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.”
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Notes
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.
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).
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.
Raushenbush was a student of Robert Park, and Faris was both a student and the son of Ellsworth Faris, a long-time faculty member.
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).
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.
McKenzie to Park, July 19, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
McKenzie to Park, July 19, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
Park to McKenzie, August 1, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
Park to McKenzie, August 1, 1924, Robert Park Papers, Box 14.
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.
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.
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).
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.
See Fig. 3.
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.
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).
Notes for “Soc. 36,” c. 1921, Robert Park Papers, Box 5.
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).
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.
Lecture notes, “Soc. 36.” Robert Park Papers, Box 5.
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.
Lecture notes, “Soc. 36.” Robert Park Papers, Box 5 (emphasis mine).
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).
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.
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).
Truesdell was Chief Statistician for Population of Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
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.
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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.
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University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center:
Ernest Burgess Papers
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University of Chicago Map Collection:
“Social scientists map Chicago” series
“Social Science Research Committee maps” series
Appendix
Appendix
Figures 1
Concentric zones. From Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925
Figures 2
Concentric zones, with demographic features of Chicago
Figures 3
Community area map, displaying juvenile delinquency rates. From the University of Chicago Map Collection, call number G4104.C6 E625 1933
Figure 4
1930 Census tract map, showing percentage of population born in Germany. From the University of Chicago Map Collection, call number G4104.C6E142 1930
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Owens, B.R. Mapping the City: Innovation and Continuity in the Chicago School of Sociology, 1920–1934. Am Soc 43, 264–293 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-012-9160-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-012-9160-7