ABSTRACT
In his review of various attempts by sociologists to develop a specifically urban theory, Leonard Reissman suggests that the ecological perspective advanced between the wars by Robert Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago remains ‘the closest we have come to a systematic theory of the city’ (1964, p. 93). Certainly human ecology was the first comprehensive urban social theory, and in the United States it has some claim to have been the first comprehensive sociological theory, for it developed at a time when American sociology was gaining institutional recognition as a discipline but lacked an indigenous body of theory. As Hawley observes, ‘The reformist phase of sociology was drawing to a close and the subject was gaining acceptance as a respected discipline in the curricula of American universities…. Ecology opportunely provided the necessary theory’ (1968, p. 329).
