Burgess - The Growth of the City PDF

“The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project” from Robert Park et al. (eds), The Cit...

“The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project” from Robert Park et al. (eds), The City (1925) Ernest W. Burgess Editors’ Introduction Ernest W. Burgess (1886–1966), together with Robert Park, established a distinctive program of urban research in the sociology department at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century. Ernest Watson Burgess was born on May 16, 1886 in Tilbury, Ontario, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1913 and served on the faculty there from 1916 to 1951. One of the important concepts he disseminated was succession, a term borrowed from plant ecology. Burgess was the originator of concentric zone theory, which predicted that cities would take the form of five concentric rings growing outwards, with a zone of deterioration immediately surrounding the city center, succeeding to increasingly prosperous residential zones moving out to the city’s edge. Burgess understood the invasion–succession process as a “moving equilibrium” of the social order, a “process of distribution takes place which sifts and sorts and relocates individuals and groups by residence and occupation.” The human ecological research program also involved the extensive use of mapping to reveal the spatial distribution of social problems and to permit comparison between areas. Burgess was particularly interested in maps and used them extensively, requiring all his students to acquire proficiency in basic mapmaking techniques. Burgess and his students scoured the city of Chicago for data that could be used for maps, gleaning information from city agencies and making more extensive use of census data than any other social scientists of the time. This was one of the most important legacies of the urban ecology studies undertaken at the University of Chicago in the 1920s as mapmaking became part of the methodological toolkit of the Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. developing disciplines of sociology, criminology, and public policy. Burgess was not a systematic theoretician but an eclectic promoter of theory and methodology. He sought to develop reliable tools for the prediction of social phenomena such as delinquency, parole violation, divorce, city growth, and adjustment in old age. Human ecology drew criticism for its formalism in the postwar era, and newer sunbelt cities became more decentralized with the decline of railroad transportation and the onset of automobile travel and highways. In particular, Park and Burgess’ search for “natural” or “organic” process was criticized as a superficial under- taking that neglected both the social and cultural dimensions of urban life and the political-economic impact of industrialization on urban geography. Overall, the urban ecology studies of the 1920s were largely oblivious to issues of class, race, gender, and ethnicity. However, the concentric rings model has become one of the more famous formulations in urban sociology and is still applied creatively to studies of urban processes. In The Ecology of Fear (1992), Mike Davis adapts the concentric rings model to describe the exclusionary fortress of Los Angeles, a metropolis with zones of “homeless containment” and drug enforcement and neighborhood watches in the central city and near suburbs, with gated communities and prisons on the urban periphery. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  92 ERNEST W. BURGESS Burgess drew from biology more than did Robert Park, through his references to concepts like “metabolism” and “pulse.” Through the organic metaphor, the city can be compared to a body, with metabolic and circulatory processes. He thought of mobility as the “pulse of the community.” He connected the growth of cities with increasing mobility and movement of people and cultures. Geographic and cultural mobility put people in contact with increasingly diverse and unconventional behaviors. Mobility could thus breed social disorganization in the form of crime, deviance, and promiscuous behavior. Burgess viewed mobility and social disorganization not as pathological but as normal. Unusual behaviors were particularly focused in the central city and “zone-in-transition” encompassing both the “bright light” and “red light” areas of the city. As displayed in Times Square in New York and Hollywood in Los Angeles, the respectable theater district of a city attracts a critical mass of nocturnal pedestrians that can also support more licentious activities or cheap amusements. Like a body, the city can be seen as having a “heart,” erogenous zones, and something like a hormonal metabolism. The city is a site of excitement, adventure, and thrills. The bright light and red light areas of the city are crucial components of the metropolitan mosaic of social worlds. They give a city its cultural and subcultural identity and are the focal points for the emergence of artistic and bohemian communities. While Burgess mainly fretted about the negative effects of mobility on social disorganization, we may see mobility can also produce positive effects on cultural life and community. Ernest W. Burgess served as the twenty-fourth President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address “Social Planning and the Mores” was delivered at the organization’s annual meeting in Chicago in December 1934. His editing roles were extensive, and he was Editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 1936 to 1940. He founded the Family Study Center at the University of Chicago, and was involved in a number of professional associations. The outstanding fact of modern society is the out into clear relief certain distinctive character- growth of great cities. Nowhere else have the istics of urban as compared with rural populations. enormous changes which the machine industry has The larger proportion of women to men in the cities made in our social life registered themselves with than in the open country, the greater percentage such obviousness as in the cities. In the United States of youth and middle-aged, the higher ratio of the transition from a rural to an urban civilization, the foreign-born, the increased heterogeneity of though beginning later than in Europe, has taken occupation increase with the growth of the city place, if not more rapidly and completely, at any and profoundly alter its social structure. These rate more logically in its most characteristic forms. variations in the composition of population are All the manifestations of modern life which are indicative of all the changes going on in the social peculiarly urban – the skyscraper, the subway, the organization of the community. In fact, these department store, the daily newspaper, and social changes are part of the growth of the city and Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. work – are characteristically American. The more suggest the nature of the processes of growth. subtle changes in our social life, which in their cruder The only aspect of growth adequately described manifestations are termed “social problems,” by Bücher and other students of Weber was the problems that alarm and bewilder us, as divorce, rather obvious process of the aggregation of urban delinquency, and social unrest, are to be found in population. Almost as overt a process, that of their most acute forms in our largest American cities. expansion, has been investigated from a different and The profound and “subversive” forces which very practical point of view by groups interested have wrought these changes are measured in the in city planning, zoning, and regional surveys. physical growth and expansion of cities. That is Even more significant than the increasing density the significance of the comparative statistics of of urban population is its correlative tendency to Weber, Bücher, and other students. overflow, and so to extend over wider areas, and These statistical studies, although dealing to incorporate these areas into a larger communal mainly with the effects of urban growth, brought life. This paper, therefore, will treat first of all The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  “THE GROWTH OF THE CITY” 93 the expansion of the city, and then of the less-known nuclei of denser town growth, most of which processes of urban metabolism and mobility which represent the central areas of the various towns are closely related to expansion. from which it has grown, and these nuclear patches are connected by the less densely urbanized areas which began as suburbs of EXPANSION AS PHYSICAL GROWTH these towns. The latter are still usually rather less continuously occupied by buildings, and The expansion of the city from the standpoint often have many open spaces. of the city plan, zoning, and regional surveys is thought of almost wholly in terms of its physical These great aggregates of town dwellers are a T growth. Traction studies have dealt with the new feature in the distribution of man over the earth. W development of transportation in its relation to the At the present day there are from thirty to forty of O distribution of population throughout the city. them, each containing more than a million people, The surveys made by the Bell Telephone Company whereas only a hundred years ago there were, and other public utilities have attempted to outside the great centers of population on the forecast the direction and the rate of growth of the waterways of China, not more than two or three. city in order to anticipate the future demands for Such aggregations of people are phenomena of the extension of their services. In the city plan the great geographical and social importance; they location of parks and boulevards, the widening give rise to new problems in the organization of the of traffic streets, the provision for a civic center, life and well-being of their inhabitants and in their are all in the interest of the future control of the varied activities. Few of them have yet developed physical development of the city. a social consciousness at all proportionate to their This expansion in area of our largest cities is now magnitude, or fully realized themselves as definite being brought forcibly to our attention by the Plan groupings of people with many common interests, for the Study of New York and Its Environs, and emotions and thoughts. by the formation of the Chicago Regional Planning In Europe and America the tendency of the Association, which extends the metropolitan district great city to expand has been recognized in the term of the city to a radius of 50 miles, embracing “the metropolitan area of the city,” which far over- 4,000 square miles of territory. Both are attempt- runs its political limits, and in the case of New York ing to measure expansion in order to deal with the and Chicago, even state lines. The metropolitan area changes that accompany city growth. In England, may be taken to include urban territory that is phys- where more than one-half of the inhabitants live in ically contiguous, but it is coming to be defined by cities having a population of 100,000 and over, that facility of transportation that enables a business the lively appreciation of the bearing of urban man to live in a suburb of Chicago and to work in expansion on social organization is thus expressed the loop, and his wife to shop at Marshall Field’s by C. B. Fawcett: and attend grand opera in the Auditorium. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. One of the most important and striking devel- opments in the growth of the urban populations EXPANSION AS A PROCESS of the more advanced peoples of the world during the last few decades has been the No study of expansion as a process has yet been appearance of a number of vast urban aggregates, made, although the materials for such a study and or conurbations, far larger and more numerous intimations of different aspects of the process are than the great cities of any preceding age. contained in city planning, zoning, and regional These have usually been formed by the simul- surveys. The typical processes of the expansion taneous expansion of a number of neighboring of the city can best be illustrated, perhaps, by a series towns, which have grown out toward each of concentric circles, which may be numbered other until they have reached a practical to designate both the successive zones of urban coalescence in one continuous urban area. extension and the types of areas differentiated in Each such conurbation still has within it many the process of expansion. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  94 ERNEST W. BURGESS in gs ell Dw Are a t L igh ht ily rig m B Fa A iden t i a l Ho t e pa Res ls le r Little Sing tment Sicily I Deutschland LOOP II ZONE IN Chinatown TRANSITION III Ho ZONE OF “Two Flat” WORKINGMEN’S Black Belt us Area HOMES IV s e RESIDENTIAL ZONE Br V ig COMMUTER ht Lig ZONE ht A Re Re rea si str de icted nti al D istrict n tio Sec Bungalow Figure 1 The concentric zone model of the city, based on Chicago This chart represents an ideal construction of the satellite cities – within a thirty- to sixty-minute Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. tendencies of any town or city to expand radially ride of the central business district. from its central business district – on the map This chart brings out clearly the main fact of “The Loop” (I). Encircling the downtown area expansion, namely, the tendency of each inner there is normally an area in transition, which is being zone to extend its area by the invasion of the next invaded by business and light manufacture (II). outer zone. This aspect of expansion may be A third area (III) is inhabited by the workers in called succession, a process which has been industries who have escaped from the area of studied in detail in plant ecology. If this chart is deterioration (II) but who desire to live within easy applied to Chicago, all four of these zones were in access of their work. Beyond this zone is the its early history included in the circumference of “residential area” (IV) of high-class apartment build- the inner zone, the present business district. The ings or of exclusive “restricted” districts of single present boundaries of the area of deterioration family dwellings. Still farther, out beyond the city were not many years ago those of the zone limits, is the commuters’ zone – suburban areas, or now inhabited by independent wage-earners, and The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  “THE GROWTH OF THE CITY” 95 within the memories of thousands of Chicagoans co-operation is an example of co-operation with- contained the residences of the “best families.” It out a shred of what the “spirit of co-operation” is hardly needs to be added that neither Chicago nor commonly thought to signify. The great public any other city fits perfectly into this ideal scheme. utilities are a part of the mechanization of life Complications are introduced by the lake front, the in great cities, and have little or no other meaning Chicago River, railroad lines, historical factors in for social organization. the location of industry, the relative degree of the Yet the processes of expansion, and especially resistance of communities to invasion, etc. the rate of expansion, may be studied not only in Besides extension and succession, the general the physical growth and business development, process of expansion in urban growth involves the but also in the consequent changes in the social T antagonistic and yet complementary processes of organization and in personality types. How far is W concentration and decentralization. In all cities the growth of the city, in its physical and technical O there is the natural tendency for local and outside aspects, matched by a natural but adequate re- transportation to converge in the central business adjustment in the social organization. What, for a city, district. In the downtown section of every large city is a normal rate of expansion, a rate of expansion we expect to find the department stores, the with which controlled changes in the social organ- skyscraper office buildings, the railroad stations, the ization might successfully keep pace? great hotels, the theaters, the art museum, and the city hall. Quite naturally, almost inevitably, the economic, cultural, and political life centers SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND here. The relation of centralization to the other DISORGANIZATION AS PROCESSES processes of city life may be roughly gauged by OF METABOLISM the fact that over half a million people daily enter and leave Chicago’s “loop.” More recently sub- These questions may best be answered, perhaps, business centers have grown up in outlying zones. by thinking of urban growth as a resultant of These “satellite loops” do not, it seems, represent organization and disorganization analogous to the the “hoped for” revival of the neighborhood, but anabolic and katabolic processes of metabolism in rather a telescoping of several local communities the body. In what way are individuals incorporated into a larger economic unity. The Chicago of into the life of a city? By what process does a yesterday, an agglomeration of country towns person become an organic part of his society? The and immigrant colonies, is undergoing a process natural process of acquiring culture is by birth. of reorganization into a centralized decentralized A person is born into a family already adjusted to system of local communities coalescing into sub- a social environment – in this case the modern city. business areas visibly or invisibly dominated by the The natural rate of increase of population most central business district. The actual processes of favorable for assimilation may then be taken as the what may be called centralized decentralization excess of the birth-rate over the death-rate, but is are now being studied in the development of the this the normal rate of city growth? Certainly, Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. chain store, which is only one illustration of the modern cities have increased and are increasing change in the basis of the urban organization. in population at a far higher rate. However, the Expansion, as we have seen, deals with the natural rate of growth may he used to measure physical growth of the city, and with the extension the disturbances of metabolism caused by any of the technical services that have made city life excessive increase, as those which followed the great not only livable, but comfortable, even luxurious. influx of southern Negroes into northern cities Certain of these basic necessities of urban life are since the war. In a similar way all cities show possible only through a tremendous development deviations in composition by age and sex from of communal existence. Three millions of people a standard population such as that of Sweden, in Chicago are dependent upon one unified water unaffected in recent years by any great emigration system, one giant gas company, and one huge or immigration. Here again, marked variations, electric light plant. Yet, like most of the other as any great excess of males over females, or of aspects of our communal urban life, this economic females over males, or in the proportion of children, The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  96 ERNEST W. BURGESS or of grown men or women, are symptomatic of thrifty. This is an area of second immigrant settle- abnormalities in social metabolism. ment, generally of the second generation. It is the Normally the processes of disorganization and region of escape from the slum, the Deutschland organization may be thought of as in reciprocal of the aspiring Ghetto family. For Deutschland relationship to each other, and as co-operating in (literally “Germany”) is the name given, half in a moving equilibrium of social order toward an end envy, half in derision, to that region beyond the vaguely or definitely regarded as progressive. So Ghetto where successful neighbors appear to be far as disorganization points to reorganization and imitating German Jewish standards of living. But makes for more efficient adjustment, disorganiza- the inhabitant of this area in turn looks to the tion must be conceived not as pathological, but “Promised Land” beyond, to its residential hotels, as normal. Disorganization as preliminary to re- its apartment-house region, its “satellite loops,” organization of attitudes and conduct is almost and its “bright light” areas. invariably the lot of the newcomer to the city, and This differentiation into natural economic and the discarding of the habitual, and often of what cultural groupings gives form and character to the has been to him the moral, is not infrequently city. For segregation offers the group, and thereby accompanied by sharp mental conflict and sense the individuals who compose the group, a place of personal loss. Oftener, perhaps, the change and a role in the total organization of city life. gives sooner or later a feeling of emancipation and Segregation limits development in certain directions, an urge toward new goals. but releases it in others. These areas tend to In the expansion of the city a process of accentuate certain traits, to attract and develop distribution takes place which sifts and sorts and their kind of individuals, and so to become further relocates individuals and groups by residence and differentiated. occupation. The resulting differentiation of the The division of labor in the city likewise cosmopolitan American city into areas is typically illustrates disorganization, reorganization, and all from one pattern, with only interesting minor increasing differentiation. The immigrant from modifications. Within the central business district rural communities in Europe and America seldom or on an adjoining street is the “main stem” of brings with him economic skill of any great value “hobohemia,” the teeming Rialto of the homeless in our industrial, commercial, or professional life. migratory man of the Middle West.1 In the zone of Yet interesting occupational selection has taken deterioration encircling the central business section place by nationality, explainable more by racial are always to be found the so-called “slums” and temperament or circumstance than by old-world “bad lands,” with their submerged regions of economic background, as Irish policemen, Greek poverty, degradation, and disease, and their under- ice-cream parlors, Chinese laundries, Negro worlds of crime and vice. Within a deteriorating porters, Belgian janitors, etc. area are rooming-house districts, the purgatory The facts that in Chicago one million (996,589) of “lost souls.” Near by is the Latin Quarter, where individuals gainfully employed reported 509 creative and rebellious spirits resort. The slums occupations, and that over 1,000 men and women Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. are also crowded to overflowing with immigrant in Who’s Who gave 116 different vocations, give colonies – the Ghetto, Little Sicily, Greektown, some notion of how in the city the minute differ- Chinatown – fascinatingly combining old world entiation of occupation “analyzes and sifts the heritages and American adaptations. Wedging population, separating and classifying the diverse out from here is the Black Belt, with its free and elements.” These figures also afford some intima- disorderly life. The area of deterioration, while tion of the complexity and complication of the essentially one of decay, of stationary or declining modern industrial mechanism and the intricate population, is also one of regeneration, as witness segregation and isolation of divergent economic the mission, the settlement, the artists’ colony, groups. Interrelated with this economic division radical centers – all obsessed with the vision of labor is a corresponding division into social of a new and better world. classes and into cultural and recreational groups. The next zone is also inhabited predomin- From this multiplicity of groups, with their differ- ately by factory and shop workers, but skilled and ent patterns of life, the person finds his congenial The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  “THE GROWTH OF THE CITY” 97 social world and – what is not feasible in the constant situation, as in routine movement. Move- narrow confines of a village – may move and live ment that is significant for growth implies a change in widely separated, and perchance conflicting, of movement in response to a new stimulus or worlds. Personal disorganization may be but the situation. Change of movement of this type is failure to harmonize the canons of conduct of two called mobility. Movement of the nature of routine divergent groups. finds its typical expression in work. Change of If the phenomena of expansion and metabolism movement, or mobility, is characteristically ex- indicate that a moderate degree of disorganization pressed in adventure. The great city, with its “bright may and does facilitate social organization, they lights,” its emporiums of novelties and bargains, its indicate as well that rapid urban expansion is palaces of amusement, its underworld of vice and T accompanied by excessive increases in disease, crime, its risks of life and property from accident, W crime, disorder, vice, insanity, and suicide, rough robbery, and homicide, has become the region O indexes of social disorganization. But what are the of the most intense degree of adventure and danger, indexes of the causes, rather than of the effects, of excitement and thrill. the disordered social metabolism of the city? The Mobility, it is evident, involves change, new excess of the actual over the natural increase of popu- experience, stimulation. Stimulation induces a lation has already been suggested as a criterion. response of the person to those objects in his The significance of this increase consists in the immi- environment which afford expression for his wishes. gration into a metropolitan city like New York and For the person, as for the physical organism, Chicago of tens of thousands of persons annually. stimulation is essential to growth. Response to Their invasion of the city has the effect of a tidal stimulation is wholesome so long as it is a cor- wave inundating first the immigrant colonies, the related integral reaction of the entire personality. ports of first entry, dislodging thousands of inhab- When the reaction is segmental, that is, detached itants who overflow into the next zone, and so on from, and uncontrolled by, the organization of and on until the momentum of the wave has spent personality, it tends to become disorganizing or its force on the last urban zone. The whole effect pathological. That is why stimulation for the sake is to speed up expansion, to speed up industry, to of stimulation, as in the restless pursuit of pleasure, speed up the “junking” process in the area of partakes of the nature of vice. deterioration (II). These internal movements The mobility of city life, with its increase in of the population become the more significant for the number and intensity of stimulations, tends study. What movement is going on in the city, and inevitably to confuse and to demoralize the person. how may this movement be measured? It is easier, For an essential element in the mores and in of course, to classify movement within the city personal morality is consistency, consistency of than to measure it. There is the movement from the type that is natural in the social control of the residence to residence, change of occupation, labor primary group. Where mobility is the greatest, and turnover, movement to and from work, move- where in consequence primary controls break ment for recreation and adventure. This leads down completely, as in the zone of deterioration Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. to the question: What is the significant aspect in the modern city, there develop areas of demor- of movement for the study of the changes in city alization, of promiscuity, and of vice. life? The answer to this question leads directly In our studies of the city it is found that areas to the important distinction between movement of mobility are also the regions in which are found and mobility. juvenile delinquency, boys’ gangs, crime, poverty, wife desertion, divorce, abandoned infants, vice. These concrete situations show why mobility is MOBILITY AS THE PULSE OF perhaps the best index of the state of metabolism THE COMMUNITY of the city. Mobility may be thought of in more than a fanciful sense, as the “pulse of the community.” Movement, per se, is not an evidence of change or Like the pulse of the human body, it is a process of growth. In fact, movement may be a fixed and which reflects and is indicative of all the changes unchanging order of motion, designed to control a that are taking place in the community, and which The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  98 ERNEST W. BURGESS is susceptible of analysis into elements which may Land values, since they reflect movement, be stated numerically. afford one of the most sensitive indexes of mobil- The elements entering into mobility may be ity. The highest land values in Chicago are at the classified under two main heads: (1) the state of point of greatest mobility in the city, at the corner mutability of the person, and (2) the number and of State and Madison Streets, in the Loop. A kind of contacts or stimulations in his environ- traffic count showed that at the rush period 31,000 ment. The mutability of city populations varies people an hour, or 210,000 men and women in six- with sex and age composition, the degree of teen and one-half hours, passed the southwest detachment of the person from the family and corner. For over ten years land values in the Loop from other groups. All these factors may be have been stationary, but in the same time they have expressed numerically. The new stimulations to doubled, quadrupled, and even sextupled in the which a population responds can be measured in strategic corners of the “satellite loops,” an accur- terms of change of movement or of increasing ate index of the changes which have occurred. Our contacts. Statistics on the movement of urban investigations so far seem to indicate that variations population may only measure routine, but an in land values, especially where correlated with increase at a higher ratio than the increase of differences in rents, offer perhaps the best single population measures mobility. In 1860 the horse- measure of mobility, and so of all the changes tak- car lines of New York City carried about ing place in the expansion and growth of the city. 50,000,000 passengers; in 1890 the trolley cars In general outline, I have attempted to present (and a few surviving horse-cars) transported about the point of view and methods of investigation 500,000,000; in 1921, the elevated, subway, surface, which the department of sociology is employing in and electric and steam suburban lines carried its studies in the growth of the city, namely, to a total of more than 2,500,000,000 passengers. In describe urban expansion in terms of extension, Chicago the total annual rides per capita on the succession, and concentration; to determine how surface and elevated lines were 164 in 1890; 215 expansion disturbs metabolism when disorganiza- in 1900; 320 in 1910; and 338 in 1921. In addition, tion is in excess of organization; and, finally, to the rides per capita on steam and electric suburban define mobility and to propose it as a measure lines almost doubled between 1916 (23) and 1921 both of expansion and metabolism, susceptible to (41), and the increasing use of the automobile precise quantitative formulation, so that it may be must not be overlooked. For example, the number regarded almost literally as the pulse of the com- of automobiles in Illinois increased from 131,140 munity. In a way, this statement might serve as in 1915 to 833,920 in 1923. an introduction to any one of five or six research Mobility may be measured not only by these projects under way in the department: The project, changes of movement, but also by increase of however, in which I am directly engaged is an contacts. While the increase of population of attempt to apply these methods of investigation to Chicago in 1912–22 was less than 25 per cent a cross-section of the city – to put this area, as it (23.6 per cent), the increase of letters delivered to were, under the microscope, and so to study in more Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Chicagoans was double that (49.6 per cent) – detail and with greater control and precision the (from 693,084,196 to 1,038,007,854). In 1912 processes which have been described here in the New York had 8.8 telephones; in 1922, 16.9 per 100 large. For this purpose the West Side Jewish inhabitants. Boston had, in 1912, 10.1 telephones; community has been selected. This community ten years later, 19.5 telephones per 100 inhabitants. includes the so-called “Ghetto,” or area of first In the same decade the figures for Chicago in- settlement, and Lawndale, the so-called “Deutsch- creased from 12.3 to 21.6 per 100 population. But land,” or area of second settlement. This area has increase of the use of the telephone is probably certain obvious advantages for this study, from the more significant than increase in the number of standpoint of expansion, metabolism, and mobility. telephones. The number of telephone calls in It exemplifies the tendency to expansion radially Chicago increased from 606,131,928 in 1914 to from the business center of the city. It is now 944,010,586 in 1922, an increase of 55.7 per cent, relatively a homogeneous cultural group. Lawndale while the population increased only 13.4 per cent. is itself an area in flux, with the tide of migrants The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.  “THE GROWTH OF THE CITY” 99 still flowing in from the Ghetto and a constant egress NOTE to more desirable regions of the residential zone. In this area, too, it is also possible to study how 1 For a study of this cultural area of city life see the expected outcome of this high rate of mobility Nels Anderson (1923) The Hobo. Chicago: in social and personal disorganization is counter- University of Chicago Press. acted in large measure by the efficient communal organization of the Jewish community. T W O Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:51.