The Metropolis

Anthony M. Orum

Introduction manufacturing sectors. Over time certain natural One can think of the metropolis as a social space areas of the metropolis emerge, such as the down- that is characterized by a high density of people, town, or central area, as well as outlying residen- the twin processes of spatial segregation and social tial, or commuter zones. stratification, and the concentration of the princi- The fruits of the Chicago School came to be rep- pal political and economic processes of societies. resented in different ways. The most famous took It is, by its very nature, an empirically complex the form of a diagram that showed the metropolis phenomenon and therefore it has attracted the as a series of concentric zones (Burgess in Park scholarly attention of a wide spectrum of social and Burgess 1925). They ranged from the central scientists, ranging from geographers to urban zone, or the business district where major busi- planners, sociologists, and historians. In broadest nesses and banks were to be found, to spaces like strokes, one can also say it is a significant social the warehouse and red light districts, to the out- fact in people’s lives: on the one hand, they can lying commuter zones. Various immigrant com- and do shape what happens in the metropolis, munities also were represented in the portrait, through the creation of its commercial and resi- including those of Chinatown, Little Sicily and dential areas; yet, on the other hand, once estab- Deutschland (the German immigrant quarters). lished the metropolis deeply influences their lives The diagram, in fact, was a portrait of the metrop- by way of its means and modes of transportation olis of early 20th century Chicago, itself, and it as well as the inequalities (and survival risks) that was proposed as a hypothetical representation of become inscribed into its specific neighborhoods the way other metropolitan areas developed and and other places (Malpas 1999; Orum 1998; Orum how they would develop in the future. Indeed, this and Chen 2003; Chen, Orum and Paulsen, 2012). map of Chicago came to be seen and adopted by many other urban scholars and sociologists as a Of Space and the Metropolis kind of ideal spatial representation of the 20th Comparative analysis has been a hallmark of stud- century industrial metropolis. ies of the metropolis since the early 20th century. As Burgess had hoped, the clarity and concep- It has been employed to clarify how the metrop- tual reach of this representation proved to be the olis works and evolves. Early analysts focused spur for a great many comparative analyzes of the almost exclusively on the spatial, or material, metropolis, in general (Theodorson 1961). Though form of the metropolis. One of the 20th century’s many growing American metropolitan areas leading branches of sociology and of urban analy- seemed to replicate the Chicago configuration of sis, in particular, the Chicago School of Sociology, zones and areas, many others did not. Two urban developed the earliest and most powerful strate- geographers, Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman gies for examining the metropolis as a spatial form (1945), uncovered different patterns in the nature (Bulmer 1984). The key members of this school of the social spaces and zones of metropolitan were Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (1925). In areas, and proposed a different model altogether. the early days of the 20th century, they and their In contrast to the single center of the Chicago colleagues proposed a view of the metropolis that model, they showed that many other metropoli- drew upon work in ecology. They created a para- tan areas, such as London and New York City, digm that soon became known as the perspective possessed multiple centers of business as well of human ecology. Park, Burgess and their associ- as residential activity. Indeed, their conception ates insisted that the metropolis develops through of multiple centers and districts in the emerging the competition among different sectors for their metropolis better anticipated the development dominance, or control, of specific areas within the of urban centers later in the 20th century and in metropolis. The population sectors could be dif- the first decade of the 21st century, especially in ferent groups of ethnic immigrants, but they also the Western and Southern United States, than the could be key elements of the larger metropolis, Burgess model did. Harris and Ullman were not and the society, itself, such as the financial and the only ones to challenge the concentric zone the metropolis 175 representation. Homer Hoyt (1943), a geographer, of the metropolis clearly possessed more power proposed yet a different representation, one com- to control metropolitan development, and land posed not of concentric zones, but of sectors that values, than other sectors, especially in the case radiated out from the center of the metropolis. He of metropolitan areas, and by implication, societ- argued that particular sectors could become the ies that had experienced the growth of industrial site of specific metropolitan elements, like high- capitalism. Banking and finance especially were cost residential housing, and that over time such the leading edges in this regard, and they tended housing would continue to develop to the outer to be concentrated in the center part of the met- reaches of a specific sector, following transporta- ropolitan area where the land values also were the tion routes like trains and highways. highest. In effect, the spatial location of key indus- The richness and clarity of these three different trial sectors like banking appeared to mirror their representations of the spatial form of the metrop- importance to the functioning and working of the olis furnished working models that other analysts metropolis itself. could then take and compare to the spatial order and development of cities, towns and villages in Of Time and the Metropolis other countries. Sociologist Theodore Caplow But spatial representations and spatial locations (1949), for example, examined Guatemala City in were only one of the ways, albeit a significant way, order to discover whether the patterns of spatial for understanding how the metropolis worked. order resembled those found by Burgess. In fact, Social historians also took a crack at deciphering his work suggested that the spatial order of Latin the code of the city by using a comparative analytic American villages and towns like Guatemala City framework. Unlike the urban geographers and the was far different than the industrializing metropo- human ecologists, however, it was time, and his- lises of America. Instead of corporations occupy- tory, not space that mattered to the historians. The ing the most favorable central parts of a city or great social historian, Max Weber (1958a), helped metropolis, those areas instead were occupied by to launch this sort of work in an extensive essay political administration offices. There also were on the nature of the city and why it was important satellite areas in Guatemala City focused around for social history. He claimed that the nature of plazas and other public spaces where people the city was principally as an economic market- could gather. And land, itself, simply did not have place, wherein goods were produced both for local the same kind of value, nor did it trade in the people as well as well as people in the hinterlands. same way, as land and real estate did in Chicago Occasionally, he noted, the city also could serve and other metropolitan areas of the United States. as the residence of a prince or other nobility. He Caplow suggested that the history and culture of drew comparisons between cities in the Occident nations shaped the way that villages, towns and and those of antiquity, such as ancient Greece. cities would develop. Moreover, he insisted that His essay, while rich and fascinating, is primarily while Guatemala City, of course, had not experi- a descriptive accounting of the differences among enced the level of industrialization nor the met- cities located in different cultures and different ropolitan growth, as Chicago had, other sites, like times. Unlike more contemporary efforts, includ- St. Louis, which were roughly of comparable size ing those of the Chicago School, Weber did not to Guatemala City, in many ways resembled Chi- propose a rich and interesting hypothesis—as he cago. Culture and history, he insisted, play a very had done, for example, in his great work on the prominent role in the creation of cities and met- Protestant ethic (1958b)—but rather simply drew ropolitan areas (also see Firey 1947). attention to some key social and political differ- When all was said and done, the hypothesis ences among cities. of a concentric zone representation to depict the By contrast, the sociologist Gideon Sjoberg nature of the space in the metropolis helped to (1960) added a great deal of punch to this line launch a serious and systematic inquiry into how of historical thinking with a famous work on the the areas of the metropolis in different parts of the nature of preindustrial cities. He suggested that world developed. It became clear that different such cities were far different than the industrial spatial patterns existed, and that no single pat- cities that Robert Park and Ernest Burgess had tern was dominant. At the same time, however, used to propose their concentric zone portrait it also was clear that certain sectors, or elements, of the metropolis. Employing a range of data,