ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the recognition of a meaning referring to neighbourhood social relations, given that the neighbourhood, in the early Chicago School, was considered one of the ‘natural areas’ of the city. On the ‘natural’ character of neighbourhood relations, compared to ecological naturalness, there are also interpretative ideas on the subject of racial antagonisms and class interests. At the cultural level of the community and the forces operating within, the neighbourhood turns out to be the typical area of ‘natural’ social relations. The neighbourhoods-quarters-suburbs-outskirts spiral became perverse in metropolitan growth. In the systematics of sociological theory, deviance has sometimes been conventionally represented as an objective consequence of anomic society and sometimes as a subjective-objective consequence of some individual pathology. The move from ‘differentiation’ to ‘diversity’ is essential to understand the substantial contributions of the new Chicago School, whether in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, or phenomenological sociology.
