SOURCE: "A Sociologist and The City: The Experience of Robert Park," in From Main Street to State Street: Town, City, and Community in America, Kennikat Press Corp., 1977, pp. 110-20.

[In the following essay, Goist examines Park's concept of urban life.]

Robert Redfield, a widely known anthropologist, once observed: "If one studies the rise of urban communities out of more primitive communities, it is the change in the mental life, in the norms and in aspirations, in personal character, too, that becomes the most significant aspect of the transformation." Redfield used the tools of a social scientist in investigating these and other changes in the villages and towns of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico in the 1930s. In the previous decade Sherwood Anderson had employed the insights, personal experiences, and techniques of the novelist in exploring the impact of similar transformations on individuals in the fictional town of Bidewell, Ohio. A phenomenon related to these concerns of Redfield and Anderson is the experience of those who left smaller places like Bidewell or the Yucatan villages of Tusik and Dzitas and came to cities like Chicago or Merida (population 96,600 at the time Redfield did his research).…

It is an essential argument of this book that, as men and women left small town America, at least some of them faced the question whether the city could or should be expected to provide "community" in any way comparable to what the town had, at least in memory, offered. This chapter will discuss this question by reference to the life and work of Robert Park, a teacher and colleague of Redfield's, and a leading figure in the founding of urban sociology in America. Park grew up in a small town and then spent a good portion of his life trying to understand the metropolis. His sociology is an interesting response to social change, because he is in one sense looking backward, testing the validity of older forms and seeking out their altered functions in the city, and simultaneously looking forward, attempting to locate and understand newer social forces. Like so many others of his generation, Park is attempting to come to terms with the metropolis and is searching out the possibilities for community in a rapidly changing urban world.

Park was fifty years old when he began his teaching career as a sociologist at the University of Chicago in 1914. He brought the experiences and observations of a widely traveled scholar and journalist with him as a basis for his involvement in helping found the Chicago School of urban sociology. He joined with a group of outstanding social scientists in establishing Chicago as the leading center for the study of sociology in the United States. He encouraged and helped inspire an entire body of significant research into the ways of life of an industrial metropolis. As his colleagues and students investigated the variety and diversity of lifestyles, occupations, and subcultures of Chicago, Park sought to provide a framework for all this rapidly accumulating factual knowledge.

Prior to his arrival in Chicago Park was, in his own words, an "intellectual vagabond," seeking the kind of work which would satisfy his need to combine thought and action. He was born in 1864 on a farm in Pennsylvania, but grew up in Redwing, Minnesota, originally settled by New Englanders but also containing a very sizable Scandinavian population. He grew up with Swedes and Norwegians, always conscious of "life at the other end of town" where the descendants of the New Englanders lived and where life was "on a higher plane." Park maintained in later years that he "grew up to be an awkward, sentimental, and romantic boy," but one wonders if his early experience among Scandinavians and New Englanders of Redwing didn't also play a key role in his lifelong interest in and enjoyment of human diversity.

Park went to the University of Minnesota for a year, and then transferred to Michigan where he graduated in 1887. He started out as an engineering student but developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of John Dewey, who at the time was an instructor at Michigan. As Park recalled it years later, at this juncture he "conceived a scheme of life that should be devoted to merely seeing and knowing the world without any practical aims whatever.… I made up my mind to go in for experience for its own sake.… " Whether such a decision was consciously made or not, he entered newspaper work and for the next eleven years moved from Minneapolis to Detroit, Denver, New York, and Chicago as reporter, feature writer, and reform-minded city editor. Impressed by the exposés of urban corruption in the series of articles "The Shame of the Cities" by Lincoln Steffens, Park became interested in the sociology of the city. He spent a good deal of time investigating and writing about city life, believing for a while that the muckraking or reform newspaper might become an instrument whereby thought and fact could be converted into action. (He attributed this hope to the ideas of Dewey and a newspaper man named Franklin Ford.) However, this "organization of intelligence" did not readily come about, and he eventually became dissatisfied with the mere collecting and reporting of facts. Thus, he returned to the university, seeking a perspective from which he could better understand the relationship between facts and the social function of the newspaper.

Park entered Harvard, taking a master's degree in philosophy, and then studied at various German universities, earning a Ph.D. at Heidelberg in 1904. Upon returning to the United States he taught philosophy at Harvard for two years, but was no longer satisfied with academic life. He turned again to journalism for a short period, and became interested in race relations. First he worked as publicity agent for the Congo Reform Association, and acted as secretary for that group. Then, in order to pursue his new concern, Park went to Tuskegee, Alabama, where he became an associate of Booker T. Washington and acted as an informal secretary to the black leader. (He traveled with Washington to Europe in 1910 and helped with the preparation of The Man Farthest Down, Washington's study of the condition of European peasants.) In 1914 he was invited to lecture on race relations at the University of Chicago, and this was the beginning of a formal teaching career of some nineteen years. Of his decision to remain at Chicago Park has said, "I conceived the notion that the thing for me to do was to stick around and see if I could not work out in the classroom the more general theoretical problems which had arisen … out of my own encounters with life." After his retirement in 1933 he continued to travel and lecture widely throughout the world. Then, after eighty vigorous years, Robert Park passed away in early 1944.

The pattern of Park's life—the continual movement back and forth between academia and journalism—represents a restless search for a way of looking at the world. He was forever seeking a perspective, a frame of reference, a point of view, a method whereby he could give meaning and order to his experiences, to the observations he had made, to the facts he had gathered. He seems to have thought at one point that it was possible to "go in for experience for its own sake"; but even as a young reporter he learned that the stuff of experience had to be ordered in some way before it made sense. He sought that way or perspective first in philosophy, particularly the study of collective psychology, and finally in the new field of sociology. Park's work at Chicago indicates he had found his way, his method. But how did he arrive at that point, and how was his search related to the concepts of town, city, and community?

During his searching years, prior to arriving at Chicago, Park had the experiences and intellectual encounters which provided the background for his formulation of an urban theory. His interest in understanding the city originated during his newspaper days, and in later years Park reflected on this:

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 anything 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.

Also during these years Park came into contact with William James at Harvard and Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Windelband in Germany. These men encouraged him and provided the intellectual elements from which he forged a framework for organizing his reflections on city life.

At the University of Michigan Dewey emphasized the importance of communication to social life. In 1916 he wrote, "Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common." Park's experiences as a reporter and city editor seemed to confirm this observatin, and he always understood the newspaper in this context, as a vehicle for building community. Also, Dewey's view of the school as a bridge between village traditions and modern industrialization paralleled Park's understanding of a similar role played by certain social-geographical areas and institutions in the city. Finally, both Park and Dewey distinguished between society and community, stressing the phenomenon of people who make up a larger society but who fail to create or share community.

While at Harvard, Park took courses in philosophy and psychology from some of the outstanding thinkers of the day, including William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana. James struck a particularly responsive chord with Park with his famous essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," which he read in class one day. James emphasized the importance of understanding styles and ways of life different from one's own. This is important because each individual has his own unique experiences and insights into the world that no other person can have. Our "blindness" is a failure to appreciate the meaning of the other person's life. For Park, James confirmed the belief that "the real world was the experience of actual men and women and not abbreviated and shorthand descriptions of it that we call knowledge." Yet the very thing that most interested Park about the philosophers at Harvard was their efforts to distnguish between various ways of knowing, between a variety of "abbreviated and shorthand descriptions" of the real world. He was still struggling to find a method "and to define my problem." The study of collective psychology in Germany was a turning point in this search for a way to define his problem, a way to understand the variety and diversity of experience.

Park studied at Berlin, Strausberg, and Heidelberg, and wrote a doctoral dissertation on collective behavior under the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband in 1904. He was initially attracted to Windelband's work on the 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 a different level, and following the natural sciences, sociology attempts to formulate scientific generalizations about human nature and society which are not bound by time and space. Park became convinced that underlying the seemingly unrelated facts recorded by journalists and historians there are certain "natural" processes which the social scientist must understand and explain. Thus, sociology seemed committed to achieving what Park had sought to do in newspaper work. By the time he arrived at Chicago, he found that it was the sociologist who could convert concrete facts into natural events, thus restructuring experience into conceptual knowledge as a basis for social action. The model Park chose for converting the facts of city life into the "things" of urban processes was ecology, the study of plant and animal communities.

The word "ecology" was coined by Ernst Haeckel, the nineteenth-century German biologist who popularized the theories of Charles Darwin. Haeckel used the term to refer to the intricate interrelations among living organisms and between those organisms and their environment. The study of plant and animal ecology provided a number of concepts—competition, symbiosis, invasion, dominance, segregation—which Park and his colleagues at Chicago adopted to express the physical and social changes affecting the city (they called it "human ecology"). The choice of ecology as a model for studying society stemmed in part from his effort to explain what was uniquely "human" about human social organization.

Park's theory of the city rests on the assumption that human society is organized on two distinguishable but interdependent levels: the symbiotic, which humans share with organic life, and the cultural, which distinguishes human organization from plant and animal groups. (It is important to make this distinction, Park argued, because man is not born human, but only becomes so through social interaction.) Park borrowed the term "symbiosis" to denote the kind of unintentional cooperation among various species which emerges from a struggle for survival. Thus, the symbiotic level provides one basis for similar and dissimilar organisms to live together. This was characteristic of plant and animal groupings; and at least to some extent the city, with its diversity of peoples and various distinct economic and ethnic areas, can be seen in the same light. But human society is something more; it is also organized on a cultural level, marked by communication which makes concerted action possible.

In analyzing the cultural level of human association, Park first distinguished between a "mass" which absorbs the individual completely into the purposes of the group, and a "public" marked by a diversity of opinions and sentiments. Whatever rapport or consensus exists in a human public emerges by means of a temporary resolution of conflict through discussion. Like Dewey, Park had concluded that the origin of those common purposes necessary for the operation of human society is in communication; the human public capable of collective action was first of all a discussion group. "The conscious participation in a common purpose and 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 distinguishing feature of human society.

But what happens, Park asked, if the traditional bases for communication are disrupted? What then makes community possible? In the following quotations from essays he wrote in the 1920s, Park stated this issue clearly:

What took place in [ancient] Greece first has since taken place in the rest of Europe and is now going on in America. The movement and migration of peoples, the expansion of trade and commerce, and particularly the growth, in modern times, of their vast melting pots of races and cultures, the metropolitan cities, has loosened local bonds, destroyed the cultures of tribe and folk, and substituted for the local loyalties the freedom of the cities: for the sacred order of tribal custom, the national organization which we call civilization.

Historically, the background of American life has been the village community.… But with the growth of great cities … the old forms of social control represented by the family, the neighborhood, and the local community have been undermined and their influence greatly diminished.…

For Park the problem was to understand how both traditional and newer forms of association function for those facing the unsettling consequences of the migration from nonurban areas to the metropolis. How do people regroup or reorganize themselves under this pervasive personal and social "disorganization?"

Émile Durkheim, the French scholar, had used the term "anomie" in explaining how the social development of modern society had released men from group and moral restraints, leaving them isolated and lacking the values which give meaning to life. In his turn, Park found that modern man was living in a period of extreme individualization and social disorganization. Everything was in a state of agitation, and everything was undergoing rapid change. Society appeared to be merely a random collection of social atoms, with no visible means of holding things together. But were appearances the whole truth? Were there not sources of stability amidst this apparent chaos? Both Durkheim and Park, who was familiar with the former's work, saw in the emergence of certain subgroups (such as occupational groups) the mechanisms for the reintegration of contemporary life.

As he and his students investigated Chicago—mapping, counting, interviewing, participating in neighborhood groups—Park concluded in 1929 that a significant factor in understanding what appeared to be the chaos of the city was the existence of various "natural areas." "The urban community turns out, upon closer scrutiny, to be a mosaic of minor communities, many of them strikingly different one from another, but all more or less typical." Every large city, he continued, has its central business district, residential areas, light and heavy industrial districts, satellite cities, slums, ghettos, immigrant colonies, and bohemias, and these are the natural areas. They are "natural" because rather than being planned they result from the processes of human ecology which bring about an orderly distribution of people and functions within the city.

Ernest Burgess, Park's colleague and office mate, built on the natural area formulation in putting forth his famous "zonal hypothesis" in 1923. Burgess suggested the city's shape could be represented in a zonal diagram: the central area was occupied by a business district, surrounded by a zone in transition marked by industrial and slum areas and the first-settlement location of immigrant groups, then a zone of workingmen's homes outside the slum area, a better residential zone, and finally a commuters' zone. For both Burgess and Park the local areas within this hypothetical zonal structure were the starting point for understanding the city; they provided a frame of reference within which the facts of urban life could be sorted out and seen in perspective.

Thus, the local areas Park reported on as a young journalist turned out to be the basic components of the city. The role of the natural area was to help integrate inhabitants into the life of the larger urban society. Natural areas, Park asserted, are a combination of people living in a particular place, under certain occupational, social, and economic conditions. To the extent an area in the city met these criteria, it socialized its inhabitants, sometimes developing its own local traditions, customs, and conventions. But urban conditions were never static; on the contrary, they were in constant flux. Thus, as the sorting out of a city's population would at one time be based on considerations of language and race, at another stage such factors as vocational interest, intelligence, and personal ambition would come into play to help determine where people worked and lived.

Park's emphasis on natural areas is based on the observation that spatial contiguity—people living in close proximity in local neighborhoods or immigrant colonies, for example—provided one basis for association and cohesiveness in the city. At times he sounded as if the local community was the only meaningful source of urban social organization. In a 1925 essay he made a suggestion strikingly similar to a point that Hutchins Hapgood observed almost twenty years before, that immigrant communities contain qualities which could counteract the disorganization of city life. Park went on to call for a "new parochialism."

This aspect of Park's thought has caused some observers to conclude that he has an underlying animosity toward the city; that he is, in short, antiurban. According to this reading, he "looked back from the metropolis to the days of the family, the tribe and the clan with some sense of nostalgia," a nostalgia "for a cozier, warmer form of human association" than the industrial metropolis provided. Furthermore, his work "was not an effort to provide new forms of association for city dwellers, but rather an effort to revivify old ones and plant them in a new urban context." From this perspective, Park's town origins have rendered him incapable of coping realistically with urban realities. This interpretation is incorrect because it over-looks both the meaning of Park's life (as presented here in preceding pages) and the full range of his concept of the city, which gave ample attention to nonspatially determined forms of urban association.

Park's understanding of those forms of city cohesiveness which were not based on spatial proximity stemmed in part from the influence of Georg Simmel. It was largely through his contact with Simmel, whose lectures he attended at the University of Berlin, that this German philosopher's ideas had an influence on American sociology. Simmel was concerned with how the individual is affected by group association, and in relating this to the city his major contribution was an article entitled "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903). The ideas in that paper were central to Park's understanding of the city.

Simmel argued that the quickened pace and increased stimuli of the city demanded of people greater consciousness and intelligence. On one level, this was expressed in punctuality and exactness; on another, in a blasé attitude, reserve, and antipathy—characteristics which Simmel believed were uniquely urban. This heightened intelligence acted to protect the individual against being overwhelmed by the intensity and diversity of urban life. Reserve, for example, allowed the urbanite to avoid too many unselective personal contacts without his becoming completely indifferent to others and thus stunting personal development. Simmel also noted that specialization and mobility brought on by modern division of labor give the citydweller greater independence and freedom than his small town cousin, who is hemmed in by pettiness and prejudices. On the other hand, by requiring concentration on a single skill, the division of labor demands such a restricted accomplishment as to render the individual less capable of coping with the sheer abundance of material culture in the large metropolis. Thus, according to Simmel, the city has the potential of stifling the individual at the same time it provides the freedom by which he can most fully express his potentiality.

His acceptance of Simmel's formulation reflects a different aspect of Park's approach to the city from his adoption of an ecological framework. Absent from Simmel is the emphasis on the spatial basis of social interaction. In Simmel the focus is on the implications of, and the possibilities opened up by, the increased freedom and mobility of people in the metropolis. He is saying that even under the threat of being overwhelmed by outer stimuli, the urbanite develops certain traits which can enable him to deal with the conditions of big city life. In Park a concern for the freedom of the city is directly related to the consideration he gave to nonspatially determined forms of human association.

In Park's work, then, there is an interesting tension. On the one hand, the voice of the small town and of the ecologist is heard in the observation that "all forms of association among human beings rest finally upon locality and local association." But another voice, that of the city journalist and follower of Simmel, is recognizable in Park's famous 1915 essay "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment," when he points out that traditional family bonds and local associations have been supplemented by ties based on occupational and vocational interests. In the former vein he mentioned the community functions of such place-oriented institutions as public schools, churches, settlement houses, playground associations, and on a different level, street gangs. But equally important were associations based on a "community of interests," and among those Park singled out for special mention were labor unions, reform groups, the stock market, the kind of "social advertising" represented by the Pittsburgh Survey (a massive six-volume survey of social and economic conditions, published between 1909 and 1914), and, naturally enough, newspapers. Thus, in the city older forms of association, like schools and courts, were modified to meet altered conditions, and newer forms like labor unions and settlement houses also arose.

Labor unions, Park elaborated, were founded on common occupational interests and thus had a different basis for bringing people together than did neighborhoods. He drew a distinction between political machines and municipal reform groups: the former were based on local, "primary" relationships, whereas the latter appealed to a wider public based on "secondary" contacts. Park understood the stock market as the model of a "special organization" developed in the city, based on interests and rational response rather than on prejudices and local sentiment. In a sense, the exchange was seen as an organizational counterpart of Simmel's rational urbanite. The ability of the exchange to readjust to the news of fluctuating economic conditions and to control the continued crises of financial panics struck Park as an appropriate example of the kind of organization called for in the city (there is no evidence available on how the stock market crash of 1929 affected Park's view of the exchange).

It was the newspaper, however, which Park pointed to most frequently as a nonspatial institution operating to hold the larger society together. "News" played a dual role, aiding communication in the local area and helping to integrate individuals and groups into the wider society. Public opinion, he pointed out, rests on news and on people talking about current events, and this is what newspapers make possible. Thus, while news is primarily local in character, the power of the press and other means of mass communication is in providing a basis for public opinion and political action. Compatible with both permanence of location and mobility, the metropolitan newspaper is one means of holding together a city made up of various distinct parts. So it was in such control groups as unions and neighborhoods, in such opinion-forming agencies as city newspapers and trade journals, that Park saw the means of corporate action during a period of "social disorganization" when local attachments were being disrupted.

Finally, then, Park's interest in spatially and nonspatially based forms of urban association can best be understood within the context of an American "search for community." E. Digby Baltzell suggested in 1968 that this search is at the heart of much social unrest since the Civil War. The problem, according to Baltzell, is that instead of attempting to understand the anonymity and mobility which lie at the roots of our society, we often respond by denouncing them and looking back to some imagined golden age of simple stability. The commitment to a "national nostalgia" for the good old days of small, cohesive communities has made it difficult for Americans to come to terms with an urban world which demands new forms of association. But urban men and women are in search of new kinds of communal friendships and associations, and rather than despairing over the disappearance of older ways "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 neighborliness" appropriate to an urban order. Baltzell suggests that a good deal of American social and political experience can best be understood within the framework of this search for community.

From this perspective Park's work can be seen as an effort to understand the significance of community as modified by urbanization. The issues he addressed himself to were prompted by what he saw as social disorganization, but he sought to find the basis for reorganization in the city. Park's effort was molded by the "climate of opinion" of his times, but was not entirely bound by such dominant categories as "social disorganization" and "local community." As one of America's first urban sociologists and its first urban theorist, Park was attempting in his work to come to terms with metropolitan life: to bridge the gap between a received town tradition to which he was born, and the newer forms emerging in the city—where by choice he lived and worked. The resulting tension produced an essentially urban-focused contribution to the national quest for community.