Download Community: the Chicago School

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