What is Chicago School urban ecology?
In the early twentieth century Chicago grew explosively as European immigrants and Black migrants from the South arrived. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie of the University of Chicago treated the city as a "social laboratory," and published their approach in The City (1925).
Borrowing from plant and animal ecology, they described the city as a human ecosystem. People and groups compete for limited urban space, and the result is "natural areas" where similar people cluster.
Core concepts
- Competition: groups and businesses compete for good locations, and those able to pay the highest rents take the center.
- Invasion and succession: a new group or land use enters an area (invasion) and eventually replaces the earlier one (succession), as immigrant neighborhoods turn over.
- Natural areas: homogeneous districts produced by competition and selection rather than planning, such as immigrant enclaves, business districts or affluent suburbs.
- Segregation: the separation of residential areas by race, ethnicity and class.
Burgess's concentric zone model
Burgess proposed that a city grows outward in five concentric zones:
- Central business district (the Loop): commerce, finance and administration.
- Zone in transition: invaded by the expanding center, mixing factories and deteriorating housing, home to new immigrants and the poor, where social problems concentrate.
- Zone of workingmen's homes: second-generation immigrants and working-class families who escaped the transition zone.
- Residential zone: middle-class houses and apartments.
- Commuter zone: suburbs beyond the city limits.
Urbanism and social disorganization
Louis Wirth (1938), in "Urbanism as a Way of Life," argued that the size, density and heterogeneity of urban populations make relationships anonymous, superficial and transitory.
Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) mapped juvenile delinquency in Chicago and found rates highest in the zone in transition and declining outward, and that high rates persisted in the same areas even as the ethnic groups living there changed. They located the cause in the social disorganization of areas with high residential turnover and weak community control rather than in individuals, an idea that shifted attention from punishment toward community improvement (see theories of punishment).
Later models
- Sector model (Hoyt, 1939): cities grow in wedge-shaped sectors along transport routes rather than in rings.
- Multiple nuclei model (Harris & Ullman, 1945): cities have several centers, each attracting different functions.
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Criticism
- The concentric model fits 1920s Chicago and fits poorly in older European or planned cities.
- Treating urban form as the outcome of "natural" competition ignores political and economic power such as real-estate capital and discriminatory lending, a point pressed by the new urban sociology.
- The biological analogy oversimplifies human culture and choice.
- Still, its fieldwork, mapping and life-history methods became foundations of urban sociology and criminology.
References
- Park, R. E., Burgess, E. W., & McKenzie, R. D. (1925). The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology, 44(1), 1–24.
- Hoyt, H. (1939). The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities. Washington, DC: Federal Housing Administration.
- Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Harris, C. D., & Ullman, E. L. (1945). The nature of cities. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 242, 7–17.