Dixon P. 1971

City and "Community": The Urban Theory of Robert ParkAuthor(s): Park Dixon GoistSource: American Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1971), pp. 46-59Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2711586 .Accessed: 14/10/2011 06:58

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PARK DIXON GOIST Case Western Reserve University

City and "Community": The Urban Theory of

Robert Park

SEVERAL RECENT STUDIES ASSERT THAT ONE OF THE LEADING THEMES IN

American life since the Civil War has been a "search for community."' It has further been pointed out that the small town is one of the important images influencing this quest. Whatever the reality, many Americans have equated the town with such qualities as confidence, easy familiarity, shared experience, equal participation in a common life, freedom and reli- ance on the simple values of honesty and hard work. On the basis of these characteristics, the town remembered or wished for acts as an image of community.2

In contrast to this pervasive image, only rarely have Americans identi- fied community with the city. Indeed, a second major theme in recent scholarship argues that many of America's leading intellectuals have been "anti-urban" for a multitude of reasons, including their failure to find com- munity in the large industrial city. In their study The Intellectual Versus The City, Morton and Lucia White have found what they call a "powerful

'Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); R. Jackson Wilson, In Quest of Community. Social Philosophy in the United States, 1860- 1920 (New York: Wiley, 1968); The Search for Community in Modern America, ed. E. Digby Baltzell (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Stanley Buder has recently interpreted the work of Ebenezer Howard, the Englishman who originated the modern garden city idea, within the framework of the search for community. "Ebenezer Howard: The Genesis of a Town Planning Movement," Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35 (Nov. 1969), 390-98. Buder notes that "One of twentieth century man's most important and elusive quests is his search for community in an increasingly mobile, impersonal, and bureaucratic world" (p. 396).

2Page Smith, As a City Upon a Hill. The Town in American History (New York: Knopf, 1966), passim, esp. pp. 213-34, 258-307; Anselm L. Strauss, Images of the American City (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1961), pp. 124-98; Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return. A Literary Odyssey of the 1920's (Viking ed.: New York. 1956), pp. 13-14, 209-14.

City and "Community" 47

tradition of anti-urbanism" within the American intellectual tradition. From Thomas Jefferson to Lewis Mumford, the Whites claim leading in- tellectuals have launched enough complaints against the city to constitute this anti-urban heritage. They assert that especially after the Civil War, many intellectuals were nostalgic over "a cozier, warmer form of human association" than the industrial metropolis provided.3

But an effort to understand the urban thought of a particular intellectual might benefit more from seeing it within the framework of a search for community than by applying pro- or anti-urban categories. Robert Park, who originally came from a small town and then spent a good portion of his life trying to understand the modern metropolis, offers an interesting example. An eminent urban sociologist, Park is one of the intellectuals the Whites have included in their study. According to their interpretation, he is essentially anti-urban because like John Dewey and Jane Addams, he had "deep reservations and feelings of uneasiness" about the 20th century city. These qualms arose from a favorable estimate of pre-industrial modes of life, and disappointment over the impossibility of returning to a rural past.

Viewed within the context of the search for community, however, Park's work can be seen as a more subtle and meaningful contribution than the limiting anti-urban category suggests. In this new context, Park's thought emerges as a "double-visioned" response to complex social change, whereby one simultaneously looks backward and forward, testing the valid- ity of older forms, seeking out their altered functions and attempting to understand the potential of newer forces. The following paragraphs deal with Park from this perspective, emphasizing the origins, development and meaning of his efforts to come to terms with the metropolis, and with his conception of the possibilities for community within a rapidly chang- ing urban world.4

3Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Mentor Books ed.: New York, 1964), pp. 15, 159.

4Ibid., pp. 160, 167. Some scholars have accepted the anti-urban interpretation in general and/or with regard to Park in particular. Scot Donaldson, following the Whites, maintains, "It is both ironic and appropriate that Park, the nation's first great urban sociol- ogist, should have revealed a nostalgic preference for the secure values of an agrarian civilization, of the family on the farm." "City and Country: Marriage Proposals," Ameri- can Quarterly, 20 (Fall 1968), 553. Peter Orleans, like Donaldson, cites the Whites in ob- serving that Park's emphasis on spatial continguity was anti-urban. "Robert Park and Social Area Analysis: A Convergence of Traditions in Urban Sociology," Urban Affairs Quarterly, I (June 1966), 13. Peter J. Schmitt has made a convincing argument for dis- tinguishing between an "arcadian" myth-primarily urban in origin and character-and traditional agrarianism, but in his discussion of Park the sociologist is made to sound as though he were making a "case against the city." Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 179-80. On the other hand, the validity of the anti-urban category has been questioned by a number of students:

48 American Quarterly

Park was fifty years old when he began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1914. He used the observations of a lifetime in helping found the "Chicago school" of urban sociology. One of the leading figures in American sociology, Park inspired a whole body of urban research and helped develop an ecological perspective for studying the industrial me- tropolis.5 Prior to his arrival in Chicago, he had sought for a life's work which would satisfy his need to combine thought and action.

Born in 1864 in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Park grew up in a small South Dakota prairie town.6 He attended the University of Minnesota for a year and then the University of Michigan, graduating from the latter in 1887. While at Michigan he was part of a circle which included John Dewey, George H. Mead and Franklin Ford, men whose interest in human

Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 53-54; Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settle- ments and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 23, 76, 264; Michael H. Cowan, City of the West: Emerson, America, and Ur- ban Metaphor (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967); Paul Carter, The Twenties in America (New York: Crowell, 1968), pp. 95-98; Park Dixon Goist, "Lewis Mumford and 'Anti-Urbanism,"' Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35 (Sept. 1969), 340-47.

5Park's ecological approach to the city is best exemplified in his famous essay, "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment," American Journal of Sociology, 20 (Mar. 1915), 577-612, rev. and repr. in The City, eds. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Roderick D. McKenzie (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1925-67), pp. 1-46. Criticism and evaluations of Park and/or the ecological approach include: Milla Aissa Alihan, Social Ecology: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1938); Warner Gettys, "Human Ecology and Social Theory," Social Forces, 18 (May 1940), 469-76; Walter Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947); William Kolb, "The Social Structure and Functions of Cities," Economic Development and Culture Change, 3 (Oct. 1954), 30-46; Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies (Torchbook ed.: New York: 1964), pp. 13-46; Herbert J. Gans, "Urbanism and Sub- urbanism as Ways of Life: A Re-evaluation of Definitions," Human Behavior and Social Process, ed. Arnold Rose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), pp. 625-48; Leonard Reiss- man, The Urban Process: Cities in Industrial Societies (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 93-121; Orleans, "Robert Park and Social Area Analysis"; Richard Sennett, ed. Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 13-19.

6Biographical information on Park was obtained from the following sources: Ernest W. Burgess, "In Memoriam: Robert E. Park, 1864-1944," American Journal of Sociology, 49 (Mar. 1944), 478, and "Contributions of Robert E. Park to Sociology," Sociology and Social Research, 29 (Mar.-Apr. 1945), 255-61, and "Research in Urban Society: A Long View," Contributions to Urban Sociology, eds. Burgess and Donald J. Bogue (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 1-11; Ellsworth Faris, "Robert E. Park, 1864- 1944," American Sociological Review, 9 (June 1944), 322-25; Charles S. Johnson, "Robert E. Park: In Memoriam," Sociology and Social Research, 28 (May-June 1944), 354-58; Erle Fiske Young, "Robert E. Park," Sociology and Social Research, 28 (July-Aug. 1944), 436-39; New York Times, Feb. 8, 1944; Who Was Who in America, 1943-1950, Alihan, Social Ecology, chap. 2; Park, "An Autobiographical Note," Race and Culture, Vol. I, Collected Papers of Robert E. Park, ed. E. H. Hughes et al. (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), pp. v-ix.

City and "Community" 49

behavior influenced Park's later efforts. After graduating he entered news- paper work and from 1887 to 1898 worked in Minneapolis, Detroit, Den- ver, New York and Chicago. As a reporter, feature writer and reform- minded city editor, he was fascinated by the social function of news, but became disgruntled with the limited scope of merely presenting the facts. His earlier contact with Dewey, Mead and Ford had convinced him that there were more basic causes for the facts he was reporting and editing.

Thus in 1898 Park quit newspaper work and for the next few years pursued an academic career. First he entered Harvard, taking an M.A. in philosophy and then studied in Germany, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1904. Upon returning to the United States, he taught at Harvard for a year, but was no longer satisfied with academic life. He turned again to journalism for a short period, during which time he became interested in race rela- tions. To pursue this new interest Park went to Tuskegee, Alabama, where he became an associate of Booker T. Washington and traveled in the South as an informal secretary to the black leader. In 1914 he was invited to lecture at Chicago, and this was the beginning of a formal teaching career of some nineteen years. After his retirement in 1933, Park continued to travel and lecture widely throughout the world. Then, after eighty vigorous years, Robert Park passed away in February of 1944.

During his searching years Park had the experiences and intellectual en- counters which furnished the background for his formulation of an urban theory. His interest in understanding the city originated during his news- paper days, and in later years Park reflected on this experience:

While I was a newspaper reporter I used to do a good deal of writing for the Sunday papers.... I found that the Sunday paper was willing to publish any- thing so long as it concerned the local community and was interesting. I wrote about all sorts of things and became in this way intimately acquainted with many different aspects of city life. I expect that I have actually covered more ground, tramping about in cities in different parts of the world, than any other living man. Out of all this I gained, among other things, a conception of the city, the community, and region, not as a geographical phenomenon merely but as a kind of social organism.7

Also during these formative years, Park came into contact not only with Dewey, but also with William James at Harvard, and Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Windelband in Germany. These men guided him in addressing certain questions and provided the intellectual framework from which emerged his own reflections on city life.

7"An Autobiographical Note," p. viii. Park was a reform journalist, and though in later years he abandoned the moral indignation of the reformer, he still thought of the sociolo- gist as a more scientific reporter. Ibid., pp. vi, viii-ix.

50 American Quarterly

When Park attended the University of Michigan in the 1880s, John Dewey was a young instructor there in philosophy. The latter's emphasis on communication as fundamental to social life affirmed Park's conclusions from his newspaper experience. Also, Dewey's view of the school as a bridge between received tradition and industrialization paralleled Park's later understanding of a similar role played by certain socio-geographical areas and institutions in the city. Finally, both Park and Dewey distin- guished between society and community, stressing the phenomenon of people who constitute a larger society but fail to create community.8

At Harvard Park was particularly impressed with James' "On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings," which confirmed his belief that under- standing styles of life different from one's own is difficult but necessary. Years later Park reflected that "The 'blindness' of which James speaks is the blindness each of us is likely to have for the meaning of other people's lives."9 From this Park concluded that what the student of society wants to know is what makes life either meaningful or dull for the individual. To understand the question more fully Park turned to the study of human as- sociations, for he believed it is primarily through group participation that the individual gives purpose to his life. But if an individual's world changed, by migrating from village to city for example, his bases of associations were greatly altered. Park's interest in an issue so close to his own experi- ence led him to the study of "collective behavior."

Park wrote his dissertation on collective behavior at the University of Heidelberg under Wilhelm Windelband in 1904. He was initially attracted to Windelband's distinction between various forms of knowledge, particularly between history and natural science. In Park's understanding, the historian, somewhat like the reporter, seeks to record and interpret concrete events as they actually occur in space and time. On the other hand, sociology, following the natural sciences, attempts to arrive at sci- entific generalizations about human nature and society which are not bound by time and space. Park believed that underlying the seemingly un- related facts recorded by journalists and historians there are certain "na- tural" processes which the social scientist should probe. The sociologist converts facts into natural events, restructuring experience into conceptual knowledge as a basis for social action.'0 The model Park chose for con-

8"Sociology," Research in the Social Sciences, ed. Wilson Gee (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 3-49; Whites, The Intellectual Versus the City, pp. 171-79.

9"An Autobiographical Note," p. vi; Whites, The Intellectual Versus the City, pp. 139- 40.

10"Sociology and the Social Sciences," American Journal of Sociology, 26 (Jan. 1921), 401-24, 27 (July 1921), 1-21, (Sept. 1921), 164-83. These three articles appear as chapter one of Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1921), pp. 1-58. "Sociology," Research in the Social Sciences,

City and "Community" 51

verting the facts of city life into the things of urban processes was ecology, the study of plant and animal communities.

The term "ecology" was coined by Ernst Haeckel, the late 19th century German biologist and popularizer of Darwin. Haeckel used the term to emphasize the intricate interrelations among living organisms and be- tween those organisms and their environment. Ecology provided a number of concepts-competition, invasion, dominance, segregation-which Park and his colleagues, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, adopted to express the physical and social changes affecting the city. Park believed that viewing the facts of city life within an ecological framework would enable one to transform "concrete fact to systematic and conceptual knowl- edge." In the approach he called "human ecology," Park found a scientific language by which he could describe the processes of urban society."

Leonard Reissman has suggested that the reasons a biological model appealed to early urban theorists were excitement over a "social Darwin- ism" and disillusionment with metaphysics.'2 It is clear that Park was as enthusiastic as numerous other intellectuals of his generation about using theories from the natural sciences to help explain social phenomena. In this limited sense he may have been a social Darwinist. But his em- phasis upon communication as a basis for corporate action in society in- dicates that he was not one of those thinkers who raised biological com- petition to the level of a social ideal. On the contrary, his background, experience and training all indicated to him the importance of com- munity as against rugged individualism.

Park's choice of organic ecology as a model for studying society was re- lated to his effort to explain what was uniquely "human" about social organization. Park's theory of the city rests on the assumption that human society is organized on two distinguishable but interdependent levels: the

repr. as "Sociology, Community and Society," Human Communities: The City' and Human Ecology, Vol. II of Collected Papers of Robert E. Park, p. 179. "News as a Form of Knowl- edge," American Journal of Sociology, 45 (Mar. 1940), 669-86, repr. in Societv, Vol. III of Collected Papers of Robert E. Park, p. 74. On Windelband and Park see Goist, "The City As Organism: Two Recent American Theories of the City" (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1967), pp. 16-18.

"Marston Bates, "Human Ecology," Anthropology, Today: Selections, ed. Sol Tax (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 222-35. Amos Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theory, of Community Structure (New York: Roland Press, 1950), pp. 4-8. A. B. Hollingshead, "Human Ecology," An Outline of the Principles of Sociology, ed. Robert E. Park (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1939), p. 65. Roderick McKenzie, "The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community," The City, pp. 63-79; "The Scope of Human Ecology," The Urban Comnmnunit ', ed. Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1926), pp. 167-82. Park, "Sociology, Community and Society," Human Com- munities, p. 199.

'2Reissman, Urban Process, pp. 95-98.

52 American Quarterly

symbiotic level which humans share with organic nature, and the cultural level which distinguishes human organization from plant and animal soci- ety. The symbiotic level, characterized by a competitive struggle for sur- vival, provides an elementary basis for the living together in close associa- tion of dissimilar organisms. This situation characterizes plant and animal communities; and at least to some extent the city, with its myriad of peoples and various distinct functional and ethnic areas, can be seen in this light. But human society is something more; it is organized on a cultural level marked by communication which makes some sort of concerted action possible. 13

In his dissertation Park examined the uniquely cultural level of human association. He first distinguished between a "mass" which completely absorbs the individual into the purposes of the group, and a "public" marked by diversity of sentiments and opinions. The rapport which exists in a human public is due to conflict and discussion, and so the public is what a crowd can never be, a discussion group.'4 Like Dewey, Park con- cluded that the origin of those common purposes basic to society is com- munication. "The conscious participation in a common purpose and a common life, rendered possible by the fact of speech and by the existence of a fund of common symbols and meanings" is the fundamental and dis- tinguishing feature of human society.15 What happens, Park asked, when the traditional bases for communication are disrupted? What then makes community possible? What then keeps things from falling apart? His an- swer to this question was partially determined by the ecological approach.

Park's choice of the ecological model then points up another important aspect of his effort to come to grips with the city. In their study of interact- ing organisms, ecologists emphasize the territorial or spatial basis of inter- action and survival. Park was interested in this aspect because he shared the widely held belief that one of the immediate consequences of rapid urban growth is "social disorganization." Maurice Stein maintains that Park was influenced by Emile Durkheim's concept of "anomie": "Durk- heim's analysis of suicide, in which he shows how social differentiation re- leases men from group ties and moral restraints only to leave them isolated and without values that confer meaning on life, underlies much of the the- orizing of the urban sociologists."'6 The role of the city in this context,

13" Human Ecology," American Journal of Sociology, 42 (July 1936), 1-15, repr. in Human Communities, pp. 145-58; "Symbiosis and Socialization: A Frame of Reference for the Study of Society," American Journal of Sociology, 45 (July 1939), 240-62, repr. in Human Communities, pp. 1-25.

'4Portions of the thesis were translated and appeared in Park and Burgess, Introduc- tion to the Science of Sociology, see esp. pp. 893-95.

"5"Human Behavior and Collective Behavior," American Journal of Sociology, 32 (Mar. 1927), 695-703, repr. in Society, pp. 16-17. 16Stein, Eclipse of Community, p. 18.

City and "Community" 53

Park argued, is to disrupt certain modes of association, thus making read- justments necessary. In 1925 he noted:

Historically, the background of American life has been the village community. . . . But with the growth of great cities . .. the old forms of social control repre- sented by the family, the neighborhood, and the local community have been un- dermined and their influence greatly diminished....17

For Park the problem was to understand how both traditional and newer forms of association function for those who face the unsettling transition from nonurban areas to the metropolis.18

As he and his students scrutinized Chicago, Park concluded that an im- portant key to understanding the apparent chaos of the industrial metrop- olis lay in the existence of numerous subcommunities or "natural areas." "The urban community turns out to be a mosaic of minor communities," he noted, "many of them strikingly different one from another, but all more or less typical."'19 Nearly every large city, he continued, has its central business district, residential areas, industrial districts, satellite cities, slums, immigrant colonies-and these are the natural areas. They are "natural" because rather than being planned they result from ecological processes which affect an orderly distribution of population and functions within the city. The social and physical structure of the city, with its many neighborhoods and functional areas, is then an unanticipated consequence of people attempting to live together collectively.20

The local communities Park had written about as a young reporter turned out to be the important components of the urban organism. Serving essentially the same role as a small town, the natural area can help inte- grate an individual into the life of the larger urban society. Some natural areas, Park asserted, are made up of a place, people and the conditions under which they live, and to that extent socialize their inhabitants accord- ing to traditions, customs and conventions of their own. But every urban situation is also in flux, and if segregation of the population is first based on

""Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency," The City, pp. 106-7; see also "Human Migration and the Marginal Man," American Journal of Sociology, 33 (May 1928), 881-93, repr. in Race and Culture, p. 353.

"8Gideon Sjoberg has noted that Park and the "urbanization school" addressed them- selves "to an issue of central concern to most leading sociologists-namely, 'What are the patterns and processes involved in the transition from a pre-industrial, or agrarian, or feudal way of life to an industrial, or urban, or capitalistic order?"' "Theory and Research in Urban Sociology," The Study of Urbanization, eds. Philip M. Hauser and Leo F. Schnore (New York: Wiley, 1965), p. 10.

'9"Sociology, Community and Society," Human Communities, p. 196; see also "Foreword," Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1928), pp. Cx-xu. '0"Sociology, Community and Society," Human Communities, pp. 196-99.

54 American Quarterly

language and race, other considerations such as vocational interest, intel- ligence and personal ambition soon become important. In regard to the resulting changes of location within the mobile urban setting, Park ob- served that "the physical or ecological organization of the community, in the long run responds to and reflects the occupational and the cultural.' Amidst the shifting urban scene if one wants to study the social conse- quences of rapid urbanization and to understand what is uniquely char- acteristic about modern city life, local areas provide a starting point. They are the cells of the city organism, and they provide a frame of reference within which the facts and statistics of urban life can be sorted out and seen in perspective.

Park's emphasis on natural areas indicates his conviction that spatial contiguity-local neighborhoods, immigrant colonies and functional districts-continue to provide one basis for association within the city. Indeed, at times Park wrote as though the local community were the only meaningful source of social organization. At one point he suggested that cohesive immigrant communities contain qualities necessary for solving some of the city's problems, and he called for a "new parochialism."22

For those, like the Whites, who believe the American intellectual tradi- tion is characterized by anti-urbanism, such remarks suggest an underlying animosity toward city life. As noted previously, according to the anti-urban interpretation, Park shares with many American intellectuals a strong dis- trust of and antagonism toward the city. He "looked back from the me- tropolis to the days of the family, the tribe and the clan with some sense of nostalgia," and further, his "was not an effort to provide new forms of as- sociation for city dwellers, but rather an effort to revivify old ones and plant them in a new urban context."23 From this perspective Park's small- town origins seem to have rendered him incapable of coping adequately with urban realities.

This interpretation fails to take into account the full complexity of Park's concept of the city, which includes some effort to deal with both the al- tered functions of older forms and newer kinds of association. His interest in this aspect of the city owes at least some of its impetus to the influence of Georg Simmel. It was largely through Park's contact with Simmel, whose lectures he attended at the University of Berlin, that the German philosopher's ideas were infused into an important segment of American

2"The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order," Publications of the American Sociological Society, 20 (1925), 1-14, repr. in Human Communities, p. 170.

22"Community Organization and the Romantic Temper," Social Forces, 3 (May 1925), 675-77, repr. in The City, p. 122.

23Whites, The Intellectual Versus the City, p. 216; Morton White, "The Philosopher and the Metropolis," Urban Life and Form, ed. Werner Z. Hirsch (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 84.

City and "Community" 55

sociology. Simmel was concerned with the problem of the individual as he is affected by group association and social interaction, an issue of pri- mary interest to Park. In relating this concern to the city, Simmel's major contribution is an article entitled "Die Grosstadte und das Geistesleben" ("The Metropolis and Mental Life"), published in 1903.24

In his essay Simmel argued that the quickened pace and increased stim- uli of the city demand of men greater consciousness and intelligence, ex- pressed on one level in punctuality and exactness. The same forces produce the blase attitude, reserve and antipathy which Simmel believed were uniquely urban characteristics. Heightened intelligence is a means of protecting the individual against currents in the urban environment which threaten to inundate him. Concerning reserve and antipathy, which he thought necessary to protect one against both indifference and too many unselective personal contacts, Simmel observed, "What appears in the metropolitan style of life directly as dissociation is in reality only one of its elemental forms of socialization."25 The specialization and mobility occasioned by industrial division of labor gives the urbanite greater in- dependence and freedom than his small-town counterpart, who is hemmed in by pettiness and prejudices. An urbanite assumes traits like reserve and antipathy to preserve independence and to allow for personal development. But this development is also threatened by the very forces which make it possible. In requiring concentration on a single skill, the modern division of labor demands such a restricted accomplishment as to render the in- dividual less capable of coping with what Simmel called the "over-growth of objective culture." The city then has the potential of stifling an in- dividual, but more important, provides the basis for the freedom by which he can most fully express his own uniqueness.

His acceptance of Simmel's formulation reflects a somewhat different aspect of Park's approach to the city than his adoption of an ecological framework. Absent from Simmel is the ecological emphasis on the spatial basis of social interaction. In Simmel the focus is on the implication of, and the possibilities opened up by, the increased mobility of individuals in the metropolis. He is saying that even under the threat of being over- whelmed by outer stimuli, the urbanite develops certain traits which en- able him to deal with the conditions of big-city life.

In Park's work, this concern for the possibilities opened up by the con- ditions of the urban environment helps account for the attention he gave to non-spatially determined forms of human association. On the one hand

240n Simmel see Nicholas J. Spykman, The Social Theory of Georg Simmel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1925); Kurt H. Wolf, ed. The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1964); Sennett, Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, pp. 3-13.

25"The Metropolis and Mental Life," Sociology of Georg Simmel, p. 416.

56 American Quarterly

the ecologist in him asserted that "All forms of association among human beings rest finally upon locality and local association."26 Yet in his famous essay, "The City: Suggestions For The Investigation Of Human Behav- ior In The Urban Environment," he maintained that the consequence of the division of labor is to modify the social and economic organization of society based on family ties and local associations, "and to substitute for it an organization based on occupation and vocational interests."27 The very structure of that important article, first published in 1915, indicates the significance Park attributed to this problem. The first section of the essay is devoted to the importance of local organizations, while the second and third parts, the bulk of the article, deal with the impact of industrial organization on the traditional order of the city, and the resulting problems of social control necessitated by the transition from "primary" to "secon- dary" relations. In the final section of the essay, following Simmel, Park discussed the temperamental consequences for the individual of both mobility and the various regions of the urban environment.

Park's effort to come to terms with city life is reflected in his empathy with the struggle of individuals and institutions attempting to adjust to urban conditions. When he observed that large cities are full of human "junk," it is not an attack on the city as a heartless place, but a way of emphasizing the point that "The only thing of which we still know least is the business of carrying on an associated existence."28 In "The City," and throughout his work, Park pointed to a number of modified and new institutional forms aimed at providing social organization and control in the city. He saw the public school, for example, taking on some of the tra- ditional functions of the family and acting as a focal point for the com- munity. Schools and other older institutions such as the church and courts are not always able to respond adequately to changing urban conditions. But juvenile courts did represent for Park a meaningful response, as did settlement houses, playground associations and even street gangs. Other kinds of urban associations which he singled out include the stock market, newspapers, political machines, reform groups and the kind of "social advertising" represented by Paul Kellogg's Pittsburgh Survey.29

Some of the institutions and movements which make corporate action possible in the city are based on spatial contiguity, and some on what Park called a "community of interests." Labor unions founded on common oc-

26"The Mind of the Hobo: Reflections Upon the Relationship Between Mentality and Locomotion," The City, p. 159.

27The City, pp. 13-14. 28"Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency," The City, p. 109. 2" 'The City . . . " and "Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency," The

City, pp. 24, 29, 109-12. One of the dozens of studies on urban agencies of social control was Frederick M. Thrasher's The Gang (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1927).

City and "Community" 57

cupational interests differ from forms of association like the spatially de- fined neighborhood. Further, he distinguished on similar grounds between political machines and municipal reform organizations. The political machine reflects local or primary relationships, while the good-govern- ment movements appeal to a wider public, based on secondary relation- ships. Park presented the stock exchange as a model of the "special or- ganization" developed in the city, based on interests and rational response rather than on prejudices and local sentiment. In a sense the exchange was an organizational counterpart of the rational urbanite Simmel had spoken of. The ability of the exchange to readjust to the news of fluctuating eco- nomic conditions and to control the continual crises of financial panics struck Park as an appropriate example of one kind of organization called for in the city, though he never made clear how the experience of the ex- change would be applied to other areas of life. The important point, how- ever, is that in such control groups as unions and in such opinion-forming agencies as city newspapers and trade journals, Park saw the means of corporate action during a period when certain local attachments were being disrupted.30

It was above all in the newspaper as a means of transmitting "news" that Park found an example of a non-spatially defined, yet community- oriented phenomenon which functioned to hold the larger society to- gether. The news, as Park presented it, played a dual role-making com- munication within the local area possible, but also acting to integrate individuals and groups into the wider society. He illustrated the point by indicating the function of the immigrant press. The effect of city life is to destroy the provincialism of the immigrant, and the foreign-language newspaper is the chief means of replacing older ties with a wider national loyalty. The press also makes it possible for the immigrant group to par- ticipate in American life, thus providing a first step in Americanization.3' Park understood the metropolitan press to serve essentially the same function. Public opinion rests on news, on people talking about present events, and that is what newspapers make possible. While news is primar- ily local in character, the real power of the press, and other means of mass communication as well, is in providing the basis for public opinion and political action. Compatible with both permanence of location and with mobility, the metropolitan newspaper is an important means of holding together a city organism made up of various distinct parts.32

30A11 the examples in this paragraph are from "The City...." 31"Immigrant Community and Immigrant Press," American Review, 3 (Mar.-Apr.

1925), 143-52, repr. in Society, pp. 152-64; "Foreign Language Press," Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1923), pp. 493-500, repr. in Society, pp. 165-75.

32See various articles on news and the newspaper in Society, pp. 71-184.

58 American Quarterly

Park asserted that his notion of the city as an organism was implicit in the neighborhood emphasis of settlement-house workers like Jane Ad- dams and Robert Woods.33 The settlement movement was, in fact, com- mitted to developing a new neighborliness. Robert Woods, a Boston social worker, maintained that within the "city wilderness," settlement houses were reconstructive agencies based on the local district. Their primary functions included re-establishing social relations disrupted by the city, and helping to rehabilitate neighborhood life in order to "give it some of that healthy corporate vitality which a well-ordered village has."34 To the extent that he conceived of natural areas as capable of providing their own subcultural characteristics and personality types, Park was in agree- ment with the neighborhood emphasis of the settlement movement. To the extent that he looked to the wider public implications of political reform, union organization, newspapers and other forms of mass com- munication, Park went beyond most of his contemporaries in his search for community in the industrial metropolis. While the local area is a start- ing point for one's study of the large city, Park realized it is equally im- portant to understand how the relationship between community and the larger society is achieved.

Finally then, Park's interest in spatial continguity and non-spatially de- termined forms of urban association can best be understood within the con- text of an American search for community. E. Digby Baltzell has sug- gested that this search is at the heart of much social unrest since the Civil War. The problem is that instead of attempting to understand the anonym- ity and mobility which lie at the roots of our society, the response has too often been denunciation and various forms of extremism. The commit- ment to a "national nostalgia" for the good old days of the small, cohesive community have made it difficult for Americans to come to terms with an urban world that demands new forms of association. But urban men are in search of new kinds of transcommunal friendships and associations, and rather than despairing over the loss of the small community, "it would be wiser to try to understand what neighborliness means in a large-scale and urban society." The important question, Baltzell maintains, is how to institutionalize relationships which will promote a "responsible neighbor- liness" appropriate to an urban order.35 Baltzell's provocative interpreta-

33"The City as a Social Laboratory," Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research, eds. T. V. Smith and L. White (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1929), pp. 1-19, repr. in Human Communities, pp. 75-78.

34The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), p. 274. Lyle Dorsett has observed that both Woods and Jane Addams "hoped to create in urban America the moral equivalent of a rural sense of community." The Challenge of the City, 1860-1910 (Lexington, Ky.: Heath, 1968), p. 33.

35Baltzell, Searchfor Community, pp. 1-13.

City and "Community" 59

tion suggests that a good deal of American cultural expression can most clearly be read within the framework of the search for community. In this context, Park's interest in the city and the social function of news is best understood not as a chapter in an anti-urban heritage, but as one of America's first urban-oriented contributions to the dialogue over community.

Park had become familiar with the particulars of city life during his newspaper days. Then in philosophy, natural science and the emerging social sciences he sought a systematic method of organizing his observa- tions. From this background he developed a unique, ecological approach to the city which, though it emphasized the spatial basis of culture, also looked to extra-spatial means of communication and community. If the interpretation presented in this paper is correct, Park's early interest in collective behavior and the social psychology of Georg Simmel expresses itself in a question strikingly similar to the one recently posed by Balt- zell and others. From this perspective his work is not an expression of nostalgia for village ways, but an effort to understand the significance of community as modified by urbanization.

The issues Park raised may have been prompted by the category of social disorganization; but he also sought to discover the basis for individ- ual and group readjustment in the urban context. Park's effort is the prod- uct of an inquiring mind, molded by its own "climate of opinion" to be sure, but not entirely bound by dominant categories, such as social dis- organization and local community. As one of America's first urban sociologists and its first urban theorist, Park was attempting in his study of the city to come to terms with metropolitan life, and to bridge the gap be- tween the received village tradition to which he was born and the newer forms emerging in the city-where he lived and worked by choice. The tension produced a valuable and essentially urban-focused contribution to the national quest for community.