Mapping the City: Innovation and Continuity
in the Chicago School of Sociology, 1920–1934
B. Robert Owens
Published online: 19 June 2012
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract This paper examines the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of
the maps of the city of Chicago produced by sociologists at the University of Chicago
between 1920 and 1934. I argue that the three mapping schemes produced in those
years—the concentric zone map of The City (1925), the base map of 75 community
areas and the census tract maps published in three volumes of Census Data of the City
of Chicago (1920, 1930, 1934)—draw upon distinct historical antecedents and have
distinct theoretical implications. The first scheme exhibits the strong influence of
Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s location theory and maps produced by early Chicago
city boosters, the second most clearly exhibits the influence of the Social Survey
Movement and of pragmatist philosophy and the third, the influence of the financial
and governmental interests of the organizations that made up the Chicago Census
Committee. Literature on early urban sociology and mapping in Chicago has hitherto
not adequately differentiated these three mapping schemes or problematized the
implications of their differences for our understanding of the theoretical commitments
of the “Chicago School.”
Keywords Mapping . Ecology. Community areas . Social survey
movement . Chicago school
This paper examines the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of the maps
of the city of Chicago produced by sociologists at the University of Chicago between
1920 and 1934. While there is an extensive literature on Chicago sociology, much of
which makes reference to their mapping efforts, the historically and theoretically
distinct mapping projects undertaken by Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and their first
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
DOI 10.1007/s12108-012-9160-7
B. R. Owens (*)
University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637, USA
e-mail: browens@uchicago.edu
generation of students have not been adequately differentiated in the existing literature.
I refer here to three mapping schemes, all conceptualized and produced under
different circumstances but within a span of 15 years: the “concentric zone” model
that appeared in print in the Proceedings of the American Sociological Society in
1923 and was reprinted in Park, Burgess and Roderick McKenzie’s The City (1925);
the scheme of 75 “community areas,” a large-scale, collective mapping project, much
of the initial work for which was done by Park, Burgess and Vivien Palmer; and,
finally, the division of Chicago into 935 census tracts in research spearheaded by
Burgess. These three mapping schemes have clearly distinguishable historical antecedents
and carry with them distinct and not wholly consonant theoretical implications
regarding the social forces that shape urban environments. It is the project of
this paper to parse those historical and theoretical distinctions. The payoff is two-fold.
Firstly, an historical study of the various ways in which Chicago sociologists mapped
their city enriches our understanding of how the Chicago tradition absorbed, modified
and elaborated upon earlier traditions in social science, social work and philosophy.
Secondly, recognizing the plurality of theoretical positions implicit in these maps will
further clarify the multiplicity of theoretical commitments and visions for the future
of the discipline contained within that intrinsically messy label, the “Chicago School
of Sociology.”1
I begin with a review of the literature on early Chicago sociology. Mapping is not a
focal point of most of the holistic studies of Chicago sociology, although much of the
literature at least touches upon the significance of its maps. Just as the meaning and
significance of the maps can only be fully appreciated in the context of the broader
aims of Chicago sociology, a thorough understanding of the maps and their origins
has implications for the interpretation of all facets of Chicago sociology in the 1920s
and 1930s. I next address the history and theory of the three mapping projects in
chronological turn. With respect to the concentric zones, I point to the work of
German agronomist and economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen and the popular
writings of Chicago city boosters at the turn of the century as the major sources of
intellectual influence. I then argue that the community areas project organized
through the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) in the mid- to late
1920s owed much to the influence of the Social Survey Movement, a tradition with
which the major figures of the Chicago Sociology Department were acquainted both
intellectually and personally through Chicago’s Hull House. My discussion of the
theory behind these first two mapping schemes revolves around the notion of “urban
ecology.” I argue that the more elaborate community area scheme signified a shift in
1
Although I caution against a monolithic interpretation of the “Chicago School,” I nevertheless resort to
that phrase and the related phrase, “Chicago sociology” throughout this paper. In the context of this paper,
those phrases are meant as shorthand for the collective work of Park, Burgess and their students in the
1920s and early 1930s, particularly Roderick McKenzie, Vivien Palmer and Louis Wirth. Others departmental
students include Ernest Shideler, Harvey Zorbaugh, Nels Anderson, Paul Cressey, Ernest Mowrer,
Everett Hughes and Clifford Shaw, all of whom produced important work on urban sociology on their own.
Frequently their work was done under the auspices of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC),
later renamed the Social Science Research Committee (SSRC), a University-wide body that organized and
funded collective research projects in the social science disciplines in the 1920s and 1930s. My description
of their work aims to capture an essentially collective self-understanding, and, as I will argue below, the
three distinct mapping schemes that the Chicago School produced do not line up neatly with distinct
outlooks of individual members of the department.
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 265
the Chicago School’s concept of ecology, from a deterministic view borrowing
heavily from biology to a view of human communities and social relations as built
“on top of” ecological landscapes and thus not subject to the same inexorable laws as
plant and animal ecological systems. The final mapping scheme, the census tracts,
was a collective effort of the US Bureau of the Census and multiple commercial,
governmental and academic interests in Chicago, with Burgess playing a leading role.
The census tract project represented a clear move away from ecological theory—and
indeed away from a framing sociological theory of any sort—although the project did
not represent a permanent change of theoretical outlook for Burgess or his students.
Because the census tract project was largely atheoretical, I focus less on sources of
intellectual influence and more on the confluence of administrative and financial
interests that brought the project to fruition. In my conclusion, I argue that the
mapping schemes themselves cannot be treated as simply facets of a single theoretical
outlook or as steps towards the elaboration of one. Rather, the maps are indicative of
the catholicity of interests and approaches that the Chicago School entertained. While
we should not downplay the conceptual divergence of the mapping schemes, we
should appreciate the impressive empirical and theoretical advances that these multiple
visions of the city collectively enabled.
Literature on the Chicago School’s philosophical grounding and intellectual origins
is extensive, but there are few commentaries that problematize the distinctions
between the different sets of maps. The most comprehensive history of the Chicago
School in the relevant time period is Martin Bulmer’s The Chicago School of
Sociology (1984). Bulmer focuses heavily on the institutional character of Chicago
sociology, reading most of the important developments in Chicago sociology from
the early 1920s onwards through the lens of the LCRC and the Social Science
Research Committee (SSRC). He pays close attention to individuals (Park and
Burgess loom largest, although he gives due attention to W.I. Thomas as a precursor
to firmly institutionalized Chicago sociology), but Bulmer sees their contributions as
mediated by institutional allocation of resources and commitments to empirical or
theoretical, qualitative or quantitative work established in advance and often by
committee. According to Bulmer, historical narratives that do not take adequate
account of “the role of foundations of independent research bodies, of research and
statistical activity within the federal government, and of the market research industry”—in
short, of institutional structures—have missed a crucial dimension of Chicago
sociology (Bulmer 1997, pp. 25-26).
Against Bulmer’s notion that the Chicago School of Burgess and Park was a brief
flowering of creativity “conditioned” by institutional factors (Bulmer 1984, pp. 208–
224), many accounts argue that there are essential continuities from W.I. Thomas and
G.H. Mead through Park and Burgess to the generation of Herbert Blumer and
Everett Hughes and later, Erving Goffman, Morris Janowitz and Howard Becker
(see the compiled volumes Tomasi 1998; Fine 1995; Plummer 1997). These narratives
point to different features of Chicago sociology in their attempts to locate its
prevailing essence over time.2
But they all, at least implicitly, challenge Bulmer’s
2
Patricia Lengermann distinguishes five common perspectives on the theoretical content of Chicago
sociology, including accounts that call it functionalist, symbolic interactionist and dedicated to developing
“middle range” theories (Lengermann 1997, p. 240).
266 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
account of creativity built on a narrow institutional basis, emphasizing instead the
potential for innovation and regeneration Chicago sociology had at least in part
because of its self-referential nature.3
Such interpretations are given some weight
by the fact that many of the early interpreters of Chicago sociology were members of
the department themselves. Winifred Raushenbush’s biography of Robert Park and
Robert Faris’s Chicago Sociology, 1920–1932 are two examples (Raushenbush 1979;
Faris 1967).4
Louis Wirth’s and Everett Hughes’s efforts to collect and standardize
the writings of Park and Burgess continued the tradition, as did revisits to the field
sites of iconic early ethnographies by later generations of Chicago sociologists. The
LCRC commissioned one volume to “take thought of its experience and accomplishments”
a mere 5 years after the establishment of the Committee (Smith and White
1968, p. vii; see also Hunter 1974; Suttles 1972).
Andrew Abbott endorses a loose interpretation of the theoretical continuity of
Chicago sociology. Reading the work of Thomas, Park, Burgess and the first generation
of postwar students as clearly differentiated projects, he argues, for example,
that Thomas worked with a “profoundly interpretative frame of mind” developed
during his early years as an English professor that set him apart from Park and
Burgess, who in many ways were eager to emulate the methods of the natural
sciences (Abbott and Egloff 2008, p. 219; Abbott 1999, pp. 193–222; Abbott and
Gaziano 1995). Nevertheless, Abbott still finds it useful to identify a kernel of
theoretical insight in Chicago sociology—the spatial and temporal contextualization
of social facts—that has since been disregarded to the detriment of contemporary
sociology (Abbott 1999, pp. 196–198). If Abbott is right that “social facts are
located” conveys the central theoretical insight of the Chicago School (p. 197), then
we should expect their mapping projects to entail substantial and revealing theoretical
commitments. I will argue here that they do.
Mary Jo Deegan and Dennis Smith have each focused less on the continuity of
theoretical commitments or substantive interests, instead attempting to distill the
meaning of the “Chicago School” by tracing its origins whole cloth to an earlier
intellectual tradition. For Deegan, that tradition is the work of Jane Addams and her
colleagues at Hull House, whereas for Smith it is the institutionalist economics—a
“liberal critique of capitalism”—most strongly associated with Thorstein Veblen
(Deegan 1988; Smith 1988). Carla Cappetti locates the work of Thomas, Park and
Burgess between two literary traditions, inspired by the writers of realist novels who
grappled with the social dynamics and pathologies of urban life (Zola, Dickens,
Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, among many others) and inspiring of Chicago urban
novelists Richard Wright, James Farrell and Nelson Algren (Cappetti 1993, pp. 1–
19). Cappetti is more directly interested in the maps than the authors discussed above,
but in her chapter on “Maps, Models, and Metaphors” her focus is on explaining how
3
See Fine 1995. While many of the contributors to the volume are loath to reduce the complexity of
postwar Chicago sociology to a few characteristic features and are hesitant to apply the label “school” to the
collection of sociologists working there at the time, the themes of memory, tradition and interpersonal
relationships structure the narratives given in several chapters and preserve the notion that there were
essential continuities from the work of Park and Burgess to postwar Chicago sociology. The volume’s
dedication, “To the Second School,” gives away the question posed in the title.
4
Raushenbush was a student of Robert Park, and Faris was both a student and the son of Ellsworth Faris, a
long-time faculty member.
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 267
ethnography and literary exposition made the formerly “unintelligible and illegible”
city slums understandable through a newfound, jointly developed sociological imagination
(pp. 34–58). My interest here is in parsing apart the multiple means by which
Chicago sociologists alone made the city comprehensible.
Two recent studies by Jennifer Light and Elaine Lewinnek, respectively, pay close
attention to the historical antecedents to the concentric zone model (Light 2009;
Lewinnek 2010). As possible influences on Burgess, Light points to the concentric
model of agricultural land use around an “isolated state” proposed by von Thünen, as
well as several plant ecologists, some of them at the University of Chicago, who had
modeled the succession of plant growth in roughly concentric patterns (Light 2009,
pp. 22–25). Lewinnek focuses on maps produced by Chicago city boosters, real estate
developers and professional mapmakers, who at the turn of the century regularly
overlaid their maps with concentric circles and proposed building projects that would
solidify the concentric scheme of Chicago. Both note the close connection between
Burgess’s concentric zone map of Chicago and the ecological theory that developed
over time in the work of many Chicago sociologists.
Sudhir Venkatesh, Emanuel Gaziano and Thomas Gieryn likewise give sustained
attention to mapping as a central component of Chicago sociology (Venkatesh 2001;
Gaziano 1996; Gieryn 2006). Venkatesh relates Park and Burgess’s mapping schemes
to the pragmatist philosophical foundations of Chicago sociology, and, like Lewinnek
and Light, he emphasizes the frequent convergence of interests between professional
sociologists at the University of Chicago and other so-called urban professionals (see
Light 2009, pp. 161–163)—particularly city administrators and social workers—that
made studying and reforming the city intractably interconnected projects. Gieryn
presents map-making, and urban ethnography more generally, as complex processes
that depended for their success on more than their philosophical foundations. In order
to establish the city as a “truth-spot,” argues Gieryn, the Chicago sociologists had to
depict it for their audience as a space, the identity of which “oscillates between a
given thing found in ‘nature’ and a manipulated artifact of laboratory metrology”
(Gieryn 2006, p. 12). Eventually, when this dual identity of the city gained currency,
the use of city as a site for research came to legitimate the intellectual products of
maps and ethnographic accounts. Gaziano draws substantially on Gieryn’s work but
focuses on the ecology metaphor as a means of theoretical legitimation and as a tool
for conceptual understanding, in the work of the Chicago School as well as other
sociological and biological projects.
Much of the literature cited above shares the common impulse to distill a single
meaning for the phrase “Chicago School,” a natural and to some degree necessary
undertaking if one is going to attribute to it any heuristic or analytic value. However,
it is perhaps an indication that the coherence of the label has often been taken too
much for granted that the considerable differences among the several mapping
projects has not received more attention in the literature. To the extent that they
address Chicago School mapping, none of the preceding studies thoroughly explore
how the various mapping projects relate to one another. Still less do they address, as I
propose to do here, theoretical incongruities and disparities of creative vision evident
in the mapping efforts of the Chicago School. Bulmer broaches the topic when he
asks, rhetorically, who would think to associate Chicago sociology with the origins of
census tract data collection (Bulmer 1984, p. 189). He raises the question in order to
268 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
debunk the old stereotype of Chicago sociology as predominantly qualitative, but he
leaves the matter there. He does not follow up by asking why Burgess moved so
quickly from concentric zone mapping to census tract mapping, nor does he interrogate
how theoretically compatible the two projects are. Lewinnek argues that the
concentric zone model continued to hold sway as the privileged view of the city from
the Chicago School even as the model became untenable in light of careful ethnographic
study (pp. 212–214). She focuses on Walter Reckless and Clarence Glick as
the exemplary successors to Burgess, both of whom worked to preserve the concentric
model by designating areas that did not neatly fit its predictions as additional
“zones in transition” (p. 213). However, the community area project followed fast on
the heels of Burgess’s concentric zone map and enlisted the participation of many
members of the department, including Burgess himself. The participants in that
project cannot be said to have felt the concentric zone model as a theoretical burden
they had to keep defending. The project moved ecological theory in a direction not
anticipated in The City, but it remained just as theory-laden. Reckless’s and Glick’s
monographs notwithstanding, it is more productive to see Chicago School mapping
as a series of three distinct projects pursued in quick succession (in fact, the latter two
projects were at some moments pursued simultaneously), rather than as a single,
highly schematic proposal followed by a series of stopgap attempts to preserve its
relevance in the face of mounting evidence against it.5
Light pursues the development
of mapping at Chicago from Burgess to Homer Hoyt, a Chicago PhD in economics
and later real estate developer, emphasizing the continuities both in terms of their
commitment to ecological theory and their attempts to map circular patterns of urban
growth (Light, pp. 70–81). However, she does not trace the interests of the University
of Chicago Sociology Department itself beyond concentric zone mapping. Gieryn’s
thesis is that the city needed to fulfill a dual role for Chicago sociologists, namely, as
a found thing and as a laboratory artifact. His paper argues, as this paper will argue,
that Park, Burgess and their students viewed the city through multiple theoretical
lenses, often oscillating back and forth among them for heuristic purposes. Whereas
Gieryn and Gaziano focus on metaphorical representations of the city as “laboratory”
and “ecology” in Chicago sociology, however, I take as my subject the cartographic
maps that Chicago sociologists produced in the same years.
Concentric Zone Mapping
The Chicago School’s cartographic mapping of the city began with the now-famous
scheme of five “concentric zones” that first appeared in print in Burgess’s article,
“The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project” in Proceedings of
the American Sociological Society in 1923. It was reprinted in The City (1925),
coauthored by Burgess, Park and Roderick McKenzie, the last a one-time Chicago
student who was by 1924 a professor at the University of Washington. The concentric
zone scheme was not intended to be specific to Chicago, but rather consisted in five
zones that Burgess understood to make up any urban ecology: the central business
5
Reckless, in fact, relied only on community area maps in Vice in Chicago and did not reproduce the
concentric zone scheme in its original or in a modified form (Reckless 1933).
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 269
district, the zone in transition, the zone of workingmen’s homes, the residential zone,
and the commuter’s zone (Park et al. 1925, p. 51). Onto the zones Burgess then
translated specific features of the city of Chicago, mostly having to do with ethnic and
national demographics: the “Black Belt,” “Little Sicily,” “Deutschland,” the “Ghetto,”
“Underworld” and “Chinatown,” among others (p. 55).6
The concentric zones
were deeply tied to the notion of the city as an “urban ecology.” Burgess, Park and
McKenzie argued that urban institutions and social processes were an adaptive
system, responsive to exogenous shocks like immigration and technological innovation
in a way that made the city amenable to comparisons to ecosystems in the natural
world. The authors of The City argued that the zones expanded outward in a process
of succession as industries developed, pushing the most desirable residential areas
ever further from the city center and leaving low-income and immigrant family
homes in the “zone of workingmen’s homes” and the uneasy “zone in transition”
closer to the central business district.
The forces that change the social order in this ecological model are primarily
economic ones. Although the designation of the city as an “urban ecology” calls to
mind the influence of biology more than economics, the “workingmen” and “commuters”
of the model were economic classes, understood to be the assemblages of
individuals maximizing their own interests in finding the best available land at the
best price. The various ethnic and national group identities that were overlaid on the
concentric scheme, meanwhile, were presented as products of collective segregation,
a process that “offers the group, and thereby the individuals who compose the group,
a place and a role in the total organization of city life” (p. 56). The social groups that
appear, in this model, to be built on top of on the ecological areas of the city would
eventually be elaborated and further refined as the “community areas” and neighborhoods
within them.
The concentric zones described by Burgess were ideal types. The designations of
economic classes (which defined the zones) and ethnic groups (which cut across
them) were analytic simplifications, and the model took no account of the physical
geography of the city or contingent historical and legal factors that might distort land
rent. As Burgess frankly acknowledged, the “ideal scheme” was complicated by “the
lake front, the Chicago River, railroad lines, historical factors in the location of
industry, the relative degree of the resistance of communities to invasion, etc.” (p.
52). An equally important feature of the model is its temporal dynamism. The theory
expressed by the concentric zone map entails the claim that the standing of the five
concentric zones relative to one another will change over time as the city grows. The
processes of growth and succession were central to the theories of plant ecologists as
much as they were to the concentric zone model.7
Growth of cities would continue
indefinitely (Burgess 1930, p. 163) and—at least according to two Chicago students
—transformation of the urban center would stop only when the city reached an
6
See Figs. 1 and 2.
7
Several foundational texts in ecological theory are excerpted in Park and Burgess’s textbook Introduction
to the Science of Sociology (1921): William Wheeler’s Ants, Their Structure, Development and Behavior
(1910), Eugenius Warming’s Oecology of Plants (1909) and Frederick Clements’s Plant Succession (1916),
among others (Gaziano 1996, pp. 880–881; see also Park and Burgess 1969, pp. 169–172, 175–182, 182–
184, 525–527). By contrast, the Social Survey Movement is not given much space in the text, despite its
importance for Chicago School work in other contexts.
270 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
“equilibrium of decay” in which the central zone stopped expanding and remained
static in a state of poverty (Light 2009, p. 27; Anderson and Lindeman 1928, p. 87).
There was no shortage of models for Burgess and the coauthors of The City to
draw upon when they conceived of the concentric zone model and the accompanying
ecological theory. Mapping Chicago as a series of concentric zones was commonplace
among city boosters and urban planners in the early years of the twentieth
century. Daniel Hudson Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909) is a concentrated example
of such maps, in that it was both an anthology of earlier mapping efforts, several
of which visualized Chicago in concentric rings (see Burnham and Bennett
1993[1909], pp. 41, 44–45, 81) and presented a concerted vision for future city
planning. Burnham’s Plan was an expensive and successful force in guiding the
future of urban development in Chicago: Lewinnek cites $234 million as the total
sum spent on municipal bonds to enact parts of the Plan, most notably Chicago’s
lakefront parks (Lewinnek 2010, p. 206).
However, in terms of its theoretical ambitions, a different antecedent source bears a
closer resemblance to Burgess’s map. I emphasize above that Burgess’s concentric
zones are ideal types, and the same cannot be said of boosters’ and city planners’
earlier concentric maps of Chicago. One of the distinctive features of Chicago
boosterism was an emphasis on the unique geographical advantages of Chicago
(Burnham and Bennett 1993[1909], pp. 31–34; Lewinnek 2010, p. 206; Cronon
1991, pp. 31–54). Chicago boosters and city planners did not generally consider their
visions of Chicago as predictive models for other urban centers, whereas, by its
inclusion in The City, Burgess’s concentric zone model was embedded in a theory of
urban ecology and claimed a greater theoretical import. In that respect, the model
most closely resembles the mapping work of German economist and agronomist von
Thünen. To explore the possible influence of von Thünen, however, it is necessary to
turn away from Burgess’s paper, “The Growth of the City” and look at the role of his
collaborators in bringing The City into print.
While the concentric zone map first appeared in a paper authored independently by
Burgess, the proposal to embed that map in a general text on “Human Ecology”—the
project that was to become The City—was first raised in correspondence between
Burgess’s collaborators Park and McKenzie. From the start, both of them held high
aspirations that the book would be comprehensive and agenda setting in the same
manner as Park and Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921).
McKenzie wrote to Park that it ought to “be worked out in some such way as [Park]
and Burgess developed [their] General Sociology. That is, starting with an introduction,
stating the meaning and scope of Human Ecology, then developing the system of
concepts involved in Ecology, illustrating the processes by selected readings.”8
In a
sense that project was dropped. The City does not approach the Introduction in terms
of total length, nor does it make the same effort to produce a comprehensive typology
of concepts (although that breadth of vision is still visible in Louis Wirth’s bibliography).
Nor does The City include selected readings from foundational and contemporary
sources in the way that the Introduction does. However, the volume that was
the final product of Park and McKenzie’s conversation retained a high level of
ambition in other ways. For one thing, it was brought rapidly into print. McKenzie
8
McKenzie to Park, July 19, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 271
wrote in his first letter on the topic to Park, “there is no doubt but that the book should
be gotten out at the earliest possible date,”9
and production was further hastened by
the December 1925 meeting of the American Sociological Society, where Park served
as president and designated the organizing theme as “the City.” Secondly, the
chapters of The City (many of which had been previously published) tackled the
big problems of urban sociology, frequently at a high level of abstraction, setting a
research agenda for the field.
Park included in a letter to McKenzie of August 1, 1924 a proposed outline of the
book, organizing “existing materials under a series of categories as Burgess and
[Park] did in the Introduction to Sociology” (a suggestion that initially came from
McKenzie).10
In the same letter Park raised the question of formative influences on
human ecology and suggested that “there is a good deal of material in the German
literature, and possibly in the French.” He gave explicit mention to only one text in
the letter, however, “a pamphlet…entitled ‘City Building’” that he had purchased on
his trip to Germany 2 years earlier:
by “City” they mean the central business area, but as the central business area is
responsible for the concentric organization of the cities into areas of slums,
rooming houses, apartment houses, etc., we can use that concept for that
particular type of process and organization.11
In all likelihood Park’s pamphlet drew upon the work of von Thünen, the originator
of concentric mapping and location theory in Germany. The similarities between
von Thünen’s model as Park describes it and the concentric zone map that
ultimately appeared in The City are clear, and Park’s time in Germany12
provide a
plausible course by which von Thünen could have directly impacted the development
of Chicago sociology.
In Der Isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie.
[The Isolated State in its Relation to Agriculture and National Economy], (first
published in 1826, expanded in 1842), von Thünen hypothesizes about the patterns
of land use that would emerge in an “isolated state,” a single city surrounded by
uniformly flat, uniformly fertile land. Like Burgess’s concentric scheme, the model
that resulted from von Thünen thought experiment was an ideal type that he fully
acknowledged would have no direct parallel in reality.13
Land rent would be determinative
of how the isolated city’s hinterland took shape, and at further distances
from the city, lower-yield agricultural activities would take place until the point at
which cultivating land for any purpose would exceed the cost of bringing goods to
market in the city. Both models focus on economic interest as the driving force behind
urban structure and processes, although von Thünen paid less attention to the mutual
interdependence that economic activity imposes upon people. For him, social actors
9
McKenzie to Park, July 19, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
10
Park to McKenzie, August 1, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
11
Park to McKenzie, August 1, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
12
Park received a PhD from Heidelberg in 1903. He took two trips to Germany, in 1910 (with Booker T.
Washington; see Raushenbush 1979, p. 51) and in 1922. On the latter trip he kept journal recording
personal experiences as well as a record of books and magazines relevant to “human geography.” Diary of a
trip through Germany. Robert Park Papers, Box 16.
13
In fact, the original title of the book was The Ideal State (von Thünen 1966, p. xxi; Barnes 2003, p. 76).
272 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
were individuals whose economic behavior would depend on their location with
respect to the central city but for whom group membership was unimportant. Furthermore,
von Thünen posited that the rings of his concentric model would be
dynamic over time. “With a general rise in living standards,” von Thünen writes,
“crop alternation [the third ring from the center] will in due course become the ruling
farm system,” diminishing the importance of the others (von Thünen 1966, p. 141).
That Park’s interest in German social theory influenced his own contributions to
The City is confirmed in his correspondence with McKenzie. Although Burgess had
less direct contact with the German tradition, he at least appreciated its relevance to
Chicago sociology enough to allow it a privileged place in the Introduction.14
As for
Burgess’s concentric zone model itself, it is clearly reminiscent of von Thünen’s
model. The similarities of Burgess’s and von Thünen’s concentric models have been
recognized by some recent commentators (Light 2009; Sinclair 1967, p. 78), and
although von Thünen’s work receives no explicit mention in the text of The City or in
Wirth’s bibliography, it is difficult to imagine that, after his time in Germany, Park
was unfamiliar with von Thünen15
or that he was unconscious of the similarity
between von Thünen’s model and Burgess’s.
Finally, a word on the afterlife of this first mapping effort from the Chicago School:
the concentric zone model remains widely recognizable, but its substantive influence at
the University of Chicago was limited. Few of the major ethnographic monographs
published by Park and Burgess’s students reproduced the scheme (see Zorbaugh 1929;
Thrasher 1963[1927]; Mowrer 1972[1927]; cf. Wirth 1956[1928]; Anderson 1923;
Shaw 1930; Cressey 1932; Hughes 1979[1931]; Reckless 1933), and Zorbaugh
included it primarily to stress its limitations.16
Park and Burgess themselves quickly
moved on to new mapping projects after The City. Theoretically, this was a move
away from ideal-type analysis and towards a more empirically grounded ecological
theory. It entailed not just rethinking on the part of Park and Burgess, but also a turn
towards different and more contemporary sources of intellectual inspiration.
Community Area Mapping
The concentric zone scheme did not go far towards a sophisticated, particularistic
analysis of Chicago, but Chicago sociology’s next effort to map the city did much
14
Georg Simmel receives 43 mentions in that text, more than any other theorist; further references are
made to Werner Sombart, Ferdinand Tönnies and Freud, giving German social theory more prominence in
the volume than any theoretical tradition save plant ecology.
15
Von Thünen was well known and respected in Germany, so much so that by the 1920s prominent
scholars in the fields of location theory, historical theory and economics had all declared themselves to be
his heirs (Blaug 1979, pp. 27–28).
16
In The Gold Coast and the Slum, Zorbaugh pays homage to the concentric zone model for representing
“the processes of expansion, succession, and ‘centralized decentralization’ displayed in the growth of every
city” (p. 231), but he does so only at the end of the volume, after presenting and analyzing thirteen
community area maps. The chapter in which the concentric zone map appears is primarily a reflection on
the meaning of “community,” and Zorbaugh contends that “an area does not become a community merely
by virtue of having distributed over it…people having certain interests in common…An area becomes a
community only through the common experiences of the people who live in it, resulting in their becoming a
cultural group, with traditions, sentiments and attitudes, and memories in common” (pp. 222–223). That is,
it is not economic interest but shared identity that makes a community.
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 273
more in that respect. From 1924 to 1930, the LCRC delineated 75 distinct “community
areas” in the city (Bulmer 1984, pp. 129–150).17
Many, but not all, of the
community areas were bounded on all sides by physical barriers, most frequently
railway tracks and embankments, industrial areas, the Chicago River and Lake
Michigan. Railways and the river marked off areas close to the city center, whereas
industrial areas and empty lots were prevalent further out on the periphery. Some, like
the university’s home of Hyde Park, had long-standing historical status as independent
neighborhoods or real estate developments, while other boundaries and names
were original definitions of the LCRC. In one now notorious instance, Burgess
designated as “New City” the community then (and still) widely known as Back of
the Yards. His intent was to avoid any negative association with Chicago’s stockyards,
but within the community itself the old name has stuck much more than
Burgess’s sanitized version (Hunter 1974, p. 79).
Much of the preliminary work for the community area project was done by
Vivien Palmer, who described the vision implicit in the mapping scheme as
follows:
Mr. Park and Mr. Burgess looking over the city saw it as an aggregation of
many small territorial groupings—immigrant colonies of first, second, and third
settlement, suburban communities, industrial suburbs, gold coasts, hobohemias,
truck garden districts, apartment house areas, bungalow neighborhoods, and so
on. Each of these districts they looked upon as a distinct cultural complex, as a
world in itself with its own characteristic institutions and its own distinct mode
of life. They felt that general statements concerning the city as a whole did not
give specific enough data on which to base sociological research, but that it
would be necessary to study each of these social environments minutely in
order to obtain an understanding of the peculiar social situations, the whole
immediate social setting in which any particular sociological problem manifested
itself.18
By identifying the community areas as what Park and Burgess “saw” in the
city, a model that was for the first time differentiated enough to “give specific
enough data on which to base sociological research,” Palmer ascribes no
significance to the schematic concentric zones as a prior product of the Chicago
School. With the community areas project, Burgess and his colleagues took
upon themselves the tasks of providing a definition for “community” that would
both further the theoretical paradigm of urban ecology and identify a series of
real communities within the city that, once set on a map, would provide a
viable foundation for further empirical research. In both respects, the community
area scheme proved impressively successful. Not only did the community
area scheme set the frame for numerous empirical studies well beyond Park and
Burgess’s first generation of students, the names of the community areas were
eventually established, by municipal ordinance, as the official names of the
city’s distinct areas (Venkatesh 2001, p. 276).
17
See Fig. 3.
18
Vivien Palmer, “The Study of the Growth of Local Communities of Chicago,” January 1929. Social
Science Research Committee Papers, Box 14. See also Palmer 1932.
274 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
The community area map differed not only in its level of detail from the concentric
zones, but also in its basic theoretical assumptions. Gone from this model is the
assumption that economic interest is the primary driving force behind the formation
of the urban environment, and the acknowledgement that each community forms “a
distinct cultural complex, as a world in itself with its own characteristic institutions
and its own distinct mode of life,” at the very least, pushes far into the background the
aspiration to create a generalized model for urban growth applicable to all cities.
However, the community area model does not abandon or directly conflict with the
ecological theory that is so central to The City. Instead it elaborates the ecological
theory in a new direction, emphasizing contingency and agency in human interaction
more strongly than biological or economic causes or causal mechanisms.
First associated with concentric zone mapping, the ecological theory of the Chicago
School could easily have developed towards greater economic determinism. Park and
Burgess could have moved from the ideal-typical scheme of zonal urban development to
either (1) the strong claim that the zones were the real products of rational individuals
competing for scare resources, land foremost among them, or (2) the position that the
ideal-typical concentric zone model were so analytically sound that many further
inferences and deductions about urban social organization could reasonably be made
from it. As Emanuel Gaziano’s survey of the ecological metaphor in interwar
sociology and biology reveals, a move towards greater biological determinism was
an equally plausible path for ecological theory as it developed at Chicago. As
Gaziano writes, there were “negotiable boundaries between the social and the natural
in 20th-century science” (Gaziano 1996, p. 874), and sociobiology developed from
many of the same progenitors and claims essentially the same explanatory mandate as
sociology. The heuristic utility of borrowing concepts from the natural sciences was a
double-edged sword for sociologists, then and now: the more successful naturalistic
explanations of human behavior and social structure are, the less autonomous and
independently meaningful sociology appears. Ultimately, however, the Chicago sociologists
embraced neither rational choice theory nor ecological process as a sufficient basis
for understanding human social behavior. At Park’s urging, departmental students
instead went out into the city to get the seats of their pants dirty in ethnographic work.
In doing so, they collectively re-envisioned the city as a set of community areas rather
than as a series of concentric circles, and they redirected their ecological vision away
from deterministic models of human behavior.
A passage from Vivien Palmer’s Field Studies manual attempts to justify this
melding of community studies and ecological theory:
Social areas in modern society are usually in a state of flux, reflecting the
ceaseless flow of life itself[…]
Ecological areas give a more permanent, though at the same time a more
arbitrary, basis. Yet inasmuch as they take into account physical and economic
factors which exert an influence upon the location of groups, they bear a
significant relationship to the social area[…]
The ecological areas, in other words, are pigeonholes on the landscape which
the investigator uses in studying the surge of social life. Experience has shown
that social groupings tend to segregate within those pigeonholes. But while the
sociologist uses these divisions to pool data over a period of time, he is always
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 275
interested in using the social areas which are contained within the ecological
boundaries and he uses these as the basic unit for his investigations of any given
period (Palmer 1928, p. 80).
A similar statement is attributed to Park in Ernest Shideler’s dissertation:
When we seek to determine and describe the institution which grow up on the
ecological organization, or the processes by which these institutions grow up,
then we are in the realm of community organization…Every type of social
organization may be assumed to rest upon the basis of an ecological organization
(Park, quoted in Shideler 1927, p. 5).
The juxtaposition between ecological and social areas here is perhaps an uncomfortable
one, but it does demonstrate Palmer’s and Park’s shared commitment to integrating
ecological theory and the community area scheme as two facets of a single vision of the city.
The ecological metaphor that pervades Chicago sociology is thus an important point of
continuity tying together the concentric zone and community area maps. It helps to make
sense of why the same group of sociologists moved so quickly from concentric mapping
to community area mapping. Continuities notwithstanding, however, the differences
between the two mapping schemes are foundational, and they are thrown into relief by
their respective historical precedents. When we look for the likely sources of influence
behind the community areas project at the University of Chicago, we find reference points
wholly different from the early concentric circle models discussed above.
One vital source for the community area project as it developed at Chicago was the
series of reform-oriented urban studies now known collectively as the Social Survey
Movement. Between 1890 and 1920, social surveyors produced voluminous studies
on major urban centers including London, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago and
Springfield. Among the most prominent and influential were Charles Booth’s Life
and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903), the six-volume Pittsburgh Survey,
sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and edited by Paul Kellogg (1909–1914),
Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (2010), B. Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A
Study of Town Life (1980), the Hull-House Maps and Papers (Residents of HullHouse,
a social settlement, 1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro
(1973). They relied heavily on visuals and were clearly attuned to their significance.
Booth and the Hull-House authors both included large-scale, foldable maps in their
published volumes at a time when the cost of doing so was considerable (see Booth et
al. 1970; Residents of Hull-House 1895). Florence Kelley of Hull House made
inclusion of the removable maps (modeled on Booth’s) a condition of publication
when the publisher hesitated to include them (Bulmer et al. 1991, pp. 122, 137). Du
Bois’s maps resemble the Hull House ones insofar as they throw into relief the
containment of the urban poor within a few, clearly defined city blocks (Du Bois
1973, p. 1; Bulmer et al. 1991, pp. 21, 175). After the publication of How the Other
Half Lives Riis reflected that photography, not drawing, was “evidence of the kind
[he] wanted” to tell his story (Riis, p. 483),19
and although he included no maps he
described his city in evocative, visual language:
19
Although he was not a trained photographer, Riis’s pictures in How the Other Half Lives made an instant
impact and have had a long afterlife as objects of historical study (Riis 2010[1890], pp. xii, 485–488).
276 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
a map of the city, colored to designate nationalities, would show more stripes
than the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow. The city on such a
map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in the
West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the East Side.
But intermingling with these ground colors would be an odd variety of
tints that would give the whole the appearance of an extraordinary crazy-quilt
(Riis, p. 18).
The social survey writers thus shared with the LCRC researchers a vision of their
respective cities as patchworks of “distinct cultural complex[es], [each] as a world in
itself with its own characteristic institutions and its own distinct mode of life.” There
was, furthermore, a direct institutional link between the Social Survey literature and
the Chicago School, as Park regularly taught a course on the Social Survey. He kept
good records of his teaching, and his course on ‘The Social Survey,’ taught over
many years, offers some insights into the commonalities of the survey projects and
his own. In particular, Park’s description of Social Survey in an early introductory
lecture reflects precisely the epistemological sentiment behind the construction of the
community areas, captured in Vivien Palmer’s notes quoted above:
The expert presents the point of view. It is part of his work to popularize and
make intellig[i]ble this point of view. The result of the survey should justify in
the minds of the community the new point of view. This is part of the
educational task.
The men who have made the surveys know this; it is my business to call your
attention to it so that you should not think the survey was a mere formal thing.20
As Park noted, the aim of the Social Survey Movement writers was to interpret the
social conditions of their cities and simultaneously make a case for political reform
and social welfare. In general, the surveys were carried out outside the auspices of the
newly emergent professional discipline of sociology21
by citizens who aspired to
objectively rigorous and thorough documentation, on the one hand, and, on the other,
to produce studies that would “justify” their own conclusions “in the minds of the
community.” The social surveyors intended their own expert authority to put them in
greater touch with the public rather than cutting them off from it. They hoped to bring
a new awareness of the condition of the urban poor and systematically disenfranchised
to a wide readership and, ultimately, to serve as a force for reform by raising
awareness.
Park and Burgess did not follow the social survey writers in their overt politiciza-
tion22
but certainly did echo the manner in which the surveyors collected their data.
20
Notes for “Soc. 36,” c. 1921, Robert Park Papers, Box 5.
21
Du Bois was an exception in this regard. He was invited to conduct the Philadelphia study by the
University of Pennsylvania. At the time he was teaching at Wilberforce University (and, to his displeasure,
was not allowed to teach sociology). After the completion of the study he took up a teaching position at
Atlanta University (Du Bois 1973[1899], p. 5).
22
In The City, for example, Burgess wrote that “neighborhood work” could only hope to have a “scientific
foundation if it [would] base its activities upon a study of social forces.” Lacking such a scientific basis,
social work could never hope to make the transition from “futile” and “ignorant” good intentions to an
effective tool to combat the pressing problems of modern urban society (Park et al. 1925, pp. 154–155).
Similar statements can be found in Park.
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 277
The LCRC mobilized a large contingent of researchers and insisted on gathering
original ethnographic and quantitative data. At Chicago, this building up of an
independent database of information about the city proved extremely fruitful: the
LCRC used the community area “base map” as a template to represent the organization
of immigrant groups in Chicago, distribution of population by age and occupation,
the prevalence of sexually transmitted disease and deserted homes by area, to
name just a few of the demographic trends they explored. The scheme was further
elaborated by Chicago students working on individual dissertation projects who made
use of its partitioning scheme to set the terms of their own ethnographic studies. This
model of collective urban research, eschewing the use of existing government data,
followed a course already set by the social surveyors. Booth’s Life and Labour, the
Hull-House Maps and Papers and the Pittsburgh Survey had all credited multiple
authors upon publication. Rowntree and Du Bois relied on assistants to complete the
exhaustive house-by-house surveys that they considered essential to their projects.
Among the social surveyors we can identify two distinct reasons for this methodological
approach, both of which resonate in the work of the Chicago School. Booth and
Rowntree (who explicitly followed Booth’s example) both insisted that the existing data
on their cities, gathered by government agencies, would not be adequate to support careful
studies of poverty (Bulmer, Bales and Sklar, eds., pp. 72–74; Rowntree, p. vii). Both
aspired to understand poverty and unemployment in individual cities in more detail
than the census data would allow, and they set out to investigate what new social
divisions within the city those demographic indicators (and particularly, a quantifiable
“poverty line”) would suggest, rather than simply to map poverty onto existing
political representations of the city (Booth 1967, pp. 180–184; Rowntree 1980, pp.
27–31). In their community area mapping, the Chicago sociologists likewise turned
away from using political ward maps as a basis for studying the city. Burgess in
particular would, as we will see below, further solidify his desire not to rely on
political wards as the basis for data collection in his work on the Census Data
volumes.
A second, distinct reason for initiating independent ethnographic investigation
and data-gathering is evident in the Hull-House Maps and Papers, written
collaboratively by residents of the Hull House settlement, all of them in close
personal contact and collaboration with the poor immigrants whom they served. Jane
Addams, Kelley and their colleagues recognized, as Park and Burgess later would,
that their work would have limited impact if they could not enlist the cooperation of
the population about which they were writing. At Hull House, to “justify in the minds
of the community the new point of view” meant not only to illustrate to the privileged
class, “how the other half lives” (as it primarily did for Riis) but to offer to poor
immigrant Chicagoans a means of understanding their own predicament. Park and
Burgess likewise recognized the importance of persuading the community to share
their understanding of the community area partitioning of the city. This is evident in
their frequent references to the city as a “social laboratory” and in their anxieties
about being able to conduct properly controlled experimental research within it. We
find Burgess writing, for example,
what is meant by the phrase, the city as a laboratory for social science research?
If it is anything more than a metaphor, it must mean the establishment of a
278 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
control over observation and experimentation in urban behavior essentially the
same as that provided by the physical, chemical, or biological laboratory
(Burgess, quoted in Bulmer 1984, pp. 156–157).
The potential for human subjects to be uncooperative and derail experimentation
and social scientific progress was readily apparent and certainly recognized by Park
and Burgess at the time (see Gieryn 2006; Venkatesh 2001; Burgess comments on the
difficulty of gathering “basic social data” in Smith and White 1968, pp. 47–66).
Pierre Lannoy has proposed that Park’s essay on “The City,” first published in 1915
and later to become the title piece in The City, was in fact a “radical critique of the
social survey movement” (Lannoy 2004, p. 35), and that Park was neither very
familiar with nor very sympathetic to the particular combination of scientific rigor
and community involvement attempted by the social surveyors. Lannoy argues
persuasively that there is a substantial gap between the texts Park was required to
teach and his own political and theoretical sympathies. Others have generalized this
divergence between The City and the survey, arguing that the Social Survey Movement
represents “a sociological road not taken” in the early days of the discipline
(Bulmer et al. 1991, p. 245). With respect to the specific issue of mapping, however,
important parallels between Park and the social surveyors are clear. They shared an
interest in the city as the primary site of social problems, a commitment to collective
social study and an epistemological outlook that sociological analysis was a creative
project and not “a mere formal thing.” Lannoy does not consider the Social Survey
Movement alongside the community areas project of the LCRC, where he would
have found affinities much more readily. The lesson here is not so much that there
was a definitive, sharp divergence between the Social Survey Movement and Chicago
sociology, but rather that the Chicago sociologists of the 1920s and 1930s embraced a
range of methodological approaches to sociological mapping. What is rejected in The
City is embraced in the community areas project.
Alongside the Social Survey Movement, pragmatist philosophy—itself to a large extent
a product of the University of Chicago—looms large as a formative influence on the
community areas mapping project. The relationship between pragmatist philosophy (particularly
that of G.H. Mead and John Dewey) and Chicago sociology has been much
commented on (Joas 1993, 1997; Venkatesh 2001; Gross 2007; Lewis and Smith,
1980; Fisher and Strauss, 1979a, 1979b), and there is compelling evidence that the
ideas of pragmatism influenced the community areas project in particular, sometimes
overlapping substantially with the influence of the Social Survey Movement. Park
recognized this latter point and thought it important enough to bring to the attention
of his students when speaking on the Social Survey Movement. In his lecture notes he
wrote,
[I] have sought to define this larger movement of which the Survey Movement is a
part. I have not given it a name.
I might call it the sociological movement; sociology has grown up during this
period. Sociology seeks to analyze, describe and explain just these social facts upon
which we are now seeking more and more to conduct our common life together[…]
There has grown up in this same period a school of philosophy which is
intimately associated with this movement. This is pragmatism. I can not
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 279
undertake to interpret pragmatism here or indicate its deeper connections with
this movement of which I speak. It again has insisted on the importance of fact
as over against mere speculation defining our larger views of life[…]
I might call this larger movement the pragmatic movement. I think I will. In this
sense pragmatic would mean that fact is never quite a fact merely because it is
investigated and recorded. It only becomes a fact in the fullest sense of the term
when it is delivered and delivered to the persons to whom it makes a difference.
This is what the survey seeks to do.23
Park’s lecture notes make clear the connection that he saw between the pragmatist
philosophy and the work of the social surveyors, in terms of their treatment of fact
and value, their understanding of the relationship between the expert and the public
and their interest in the analysis and explanation of observed social facts. The fact that
he identifies professional sociology with this “larger movement” does not necessarily
imply that Park saw himself as part of it, but the (admittedly very general) description
of what sociology seeks to do here lines up well with the descriptions he gave
elsewhere of what his own work sought to do; namely, to combine a theory of social
life as artifactual with an experimental social science geared towards the understanding
and control of it. In the essay, “The City as a Social Laboratory,” Park wrote,
the new social order…is more or less of an artificial creation, an artifact. It is
neither absolute nor sacred, but pragmatic and experimental[…]
Social science is now seeking, by the same methods [as natural science] of
disinterested observation and research, to give man control over himself (Park
1952, p. 75).
In this passage, Park again refers to the “pragmatic point of view” (75), not as a
fully elaborated, nuanced philosophical system but as a rough stand-in for the insight,
shared by Mead, Dewey and Park himself, that social facts are the products of human
social activity and that our social behavior in turn depends upon our interpretations—
generated in the process of interaction—of those social facts (see Gross 2007, pp.
193–194; Joas 1993, pp. 20–22; for detailed discussions of Mead see Joas 1985;
Lewis and Smith 1980, pp. 120–148).
Given the looseness with which Park wrote about pragmatism and the “pragmatic
point of view,” it is prudent to acknowledge that the influences of pragmatism and the
Social Survey Movement on Chicago sociology overlapped. There are, furthermore,
historical connections and interpersonal relationships beyond the University of Chicago
Sociology Department that makes it difficult to keep separate the influence of
those two intellectual traditions on Park and his colleagues. Before he produced The
Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois had studied under William James at Harvard (as had
Park), and Jane Addams of Hull House was both personal friendly and professionally
affiliated with Dewey (who occasionally taught at Hull House) and Mead (Deegan
1988, pp. 251–253). The Chicago sociologists were in dialogue with pragmatist
principles both directly, through the concurrent presence of Mead at Chicago and
through Park’s time studying with James at Harvard, and indirectly, though the social
survey writings of Addams and Du Bois.
23
Lecture notes, “Soc. 36.” Robert Park Papers, Box 5.
280 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
Those overlaps notwithstanding, in at least one important respect the intellectual
influence of pragmatism on Chicago sociology was not replicated by the social
surveyors. Whereas the relationship between the expert and the public, innovative
methods of empirical data collection and the relationship between scientific objectivity
and the reform impulse were all explored by the social surveyors in ways that
provided cues for Park and Burgess, Park and Burgess did not read the social
surveyors as scholars with a vested interest in theorization and generalization.24
Turning once again to Park’s lecture notes, we find him writing:
the survey, as it is ordinarily conceived, is distinguished form other sociological
investigations as to form and content. In form it is, as the name implies, an
attempt to bring within a single viewpoint facts, of which the connection,
viewed superficially, does not always appear. Its methods are statistical and
descriptive, and are to produce a report which has the precision and accuracy
and the impersonality of science.
As regards content, however, the survey is practical rather than scientific. It has
been described as a kind of social and economic stocktaking, but it is at the
same time a diagnosis. It is intended less to develop general principles than to
apply them to individual situations.25
Emphasizing the politicized nature of the survey studies, Park argued to his
students that the social surveyors were mostly interested in revealing the particularly
abject conditions of the urban poor, immigrants or marginalized racial minorities,
because such particularistic observations would make a stronger case for reform than
a general theory that presented such conditions as consequences of the usual, perhaps
even inevitable, course of urban development. Meanwhile, Park and Burgess themselves
were interested, in the community areas project as in The City, in fitting their
visualizations of the city into a larger theoretical framework that would allow them to
elaborate a testable research agenda. To the extent that the social surveyors did
elaborate research agendas for the future, they found few followers and little financial
backing (see Bulmer et al. 1991, pp. 40–49 (on Pittsburgh), p. 184 (on Du Bois)).
The community area project was theory-laden and intimately tied to the notion of
the city as ecology. Because they thought that the Survey Movement had few
24
I predicate the above claim on Park’s and Burgess’s reading of the social survey literature because one
could make a case that it was an unfair reading. The generalizing impulse was not absent from the authors
of the social surveys. Du Bois was a polymath whose social theoretical ambitions were as great as those of
Park and Burgess. Rowntree wrote that he undertook his study of York because it was “impossible to judge”
a priori “how far the general conclusions arrived at by Mr. Booth in respect of the metropolis would be
found applicable to smaller urban populations” (p. viii), and in his conclusion he suggested that his results
in a “typical provincial town” were probably representative (p. 301). The Pittsburgh Survey, to the extent
that it was theoretical, concerned itself seriously with the concepts of ecology and succession. The total
survey was “an analysis of the social forces that shaped the city’s growth” (Bulmer et al. 1991, p. 251). In
his serial Charities and Commons, Kellogg grappled with a way to understand the “muddled metropolitan
geography” of greater Pittsburgh (Greenwald and Anderson 1996, p. 69). Meanwhile, in his introduction to
John Fitch’s The Steel Workers, Kellogg stressed that this study of labor conditions concerned not just those
in Pittsburgh but all those throughout the country who relied on the products of its massive industry (Fitch
1911, p. v). Although he did not present a general theory of urban growth to explain it, Kellogg clearly
understood the significance that urban geography held for the self-understanding of his subjects and for the
understanding of the surveyors.
25
Lecture notes, “Soc. 36.” Robert Park Papers, Box 5 (emphasis mine).
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 281
theoretical lessons to offer, Park and Burgess had to look elsewhere to develop their ideas
about ecology. I will argue that G.H. Mead’s philosophy provided important aspects of the
theoretical framework that stood behind the community area mapping scheme.
A redirection and elaboration of ecological theory was crucial for the community
area project to succeed as a basis for theoretical—and not just ethnographic—understanding
of the city. Mead faced a related problem. As were
practically all of his contemporaries in philosophy and social science, Mead
was deeply challenged by the intellectual revolution initiated by Darwin, and
much of Mead’s philosophical writing was dedicated to the problem of explaining
human action in a way that preserved the relevance of subjective meaning
and interpretation. For Mead, this entailed theorizing about the distinctively
human behavior of “role-taking” as a means to self-understanding and the
understanding of others. Self-consciousness and communication are possible,
Mead suggests, only when we are able to imagine ourselves in the role of the
other and thus imagine a response to verbal and visual cues that we ourselves
provide in communication. The “construction of a self” and, contingent upon
that, intersubjective meaning, grow out of “any gesture by which the individual
can himself be affected as others are affected…which therefore tends to call out
in him a response as it would call it out in another” (Mead, quoted in Joas
1985, p. 108). The concept of role-taking as necessary for human communication was
meant to be a bulwark against the reduction of human behavior to the study of animal
behavior (Joas 1985, p. 53). Those who conducted ethnographies with the community
area scheme in mind began with understandings of communication and meaning very
similar to Mead’s. The community areas were as they were because members of the
community had a shared understanding of themselves and of the boundaries of their
communities; in Palmer’s words, these communities would be constantly “in a state
of flux” as the intersubjectively determined meanings of boundaries and identities
changed, but they could always be “pigeonholed” into the categories of the more
permanent ecological landscape. The key to sound sociological investigation, according
to Palmer, was to understand both the ecological basis of urban structure and the
dynamics of communities build on top of that basis, without reducing the latter to the
former.
Census Tract Mapping
The third and final set of maps I consider here are those originally published in a
series of three volumes of Census Data of the City of Chicago, for the years 1920,
1930 and 1934, respectively,26
under the editorship of Ernest Burgess. 499 tracts were
used in the 1920 volume, 935 tracts in the 1930 and 1934 volumes.27
The institutional
26
Although it was an off-census year, a volume was commissioned in 1934 by ordinance of the city council
so that the city would have up-to-date information on the effect of the Depression on “changes of
residences, occupation of dwellings, housing needs, health of the people, etc.” (Newcomb and Lang
1934, p. v).
27
See Fig. 4. Fewer tracts were used for the 1920 census because Burgess and his colleagues were
retrospectively reworking data that had already been collected, and they did not have the means to extract
data along the lines of the smaller 935 census tracts that they used from 1930 onwards.
282 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
setting for the endeavor was the Chicago Census Committee, composed of the newly
renamed SSRC at the University of Chicago and a number of local businesses and
civic organizations28
and working in cooperation with the US Bureau of the Census.
The basic aim of the tract maps that the Census Committee produced was to partition
the city into the smallest possible units, which could in principle be reassembled
along any axis and made to represent the city in fundamentally different ways: “the
small unit areas are adaptable to…internal combinations through which new knowledge
is discovered” (Burgess and Newcomb 1933, p. xi). This final mapping project,
then, represents another change of course for Burgess, and one that is perhaps harder
to comprehend than the move from concentric zone mapping to community area
mapping. The census tracts broke with the community areas and the concentric zones
insofar as they were an attempt at a fully instrumental, theory-free representation of
the city. The notion of census tracts distanced Burgess and his SSRC colleagues from
their efforts to define bounded neighborhoods under the name of community areas
that aligned with the collective self-understanding of the residents of Chicago.
Although Burgess’s introductions to the published Census Data volumes express
nothing but enthusiasm for the delineation of the census tracts as a major sociological
achievement, they clearly no longer reflect what, in Palmer’s words, Park and
Burgess “saw” in the city.
My commentary on the historical roots of the census tract project are briefer
than the corresponding commentaries above on the concentric zones and the
community areas, for three reasons. Firstly, as I have already noted, the census
tract scheme deliberately eschewed theory. There was no von Thünen, Mead or
Social Survey Movement clearly informing this mapping project and structuring
its theoretical meaning. On the contrary, Burgess and his collaborators embraced
and advertised the fact that the tract data would be useful to sociologists,
businesspeople, public health officials, politicians and journalists alike.
Secondly, the Chicago sociologists had less autonomy over this census tract
project than over the two discussed above. Here, Burgess was contributing to
an existing initiative with a history dating back to the US Constitution (although
the census was admittedly undergoing significant transformations in the
1930s, given advances in statistical techniques and a dire economic climate; see
Anderson 1988, pp. 159–190) rather than creating anew an explicitly sociological
vision of the city. More than the University of Chicago Sociology Department, it was
the prior work of the US Census Bureau that made the Census Data volumes and
their maps possible. Finally, census tract mapping did not have a long afterlife in
Chicago sociology. The census tract maps neither attained the iconic status of the
28
In addition to the SSRC, the members organizations of the Chicago Census Committee were: the
Chicago Association of Commerce, Chicago Church Federation, Chicago Community Trust, Chicago
Council of Social Agencies, Chicago Department of Public Health, Chicago Plan Commission, Chicago
Real Estate Board, Commonwealth Edison Company, Chicago Daily News, Chicago Evening Post,
Chicago Herald and Examiner, Chicago Tribune, Illinois Bell Telephone Company, Northwestern University,
People Gas Light and Coke Company and the Weibolt Foundation (Burgess and Newcomb 1931, p. 3).
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 283
concentric zone maps nor did they prove such a rich basis for further empirical study
as the community area base map. The census tract maps are, to be sure, an important
part of the legacy of the Chicago School, but they are primarily important for what
they contributed to commercial life in Chicago, to social study in the public sphere
and to the methodology of the national United States Census. When Chicago
sociologists pursued their own ethnographic research in the wake of the Census Data
volumes, they reverted to use of the community area mapping scheme, as in the
several volumes of Local Community Fact Books (see Wirth and Furez 1938), or to a
halfway point of “subcommunities,” defining neighborhoods more narrowly than the
75 community areas but nonetheless moving away from the theory-free cells of the
Census Data volumes (Hauser 1938, p. 67).
A few comments are in order to situate the Census Data volumes in the longer
history of the US Census. Before 1920, census data had been published in Chicago,
as in most cities across the United States, by political ward, divisions that reflected
political interest above all and changed every few years, thus making intra-city data
comparisons, between neighborhoods and over time, very difficult. A significant
move towards a new system was made in 1910, when census data in Chicago and
several other major cities was collected and recorded by tract. The data was not
published in this form, however, as it was deemed too expensive (Burgess and
Newcomb 1931, pp. 1–2). The Chicago Census Committee’s achievement was to
define a stable set of 935 tracts and find funding, from governmental and private
sources, to make the publication of data by tract possible. Burgess and his colleagues
at the Census Committee were eager to have Census data tabulated by tract available,
and the US Census Bureau ultimately agreed to publish data by tract “within
reasonable limits for the sake of making the census figures more useful to the people
whom they represent” (Burgess and Newcomb 1933, pp. xi–xiv; Truesdell 1932, p.
79).29
After the publication of the Census Data volumes, several other cities followed
Chicago’s model and began to collect data in terms of census tracts rather than
political wards. As such, the Census Data volumes and the census tracts they
constructed to partition the city have rightly become a central part of their legacy.
In Martin Bulmer’s words, Burgess “may be fairly claimed [as] the father of modern
census tract statistics, both by example and as a coordinator of pressure on the Bureau
of the Census to make data available in that form” (Bulmer 1984, p. 157). But we
ought to question why Burgess took the project on, when it was so conceptually at
odds with his earlier work on the concentric circles and the community areas. The
notion that Burgess did not care about the theoretical implications of his maps or their
consistency over time seems unconvincing. There is textual evidence throughout this
paper that Burgess and his colleagues cared deeply about theory and its implications
for mapping, most notably in their engagements with ecological theory and references
29
Truesdell was Chief Statistician for Population of Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
284 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
to pragmatism. Yet Burgess acknowledged and embraced the fact that the census tract
maps implied no particular theory about urban social organization. Indeed, that was
one of the principal selling points of the mapping scheme and the accompanying
Census Data volumes. It is equally implausible to suggest that the census tract project
represented a permanent intellectual evolution for Burgess or the Chicago School.
Burgess’s later writings and those of his students stressed the concepts of community
and neighborhood and built off the community area project much more than the
two other mapping projects. The Local Community Fact Books and the subcommunities
have already been mentioned. In 1930, the same year that Burgess published
the second Census Data volume, he collaborated with Palmer on an LCRC-published
volume, Social Backgrounds of Chicago’s Local Communities (Burgess and Palmer
1930).30
Ultimately the most satisfying answer is that Burgess himself, like the
department of which he was a member, was willing to countenance some
theoretical catholicity in the pursuit of new and promising empirical methods
and interpretive frames.
Conclusion
This paper has argued for the differentiation of three mapping schemes that
were products of the University of Chicago Sociology Department in the 1920s
and 1930s. The concentric zone scheme, the community areas scheme and the
census tract scheme were all produced within a few years of each other and
under the leadership of the same scholars, namely Robert Park and Ernest
Burgess. The differences are not the product of competing visions from separate
individuals working in a common department. Nor are the maps three progressive
steps along the way to the elaboration of a single methodological and
theoretical perspective, however loosely defined. Their underlying differences
are the products of the Chicago sociologists following, at different moments,
distinct theoretical insights and opportunities for empirical investigation.
My paper has outlined the theoretical implications of these three visions of
the city, and, though a reading of archival and published papers, I have outlined
likely sources of intellectual influence behind each of the schemes. The
30
There is even some evidence that Burgess had second thoughts about the census tract project when he
still served on the Census Advisory Committee. In his papers he retained a letter from W.L. Austin at the
Bureau of the Census to Ralph Goodman of the Chicago Census Advisory Committee. In the letter Austin
urges continued adherence to the census tract scheme that was worked out in 1930, and in the final
paragraph he writes, “Professor Burgess has been one of the most prominent members of the committee
working on the present Chicago tracts and I am somewhat surprised that he should be urging this departure
from the tract system which has been worked out through three decades of experience. The tracts for 1930
were revised by the committee with which he is identified.” Unfortunately, Burgess’s practice of not
keeping copies of his own letters makes it difficult to know exactly what his objection was. W.L. Austin to
Ralph Goodman, 15 October, 1940. Ernest Burgess Papers, Box 50.
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 285
concentric zone map is most plausibly traced back to von Thünen’s model of
agricultural development around an “isolated state,” as well as Chicago boosters’
early maps of the city. The community area project involved much more
collective and empirical effort, and it depended not only on a more exhaustive
investigation of the city itself but also on two distinct intellectual traditions,
namely, the Social Survey Movement and pragmatist philosophy. Both traditions
were deeply intertwined with the intellectual life of Chicago sociology: the
Social Survey Movement through courses taught by Park and through the
presence of Hull House in the city’s North Side, pragmatist philosophy through
the presence of Mead at the University and though Park’s time as a student
under William James. Plant ecology, discussed extensively in Park and Burgess’s
Introduction and in The City, served as the starting point for the urban
ecological theory implied in both of the preceding mapping schemes. The census
tract project, meanwhile, was a collaborative effort of political, academic and commercial
interests in Chicago, and while Burgess mobilized the resources of the SSRC
to delineate the tract boundaries and collect census data, he was more than happy for
others to use the data to their own instrumental ends, without regard for the theoretical
commitments of Chicago sociology.
A rough characterization of the progress from concentric zones to community
areas to census tract mapping would be to say that Chicago sociology
moved towards ever-increasing atomism and analytical precision in their maps
of the city. This is true, and it is not a coincidence. In the period of interest,
advances in techniques of data collection and analysis were beginning to make
such increasingly exhaustive and precise empirical study possible (Stigler 1999,
pp. 157–172; Porter 1986, pp. 18–39). Another pattern I have stressed in this
paper is the gradual elaboration of the vision of the city as ecology, through
the concentric zone and community area maps, then a turn away from that
theory in the census tract maps. Ultimately, however, we should resist them
impulse to fit the several Chicago mapping projects into a neat narrative of
how the Chicago School visualized the city or how their vision of the city
evolved over time. The distinct histories and theoretical implications of the
mapping projects are noteworthy, but so too is the ability of Park, Burgess and
their students to work with each of the schemes, sometimes simultaneously,
visualizing and revising visions of the city in work that fueled empirical and
theoretical advances in sociology for many years. Their impressive range
should not invalidate any one of their projects for reasons of incoherence,
but it should caution us against characterizing their “school” too simply or
categorically.
Acknowledgements Earlier drafts of this paper was presented at the University of Michigan
Social Theory Conference and the Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, both in
2010. I am grateful to Karin Knorr Cetina, Andrew Abbott, Howard Brick, Marissa Guerrero,
Forest Gregg, the participants of both conferences and my anonymous reviewers for their advice
and encouragement.
286 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
Appendix
Fig. 1 Concentric zones. From Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie. 1925. The City.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 287
Fig. 2 Concentric zones, with demographic features of Chicago
288 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
Fig. 3 Community area map, displaying juvenile delinquency rates. From the University of Chicago Map
Collection, call number G4104.C6 E625 1933
Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293 289
Fig. 4 1930 Census tract map, showing percentage of population born in Germany. From the University of
Chicago Map Collection, call number G4104.C6E142 1930
290 Am Soc (2012) 43:264–293
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