The City

By Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess and Robert J. Sampson

First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago school of sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators were among the first to document the interplay between urban individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city's riot of people, events, and influences. As sociologist Robert J. Sampson notes in his new foreword, though much has changed since The City was first published, we can still benefit from its charge to explain where and why individuals and social groups live as they do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226636641

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1925, 2019 by The University of Chicago

Foreword by Robert J. Sampson © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19         1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63650-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63664-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226636641.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Park, Robert Ezra, 1864–1944, author. | Burgess, E. W. (Ernest Watson), 1886–1966, author. | Sampson, Robert J., 1956– writer of foreword.

Title: The city / Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess ; with a foreword by Robert J. Sampson.

Other titles: Heritage of sociology.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: The heritage of sociology | Includes bibliographical references. | Originally published: Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1925.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051243 | ISBN 9780226636504 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226636641 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Sociology, Urban.

Classification: LCC HT151 .P3 2019 | DDC 307.76—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051243

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

THE CITY

Robert E. Park & Ernest W. Burgess

With a Foreword by Robert J. Sampson

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago & London

THE HERITAGE OF SOCIOLOGY

A Series Edited by Morris Janowitz

CONTENTS

Foreword: The City for the Twenty-First Century

ROBERT J. SAMPSON

I. The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment

ROBERT E. PARK

II. The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project

ERNEST W. BURGESS

III. The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community

R. D. MCKENZIE

IV. The Natural History of the Newspaper

ROBERT E. PARK

V. Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency

ROBERT E. PARK

VI. Community Organization and the Romantic Temper

ROBERT E. PARK

VII. Magic, Mentality, and City Life

ROBERT E. PARK

VIII. Can Neighborhood Work Have a Scientific Basis?

ERNEST W. BURGESS

IX. The Mind of the Hobo: Reflections upon the Relation between Mentality and Locomotion

ROBERT E. PARK

X. A Bibliography of the Urban Community

LOUIS WIRTH

Notes

Indexes

FOREWORD

THE CITY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The great city, with its bright lights, its emporiums of novelties and bargains, its palaces of amusement, its underworld of vice and crime, its risks of life and property from accident, robbery, and homicide, has become the region of the most intense degree of adventure and danger, excitement and thrill.

ROBERT E. PARK & ERNEST W. BURGESS, The City (1925)

This book, a sweepingly ambitious attempt to capture the paradigmatic modern city, was written in an era defined by Progressive ideas. When it was reissued in 1967, with a new introduction by Morris Janowitz, American cities were entering a turbulent time, one that might have surprised its authors and their peers in the Chicago school of urban sociology. In the intervening forty-two years, the urban world had changed. The city Park and Burgess studied, the industrial cauldron that was Chicago in the early twentieth century, one teeming with immigrants and growing rapidly, was decaying in the face of the urban crisis and an increasing concentration of inner-city poverty. City residents, especially whites, were moving en masse to the suburbs, urban fiscal crises were emerging, urban crime was climbing precipitously, race relations were at a boiling point, and deindustrialization threatened the economic and social organization of entire communities.

Today, this newest edition of The City similarly arrives at a momentous time for the world, although the city itself looks quite different from the city of 1967. Unexpectedly, crime declined dramatically in the last quarter century, reshaping the urban fabric. Cities like New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, and Chicago are thriving in the postindustrial economy. Cities are engines of growth and innovation—so much so that gentrification is one of the most divisive issues on the urban agenda. Migration to the city is also now a dominant phenomenon well beyond the United States. China, with the world’s largest population, saw its urbanization rate increase from under 20 percent to nearly 60 percent between 1980 and 2018 alone. The accompanying hukou system of household registration according to urban or rural residence is an ever more important determinant of well-being. That echoes the growing chasm in the United States between well-off urbanites and everyone else.

Rising inequality means that we increasingly live in a world of urban haves and have-nots, while the rural-urban divide has also exposed deep political conflict. Even though crime has declined, mass incarceration has ruptured communities of color, and racial conflict over policing tactics has flared once again. More generally, racial segregation and neighborhood inequality remain entrenched in the metropolitan scene.

What is the place in this new world for a fresh edition of The City? It seems everyone has an opinion on the Chicago school of urban sociology, which will inform one’s judgment on whether this book is relevant to understanding the massive and paradoxical social conditions in the contemporary city. I think the guiding ideas and principles put forth by Park and Burgess—not necessarily the particulars—are indeed relevant; but even if they are not, readers will benefit from engaging anew with a foundational statement of urban inquiry that has influenced nearly a century of thinking by both scholars and the general public.

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL REVISITED

Robert Park began his career as a journalist, only later coming to sociology and the study of the city after obtaining his PhD in Germany. Ernest Burgess, by contrast, was trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, coming to the study of the city out of a deep interest in ecology. The two men’s collaboration was intense. They saw Chicago as a laboratory for urban inquiry, one that produced a rich variety of empirical studies on subjects ranging from the slum, delinquency, and hobos to the taxi dance hall and bohemia.

The City covered extensive intellectual ground, with seminal chapters on how to study the city, urban growth (the iconic map of the concentric zone alone is worth the price of admission), ecological approaches, the history of the newspaper, community organization and delinquency, and the scientific basis of neighborhood study. Louis Wirth, who later authored the famous essay Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938), also contributed an urban bibliography. The specifics might be considered outdated now, but his thinking on how to tame specialization and volume, which have only gotten worse, is fascinating. As Wirth notes, deciding what is pertinent and what is extraneous is the key, and his theoretical classification of the literature is still informative.

Books like this are rare. Unlike the turgid prose of today’s scientific journals, the monographs that emerged from the Chicago school, including The City, are easy to read, compelling, engaging, and even lyrical at times. Park and Burgess were also undaunted in tackling a wealth of concepts beyond what urbanists both then and now typically consider, such as moral distance, romantic temper, magic and mentality (who knew?), the mind of the hobo, depravity, and self-control. Some of these subjects, especially the effects of the city on the mind, have fallen by the wayside, but none are boring.

Critics of the Chicago school may object to this assessment. Their critiques are by now well rehearsed, perhaps timeworn. Whether on account of the Chicagoans’ alleged lack of attention to political economy, their biotic metaphors, their concept of the natural area, their concentric zone theory, their neglect of the pernicious effects of institutional racism, or their overgeneralizations—to name only a few—the stubborn or entrenched critic will see little need for returning to this book, perhaps especially in our neoliberal times, said by many urbanists to be unique in character.

There are at least two responses to these kinds of critiques. One is to defend Park and Burgess at all turns and stress that many of these criticisms have become caricatures. The concentric zone is a perennial punching bag, for example, because it seems too simple and schematic. But Burgess himself said the concentric zone was but an ideal type that did not describe every city, noting that it hardly needs to be added that neither Chicago nor any other city fits perfectly into this ideal scheme (51–52). Or one might point out that criticisms of the natural area concept are overstated. As Gerald Suttles (1972, 8) argues, Park and Burgess meant to emphasize the ways in which urban residential groups are not simply the artificial contrivance of planners but rather develop out of many independent personal decisions based on moral, political, ecological, and economic considerations. One can recognize racial segregation as a structural force and the result of bottom-up residential selection at the same time.

Another approach is to accept that The City made missteps. For example, one of the Chicago school’s strongest defenders, Andrew Abbott, has conceded that, when reading Park’s writing on race, one is embarrassed (1997, 1158). Other scholars like Mary Jo Deegan and Aldon Morris have gone much further in criticizing Park and the Chicago school, on not just race but also gender. But much writing of the early twentieth century is problematic, and as Abbott further argues, when we read a classic, we ignore the old ideologies and the odd phrases in order to focus on . . . the perennial, the permanent, the enduring (1997, 1158). This approach seems right to me. What matters is less the particularities of the time and more the value of the underlying ideas and the larger theoretical picture.

Fortunately, the insights of the Chicago school are many, and they have motivated decades of urban study. Abbott stresses the contextual basis of the Chicago school and its focus on urban space and temporality. In his words, Park and Burgess felt that "no social fact makes any sense abstracted from its context in social (and often geographic) space and social time. Social facts are located (1997, 1152). It is also interesting that the recent turn in the social sciences to the study of mechanisms and social processes was foreshadowed by Park and Burgess long ago. In contrast to the variables-oriented paradigm that has dominated the social sciences, they argued that science . . . is concerned not with factors, but with forces" (143). In their theoretical scheme, the goal is to conceive of abstract causes that are generalizable, rather than enumerating all the specific factors in a given event or situation. This is an ambitious approach that is at once situated and specific in empirical inquiry while also reaching for general theoretical explanation.

And so it is that The City is relevant to understanding the modern explosion of research on neighborhood effects. The study of neighborhoods and the social organization of the city was central to Park and Burgess, influencing generations of scholars, many of whom have built on their general ideas to go in new directions. For example, the seeds of classics that succeeded The City, such as Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas ([1942] 1969), are found throughout the book, especially in the chapters Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, The Ecological Approach, and Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency. For better or worse, The City also spawned social disorganization theory, about which much has been written. Critics can here read firsthand the origins of the ideas that have since been reimagined by contemporary scholars.

For my part, what makes the Chicago school framework of the pre–World War II era continually relevant to the study of neighborhoods is less its specific emphasis on disorganization (or, later, lack of social capital) and more the way it points to a general emphasis on six factors: (1) the characteristics of places rather than people; (2) neighborhood-level differentiation, especially inequality by social and ecological features; (3) what we would now call explanatory social mechanisms; (4) the neighborhood concentration of multiple and seemingly disparate characteristics, such as crime and low birth weight; (5) the importance of dynamic neighborhood processes and urban change; and (6) the interaction of larger macro-social forces, such as (de)industrialization, with local processes (Sampson 2012, 39). One can admit—as have I—to a concern over the concept of a disorganized community, while retaining the Chicago school focus on structure and process. The contemporary theory of collective efficacy, for example, defined by social cohesion and shared expectations for informal control among residents, is inspired loosely by Park and Burgess’s notions of community organization and the crucial role of social control in urban life. Their ideas on mobility as the pulse of the community are also found in contemporary work on residential sorting and neighborhood networks formed by movement flows across neighborhoods that create a higher-order structure of the city.

Morris Janowitz ended his introduction to the 1967 edition of this book by observing that the modern city cannot be fully understood or managed with only the types of data that Park and Burgess had at their disposal. He argues that although heroic in the 1920s, their data were primitive by our standards (1967, IX). That will likely strike readers today as highly ironic, considering how far removed from 1967 our current technologies are. The world we live in is one of technological revolution—the last twenty years have witnessed the greatest data and information explosion in history. Janowitz’s bet was that Park and Burgess, whose data were painstakingly gathered by hand, would bask in 1967’s technology, but, at the same time, they would continue to be concerned with individuality, focusing their attention on the modern equivalent of the hobo and taxi-hall dancer (x).

I am not so sure that would have been true in 1967, and it seems even less likely today. Park and Burgess would certainly locate and situate the modern equivalent of the characters made famous by the Chicago school—perhaps the freegan and the virtual sex worker—but my guess is that they would recoil at the triumphalism of contemporary big data advocates. Technology has indeed transformed the nature of cities—from communication networks and commerce to newspapers and other media. And that process has not ended. So-called smart cities, we are told, will harness technological advances and algorithmic decision-making to make urban life cleaner, safer, more efficient, and easier to navigate. Entire cities have been conceived around the priority of the technology-aided removal of disorder, arguably a central element of the city (Sennett 1970). The desire for order and prediction through urban informatics is far reaching—not least in the surveillance of virtually every aspect of our everyday lives.

Park and Burgess would likely be astonished at the sheer amount and exploits of contemporary data but suspicious of its explanatory power without sociological grounding. They would be worried about the threat that technocratic planning poses to spontaneous urban living. They would demand an explanatory account—that the data be disciplined by social scientific theory. They might argue that a single well-crafted map, guided by the ideas of urban social organization, can tell us as much about the city as the most sophisticated machine capable of working through massive data sets. Their data were not merely primitive. They were informed by judgment and analytical power.

Physicists, engineers, and statisticians are smart, to be sure, but from the standpoint of Park and Burgess—who might be considered the first urban scientists—to put them singlehandedly in charge of understanding urban life risks missing the close observations of meaningful personal interactions, misdiagnosing the underlying social processes, and eliding the contextual features that make cities places we want to live. International experiments in technocratic urban planning, such as Brasilia or Songdo, have been marked by their lack of soul. Park’s emphasis on mentality and city life further suggests that today he would eagerly study the internet and its modes of communication; the city was much more than ecology for him. Smart city gurus and contemporary urban scientists would thus do well to go back to The City’s drawing board, if only to glimpse a wholly different vision for how to study, plan, and create the city of the future.

CODA

Almost one hundred years after the publication of The City, cities continue to excite, challenge, and surprise us. We might not need the Chicago school in the specific form set out in this book, but its bounty of insights spreads surprisingly far. This book is passionate, and the boldness of its vision is inspiring. If nothing else, The City asks great questions and shows how a foundational research project was carried out. A new generation of readers can now find their own nuggets of Park and Burgess to argue with, their own disagreements to advance, their own parts of the book to revise and overturn. And while the details of 1920s Chicago might not seem to have much relevance now, Park and Burgess’s immersion in them provoked ideas that are continually being rediscovered and reshaped. The City might even help explain some of the vast social changes that are continuing to transform urban areas around the world.

Whether or not you agree with the arguments in The City, how fortunate we are to have this new edition of a text that is fun to read and even better to think with. What more can one ask from a book?

ROBERT J. SAMPSON

Harvard University

REFERENCES

Abbott, Andrew. 1997. Of Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School. Social Forces 75, no. 4 (June): 1149–82.

Janowitz, Morris. 1967. Introduction to The City, by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, vii–x. Reprint edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sennett, Richard. 1970. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. New York: W. W.Norton.

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay. (1942) 1969. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Suttles, Gerald D., ed. 1972. The Social Construction of Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (July): 1–24.

CHAPTER I

THE CITY: SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

The city, from the point of view of this paper, is something more than a congeries of individual men and of social conveniences—streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices—courts, hospitals, schools, police, and civil functionaries of various sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature.

The city has, as Oswald Spengler has recently pointed out, its own culture: What his house is to the peasant, the city is to civilized man. As the house has its household gods, so has the city its protecting Deity, its local saint. The city also, like the peasant’s hut, has its roots in the soil.¹

The city has been studied, in recent times, from the point of view of its geography, and still more recently from the point of view of its ecology. There are forces at work within the limits of the urban community—within the limits of any natural area of human habitation, in fact—which tend to bring about an orderly and typical grouping of its population and institutions. The science which seeks to isolate these factors and to describe the typical constellations of persons and institutions which the co-operation of these forces produce, is what we call human, as distinguished from plant and animal, ecology.

Transportation and communication, tramways and telephones, newspapers and advertising, steel construction and elevators—all things, in fact, which tend to bring about at once a greater mobility and a greater concentration of the urban populations—are primary factors in the ecological organization of the city.

The city is not, however, merely a geographical and ecological unit; it is at the same time an economic unit. The economic organization of the city is based on the division of labor. The multiplication of occupations and professions within the limits of the urban population is one of the most striking and least understood aspects of modern city life. From this point of view, we may, if we choose, think of the city, that is to say, the place and the people, with all the machinery and administrative devices that go with them, as organically related; a kind of psychophysical mechanism in and through which private and political interests find not merely a collective but a corporate expression.

Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city—its charters, formal organization, buildings, street railways, and so forth—is, or seems to be, mere artifact. But these things in themselves are utilities, adventitious devices which become part of the living city only when, and in so far as, through use and wont they connect themselves, like a tool in the hand of man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in the community.

The city is, finally, the natural habitat of civilized man. It is for that reason a cultural area characterized by its own peculiar cultural type:

It is a quite certain, but never fully recognized, fact, says Spengler, that all great cultures are city-born. The outstanding man of the second generation is a city-building animal. This is the actual criterion of world-history, as distinguished from the history of mankind: world-history is the history of city men. Nations, governments, politics, and religions—all rest on the basic phenomenon of human existence, the city.²

Anthropology, the science of man, has been mainly concerned up to the present with the study of primitive peoples. But civilized man is quite as interesting an object of investigation, and at the same time his life is more open to observation and study. Urban life and culture are more varied, subtle, and complicated, but the fundamental motives are in both instances the same. The same patient methods of observation which anthropologists like Boas and Lowie have expended on the study of the life and manners of the North American Indian might be even more fruitfully employed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and general conceptions of life prevalent in Little Italy on the lower North Side in Chicago, or in recording the more sophisticated folkways of the inhabitants of Greenwich Village and the neighborhood of Washington Square, New York.

We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary urban life. But the life of our cities demands a more searching and disinterested study than even Émile Zola has given us in his experimental novels and the annals of the Rougon-Macquart family.

We need such studies, if for no other reason than to enable us to read the newspapers intelligently. The reason that the daily chronicle of the newspaper is so shocking, and at the same time so fascinating, to the average reader is because the average reader knows so little about the life of which the newspaper is the record.

The observations which follow are intended to define a point of view and to indicate a program for the study of urban life: its physical organization, its occupations, and its culture.

I. THE CITY PLAN AND LOCAL ORGANIZATION

The city, particularly the modern American city, strikes one at first blush as so little a product of the artless processes of nature and growth, that it is difficult to recognize it