Week 7: “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project”

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 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.