Definition
The Chicago School is the cluster of urban sociologists based at the University of Chicago between roughly 1915 and 1940 who treated the modern industrial city as an ecological system and used street-level fieldwork to study how its zones generated different patterns of life, including crime.
Its central figures include Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, and the criminologists Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. Their lasting contributions are the concentric-zone model of urban growth, the theory of social disorganisation, and the establishment of ethnographic immersion as a legitimate way to know a city.
Why it matters
How it works
The school read the city as a mosaic of natural areas, each with its own population, economy, and tempo. Burgess's concentric model placed the central business district at the core, ringed by a transitional zone of cheap housing, light industry, and recent migrants, then by working-class neighbourhoods, middle-class districts, and commuter suburbs. The transitional zone, exposed to constant churn, persistently produced high rates of crime regardless of which group lived there at the time.
Shaw and McKay used decades of juvenile-court records to test this picture and found delinquency rates clustering in the transitional zone across generations of inhabitants. They named the underlying mechanism social disorganisation: weak local institutions, low collective efficacy, and rapid population turnover that left children outside any stable network of supervision. The methodological companion was deep ethnography: jack-rolling boys, taxi-dance halls, hobo hangouts, and immigrant rooming houses all entered the academic record because someone went and lived nearby.