Urban Ecology

 

Urban Ecology

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