ABSTRACT
The foundations of urban sociology as a distinct academic discipline were laid in the years following the First World War by Robert Park and his associates at the University of Chicago. Other observers of city life before them had noted many of the characteristics which they observed (e.g. the famous concentric ring pattern of residential growth and the social differentiation of various parts of the city had been noted by Engels in Manchester in the 1840s and by Booth in London at the turn of the century), but the importance of the Chicago school lay in its development of a coherent body of theory which purported to explain such patterns as the inevitable manifestation of underlying natural forces in human society. This theoretical perspective - human ecology - was based upon the argument that city growth and urban ways of life reflected a basic biotic struggle for existence among different members of a human population, and that the same processes that had been observed in relation to the ecology of the plant and animal worlds (e.g. invasion, dominance over a natural area, succession, and - most significantly - competition) thus had their counterparts in the organization of human existence. Although Park recognized that the cultural level of human society could and did mediate this process of biotic competition and could produce effects opposed to those determined by natural forces (e.g. through political regulation and planning of the human environment), and although subsequent developments in the theory of human ecology have generally come to lay greater emphasis on the role of this cultural dimension, it is nevertheless the case that Park's identification of natural ecological forces has cast a long shadow over the development of urban sociology in the western world. Without too much exaggeration, it can be said that much of the work which has followed in urban sociology and human geography constitutes either an extension of, or a debate with, this central idea produced by the Chicago school.
