ABSTRACT
The Industrial Revolution affected cities in the United States slightly later than it did in Europe, but its impact was arguably more far-reaching. During the early twentieth century, the city that captured the American imagination was Chicago. The Chicago School of Sociology had two major theoretical components. One was a conceptual perspective seeking to develop a scientific description of urban forms and processes. This perspective took ecology, the scientific study of the relationships between organisms and their environment, and adapted it to the study of the city-urban ecology. The second Chicago School component, urbanism, was essentially a social psychology of city life. It sought to understand the nature of human associations in the urban setting. This chapter examines the Chicago School's ideas about the nature of the urban dweller, the community, and city life. It then discusses the urbanism of the Chicago School and how its critics responded to this perspective.
