ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in greater depth the relationship between anti-urban bias and orthodox urban theory. It focuses on the Chicago School of urban sociology as the fountain of orthodox theory. The chapter looks at how the anti-urban bias intersects with Utopian theories. It shows how anti-planning bias is a pillar of contemporary urban theory in the United States, where rejection of the extreme rationalism common elsewhere in the world is an excuse for the abdication of planning. Robert Redfield, one of the Chicago School's prodigies, was among the twentieth-century social scientists to apply the ideal-type method to urbanization. Two prejudices consistently impede the evolution of a scientific approach to planning the metropolis: anti-urban bias and anti-planning bias. Urban problems are considered to be an inherent part of urbanization. The static Chicago School approach liquidated the importance of abrupt, qualitative changes in urbanization and tended to freeze reality in a photograph where only gradual, quantitative changes can occur.
