The Chicago School and Urban Ecology

Between roughly 1915 and 1940 the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago conducted the most consequential program of urban research in the discipline's history. Under the leadership of Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Louis Wirth, and with the crucial early organizational work of Albion Small and W.I. Thomas, the Chicago School sent cohorts of graduate students into the streets, tenements, hotels, hobo camps, jazz clubs, and ethnic enclaves of Chicago to produce systematic descriptions of how modern urban life was organized. Their subject was what Park called in a famous 1915 essay 'The City' (republished as the lead chapter of Park, Burgess, and McKenzie's 1925 book The City): the city as a distinctive form of human settlement whose size, density, heterogeneity, and dynamism generated characteristic ways of living.

Chicago in the 1920s was an ideal laboratory. It had grown from a frontier settlement of a few hundred in 1833 to roughly three million by 1930, becoming the second-largest American city. Its population was overwhelmingly first- or second-generation immigrant (Polish, German, Irish, Italian, Russian Jewish, Bohemian, Swedish) along with a rapidly growing African American community arriving via the Great Migration. Its industrial economy — stockyards, steel, rail, meatpacking, garments — employed waves of newcomers under raw and often brutal conditions. The city's physical layout around the central Loop, along the lakefront, and outward along rail corridors produced sharply differentiated neighborhoods. For Park, who had worked as a journalist before becoming an academic, the city's visible mosaic of communities was a natural experiment in how humans sort themselves in space.

Park's methodological instruction to his students — often quoted — was to 'go into the district... sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the door-steps of the flop houses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter burlesque... In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research.' The result was a stream of ethnographies — Nels Anderson's The Hobo (1923), Frederic Thrasher's The Gang (1927), Harvey Zorbaugh's The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), Louis Wirth's The Ghetto (1928), Paul Cressey's The Taxi-Dance Hall (1932), St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis (1945). Together they constituted the first serious sociological portrait of a modern American city.