Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T07:31:27.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Chicago's Pragmatic Planners

American Sociology and the Myth of Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sudhir Venkatesh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Chicago is amythic city. Its representation in the popular imagination is varied and has included, at various times, the attributes of a blue-collar town, a city in a garden, and a gangster's paradise. Myths of Chicago “grow abundantly between fact and emotion,” and they selectively and simultaneously evoke and defer attributes of the city. For one perduring myth, social scientists may be held largely responsible: namely, that Chicago is “one of the most planned cities of themodern era,” with a street grid, layout of buildings and waterways, and organization of its residential and commercial architecture that reveal a “geometric certainty” (Suttles 1990). The lasting scholarly fascination with Chicago's geography derives in part from the central role that social scientists played in constructing the planned city. In the 1920s,University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess worked with his colleagues in other social science disciplines to divide the city into communities and neighborhoods. This was a long and deliberate process based on large-scale “social surveys” of several thousand city inhabitants.Their work as members of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) produced the celebrated Chicago “community area”—that is, 75 mutually exclusive geographic areas of human settlement, each of which is portrayed as being socially and culturally distinctive.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , summer 2001 , pp. 275 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barksy, Stephan (1970) “The fragmentation and consolidation of local communities in Chicago.” Ph.D. proposal, Department of Sociology, November 1960. Morris Janowitz Papers. Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Bulmer, Martin (1984) The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bulmer, Martin (1997) “Quantification and Chicago social science in the 1920s: A neglected tradition,” in Plummer, Ken (ed.) The Chicago School: Critical Assessments. Vol.4. London: Routledge:5–31.Google Scholar
Bulmer, Martin (1998) “Chicago sociology and the empirical impulse,” in Tomasi, Luigi (ed.) The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology. Aldershot: Ashgate:75–88.Google Scholar
Burgess, Ernest, and Newcomb, Charles. 1933.Census Data of the City of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chicago Plan Commission (1942) Forty-Four Cities in the City of Chicago. Chicago: Department of Planning.Google Scholar
Chicago Plan Commission (1947) Your City Plan Begins with Your Neighborhood. Chicago: Department of Planning.Google Scholar
de Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Deegan, Mary Jo (1988) Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.Google Scholar
Ehrenhalt, Alan (1995) The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Faris, Robert E. L. (1967) Chicago Sociology,1920-1932. San Francisco: Chandler.Google Scholar
Fine, Gary Alan (1995) A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gottdiener, Mark (1985) The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Grossman, Ron (1981) Guide to Chicago Neighborhoods. Piscataway, N.J.: New Century.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Arnold (1983) Making the Second Ghetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hunter, Albert (1967) “Symbolic communities: A study of Chicago's local communities.” Working Paper no. 174, Center for Social Organizational Studies. Morris Janowitz Papers. Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Hunter, Albert (1974) Symbolic Communities: The Persistence and Change of Chicago's Local Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Janowitz, Morris (1952) The Community Press in an Urban Setting. Glencoe: Free Press.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira (1993) Marxism and the City. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Lal, Barbara Ballis (1990) The Romance of Culture in an Urban Civilization: Robert E. Park on Race and Ethnic Relations in Cities. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri (1974) The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
“‘Life Cycle’ neighborhoods a goal” (1947)Chicago Daily News, May 5, Metro section, p.1.Google Scholar
Linder, Rolf (1990) The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McGreevy, John T. (1996) Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahon, Eileen M. (1995) What Parish Are You From? A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Ross (1990) American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Molotch, Harvey (1976) “The city as a growth machine.” American Journal of Sociology 82: 309–32.Google Scholar
Mott, Seward H. (1946) “The neighborhood concept in city planning.” Urban Land 5(6), June. Located in Chicago Municipal Library: Neighborhood Files.Google Scholar
“Neighborhood names no game, city told” (1993) Chicago Tribune, September 28.Google Scholar
Palmer, Vivien M. (1928) Field Studies in Sociology: A Student's Manual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, Vivien M. (1929) “Social backgrounds of Chicago's local communities.” Chicago: Local Community Research Committee. Papers of Ernest W. Burgess, Special Collections. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W., and McKenzie, Roderick D. (1925) The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Platt, Jennifer (1998) “Chicago methods: Reputations and realities,” in Tomasi, Luigi (ed.) The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology. Aldershot: Ashgate:79–103.Google Scholar
Rast, Joel (1999) Remaking Chicago: The Political Origins of Urban Industrial Change. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Saunders, Peter (1981) Social Theory and the Urban Question. New York: Holmes and Meier.Google Scholar
Schwendinger, Herman, and Schwendinger, Julia R. (1974)The Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology (1883-1922). New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Small, Albion (1910) The Meaning of Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Dennis (1988) The Chicago School: A Liberal Critique of Capitalism. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Smith, T. V., and White, Leonard D. (1929)Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Suttles, Gerald (1972) The Social Construction of Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Suttles, Gerald (1990) The Man-Made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tomasi, Luigi (1998) The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar