Community: the Chicago School

Social Darwinism

• Popular intellectual fashion in late C19th early C20th USA

• Treated social and economic competition as “natural”

• Connected to eugenics: preserving the race

Social Darwinism

• Suggested that those groups which dominated society, economy somehow deserved it

Chicago School

• University of Chicago emerging in the 1890s as an innovative research centre– Chicago a new kind of city– Application of new ideas

Chicago School

• UofC Philosophy programme:– John Dewey as leading influence– Strong on pragmatism– Influenced by Darwin’s ideas on evolution

Chicago School

• University Settlement House– Jane Addams and Ellen Starr lead Hull House

programme to aid the poor immigrant

Chicago School of Human Ecology

• Ernest W Burgess

• Robert Ezra Park

• Roderick D McKenzie

"The human community may be considered as an ecological product"

-- Roderick Mckenzie 1923

Park on Community

• Community results from competition with other social groups for living space– Size, resources, location, internal organization– Internal workings and institutions

• Park, Burgess, and McKenzie (1925) The City

• Burgess concentric ring model

Traffic jam 1910

Old Park triangle

Chicago Astor St

Michigan Ave 1910

1910

1920 Chicago River

23rd St Tracks 1907

Chicago 1934

• Maxwell & Jefferson 1905

12th & Jefferson 1905

Stockyards district 1904

• 1912

31st St 1910

Tenement 1910

Stockyard strike 1904

Kenilworth Ave 1925

• Lakeshore Dr 1905

Lincoln Park 1907

Oak Park

Social Ecology

• Competition– people compete for living space in the city, like

plants and animals in a jungle

Social Ecology

• Ecological dominance– some groups, and land uses achieve dominance

over others – analogous to ecological dominance

Social Ecology

• Invasion & succession– social groups can colonize new areas, and

create the conditions for other groups to invade– like plant communities

Critique

• Developed for early C20th Chicago, but does not apply in other places/times.– 1920s Chicago a

city of the streetcar and the El

The El 1915

Homer Hoyt 1930s

• Expert on real-estate and land economics

• Designed shopping plazas

• By 1930s arterial highways beginning to distort rings into sectors and wedges– Sector model

Harris & Ullman 1945

• Ullman

• 1940s freeways in LA lead to the Multiple nuclei model

• Harris & Ullman 1945

Critique

• Competition represented as a process of “natural”.– Makes capitalism seem “natural”– Makes racism seem “natural”

Critique

• Race, ethnicity etc., treated as “natural” categories, not social constructions.

Critique

• Residential areas treated as if they have uniform social character– actually more diverse

• Shows ignorance of subsequent critics– Park, Burgess, McKenzie knew the city to be

diverse

1910

Critique

• Implied moral judgements– Burgess et al viewed middle-class white

heterosexual households as normal, everyone else as deviant

• Valentine plays the same game too

Critique

• Humans do not behave like plant communities

Critique

• Represents power as a product of “natural” competitive processes

• Discourages more serious consideration of power in the urban landscape

Legacy

• Classic urban models (Burgess concentric ring etc.,)

• Continue to fascinate

• Mike Davis (1992) Ecology of fear

Legacy

• The term “ecological” in sociology– ecological correlation– ecological fallacy

• Schools of Social Ecology