ABSTRACT
This research in towns and cities (not then called or thought of as a separate ‘urban anthropology’) also had non-anthropological roots. The most important were in the University of Chicago sociological tradition of research into the neighbourhoods and institutions of that city initiated by Robert Park after World War I (Hannerz 1980). Drawing upon the nineteenth-century British social survey methods of Charles Booth and others, and influenced by continental European social theorists, Park and his colleagues moved in an ethnographic direction as they studied immigrant communities, neighbourhood zones and leisure life. They tied their work to an over-arching theory of industrial city organization and concentric outward growth. Though never acknowledged, this theory is largely anticipated in †Frederick Engels’s analysis (1969 [1892]) of the impact of capitalism on Manchester in the 1840s.
