher spent eight years tracking down the youth gangs of Chicago and identified more than a thousand groups that he called gangs. Today media coverage
tends to associate street gangs with black or Hispanic teenagers in the inner city
and lament their violent ways, as exemplified by such films as Boyz N the Hood
and Locas. Thrasher’s work takes us back to the city of some seventy years ago
when gangs were as much of a problem, but their members were almost all
white. Thrasher’s study is described in more detail in Box 2.6.
FIGURE 2.7 Harvey Zorbaugh’s study, The Gold Coast and the Slum, showed where wealthy
households lived along the Chicago lakefront (known as the Gold Coast). SOURCE: istock/
©tupungato.
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T HE C H I C A G O S C H O O L S T UD I ES
Box 2.6
63
Street Gangs in Chicago, 1927
In the 1920s most street gangs were composed principally of recent immigrants
to this country. Thrasher’s census of street gangs in Chicago (included some
25,000 members in a city of 2 million) showed that roughly 17% were known
as Polish gangs, 11% were Italian, 8.5% were Irish, 7% were black, and so on,
with the largest percentage of all gangs composed of “mixed nationalities.”
While roughly 87% of all gang members were of foreign extraction, they were
organized by territory, not by ethnicity. According to Thrasher, the gang phenomenon was explained in part by the lack of adjustment opportunities for
immigrants, in part by the carryover of Old World antagonisms, and also by the
need to defend territory against “outsiders.”
Thrasher’s study demonstrates sociospatial thinking. As Robert Park comments in his introduction,
The title of this book does not describe it. It is a study of the gang, to be
sure, but it is at the same time a study of “gangland,” that is to say, a
study of the gang and its habitat, and in this case the habitat is a city
slum. (Park, 1936)
Park grounded Thrasher’s study in a biological metaphor by his use of the word
habitat. Today we would adopt the sociospatial perspective and say territory or
space. Gangland is the city space where gangs lived. Their influence was felt all
over. What Thrasher did was locate gangs in their space. In fact, he found “three
great domains” of gangdom—the “northside jungles,” the “southside badlands,”
and the “westside wilderness.” Using Ernest Burgess’s map of Chicago (see
Figure 2.5), Thrasher provided details for each of these areas and the gangs they
contained. Within gangland, “The street educates with fatal precision”
(1927:101). The northside covered an area directly north of the Chicago Loop on
the Burgess map and behind the wealthy neighborhoods that lined the shore of
Lake Michigan. It was home to the “Gloriannas,” the location of “Death Corner”
and “Bughouse Square,” and a gang so threatening that Thrasher disguised its
real name.
The westside was the most extensive slum area producing gangs, and it
encompassed the area west of downtown, spreading out both northward and
southward. The westside was home to the “Blackspots,” the “Sparkplugs,” the
“Beaners,” and the “hard-boiled ‘Buckets-of-Blood’” (1927:9). The South Side of
Chicago, with its stockyards and miles of railroad yards, was dominated by Poles
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continued
and Italians, and gangs were known as the “Torpedoes” and the “So-So’s.” Also
on the South Side, black gangs of the time were the “Wailing Shebas” and the
“Wolves.”
In a city divided by neighborhoods, Chicago pulsed with the give-andtake confrontations among the various gangs. Only the relative scarcity of
killing weapons such as handguns kept the constant confrontations from
erupting into the type of carnage characteristic of many cities today. For
students of contemporary urban sociology, there can be no better example
of spatially sensitive research than Thrasher’s original study. Moreover, it is
doubtful, in today’s urban environment, that anyone could carry out the
kind of exhaustive census on street gangs that Thrasher was able to accomplish. Certain parts of his study are now outdated, but like the Pyramids, it
remains an inspiration across time.
Roderick McKenzie and the Metropolitan Community
Roderick McKenzie was principal investigator on urban trends for President Herbert Hoover’s Committee on Recent Social Trends, and author of the chapter
titled “The Rise of Metropolitan Communities” in Recent Social Trends (1933).
McKenzie used this opportunity to apply the principles of urban ecology to a
regional metropolitan approach. He viewed the development of the metropolitan
region as a function of changes in transportation and communication that produced new forms of social organization. These stages of development were the
pre-railway era (before 1850), the railway era (1850–1900), and the motor transportation area (1900 to present). McKenzie considered technological change to be
the key variable in producing spatial patterns in urban society, as he states in his
introduction to The Metropolitan Community:
Formerly independent towns and villages and also rural territory have become
part of this enlargened city complex. This new type of super community,
organized around a dominant focal point and comprising a multitude of differentiated centers of activity, differs from the metropolitanism established by rail
transportation in the complexity of its institutional division of labor and the
mobility of its population. Its territorial scope is defined in terms of motor
transportation and competition with other regions. (1933:6–7)
McKenzie’s ideas were recognized as a significant contribution to the field at the
time. In some respects, his approach may be viewed as a precursor to the
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T HE C H I C A G O S C H O O L S T UD I ES
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general concept of the multicentered metropolitan region emphasized by the
sociospatial approach, except for his technological determinism. McKenzie spent
the last seven years of his life working on a manuscript that set forth a more
systematic statement of the principles of urban ecology. Perhaps because this
work was left unfinished, he is sometimes overlooked even by contemporary
urban ecologists. It is interesting to speculate on the reasons for this oversight.
In the 1950s, a new field of study, regional science, began investigating metropolitan regions from the perspective of economic geography—an approach with
less appeal to urban sociologists. McKenzie’s focus on the metropolitan region
conflicted with the more general tendency of urban sociologists to focus their
research and writing, as well as fieldwork, on the central city. A serious consideration of his regional perspective would have led urban sociology out of the
city and into the suburban region, something that would not happen for several
decades but is a central focus of this text.
FIGURE 2.8 Apartment building in a black section of Chicago, Illinois, April 1941. SOURCE:
Russell Lee, Photographer Gelatin-silver print FSA-OWI Collection Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress.
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FROM HUMAN ECOLOGY TO ITS CRITIQUE
Although the Chicago School established the discipline of Sociology in the US
and innovated urban sociology as a scientific study of the city, critiques of its
theory were short in coming. Most influential was an article that appeared in
1945 by Walter Firey who published a study of land use in Boston titled “Sentiment and Symbolism as Ecological Variables.” He noted that large areas of land
in downtown Boston were reserved for noneconomic uses. Parks and cemeteries, as
well as a forty-eight-acre area in the center of the city that had formed the original “commons” of the community, had never been developed. In addition, an
upper-class residential neighborhood known as Beacon Hill retained its privileged
position as a home to wealthy and established Boston families despite its location
near the downtown area. Each of these observations ran counter to Burgess’s concentric zone model. Firey suggested that “sentiment” and “symbolism” were
important ecological factors that influenced spatial patterns of development in
urban space (Firey, 1945). Although other sociologists have offered little systematic elaboration of the ideas Firey presented in this important piece of research,
his work is often referred to as the “sociocultural school” of urban ecology. Today
we can say that his work is a critique of the Chicago School and it is a prescient
analysis focusing on the role of culture and affluent status in determining land
use, much like the sociospatial approach’s appreciation for these same factors. But,
it was not until the 1980s, when Lefebvre’s influence was felt, that this critique
of human ecology was clearly understood.
SUMMARY
All theoretical paradigms are beset with potential problems and contradictions.
Theoretical models borrow concepts from other fields of study, and are creatures of the concerns and beliefs of scholars at a particular historical moment.
Robert Park wanted to create a new “science of society” and borrowed the
model of biological ecology to formulate his model of human ecology. He
incorporated the idea of conflict among competing land uses and competition
among population groups, although it is unlikely that he envisioned the particular forms of conflict among class, ethnic, and racial groups that beset
American society in the twenty-first century. Later ecologists would incorporate
new methods of data analysis to answer new and even more challenging questions concerning urban life than the early Chicago sociologists could have
imagined. But human ecology and its offspring, urban ecology, confront
numerous obstacles when studying the complexities of the multicentered
metropolitan regions that now characterize urban society in the United States
and across the globe.
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S UM M A R Y
67
The human ecology paradigm gives undue prominence to just one factor—
technological innovation—to explain urban growth and change. Roderick
McKenzie viewed changes in the metropolitan region as the product of shifts
in transportation technology. This approach created problems for other human
ecologists who followed McKenzie. Amos Hawley, who was McKenzie’s student and perhaps the best-known human ecologist, wanted to explain two
aspects of change in the post-war period: the massive growth of suburbanization and the restructuring of central city areas away from manufacturing and
toward administration. In explaining these changes, he dropped the early
ecologists’ concern for space itself. He viewed social organization as fundamentally produced by the technologies of communication and transportation. As
the technology of these means of interaction changed, so did the patterns of
social organization. No mention is made of the economic or political systems,
nor of the influence of powerful actors in the production of space. Consequently, the approach is quite outdated.
Nevertheless, the ecological perspective remains active among urban demographers who study statistical changes alone. At the explanatory level, the
core biological metaphor has been retained, as well as the central view that
social organization should be understood as a process of adaptation to the
environment. With metaphorical concepts we get locked up in the social logic
of the metaphor and miss the actual social logic of urbanization, urbanism,
and the nature of urban society. Human ecologists avoid any mention of social
groupings such as classes or life along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. Demographers using ecological theory see urbanism as a process of adaptation to preexisting conditions, rather than competition over scarce resources that often
brings conflict. This is a very passive image of human beings that ignores
human agency and the social production of urban space. They have a limited
conception of the economy, which is still viewed as simply the social organization of functions and division of labor—a conception that neglects the dynamics of capitalism and the global system. Although they emphasize ecological
location, they ignore the real estate industry and its role in developing space,
something that the housing crisis of the first decade of the twenty-first century
tells us is very important. Finally, urban ecologists have overlooked the
important political institutions that administer and regulate society and affect
everyday life through the institutional channeling of resources, another very
important part of the current housing crisis. Their emphasis on the agent-side
neglects the powerful structural-side causes of growth and change in the
metropolis. We will examine the factors responsible for the development of
the multicentered metropolitan region in the next chapter as we explore the
new urban sociology.
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2: T H E O RIG INS O F URBA N L IF E AND U RBA N SO CIO LO G Y
STUDY QUESTIONS
• What were some differences between the rural and urban ways of life?
• Explain some examples to show that religious codes were the earliest forms
of urban planning.
• What were some of the earliest cities and what were some structural features and innovat…