Quotes from
Robert Park -
Ernest Burgess
Roderick McKenzie and
Louis Wirth
Concepts for Human Ecology
1925 The City
The city: suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment
The growth of the city: an introduction to a research project
The ecological approach to the study of the human community
Community organisation and the romantic temper
Magic, mentality, and city life
A Bibliography of the Urban Community
1944 An Autobiographical Note
Park, R.E. and Burgess, E.W. 1921 Introduction to the Science of Sociology .
Competition a Process of Interaction
Of the four great types of interaction - competition - conflict - accommodation, and assimilation - competition is the elementary, universal and fundamental form. Social contact ... initiates interaction. But competition, strictly speaking, is interaction without social contact.
... in human society competition is always complicated with other processes, that is to say, with conflict, assimilation, and accommodation.
It is only in the plant community that we can observe the process of competition in isolation, uncomplicated with other social processes. The members of a plant community live together in a relation of mutual interdependence which we call social probably because, while it is close and vital, it is not biological. It is not biological because the relation is a merely external one and the plants that compose it are not even of the same species. They do not interbreed. The members of a plant community adapt themselves to one another as all living things adapt themselves to their environment, but there is no conflict between them because they are not conscious. Competition takes the form of conflict or rivalry only when it becomes conscious, when competitors identify one another as rivals or as enemies.
This suggests what is meant by the statement that competition is interaction without social contact.. It is only when minds meet, only when the meaning that is in one mind is communicated to another mind so that these minds mutually influence one another, that social contact, properly speaking, may be said to exist.
On the other hand, social contacts are not limited to contacts of touch or sense or speech, and they are likely to be more intimate and more pervasive than we imagine. Some years ago the Japanese, who are brown, defeated the Russians, who are white. In the course of the next few months the news of this remarkable event penetrated, as we afterward learned, the uttermost ends of the earth. It sent a thrill through all Asia and it was known in the darkest corners of Central Africa. Everywhere it awakened strange and fantastic dreams. This is what is meant by social contact.
a)
Competition
and Competitive Co-operation.
Social contact, which inevitably initiates
conflict,
accommodation, or
assimilation, invariably creates also sympathies, prejudices,
personal and
moral relations which modify, complicate, and control competition. On the
other hand, within the limits which the cultural process creates, and
custom, law, and tradition impose, competition invariably tends to create
an impersonal social order in which each individual, being free to pursue
his own profit, and, in a sense, compelled to do so, makes every other
individual a means to that end. In doing so, however, he inevitably
contributes through the mutual exchange of services so established to the
common welfare.
If we are to assume that the
economic order is fundamentally ecological,
that is, created by the struggle for existence, an organisation like that
of the plant community in which the relations between individuals are
conceivably at least wholly external, the question may be very properly
raised why the competition and the organisation it has created should be
regarded as social at all. As a matter of fact sociologists have generally
identified the social with the moral order, and
Dewey, in his
Democracy and
Education, makes statements which suggest that the purely
economic order,
in which man becomes a means rather than an end to other men, is unsocial,
if not antisocial.
The fact is, however, that this character of externality in human relations
is a fundamental aspect of
society and social life. It is merely another
manifestation of what has been referred to as the
distributive aspect of
society. Society is made up of individuals
spatially separated,
territorially distributed, and capable of independent locomotion. This
capacity of independent locomotion is the basis and the symbol of every
other form of independence. Freedom is fundamentally freedom to move and
individuality is inconceivable without the capacity and the opportunity to
gain an individual experience as a result of independent action.
On the other hand, it is quite true that society may be said to exist only
so far as this independent activity of the individual is controlled in the
interest of the group as a whole. That is the reason why the problem of
control, using that term in its evident significance, inevitably becomes
the central problem of sociology.
c)
Competition
and Control
Competition is universal in the world of living things. Under
ordinary
circumstances it goes on unobserved even by the individuals who are most
concerned. It is only in periods of crisis, when men are making new and
conscious
efforts to control the conditions of their common life, that the
forces with which they are competing get identified with persons, and
competition is converted into
conflict. It is in
what has been described as
the political process that society
consciously deals with its crises. War
is the political process par excellence. It is in war that the great
decisions are made. Political organisations exist for the purpose of
dealing with conflict situations. Parties, parliaments and courts, public
discussion and voting are to be considered simply as substitutes for war.
d)
Accommodation,
Assimilation, and
Competition
Conflict
is then to be identified with the political order and with
conscious control.
Accommodation, on the other hand, is associated with the
social order that is fixed and established in custom and the mores.
Assimilation, as distinguished from accommodation, implies a more
thoroughgoing transformation of the personality--transformation which takes
place gradually under the influence of social contacts of the most concrete
and intimate sort.
Accommodation may be regarded, like religious conversion, as a kind of
mutation. The wishes are the same but their organisation is different.
Assimilation takes place not so much as a result of changes in the
organisation as in the content, i.e., the memories, of the personality. The
individual units, as a result of intimate association, interpenetrate, so
to speak; and come in this way into possession of a common experience and a
common tradition. The permanence and solidarity of the group rest finally
upon this body of common experience and tradition. It is the role of
history to preserve this body of common experience and tradition, to
criticise and reinterpret it in the light of new experience and changing
conditions, and in this way to preserve the continuity of the social and
political life.
The relation of social structures to the processes of
competition,
conflict,
accommodation, and
assimilation may be represented schematically
as follows:
...
b)
Competition
and Freedom
...
The
economic
organisation
of society, so far as it is an effect of free
competition, is an
ecological organisation. There is a
human as well as a
plant and an
animal ecology.
...
Conflict,
assimilation and
accommodation as
distinguished from competition are all intimately related to control.
Competition is the process through which the
distributive
and ecological
organisation of society is created. Competition determines the distribution
of population territorially and vocationally. The division of labour and
all
the vast organised
economic interdependence of individuals and groups of
individuals characteristic of modern life are a product of
competition. On
the other hand, the moral and political order, which imposes itself upon
this competitive organisation, is a product of
conflict,
accommodation
and
assimilation.
...
Accommodation, on the
other hand, is the process by which the individuals and groups make the
necessary internal adjustments to social situations which have been created
by
competition and
conflict. War and
elections change situations. When
changes thus effected are decisive and are accepted, conflict subsides and
the tensions it created are resolved in the process of accommodation into
profound modifications of the competing units, i.e., individuals and
groups. A man once thoroughly defeated is, as has often been noted, "never
the same again." Conquest, subjugation, and defeat are psychological as
well as social processes. They establish a new order by changing, not
merely the status, but the attitudes of the parties involved. Eventually
the new order gets itself fixed in habit and custom and is then transmitted
as part of the established social order to succeeding generations. Neither
the physical nor the social world is made to satisfy at once all the wishes
of the natural man. The rights of property, vested interests of every sort,
the family organisation, slavery, caste and class, the whole social
organisation, in fact, represent accommodations, that is to say,
limitations of the natural wishes of the individual. These socially
inherited accommodations have presumably grown up in the pains and
struggles of previous generations, but they have been transmitted to and
accepted by succeeding generations as part of the natural, inevitable
social order. All of these are forms of control in which
competition is
limited by status.
| SOCIAL PROCESS | SOCIAL ORDER | Competition | The economic equilibrium | Conflict | The political order | Accommodation | Social organisation | Assimilation | Personality and the cultural heritage |
The Concept of Conflict
The distinction between
competition
and
conflict has
already been indicated. Both are forms of
interaction, but
competition is a struggle between individuals, or groups of individuals,
who are not necessarily in contact and communication; while conflict is a
contest in which contact is an indispensable condition. Competition,
unqualified and uncontrolled as with plants, and in the great impersonal
life-struggle of man with his kind and with all animate nature, is
unconscious. Conflict
is always
conscious, indeed, it evokes the deepest
emotions and strongest passions and enlists the greatest concentration of
attention and of effort. Both competition and conflict are forms of
struggle. Competition, however, is continuous and impersonal, conflict is
intermittent and personal.
Competition is a struggle for position in an
economic order. The
distribution
of populations in the world-economy, the industrial
organisation in the national economy, and the vocation of the individual in
the division of labour - all these are determined, in the long run, by
competition. The status of the individual, or a group of individuals, in
the social order, on the other hand, is determined by rivalry, by war, or
by subtler forms of conflict.
The notion of conflict, like the fact, has its roots deep in
human
interest.
Mars has always held a high rank in the hierarchy of the gods.
Whenever and wherever struggle has taken the form of conflict, whether of
races, of nations, or of individual men, it has invariably captured and
held the attention of spectators. And these spectators, when they did not
take part in the fight, always took sides. It was this conflict of the
non-combatants that made public opinion, and public opinion has always
played an important role in the struggles of men. It is this that has
raised war from a mere play of physical forces and given it the tragic
significance of a moral struggle, a conflict of good and evil.
Adaptation and accommodation
The
term adaptation came into vogue with
Darwin's theory of
the origin of the species by natural
selection. This theory was based upon the observation that no two members
of a biological species or of a family are ever exactly alike. Everywhere
there is variation and individuality. Darwin's theory assumed this
variation and explained the species as the result of natural selection. The
individuals best fitted to live under the conditions of life which the
environment offered, survived and produced the existing species. The others
perished and the species which they represented disappeared. The
differences in the species were explained as the result of the accumulation
and perpetuation of the individual variations which had "survival value."
Adaptations were the variations which had been in this way
selected and
transmitted.
The term
accommodation is a kindred concept with a slightly different
meaning. The distinction is that
adaptation is applied to organic
modifications which are transmitted biologically; while accommodation is
used with reference to changes in habit, which are transmitted, or may be
transmitted, sociologically, that is, in the form of social tradition.
The outcome of the
adaptations and
accommodations, which the struggle for
existence enforces, is a state of relative
equilibrium among the competing species and individual members
of these species. The equilibrium which is established by adaptation is
biological, which means that, in so far as it is permanent and fixed in the
race or the species, it will be transmitted by biological inheritance.
The
equilibrium based on
accommodation, however, is not biological;
it is economic and social and is transmitted, if at all, by tradition. The
nature of the
economic equilibrium which results from competition has been
fully described in chapter viii. The plant community is this equilibrium in
its absolute form.
In animal and human
societies the
community has, so to speak, become
incorporated in the individual members of the group. The individuals are
adapted to a specific type of communal life, and these
adaptations, in
animal as distinguished from human societies, are represented in the
division of labour between the sexes, in the instincts which secure the
protection and welfare of the young, in the so-called gregarious instinct,
and all these represent traits that are transmitted biologically. But human
societies, although providing for the expression of original tendencies,
are organised about tradition, mores, collective representations, in short,
consensus.. And consensus represents, not
biological adaptations, but
social accommodations.
Social organisation, with the exception of the order based on competition
and
adaptation, is essentially an
accommodation of differences through
conflicts. This fact explains why diverse-mindedness rather than
like-mindedness is characteristic of human as distinguished from animal
society.
The City
R.E. Park
1925/1
"The city: suggestions for the
investigation of human
behaviour in the urban environment"
Chapter one in
The City (pages 1-46)
The city , from the point of view of this paper, is something
more than a
congeries of individual men and of social conveniences - streets,
buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more,
also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices
-courts, hospitals, schools, police, and civil functionaries of various
sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and
traditions, and of the organised attitudes and sentiments that inhere in
these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in
other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It
is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a
product of nature, and particularly of human nature.
The city has, as
Oswald Spengler has recently pointed out, its own
culture:
The city has been studied, in recent times, from the point of view of its
geography, and still more recently from the point of view of its ecology.
There are forces at work within the limits of the urban community - within
the limits of any
natural area of human habitation, in fact - which tend to
bring about an orderly and typical grouping of its population and
institutions. The science which seeks [p.2]
to isolate these factors and to describe the typical constellations of
persons and institutions which the co-operation of these forces produce, is
what we call human, as distinguished from plant and animal, ecology.
Transportation and communication, tramways and telephones, newspapers and
advertising, steel construction and elevators - all things, in fact, which
tend to bring about at once a greater mobility and a greater concentration
of the urban populations - are primary factors in the ecological
organisation
of the city.
The city is not, however, merely a geographical and ecological unit; it is
at the same time an economic unit. The
economic organisation of the city is
based on the division of labour. The multiplication of occupations and
professions within the limits of the urban population is one of the most
striking and least understood aspects of modern city life. From this point
of view, we may, if we choose, think of the city, that is to say, the place
and the people, with all the machinery and administrative devices that go
with them, as organically related; a kind of psychophysical mechanism in
and through which private and political interests find not merely a
collective but a corporate expression.
Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city - its charters, formal
organisation, buildings, street railways, and so forth - is, or seems to
be, mere artifact. But these things in themselves are utilities,
adventitious devices which become part of the living city only when, and in
so far as, through use and wont they connect themselves, like a tool in the
hand of man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in the
community.
Anthropology, the science of man, has been mainly concerned up
to the present with the study of primitive peoples. But civilised man is
quite as interesting an object of investigation, and at the same time his
life is more open to observation and study. Urban life and
culture are more
varied, subtle, and complicated, but the fundamental motives are in both
instances the same. The same patient methods of observation which
anthropologists like
Boas and
Lowie have expended on the study of the life and
manners of the North American Indian might be even more fruitfully employed
in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and
general conceptions of life prevalent in Little Italy on the lower North
Side in Chicago, or in recording the more sophisticated folk- ways of the
inhabitants of Greenwich Village and the neighbourhood of Washington
Square, New York.
We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate
knowledge of contemporary urban life. But the life of our cities demands a
more searching and disinterested study than even
Emile Zola has given us in
his "experimental" novels and the annals of the Rougon-Macquart family.
We need such studies, if for no other reason than to enable us
to read the newspapers intelligently. The reason that the daily
chronicle of the newspaper is so shocking, and at the same time so
fascinating, to the average reader is because the average reader knows so
little about the life of which the newspaper is the record.
The observations which follow are intended to define a point of
view and to indicate a program for the study of urban life: its physical
organisation, its occupations, and its
culture.
[p.12]
II. Industrial organisation and the moral order
The ancient city was primarily a fortress, a place of refuge in time of
war. The modern city, on the contrary, is primarily a convenience of
commerce, and owes its existence to the market place around which it sprang
up. Industrial competition and the division of labour, which have probably
done most to develop the latent powers of mankind, are possible only upon
condition of the existence of markets, of money, and other devices for the
facilitation of trade and commerce.
An old German adage declares that "city air makes men free" (Stadt Luft
macht frei). This is doubtless a reference to the days when the free
cities of Germany enjoyed the patronage of the emperor, and laws made the
fugitive serf a free man if he succeeded for a year and a day in breathing
city air. Law, of itself, could not, however, have made the craftsman free.
An open market in which he might sell the products of his labour was a
necessary incident of his freedom, and it was the application of the money
economy to the relations of master and man that completed the emancipation
of the serf.
Vocational classes and vocational types. - The old adage which
describes the city as the natural environment of the free man still holds
so far as the individual man finds in the chances, the diversity p of
interests and tasks, and in the vast unconscious co-operation of city life
the opportunity to choose his own vocation and develop his peculiar
individual talents. The city offers a market for the special talents of
individual men. Personal competition tends to select for each special task
the individual who is best suited to perform it.
There are some sorts of industry, even of the lowest kind, which can be
carried on nowhere but in a
great town."
(Adam Smith -
The Wealth of Nations, pp.
28-29)
Success, under conditions of personal competition, depends upon
concentration upon some single task, and this concentration stimulates the
demand for rational methods, technical devices, and exceptional skill.
Exceptional skill, while based on natural talent, requires special
preparation, and it has called into existence the trade and professional
schools, and finally bureaus for vocational guidance. All of these, either
directly or indirectly, serve at once to select and emphasize individual
differences.
Every device which facilitates trade and industry prepares the way for a
further division of labour and so tends further to specialize the tasks in
which men find their vocations.
The outcome of this process is to break down or modify the older
social and
economic organisation of society, which was based on family
ties, local
associations, on culture, caste, and status, and to
[p.14]
substitute for it an organisation based on occupation and vocational
interests.
In the city every vocation, even that of a beggar, tends to assume the
character of a profession and the discipline which success in any vocation
imposes, together with the associations that it enforces, emphasizes this
tendency-the tendency, namely, not merely to specialize, but to rationalize
one's occupation and to develop a specific and conscious technique for
carrying it on.
The effect of the vocations and the division of labour is to produce, in
the
first instance, not social groups, but vocational types: the actor, the
plumber, and the lumber-jack. The organisations, like the trade and labour
unions which men of the same trade or profession form, are based on common
interest* In this respect they differ from forms of association like the
neighbourhood, which are based on contiguity, personal
association, and the
common ties of humanity. The different trades and professions seem disposed
to rt. group themselves in classes, that is to say, the artisan, business,
and professional classes. But in the modern democratic state the classes
have as yet attained no effective organisation. Socialism, founded on an
effort to create an organisation based on "class consciousness,'*^-has
never succeeded, except, perhaps, in Russia, in creating more than a
political party.
The effects of the division of labour as a discipline, i.e., as means of
molding character, may therefore be best studied in the vocational types it
has produced. Among the types which it would be interesting to study are:
the shopgirl, the policeman, the peddler, the cabman, the nightwatchman,
the clairvoyant, the vaudeville performer, the quack doctor, the bartender,
the ward boss, the strike-breaker, the labour agitator, the school teacher,
the reporter, the stockbroker, the pawnbroker; all of these are
characteristic products of the conditions of city life; each, with its
special experience, insight, and point of view determines for each
vocational group and for the city as a whole its individuality.
[p.23]
Secondary relations and social control
Modern methods of urban transportation and communication- the electric
railway, the automobile, the telephone, and the radio- have silently and
rapidly changed in recent years the social and industrial organisation of
the modern city. They have been the means of concentrating traffic in the
business districts, have changed the whole character of retail trade,
multiplying the residence suburbs and making the department store possible.
These changes in the industrial organisation and in the
distribution of
population have been accompanied by corresponding changes in the habits,
sentiments, and character of the urban population.
The general nature of these changes is indicated by the fact that the
growth of cities has been accompanied by the substitution of indirect,
"secondary," for direct, face-to-face, "primary" relations in the
associations of individuals in the community.
[p.24]
Touch and sight, physical contact, are the basis for the first and most
elementary human relationships. Mother and child, husband and wife, father
and son, master and servant, kinsman and
neighbour, minister, physician,
and teacher-these are the most intimate and real relationships of life, and
in the small community they are practically inclusive.
The
interactions which take place among the members of a community
so
constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on
largely within the region of instinct and feeling. Social control arises,
for the most part spontaneously, in direct response to personal influences
and public sentiment. It is the result of a
personal accommodation, rather
than the formulation of a rational and abstract principle.
The church, the school, and the family
In a great city, where the population is unstable, where parents and
children are employed out of the house and often in distant parts of the
city, where thousands of people live side by side for years without so much
as a bowing acquaintance, these intimate relationships of the primary group
are weakened and the moral order which rested upon them is gradually
dissolved.
Under the disintegrating influences of city life most of our traditional
institutions, the church, the school, and the family, have been greatly
modified. The school, for example, has taken over some of the functions of
the family. It is around the public school and its solicitude for the moral
and physical welfare of the children that something like a new
neighbourhood and
community spirit tends to get itself organised.
The church, on the other hand, which has lost much of its influence since
the printed page has so largely taken the place of the pulpit in the
interpretation of life, seems at present to be in process of readjustment
to the new conditions.
It is important that the church, the school, and the family should be
studied from the point of view of this readjustment to the conditions of
city life.
It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening of
the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the influence of
the urban environment, which are largely responsible for the increase of
vice and crime in great cities. It would be interesting in this connection
to determine by investigation how far the increase in crime keeps pace with
the increasing mobility of the population and to what extent this mobility
is a function of the growth of population. It is from this point of view
that we should seek to interpret all those statistics which register the
disintegration of the moral order, for example, the statistics of divorce,
of truancy, and of crime.
[p.43]
The moral region. - It is inevitable that individuals who seek
the same forms of excitement, whether that excitement be furnished
by a horse race or by grand opera, should find themselves from
time to time in the same places. The result of this is that in the
organisation which city life spontaneously assumes the population
tends to segregate itself, not merely in accordance with its interests,
but in accordance with its tastes or its temperaments. The resulting
distribution of the population is likely to be quite different
from that
brought about by occupational interests or
economic conditions.
Every
neighbourhood, under
the influences which tend to
distribute and
segregate city populations, may assume the character of a "moral region."
Such, for example, are the vice districts, which are found in most cities.
A moral region is not necessarily a place of abode. It may be a mere
rendezvous, a place of resort.
In order to understand the forces which in every large city tend to develop
these detached milieus in which vagrant and suppressed impulses, passions,
and ideals emancipate themselves from the dominant moral order, it is
necessary to refer to the fact or theory of
latent impulses of men.
The fact seems to be that men are brought into the world with all the
passions, instincts, and appetites, uncontrolled and undisciplined.
Civilisation, in the interests of the common welfare, demands
the suppression sometimes, and the control always, of these wild, natural
dispositions. In the process of imposing its discipline upon the
individual, in making over the individual in accordance with the accepted
community model, much is suppressed altogether, and much more finds a
vicarious expression in forms that are socially valuable, or at least
innocuous. It is at this point that sport, play, and art function. They
permit the individual to purge himself by means of symbolic expression of
these wild and suppressed impulses. This is the catharsis of which
Aristotle wrote in his Poetic, and which has been given new and more
positive significance by the investigations of
Sigmund Freud and the
psychoanalysts.
[p.44]
No doubt many other social phenomena such as strikes, wars, popular
elections, and religious revivals perform a similar
function in releasing
the
subconscious tensions. But within smaller communities, where
social
relations are more intimate and inhibitions more imperative, there are many
exceptional individuals who find within the limits of the communal activity
no normal and healthful expression of their individual aptitudes and
temperaments.
The causes which give rise to what are here described as "moral regions"
are due in part to the restrictions which urban life imposes; in part to
the license which these same conditions offer. We have, until very
recently, given much consideration to the temptations of city life, but we
have not given the same consideration to the effects of inhibitions and
suppressions of natural impulses and instincts under the changed conditions
of metropolitan life. For one thing, children, which in the country are
counted as an asset, become in the city a liability. Aside from this fact
it is very much more difficult to rear a family in the city than on the
farm. Marriage takes place later in the city, and sometimes it doesn't take
place at all.
Burgess, E.W.
1925/2
"The growth of the city:
an introduction to a research project". Chapter two in
The City (pages 47-62)
[p.50]
Expansion as a process
No study of expansion as a process has yet been made, although the
materials for such a study and intimations of different aspects of the
process are contained in city planning, zoning, and regional surveys
The typical processes of the expansion of the city can best be illustrated,
perhaps, by a series of concentric circles, which may be numbered to
designate both the successive
zones of urban extension and the types of
areas differentiated in the process of expansion.
This chart represents an ideal construction of the tendencies of
any town
or city to expand radially from its central business district - on the map
"The Loop"
(I).
Encircling the downtown area there is normally an area in transition, which
is being invaded by business and light manufacture
(II).
A third area
(III) is inhabited by the workers in industries who have escaped
from the
area of deterioration (II) but who desire to live within easy access of
their work.
Beyond this zone is the "residential area"
(IV)
of high-class
apartment buildings or of exclusive "restricted" districts of single family
dwellings.
Still farther, out beyond the city limits, is the commuters'
zone - suburban areas, or satellite cities-within a thirty- to sixty-minute
ride of the central business district. [V]
This chart brings out clearly
the main fact of expansion, namely, the tendency of each inner zone to
extend its area by the invasion of the next outer zone. This aspect of
expansion may be called
succession, a process which
has been studied in
detail in plant ecology. If this chart is applied to Chicago,
all four
of these zones were in its early history included in the circumference of
the inner zone, the present business district. The present boundaries
of the area of deterioration were not many years ago those of the zone now
inhabited by independent wage-earners, and within the
[p.51] memories of
thousands of Chicagoans contained the residences of the "best families."
Chart one: The Growth of the City
It hardly needs to be added that neither Chicago
[p.52] nor any other city
fits perfectly into this ideal scheme. Complications are introduced 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.
Besides extension and
succession, the general process of expansion in urban
growth involves the antagonistic and yet complementary processes of
concentration and decentralisation. In all cities there is the natural
tendency for local and outside transportation to converge in the central
business district. In the down-town section of every large city we expect
to find the department stores, the skyscraper office buildings, the
railroad stations, the great hotels, the theatres, the art museum, and the
city hall. Quite naturally, almost inevitably, the
economic, cultural, and
political life centres here. The relation of centralisation to the other
processes of city life may be roughly gauged by the fact that over half a
million people daily enter and leave Chicago's "loop." More recently sub-
business centres have grown up in outlying zones. These "satellite loops"
do not, it seems, represent the "hoped for" revival of the
neighbourhood,
but rather a telescoping of several local communities into a larger
economic unity. The Chicago of yesterday, an agglomeration of country towns
and immigrant colonies, is undergoing a process of reorganisation into a
centralised decentralised system of local communities coalescing into sub-
business areas visibly or invisibly dominated by the central business
district. The actual processes of what may be called centralised
decentralisation are now being studied in the development of the chain
store, which is only one illustration of the change in the basis of the
urban organisation.1
Expansion, as we have seen, deals with the physical growth of the city, and
with the extension of the technical services that have made city life not
only livable, but comfortable, even luxurious.
[p.53]
Certain of these basic necessities of urban life are possible only
through a tremendous development of communal existence. Three millions of
people in Chicago are dependent upon one unified water system, one giant
gas company, and one huge electric light plant. Yet, like most of the other
aspects of our communal urban life, this
economic co-operation is an
example of co-operation without a shred of what the "spirit of
co-operation" is commonly thought to signify. The great public utilities
are
a part of the mechanisation of life in great cities, and have little or no
other meaning for social organisation.
Yet the processes of expansion, and especially the rate of expansion, may
be studied not only in the physical growth and business development, but
also in the consequent changes in the social organisation and in
personality types. How far is the growth of the city, in its physical and
technical aspects, matched by a natural but adequate readjustment in the
social organisation ? What, for a city, is a normal rate of expansion, a
rate of expansion with which controlled changes in the social organisation
might successfully keep pace ?
R.D. McKenzie
1925/3
"The ecological approach to the study of the human
community" Chapter three in
The City (pages 63-79)
The young sciences of
plant and
animal ecology have become fairly well established. Their
respective fields are apparently quite well defined, and a set of concepts
for analysis is becoming rather generally accepted. The subject of
human ecology, however, is still practically an unsurveyed
field, that is, so far as a systematic and scientific approach is
concerned. To be sure, hosts of studies have been made which touch the
field of human ecology in one or another of its varied aspects, but there
has developed no science of human ecology which is comparable in precision
of observation or in method of analysis with the recent sciences of plant
and animal ecology.
1. The relation of human ecology to plant and animal ecology
Ecology has been defined as
This definition is not sufficiently comprehensive to include all the
elements that logically fall within the range of human ecology. In the
absence of any precedent let us tentatively define human ecology as a study
of the
spatial and
temporal (*) relations of human beings as affected
by
the selective,
[p.64]
distributive, and
accommodative forces of the environment.
2. Ecological classification of communities
From the standpoint of ecology, communities may be divided into four
general types: first, the primary service community, such as the
agricultural town, the fishing, mining, or lumbering community...
The next type of community is the one that fulfils the secondary function
in the
distributive process of commodities. It collects the basic
materials
from the surrounding primary communities and distributes them in the wider
markets of the world. On the other hand, it redistributes the products
coming from other parts of the world to the primary service communities for
final consumption. This is commonly called the commercial community...
The third type of community is the industrial town. It serves as the locus
for the manufacturing of commodities. In addition it may combine the
functions of the primary service and the commercial types. It may have its
local trade area and it may also be the
distributing centre for the
surrounding hinterland. The type is characterized merely by the relative
dominance of industry over the other forms of service...
The fourth type of community is one which is lacking in a specific economic
base. It draws its economic sustenance from other parts of the world, and
may serve no function in the production or distribution of commodities.
Such communities are exemplified in our recreational resorts, political and
educational centres, communities of defense, penal or charitable
colonies...
3. Determining ecological factors in the growth or decline of
community
The human community tends to develop in cyclic fashion. Under a given state
of natural resources and in a given condition of the arts the community
tends to increase in size and structure until it reaches the point of
population adjustment to the
economic base. In an agricultural community,
under present conditions of production and transportation, the point of
maximum population seldom exceeds 5,000.(1)
The point of maximum development may be termed the point of culmination or
climax, to use the term of the plant ecologist. (2)
The community tends to remain in this condition of balance between
population and resources until some new element enters to disturb the
status quo, such as the introduction of a new system of communication, a
new type of industry, or a different form of utilisation of the existing
economic base. Whatever the innovation may be that disturbs the
equilibrium
of the community, there is a tendency toward a new cycle of adjustment.
This may act in either a positive or negative manner. It may serve as a
release to the community, making for another cycle of growth and
differentiation, or it may have a retractive influence, necessitating
emigration and readjustment to a more circumscribed base.
[p.70]
[p.71]
4. The effect of ecological changes on the social organisation of
community
Population migrations resulting from such sudden pulls as are the outcomes
of unusual forms of release in community growth may cause an expansion in
the community's development far beyond the natural culmination point of its
cyclic development, resulting in a crisis situation, a sudden relapse,
disorganization, or even panic. So-called "boom towns" are towns that have
experienced herd movements of population beyond the natural point of
culmination.
On the other hand, a community which has reached the point of culmination
and which has experienced no form of release is likely to settle into a
condition of stagnation. Its natural surplus of population is forced to
emigrate. This type of emigration tends to occasion folk-depletion in the
parent community. The younger and more enterprising population elements
respond most sensitively to the absence of opportunities in their home
town. This is particularly true when the community has but a single
economic base, such as agriculture, lumbering, mining. Reformers try in
vain to induce the young people to remain on the farms or in their native
villages, little realizing that they are working in opposition to the
general principles of the ecological order.
Again, when a community starts to decline in population due to a weakening
of the economic base, disorganization and social unrest follow.1
Competition becomes keener within the community, and the weaker elements
either are forced into a lower economic level or are compelled to withdraw
from the community entirely.
5. Ecological processes determining the internal structure of
community
In the process of community growth there is a development from the simple
to the complex, from the general to the specialised; first to increasing
centralisation and later to a decentralisation process. In the small town
or village the primary universal needs are satisfied by a few general
stores and a few simple institutions such as church, school, and home. As
the community increases in size specialisation takes place both in the type
of service provided and in the location of the place of service. The
sequence of development may be somewhat as follows: first the grocery
store, sometimes carrying a few of the more staple dry goods, then the
restaurant, poolroom, barber shop, drug store, dry-goods store, and later
bank, haberdashery, millinery, and other specialised lines of service.1
The axial or skeletal structure of a community is determined by the course
of the first routes of travel and traffic. 2
Houses and shops are constructed near the road, usually parallel with it.
The road may be a trail, public highway, railroad, river, or ocean harbour,
but, in any case, the community usually starts in parallel relation to the
first main highway. With the accumulation of population and utilities the
community takes form, first along one side of the highway and later on both
sides. The point of junction or crossing of two main highways, as a rule,
serves as the initial centre of the community.
As the community grows there is not merely a multiplication of houses and
roads but a process of differentiation and segregation takes place as well.
Residences and institutions spread out in centrifugal fashion from the
central point of the community, while
[p.74]
business concentrates more and more around the spot of highest land values.
Each cyclic increase of population is accompanied by greater
differentiation in both service and location. There is a struggle among
utilities for the vantage-points of position. This makes for increasing
value of land and increasing height of buildings at the geographic centre
of the community. As competition for advantageous sites becomes keener with
the growth of population, the first and economically weaker types of
utilities are forced out to less accessible and lower-priced areas. By the
time the community has reached a population of about ten or twelve
thousand, a fairly well-differentiated structure is attained. The central
part is a clearly defined business area with the bank, the drugstore, the
department store, and the hotel holding the sites of highest land value.
Industries and factories usually comprise independent formations within the
city, grouping around railroad tracks and routes of water traffic.
Residence sections become established, segregated into two or more types,
depending upon the economic and racial composition of the population.
The structural growth of community takes place in
successional sequence not
unlike the successional stages in the development of the plant formation.
Certain specialized forms of utilities and uses do not appear in the human
community until a certain stage of development has been attained, just as
the beech or pine forest is preceded by successional dominance of other
plant species. And just as in plant communities successions are the
products of invasion, so also in the human community the formations,
segregations, and associations that appear constitute the outcome of a
series of invasions.1
There are many kinds of intra-community invasions, but in general they may
be grouped into two main classes: .those resulting in change in use of
land, and those which introduce merely change in type of occupant. By the
former is meant change from one
[p.75]
general use to another, such as of a residential area into a business area
or of a business into an industrial district. The latter embraces all
changes of type within a particular use area, such as the changes which
constantly take place in the racial and economic complexion of residence
neighbourhoods, or of the type of service utility within a business
section. Invasions produce
successional stages of different qualitative
significance, that is, the economic character of the district may rise or
fall as the result of certain types of invasion. This qualitative aspect is
reflected in the fluctuations of land or rental values.
The conditions which initiate invasions are legion. The following are some
of the more important:
Invasions may be classified according to stage of development into
(b) secondary or developmental stage,
(c) climax.
The initial stage of an invasion has to do with the point of entry, the
resistance or inducement offered the invader by the prior inhabitants of
the area, the effect upon land values and rentals. The invasion, of course,
may be into an unoccupied territory or into territory with various degrees
of occupancy. The resistance to invasion depends upon the type of the
invader together with the degree of solidarity of the present occupants.
The undesirable
[p.76]
invader, whether in population type or in use form, usually makes entry
(that is, within an area already completely occupied) at the point of
greatest mobility. It is a common observation that foreign races and other
undesirable invaders, with few exceptions, take up residence near the
business centre of the community or at other points of high mobility and
low resistance. Once established they gradually push their way out along
business or transportation thoroughfares to the periphery of the community.
Park R.E.
1925/6 "Community organisation and the romantic temper"
Chapter six in
The City (pages 99-122)
...
But what is a
community and what is community organisation? Before assessing
the communal efficiency one should at least be able
[p.115]
to describe a community. The simplest possible description of a community
is this: a collection of people occupying a more or less clearly defined
area. But a community is more than that. A community is not only a
collection of people, but it is a collection of institutions. Not people,
but institutions, are final and decisive in distinguishing the community
from other social constellations.
Among the institutions of the community there will always be homes and
something more: churches, schools, playgrounds, a communal hall, a local
theater, perhaps, and, of course, business and industrial enterprises of
some sort. Communities might well be classified by the number and variety
of the institutions - cultural, political, and occupational-which they
possess. This would indicate the extent to which they were autonomous or,
conversely, the extent to which their communal functions were mediatized,
so to speak, and incorporated into the larger community.
There is always a larger community. Every single community is always a part
of some larger and more inclusive one. There are no longer any communities
wholly detached and isolated; all are interdependent economically and
politically upon one another. The ultimate community is the wide world.
a) The ecological organisation. - Within the limits of any community
the communal institutions - economic, political, and cultural - will tend
to assume a more or less clearly defined and characteristic
distribution.
For example, the community will always have a center and a circumference,
defining the position of each single community to every other. Within the
area so defined the local populations and the local institutions will tend
to group themselves in some characteristic pattern, dependent upon
geography, lines of communication, and land values. This distribution of
population and institutions we may call the ecological organisation of the
community.
Town-planning is an attempt to direct and control the ecological
organisation. Town-planning is probably not so simple as it seems.
[p.116]
Cities, even those like the city of Washington, D.C., that have been most
elaborately planned, are always getting out of hand. The actual plan of a
city is never a mere artifact, it is always quite as much a product of
nature as of design. But a plan is one factor in communal efficiency.
b) The economic organisation. - Within the limits of the ecological
organisation, so far as a free exchange of goods and services exists, there
inevitably grows up another type of community organisation based on the
division of labour. This is what we may call the occupational organisation
of the community.
The occupational organisation, like the ecological, is a product of
competition. Eventually every individual member of the community is driven,
as a result of competition with every other, to do the thing he can do
rather than the thing he would like to do. Our secret ambitions are seldom
realized in our actual occupations. The struggle to live determines finally
not only where we shall live within the limits of the community, but what
we shall do.
The number and variety of professions and occupations carried on within the
limits of a community would seem to be one measure of its competency, since
in the wider division of labour and the greater specialisation - in the
diversities of interests and tasks - and in the vast unconscious
co-operation of city life, the individual man has not only the opportunity,
but the necessity, to choose his vocation and develop his individual
talents.
Nevertheless, in the struggle to find his place in a changing world there
are enormous wastes. Vocational training is one attempt to meet the
situation; the proposed national organisation of employment is another. But
until a more rational organisation of industry has somehow been achieved,
little progress may be expected or hoped
for.
c) The cultural and political organisation. - Competition is never
unlimited in human society. Always there is custom and law which sets some
bounds and imposes some restraints upon the wild and [p.117]
wilful impulses of the individual man. The cultural and political
organisation of the community rests upon the occupational organisation,
just as the latter, in turn, grows up in, and rests upon, the ecological
organisation.
It is this final division or segment of the communal organisation with
which community-center associations are mainly concerned. Politics,
religion, and community welfare, like golf, bridge, and other forms of
recreation, are leisure-time activities, and it is the leisure time of the
community that we are seeking to organise.
Aristotle, who described man as a political animal, lived a long time ago,
and his description was more true of man then than it is today. Aristotle
lived in a world in which art, religion, and politics were the main
concerns of life, and public life was the natural vocation of every
citizen.
Under modern conditions of life, where the division of labour has gone so
far that-to cite a notorious instance-it takes 150 separate operations to
make a suit of clothes, the situation is totally different. Most of us now,
during the major portion of our waking hours, are so busy on some minute
detail of the common task that we frequently lose sight altogether of the
community in which we live.
Park R.E.
1925/7 "Magic, mentality, and city life" Chapter
seven
in
The City (pages 129-141)
During the past year two very important books have been published, in
English, dealing with the subject of
magic. The first is a translation of
Levy-Bruhl's
La Mentalite Primitive, and the other is Lynn Thorndyke's
A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen
Centuries of the Christian Era.
In venturing to include two volumes so different in content and point of
view in the same general category, I have justified myself
[p.124]
by adopting Thorndyke's broad definition, which includes under "magic"
Levy-Bruhl's book is an attempt, from a wide survey of
anthropological
literature, to define a mode of thought characteristic of primitive
peoples.
Thorndyke, on the other hand, is interested mainly, as the title of his
volume indicates, in the beginnings of
empirical science. The points of
view are different, but the subject-matter is the same, namely, magical
beliefs and practices, particularly in so far as they reflect and embody a
specific type of thought.
Levy-Bruhl has collected, mainly from the writings of missionaries and
travellers, an imposing number of widely scattered observations. These have
been classified and interpreted in a way that is intended to demonstrate
that the mental life and habits of thought of primitive peoples differ
fundamentally from those of
civilised man.
Thorndyke, on the other hand, has described the circumstances under which,
during the first thirteen centuries of our era, the forerunners of modern
science were gradually discarding magical practices in favour of scientific
experiment.
There is, of course, no historical connection between the
culture of Europe
in the thirteenth century and that of present-day savages, although the
magical beliefs and practices of both are surprisingly similar and in many
cases identical, a fact which is intelligible enough when we reflect that
magic is a very ancient, widespread, characteristically human phenomenon,
and that science is a very recent, exceptional, and possibly fortuitous
manifestation of social life.
Levy-Bruhl described the intelligence and habits of thought characteristic
of savage peoples as a type of mentality. The
civilised man has another and a different mentality.
"Mentality," used in this way, is an expression the precise significance of
which is not at once clear. We use the expression "psychology" in a similar
[p.125] but somewhat different way when we say, for example, that the rural
and urban populations "have a different 'psychology,'" or that such and
such a one has the "psychology" of his class-meaning that a given
individual or the group will interpret an event or respond to a situation
in a characteristic manner. But "mentality," as ordinarily used, seems to
refer to the form, rather than to the content, of thought. We frequently
speak of the type or grade of mentality of an individual, or of a group. We
would not, however, qualify the word "psychology" in any such way. We would
not, for example, speak of the grade or degree of the bourgeoise, or the
proletarian "psychology." The things are incommensurable and "psychology,"
in this sense, is a character but not a quantity.
The term "mentality," however, as Levy-Bruhl uses it, seems to include both
meanings. On the whole, however, "primitive mentality" is used here to
indicate the form in which primitive peoples are predisposed to frame their
thoughts. The ground pattern of primitive thought is, as Levy-Bruhl
expresses it, "pre-logical."
As distinguished from Europeans and from some other peoples somewhat less
sophisticated than ourselves, the primitive mind "manifests," he says, "a
decided distaste for reasoning and for what logicians call the discursive
operations of thought. This distaste for rational thought does not arise
out of any radical incapacity or any inherent defect in their
understanding," but is simply a method-one might almost say a
tradition-prevalent among savage and simple-minded people of interpreting
as wilful acts the incidents, accidents, and unsuspected changes of the
world about them.
What is this pre-logical form of thought which characterises the mentality
of primitive people? Levy-Bruhl describes it as "participation." The
primitive mind does not know things as we do, in a detached objective way.
The
uncivilised man enters, so to speak, into the world about him
and interprets plants, animals, the changing seasons, and the weather in
terms of his own impulses
[p.126]
and
conscious purposes. It is not that he is lacking in observation,
but he
has no mental patterns in which to think and describe the shifts and
changes of the external world, except those offered by the mutations of his
own inner life. His blunders of interpretation are due to what has been
described as the "pathetic fallacy," the mistake of attributing to other
persons, in this case, to physical nature and to things alive and dead, the
sentiments and the motives which they inspire in him. As his response to
anything sudden and strange is more likely to be one of fear than of any
other emotion, he interprets the strange and unfamiliar as menacing and
malicious. To the
civilised observer it seems as if the savage lived in a world
peopled with devils.
One difference between the savage and the
civilised man is that the savage is mainly concerned with
incidents and accidents, the historical, rather than scientific, aspects of
life. He is so actively engaged in warding off present evil and meeting his
immediate needs that he has neither time nor inclination to observe
routine. It is the discovery and explanation of this routine that enables
natural science to predict future consequences of present action and so
enable us to prepare today for the needs of tomorrow. It is the discovery
and explanation, in terms of cause and effect, of this routine that
constitutes, in the sense in which Levy-Bruhl uses the term, rational
thought.
What the author of primitive mentality means by "participation" is familiar
enough, though the expression itself is unusual as description of a form of
thought. Human beings may be said to know one another immediately and
intuitively by "participation." Knowledge of this kind is dependent,
however, upon the ability of human beings to enter imaginatively into one
another's minds and to interpret overt acts in terms of intentions and
purposes. What Levy-Bruhl's statement amounts to, then, is that savage
people think, as poets have always done, in terms of wills rather than
forces. The universe is a society of wilful personalities, not
[p.127]
an irrefragable chain of cause and effect. For the savage, there are
events, but neither hypotheses nor facts, since facts, in the strict sense
of the word, are results of criticism and reflection and presuppose an
amount of detachment that primitive man does not seem to possess. Because
he thinks of his world as will rather than force, primitive man seeks to
deal with it in terms of magic rather than of mechanism.
Burgess, E.W.
1925/8
"Can neighbourhood work have a scientific basis?" Chapter
eight in
The City (pages 141-155)
...
Upon reflection it is evident that markedly different social relationships
may have their roots in the conditions of a common territorial location.
Indeed, it is just these outstanding differences in communal activities,
viewed in relation to their geographic background, which have caused much
of the confusion in the use of the term "community." For community life, as
conditioned by the
distribution of individuals and institutions over an
area, has at least three quite different aspects.
First of all, there is the community viewed almost exclusively in terms of
location and movement. How far has the area itself, by its very topography
and by all its other external and physical characteristics, as railroads,
parks, types of housing, conditioned community formation and exerted a
determining influence upon the
distribution of its inhabitants and upon
their movements and life? To what extent has it had a selective effect in
sifting and sorting families over the area by occupation, nationality, and
economic or social class? To what extent is the work of neighbourhood or
community
[p.145]
institutions promoted or impeded by favorable or unfavorable location? How
far do geographical distances within or without the community symbolise
social distances? This apparently "natural" organisation of the human
community, so similar in the formation of plant and animal communities, may
be called the "ecological community."
No comprehensive study of the human community from this standpoint has yet
been made. A prospectus for such a study is outlined in an earlier chapter
by Professor R. D. McKenzie, in this volume, under the title, "The
Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community."1 Yet there are
several systematic treatises and a rapidly growing literature of scientific
research in the two analogous fields of plant ecology and animal ecology.
The processes of
competition, invasion,
succession, and
segregation
described in elaborate detail for plant and animal communities seem to be
strikingly similar to the operation of these same processes in the human
community. The assertion might even be defended that the student of
community life or the community organisation worker might secure at present
a more adequate understanding of the basic factors in the natural
organisation of the community from Warming's
Oecology of Plants or from
Adams's
Guide to the Study of Animal Ecology than from any other
source.
In the second place, the community may be conceived in terms of the effects
of communal life in a given area upon the formation or the maintenance of a
local culture. Local culture includes those sentiments, forms of conduct,
attachments, and ceremonies which are characteristic of a locality, which
have either originated in the area or have become identified with it. This
aspect of local life may be called "the cultural community."
The immigrant colony in an American city possesses a culture unmistakably
not indigenous but transplanted from the Old World. The telling fact,
however, is not that the immigrant colony maintains its old-world cultural
organisation, but that in its new environment it mediates a cultural
adjustment to its new situation.
How basically culture is dependent upon
place is suggested by the following expressions, "New England conscience,"
"southern hospitality," "Scottish thrift," "Kansas is not a geographical
location so much as a state of mind."
Neighbourhood institutions like the
church, the school, and the settlement are essentially cultural
institutions...
There remains a third standpoint from which the relation of a local area to
group life may be stated. In what ways and to what extent does the fact of
common residence in a locality compel or invite its inhabitants to act
together? Is there, or may there be developed upon a geographical basis, a
community consciousness? Does contiguity by residence insure or predispose
to co-operation in at least those conditions of life inherent in geographic
location, as transportation, water supply, playgrounds, etc.? Finally, what
degree of social and political action can be secured on the basis of local
areas? This is the community of the community organisation worker and of
the politician, and may be described as "the political community." It is
upon this concept of the community as a local area that American political
organisation has been founded.
These three definitions of the community are not perhaps altogether
mutually exclusive. They do, however, represent three distinctly different
aspects of community life that will have to be
[p.147]
recognised in any basic study of the community and of community
organisation. A given local area, like Hyde Park in Chicago, may at the
same time constitute an ecological, cultural, and political community,
while another area like the lower North Side in the same city, which forms
a distinct ecological unit, falls apart into several cultural communities
and cannot, at any rate from the standpoint of a common and effective
public opinion, be said to constitute a going political community. The
Black Belt in Chicago comprises one cultural community but overflows
several ecological areas and has no means of common political action except
through ward lines arbitrarily drawn.
It follows that the boundaries of local areas determined ecologically,
culturally, and politically seldom, if ever, exactly coincide. In fact, for
American cities it is generally true that political boundaries are drawn
most arbitrarily, without regard either to ecological or cultural lines, as
is notoriously the case in the familiar instance of the gerrymander.
Therefore it is fair to raise the question: How far are the deficiencies in
political action through our governmental bodies and welfare action through
our social agencies the result of the failure to base administrative
districts upon ecological or cultural communities?
This analysis of the community into its threefold aspects suggests that the
study of social forces in a local area should assume that the neighbourhood
or the community is the resultant of three main types of determining
influences: first, ecological forces; second, cultural forces; and third,
political forces.
Wirth, L.
1925/10
"A Bibliography of the Urban Community" Chapter ten
in
The City (pages 161-228)
[p.160]
The city... may be regarded as the product of three fundamental
processes: the
ecological, the
economic, and the
cultural, which operate
in the urban area to produce groupings and behaviour which distinguish
that area from its rural periphery.
[p.187]
V. The ecological organisation of the city
Just as the city as a whole is influenced in its position,
function, and
growth by
competitive factors which are not the result of the design of
anyone, so the city has an internal
organisation
which may be termed an
ecological organisation, by which we mean the
spatial
distribution of
population and institutions and the
temporal
sequence of
structure and
function following from the operation of selective, distributive, and
competitive forces tending to produce typical results wherever they are at
work. Every city tends to take on a structural and functional pattern
determined by the ecological factors that are operative.
1. Plant ecologists have been accustomed to use the expression
"natural area"
to refer to well-defined
spatial units having their own peculiar
characteristics. In human ecology the term "natural area" is just as
applicable to groupings according to selective and cultural
characteristics. Land values are an important index to the boundaries of
these local areas. Streets, rivers, railroad properties, street-car lines,
and other distinctive marks or barriers tend to serve as dividing lines
between the natural areas within the city.
2. The
neighbourhood
is typically the product of the village and the small
town. Its distinguishing characteristics are close proximity, co-operation,
intimate social contact, and strong feeling of social consciousness. While
in the modern city we still find people living in close physical proximity
to each other, there is neither close co-operation nor intimate contact,
acquaintanceship, and group consciousness accompanying this spatial
nearness. The neighbourhood has come to mean a small, homogeneous
geographic section of the city, rather than a self-sufficing, co-operative,
and self-conscious group of the population.
[p.191]
3. The local
community and the
neighbourhood in a simple form of
society
society
are
synonymous terms. In the city, however, where specialisation has
gone
very far, the grouping of the population is more nearly by occupation and
income than by kinship or common tradition. Nevertheless, in the large
American city, in particular, we find many local communities made up of
immigrant groups which retain a more or less strong sense of unity,
expressing itself in close proximity and, what is more important, in
separate and common social institutions and highly effective communal
control. These communities may live in relative isolation from each other
or from the native communities. The location of these communities is
determined by competition, which can finally be expressed in terms of land
values and rentals. But these immigrant communities, too, are in a constant
process of change, as the economic condition of the inhabitants changes or
as the areas in which they are located change.
[p.192]
4. The city may be graphically depicted in terms of a series of concentric
circles, representing the
different zones or typical areas
[p.193] of settlement. At the canter we find the business district, where
land values are high. Surrounding this there is an area of deterioration,
where the slums tend to locate themselves. Then follows an area of
workmen's homes, followed in turn by the middle-class apartment section,
and finally by the upper-class residential area. Land values, general
appearance, and function divide.these areas off from each other. These
differences in structure and use get themselves incorporated in law in the
form of zoning ordnances. This is an attempt, in the face of the growth of
the city, to control the ecological forces that are at work.
5. The needs of communal life impose upon the city a certain degree of
order which sometimes expresses itself in a city plan which is an attempt
to predict and to guide the physical structure of the city. The older
European cities appear more like haphazard,
[p.194]
un-planned products of individualistic enterprise than the American cities
with their checkerboard form. And yet, most European cities were built
according to some preconceived plan which attempted to take account of the
needs of the community and the limitations of the environment. There is a
tendency, however, for the city to run counter to the plan which was laid
out for it, as is seen, for instance, in the problems of city-planning of
the city of Washington. The fact is that the city is a dynamic mechanism
which cannot be controlled in advance unless the conditions entering into
its genesis and its growth are fully known. City-planning, which has grown
into a highly technical profession, is coming to be more concerned with
studying the problems of a changing institution, with city growth, and the
forces operating in city life than with the creation of artistic schemes of
city structure. On the one hand the importance of devising a scheme of
wholesome, orderly existence in the city is being recognized, on the other
hand, the limitations of any attempt to make the city conform to an
artificial plan impresses itself upon the experience of the technicians
engaged in this work.
[p.217]
IX. Human nature and city life
The city is remaking human nature and each city is producing its own type
of personality. These influences of city life are of prime interest to the
sociologist. The materials bearing on this question are not primarily those
collected by the scientist, but by the artist. It requires insight and
imagination to perceive and to describe these deep-seated changes which are
being wrought in the nature of man himself.
1. The division of labour and the fine specialisation of occupations and
professions that is so distinctly characteristic of city life has brought
into existence a new mode of thought and new habits and attitudes which
have transformed man in a few generations. The city man tends to think less
in terms of locality than he does in terms of occupation. In a sense he has
become an adjunct of the machine which he operates and the tools he uses.
His interests are organised around his occupation, and his status and mode
of life is determined by it.
[p.219]
2. There is a city mentality which is clearly differentiated from the rural
mind. The city man thinks in mechanistic terms, in rational terms, while
the rustic thinks in naturalistic, magical terms. Not only does this
difference exist between city and country, it exists also between city and
city, and between one area of the city and another. Each city and each part
of the city furnishes a distinct social world to its inhabitants, which
they incorporate in their personality whether they will or no.
...
[p.220]
3. The medium through which man is influenced and modified in the city is
the intricate system of communication. The urban system of communication
takes on a special form. It is not typically the primary, but the
secondary, contact that it produces. The public opinion that is built up in
the city and the morale and ésprit de corps growing out of it
relies on such typical media as the newspaper rather than the gossip
monger; the telephone and the mails rather than the town meeting. The
characteristic urban social unit is the occupational group rather than the
geographical area.
[p.221]
4. The final product of the city environment is found in the new types of
personality which it engenders. Here the latent energies and capacities of
individuals find expression and locate themselves within the range of a
favorable milieu. This possibility of segregating one's self from the crowd
develops and accentuates what there is of individuality in the human
personality. The city gives an opportunity to men to practice their
specialty vocationally and develop it to the utmost degree. It provides
also the stimulus and the conditions which tend to bring out those
temperamental and psychological qualities within the individual through the
multiple behavior patterns which it tolerates.
[p.222]
X. The city and the country
The city and the country represent two opposite poles in modern
civilisation. The difference between the two is not merely one of degree,
but of kind. Each has its own peculiar type of interests, of social
organisation, and of humanity. These two worlds are in part antagonistic
and in part complementary to each other. The one influences the life of the
other, but they are by no means equally matched. The analysis of these
differences, antagonisms, and interacting forces has not passed even the
descriptive stage.
i. The ancient city was regarded as a parasitic growth. It dominated the
country by skill and by force, but contributed little to its welfare. The
modern city, too, is often regarded as a superfluous burden which the rural
sections are carrying. This view of the matter is fast passing away,
however, as the city extends its influence, not by force, but by fulfilling
a set of functions upon which the rural population has become dependent.
The economists have been especially concerned with the antagonistic
interests which the city and the country have presented. These antagonisms
have come to play a political role which influences local, national, and
international affairs.
[p.223]
2. As a result of city life new forms of social organisation have been
developed which are foreign to the country. The family, the
neighbourhood,
the
community, the state have become transformed by city needs into
new
institutions with a different organisation and with a different set of
functions. The social processes that characterise rural life do
not apply
in the city. A new moral order has developed which is fast breaking down
the precedents of an earlier epoch of civilisation.
[p.224]
3. The rustic and the urbanite not only show certain fundamental
differences in personality, but the variations found in the city far exceed
the country, and the rate at which new types are constantly being created
in the city far exceeds that of the country. The rural man still is to a
great extent the product of the nature which surrounds him, while the
urbanite has become a part of the machine with which he works, and has
developed as many different
[p.225] species as there are techniques to which he is devoted. The
attitudes, the sentiments, the life organisation of the city man are as
different from the country man as those of the civilised man are from the
primitive. As the city extends its influence over the country the rural man
is also being remade, and ultimately the differences between the two may
become extinguished.
Park, R.E.
1944
"An Autobiographical Note"
I can trace my interest in sociology to the reading of Goethe's Faust. You
remember that Faust was tired of books and wanted to see the world - the
world of men. At any rate, after leaving college I gave up a position as
teacher in a high school at Red Wing, Minnesota, and went to Minneapolis on
the chance of getting a job as a reporter. I got the job, and I saw a lot
of the world-the kind of a world that a reporter does see. I finished with
Minneapolis in about three years and started out for New York. New York was
the mecca of every ambitious newspaperman. I did not get to New York at
that time but stopped six months in Detroit; went from there to Denver,
finally got to New York. But once there I was shortly disenchanted with the
prospect. The life of the average newspaperman seemed, at that time to be
about eight years. After that if he remained in the profession his value
steadily declined.
Meanwhile I had gained an insight into the functioning of the newspaper.
The newspaper and news became my problem. About that time I was introduced
by
John Dewey, who
was then at Ann Arbor, to a very interesting man named
Franklin Ford. Ford had been a newspaper reporter. He had reported Wall
Street and gained a conception of the
function of the press by observing
the way in which the market responded to news. The market price was, from
his point of view, a kind of public opinion, and, being a man of
philosophic temperament, he drew from this analogy far-reaching inferences.
I cannot go into that. Suffice it to say he came to believe, and I did too,
that with more accurate and adequate reporting of current
events the historical process would be appreciably stepped up, progress
would go forward steadily, without the interruption disorder of depression
or violence, and at a rapid pace.
It was interest in the newspaper that sent me back to the university I had
graduated at Ann Arbor. I decided to
go to Harvard. I studied philosophy
because I hoped to gain insight into the nature and function of the kind of
knowledge we call news. Besides I wanted to a fundamental point of view
from which I could describe the behaviour of society, under the influence
of news, in the precise and universal language of science.
I spent a year at Harvard and then went abroad. I intended to stay abroad
for a year, but I remained for four years. There, listening to the lectures
of
Georg Simmel, at Berlin, I received my only formal instruction
in sociology.
While I was in Berlin I ran across a little treatise on the logic of the
social sciences by a Russian, Kistiakowski. It was the first thing had
found anywhere that dealt with the problem with which I was concerned in
the terms in which I had come to think of it. Kistiakowski had been a
student of Wilhelm Windelband, so I went to Strasburg and later to
Heidelberg, when Windelband succeeded Kuno Fischer in the chair of
philosophy in that university. I wrote a the under Windelband. I called it
Masse und Publikum ("Crowd an Public").
I returned in
1903 to Harvard,
giving my thesis the final touches there. It was during that period that I
was assistant, " assistant professor, in philosophy.
By this time, however, I was sick and tired of the academic world and I
wanted to get back into the world of men. I had never given the ambition I
gained from reading Faust - the ambition to know human nature, know it
widely
and intimately.
While I was at Harvard, William James read to us one day essay on "A
Certain Blindness in Human Beings." I was greatly impressed at the time,
and, as I have reflected upon it since, the ideas suggested there have
assumed a steadily increasing significance.
The "blindness" of which James spoke is the blindness each of is likely to
have for the meaning of other people's lives. At any rate what sociologists
most need to know is what goes on behind the faces of men, what it is that
makes life for each of us either dull or thrilling. For "if you lose the
joy you lose all." But the thing that gives zest! life or makes life dull
is, however, as James says, "a personal secret" which has in every single
case, to be discovered. Otherwise we do not know the world in which we
actually live.
Well this is merely to suggest how, after I had grown tired of books and
while I was looking about for something more thrilling than a logical
formula, I discovered a new interest in the study of the Negro and the race
problem.
This new interest grew out of meeting Booker Washington. The result of that
meeting was that I spent seven winters, partly at Tuskegee but partly
roaming about the South, getting acquainted with the life, the customs, and
the condition of the Negro people.
It happened in this way: While I was living outside of Boston, having just
completed the writing of a Doctor's thesis and having lost for the moment
any ambition to teach, as I had once intended to do, I was invited to
become secretary of the Congo Reform Association. There were at the time
reports of great scandals in the Congo, and the secretary of the Baptist
Foreign Missions, Dr Barbour, wanted someone to help him advertise the
atrocities in order to prepare for some sort of political action which
would insure reform. I was not, at that time, strong for missions, but I
undertook the job. Eventually, however, I became genuinely interested. I
discovered what I might have known in advance - that conditions in the
Congo were about what one might expect, what they have since become, though
not by any means so bad, in Kenya. They were, in short, what they were
certain to be whenever a sophisticated people invades the territories of a
more primitive people in order to exploit their lands and, incidentally, to
uplift and civilise them. I knew enough about
civilisation even at that
time to know that progress, as James once remarked, is a terrible thing. It
is so destructive and wasteful.
I was so interested by this time that I was about to go to Africa to study
the situation at first hand. It was at this moment that Booker Washington
invited me to visit Tuskegee and start my studies of Africa in the southern
states. I think I probably learned more about human nature and society, in
the South under Booker Washington, than I had learned elsewhere in all my
previous studies. I believe in firsthand knowledge not as a substitute but
as a basis for more formal and systematic investigation. But the reason I
profited as much as I did from this experience was due, I am sure, to the
fact that I had a long preparation. As a result I was not, as I found
later, interested in the Negro problem as that problem is ordinarily
conceived. I was interested in the Negro in the South and in the curious
and intricate system which had grown up to define his relations with white
folk. I was interested, most of all, in studying the details of the process
by which the Negro was making and has made his slow but steady advance. I
became convinced, finally, that I was observing the historical process by
which
civilisation, not merely here but elsewhere, has evolved,
drawing
into the circle of its influence an ever widening circle of races and
peoples.
Since then I have been around a good part of the world. I was a year in
Honolulu as research professor, at the University of Hawaii I was in
Peiping a few months, where I learned a great deal about China from the
members of my class at Yenching University. I attended the Fourth Pacific
Science Congress in Java in
1929. Two years later I visited India, South
Africa, and South America. In
July, 1937, I went
again to Brazil, to visit
the city of Bahia, which is a kind of centre of African
culture, so much as
remains of it, in Brazil.
I have told you how I came to be interested in the newspaper, in the crowd
and the public, in collective psychology, generally. I have indicated how I
came to get interested in the races and racial attitudes and the incidental
problems of cultural conflict and cultural change. There remains the
studies of the city, of urban and rural communities, what R. D. McKenzie
and I call, quite properly I believe, "human ecology."
While I was a newspaper reporter I used to do a good deal of writing for
the Sunday papers. In those days the daily papers wrote their own Sunday
papers and did not depend to the extent they do now upon syndicated
articles.
I found that the Sunday paper was willing to publish anything long as it
concerned the local community and was interesting. I wrote about all sorts
of things and became in this way intimately acquaint with many different
aspects of city life. I expect that I have actually covered more ground,
tramping about in cities in different parts the world, than any other
living man. Out of all this I gained, amongst other things, a conception of
the city, the community, and the region not as a geographical phenomenon
merely but as a kind of social organism.
My interest in the newspaper had grown out of the discovery that a reporter
who had the facts was a more effective reformer than an editorial writer
who merely thundered from his pulpit, no matter how eloquently.
According to my earliest conception of a sociologist he was to
be a kind of super-reporter, like the men who write for Fortune. He
was to report a little more accurately, and in a manner a little more
detached than the average, what my friend Ford called the "Big News." The
"Big News" was the long-time trends which recorded what is actually going
on rather than what, on the surface of things, merely seems to be going on.
Andrew Roberts likes to hear from users:
..
In general, we may say that competition determines the position of the
individual in the community;
conflict fixes his
place in society. Location,
position, ecological interdependence - these are the characteristics of the
community. Status, subordination and superordination, control -
these are
the distinctive marks of a
society.
..
...
The term
accommodation, while it has a limited field of application in
biology, has a wide and varied use in sociology. All the social heritages,
traditions, sentiments,
culture, technique, are accommodations - that is,
acquired adjustments that are socially and not biologically transmitted.
They are not a part of the racial inheritance of the individual, but are
acquired by the person in social experience. The two conceptions are
further distinguished in this, that adaptation is an effect of competition,
while accommodation, or more properly social accommodation, is the result
of conflict.
"What his house is to the peasant, the city is to civilised
man. As the house has its household gods, so has the city its protecting
Deity, its local saint. The city also, like the peasant's hut, has its
roots in the soil." (Oswald Spengler,
Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 4. Munchen, 1922, p.105.
"The city is, finally, the natural habitat of civilised man. It
is for that reason a cultural area characterised by its own peculiar
cultural type:"
"It is a quite certain, but never fully recognised, fact," says
Spengler, "that all great cultures are city-born. The
outstanding man of the second generation is a city-building animal. This is
the actual [p.3]
criterion of world-history, as distinguished from the history of mankind:
world-history is the history of city men. Nations, governments, politics,
and religions - all rest on the basic phenomenon of human existence, the
city." (Oswald Spengler,
Untergang des Abendlandes, 4, p. 106)
"The difference of natural talents in different men is, in
reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius
which appears to distinguish
[p.13]
men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon
many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour.
The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a
philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so
much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into
the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they
were perhaps very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows
could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after,
they come to be employed in different occupations. The difference of
talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at
last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any
resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange,
every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of
life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the
same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment
as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talent...
"By primary groups I mean those characterised by intimate
face-to-face association and co-operation. They are primary in several
senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social
nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association,
psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole,
so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and
purpose of the group||Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness
is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual
identification for which "we" is the natural expression. One lives in the
feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that
feeling..."
(Charles Horton Cooley -
Social Organisation, p. 15)
...
This is important because it is, in the last analysis, upon these
institutions in which the immediate and vital interests of life find a
corporate expression that social organisation ultimately rests.
"that phase of biology that considers plants and animals as they exist in
nature, and studies their interdependence, and the relation of each kind
and individual to its environment."
Encyclopedia Americana, New
York
(1923), p. 555.
...
The evolution of new types of industry is another feature that becomes a
determining factor in the redistribution of the country's population. As we
review our census reports we see the emergence each decade of one or more
important industries; first, the textile industry causing concentrations of
population in the eastern states, then the development of the iron and
steel industry with its centre of operations gradually shifting farther and
farther west, and more recently the advent of the automobile and oil
industries making for enormous concentration of population in certain
states of the Union, also the motion-picture industry with its concentrated
centre in southern California. The emergence of a new industry has a .
far-reaching effect in disturbing the status quo of communal life.
Competition soon forces the new industry to concentrate its productive
enterprises in one or two communities; these communities then serve as
great magnets drawing to themselves the appropriate population elements
from communities far and near.
...
[p.73]
(a) initial stage,
2). The community defined
"all
occult arts and sciences, superstition and
folklore."
The term
"community" is widely used by sociologists,
neighbourhood workers,
and others, but often with widely divergent meanings. In research in any
field it is necessary to define our concepts and to make relevant
distinctions. In the literature of the subject there is a growing
disposition to emphasise as one of the fundamental aspects of the community
its geographical setting. Whatever else the community may be, it signifies
individuals, families, groups, or institutions located upon an area and
some or all of the relationships which grow out of this common location.
"
Community is the term which is applied to societies and
social groups
where they are considered from the point of view of the geographical
distribution of the individuals and institutions of which they
are
composed." (Park and Burgess,
Introduction to the Science of Sociology, p. 163)
...
[p.146]
...
[p.188]
Simmel, G.
Die Grossstadte und das Geistesleben, in "Die
Grossstadt" (Dresden, 1903) -
The most important single article on the city from the sociological
standpoint.
(Dictated to his secretary at Fisk University and found among his
papers after his death)
Study
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Index
Blue links go to
entries on this
page, red links
to another page
accommodation:
dictionary -
1921 A -
1921 B -
1925, p.24 -
1925, p.63 -
adaptation:
dictionary -
1921 -
animal ecology
dictionary -
1921Ab -
1925, p.63 -
anthropology:
dictionary -
1925, p.3 -
1925, p.124 -
assimilation:
dictionary -
1921 -
civilisation:
dictionary -
1925, p.43 -
1944 -
Clements
timeline
p.68 -
p.74 -
community
dictionary -
1921 -
1925, p.114 -
p.144
competition:
dictionary
-
1921 -
1925, p.187
conflict:
dictionary
-
1921 -
conscious:
dictionary -
1921 conflict -
1921Ac war -
1921Ad -
1921B -
1925, p.126 (conscious
purposes) -
culture
dictionary -
1921
- 1925, p.1 (Spengler)
- p.3 (anthropology)
- p.3 again
- p.124
- 1944 -
cyclic development:
1925, p.68
distributive and distribution
distribution of commodities
distribution of people
distribution of people and institutions
ecological organisation
ecological process
economic:
economic cooperation
economic conditions
economic
equilibrium
economic interdependence
economic order:
economic organisation
1921Ab -
1925, p.2 -
equilibrium
function:
Freud:
human ecology:
interaction:
natural area:
neighbourhood:
plant ecology
organisation:
secondary relations:
Smith:
society
society and community synonymous or not -
1925, p.191 -
spatial
Spengler:
structure
subconscious:
succession:
successive zones:
temporal
unconscious:
zones:
1925, p.64
1921Ab -
1921Ac -
1921B -
1925, p.23 -
p.43 -
1925, p.115 -
p.144 -
p.187
1921Ab -
1925, p.187
1925, p.160
dictionary -
1925, p.52
1925, p.53
1925, p.43 -
1921 table -
1921B
1921Ac
dictionary -
1921Ab -
1921B -
dictionary -
1921 table -
1921B -
1925, p.68
dictionary
1925, p.24 -
p.44 -
p.187 -
p.223 -
1944 -
people
1925, p.43
dictionary -
1925, p.63 -
dictionary -
1921A -
1921B -
1925, p.24 -
1925, p.2 -
p.188 -
1925, p.14 -
p.24 -
p.43 -
p.52 -
p.144 -
p.188 -
p.191 -
1925, p.50 -
p.63 -
p.68 -
p.188 -
dictionary -
1925, p.187
1925, p.23
timeline
1925, pp.12-13
dictionary -
1921Ab -
1921B -
1921B
again -
dictionary -
1921Ab -
1925, p.63 -
p.187 -
p.188 -
timeline
1925, p.1 -
p.3 -
dictionary -
1925, p.187
dictionary -
1925, p.44
1916, Clements -
1925, p.50 -
p.68 -
p.74 -
1925, p.50
dictionary -
1925, p.63 -
1925, p.187 -
dictionary -
1921 (not conscious)
-
1921B -
1925, p.50 -
1925, p.192 -
