Three of this first week’s readings provide a historical grounding of urban theory. The earliest example is DuBois, from 1899, providing a first look at urban research in his study on African Americans in Philadelphia. We see him grapple with the pain of imprecision in social science research.
Then, there is theorizing and analysis from Robert Park in 1915 and Ernest Burgess in 1925. Park, writing on the cusp of World War I, is full of excitement over the questions that can be asked through the study of cities. He has an almost romantic view of what can be learned about humans through cities, claiming that the urban environment is the “natural of the civilized man” (especially Jews???). Park wrote of the city both as a construction and reflection of its people and also as a self-contained object of study. From this writing, a core question about cities emerges: who effects who? How does a city reflect is people, and how do people change based on their city? This is particularly pronounced in economic terms as he approaches the new pool of vocations available to people through division of labor, which highlights these questions of exchange of cause and effect regarding how one’s corner of the economy may yield other civic and political identities and beliefs.
In the intervening years between Park and Burgess, I could see some of the effects of the success of the prohibition movement and the moral crusading of the early women’s movements. Their language seems to represent a shift in the prevalence in the politics of fear about morality and how it is maintained in an urban environment with high crime and delinquency. What Park calls “the disintegrating influences of city life” are given more color as an “underworld of vice and crime…the most intense degree of adventure and danger, excitement and thrill.” But he builds on Park’s work primarily by going deeper into the meanings that are constructed around particular areas of cities and the processes of expansion. Instead of seeing the city as a concrete unit of study, he describes “processes of disorganization and organization.” He begins to see the unfolding of some of Park’s ideas, recognizing the potential divisive social effects of division of labor. Particularly interesting to read in the current political context is how he grapples with migration. The combination of foreign immigration and the Great Migration yield what cities may experience as outside intervention, disturbances, “the excess of the actual over the natural increase of population.” This construction – that migration is not part of the natural increase of population – is still felt in today’s politics.
I am curious about how two terms in particular evolved over the course of the 20th century, that either changed meanings or fell out of fashion. One is “sentiment” – something Park associates with people’s relationship to neighborhoods, but is also used as a counter to the rational life that is supposed to exist in cities. The second is mobility, which they both explain in great detail, but perhaps due to the difference in how I conceive of it, remains a bit opaque to me, though is clearly central to the early development of urban theory.
