Urban
ecology, pioneered by Chicago sociologists in the 1920s, was central to the
development of human ecology. Indeed the two terms are often used
interchangeably. Urban ecology applies
principles derived from biological science to the explanation of spatial
distribution in urban populations. This is said to result from ‘biotic’
competition for territorial advantage by human groups, each constituted by
social basis, for example, common class position or ethnicity. It was an
approach to the study of cities, social change, and urban life, these theories
were introduced into sociology by the Chicago School to explain the competition
between social groups for scarce resources such as land. The competition
between groups was assumed to increase efficiency and promote a greater
division of labor. These competitive struggles meant that distinctive social groups
had adapted to their local environment, just as the competition between plants
and their adaptation to the local environment in the natural world resulted in
specialization. The balance between competition and co-operation functions to
allocate members of a population to urban niches. The city, like the economy,
was seen to produce a social equilibrium. According to the theory, groups
occupy distinctive ‘natural areas’ or neighbourhoods. The concentric zone model
proposed by Ernest Burgess is an ecological representation of this urban
system. The ecological concepts of invasion, domination, and succession
describe the stages of change occurring as groups relocate due to competitive
pressures. However, unrestrained biotic competition makes social order
impossible, so a second level of social organization (‘culture’) overlays and
limits territorial competition. This involves communication, consensus, and
co-operation, seen in both the natural areas occupied by socially homogeneous
groups, and in city-wide mechanisms of integration, such as mass culture, the
media, and urban politics. This competitive process was also described in terms
of the concentric zone theory in which the central zone of the city is occupied
by banks and the service sector, while the zone of transition emerges as the
central business district expands outwards. Social classes are distributed
through various zones according to rental values, house prices, and the
accessibility of work. The manual workers live in the third zone and the fourth
zone houses the middle class. The fringe of the city is a commuter belt. This
theory helps us to understand how migrants move into run-down areas of the city
where rental costs are low and, as a result of social mobility, they can move
eventually to better-quality housing as they join the middle class. The urban
ecology school embraced a number of prominent American sociologists, including Robert Ezra Park, Ernest W. Burgess,
and Roderick D. McKenzie who published The City (1925). It is not clear that
there is a systematic theory of the urban ecology; there appears to be rather a
collection of assumptions about how cities develop over time. Another member of
the Chicago School, Louis Wirth, following the approach of Georg Simmel, wrote
his famous “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938, American Journal of Sociology) in
which he described the anomie and anonymity of city life.
Urban
ecology has been criticized because its assumptions are too simple to explain
the variations between cities, but its basic notions (about the central
business district, transition zones, and the urban distribution of social
classes) continue to influence the work of modern sociology. Few sociologists
now accept the biologically derived assumptions underlying urban ecology.
However, the urban ecologists’ use of Chicago as a research laboratory
contributed greatly to the development of empirically grounded sociology and
its research methods, influencing directly the development of urban sociology,
community studies, cultural sociology, the study of deviance and illness,
social and religious movements, the family and race relations, and rural
sociology. The recollections by Helen MacGill Hughes of her training in Chicago
shed an interesting light on the (at times naïve) methodology of urban ecology.
Youtube class lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlnEgCSEYkc&ab_channel=AnthropologyforBeginners
