Social Disorganization Theory - Robert Ezra Park and Ernest W. Burgess

Robert Ezra Park and Ernest W. Burgess

Park and Burgess (1925) developed a theory of urban ecology which proposed that cities are environments like those found in nature, governed by many of the same forces of Darwinian evolution, i.e. competition, which affects natural ecosystems. When a city is formed and grows, people and their activities cluster in a particular area, i.e. the process of "concentration". Gradually, this central area becomes highly populated, so there is a scattering of people and their activities away from the central city to establish the suburbs, i.e. "dispersion". They suggested that, over time, the competition for land and other scarce urban resources leads to the division of the urban space into distinctive ecological niches, "natural areas" or zones in which people share similar social characteristics because they are subject to the same ecological pressures. As a zone becomes more prosperous and "desirable", property values and rents rise, and people and businesses migrate into that zone, usually moving outward from the city center in a process Park and Burgess called "succession" (a term borrowed from plant ecology) and new residents take their place. At both a micro and macro level, society was of thought to operate as a super organism, where change is a natural aspect of the process of growth and neither chaotic nor disorderly. Thus, an organized area is invaded by new elements. This gives rise to local competition and there will either be succession or an accommodation which results in a reorganization. But, during the early stages of competition, there will always be some level of disorganization because there will be disruption to, or a breakdowns in, the normative structure of the community which may or may not lead to deviant behavior. Thus, although a city was a physical organization, it also had also social and moral structures that could be disorganised.

Their model, known as Concentric Zone Theory and first published in The City (1925) predicted that, once fully grown, cities would take the form of five concentric rings with areas of social and physical deterioration concentrated near the city centre and more prosperous areas located near the city's edge. This theory seeks to explain the existence of social problems such as unemployment and crime in specific Chicago districts, making extensive use of synchronic mapping to reveal the spatial distribution of social problems and to permit comparison between areas. They argued that "neighborhood conditions, be the of wealth or poverty, had a much greater determinant effect on criminal behavior than ethnicity, race, or religion" (Gaines and Miller). In the post-war period, the cartographic approach was criticised as simplistic in that it neglected the social and cultural dimensions of urban life, the political and economic impact of industrialisation on urban geography, and the issues of class, race, gender, and ethnicity.