Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
within U.S. urban areas. Before tracts, the Census Bureau only published
data from large wards, which could be well over 100,000 in population
and encompassed big areas that could be quite diverse. Once tracts were
defined, the enhanced view of the population made it relatively easy
to compute the extent to which segregation existed. This was done by
developing various measures of the degree to which different groups, in
the mid-twentieth century African Americans (also called Negroes and
then later blacks by the Census Bureau), were separated from whites.
Segregation is conceptualized and measured as the degree of separation
between two groups. Thus, the mere presence of African Americans and
whites in a city does not mean that that city is integrated; rather, segrega-
tion measures report the degree to which the groups live separately, as
defined technically.
In the United States, urban studies, urban sociology, and certain
types of demography have been dominated by the so-called Chicago
School, which favored an underlying conception or model of urban so-
ciety that drew on a biological analogy.
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Developed after the founding of
the University of Chicago sociology department in the 1920s, it featured
one of the earliest models designed to explain the spatial organization
of urban areas, and it is associated with Professors Robert Park and Er-
nest Burgess. The Chicago School's classic model was Burgess's “con-
centric ring” theory of how various sectors of the city evolved. Figure 2.1
presents a diagram that displays these rings. At the center of this model
was the central business district, which was also where the homeless of
those days lived. This zone was surrounded by a zone in transition, into
which business, light manufacturing, and new immigrants were mov-
ing and where the city's “slums” and vice were concentrated. The next
zone out was inhabited by workers, often second-generation immigrants,
who wanted to live within easy access of work and could afford modest
homes. The inhabitants of this zone looked to move farther out to the
“promised land” of the next two zones. Thus, the next zone out was high-
class apartment buildings or somewhat exclusive areas of single-family
housing for the middle class. The zone farthest out contained the com-
muter suburbs.
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The dynamic terms of the model were “invasion,” “suc-
cession,” and “segregation,” which, encapsulating the belief that moving
