Rigour and rebellion in and after the Chicago School *

Abstract

This essay argues for ongoing critical engagement with the Chicago School of urban sociology despite its problematic foundations. Responding to Justus Uitermark, I contend that the Chicago School remains pedagogically, theoretically, and methodologically valuable when taught reflexively and in dialogue with later critiques, including the LA School. I frame the Chicago School as a flawed but provocative part of the canon for urban studies.

‘Don’t throw the baby out with the racist/sexist/xenophobic bathwater!’

That's my crude, simplified, and dare I say very American way of characterizing Justus Uitermark's article ‘Parsing the Chicago School Legacy’. Justus recognizes that the Chicago School made ‘mistakes that urban studies should learn from’ but also provided us with fruitful theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that deserve continued engagement. I could not agree more. In this essay, I argue that the Chicago School should remain central to urban studies pedagogy and research – not despite its racist and sexist foundations, but because critical engagement with those foundations helps us to confront contemporary urban inequalities and stand morally resolute amid a crisis of public knowledge.

I am in a unique position to comment on Justus’s article. First, I am his former colleague. We overlapped at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) for several years, including part of that time as faculty in the same department. ¹ Justus taught a popular graduate course called Urban Debates; I taught a kindred undergraduate course, Urban Places and Social Problems, as well as graduate courses on Urban Ethnography. We coordinated so that our syllabi were complementary yet distinct. Second, I have used the core texts that Justus analyzes – including Park, Burgess, Wirth, Cressey, and others – in my teaching at research universities in the US and the Netherlands, and now at a liberal arts college. I have direct experience in the pedagogical utility of introducing diverse populations of students to the Chicago School's insights and perils. I can speak to what it means to teach these seemingly archaic texts to students from around the world. Third, my research has drawn inspiration from the Chicago School's rich tradition of ethnographic research. I have used Los Angeles as my ‘lab’ for nearly two decades, inspired by the Chicago School's approach of treating the city as a living entity while incorporating the urban political economy insights of later critiques. Fourth, like Park, I am a former journalist. I know what it means to see sociology as a kind of ‘super reporting’ that helps set the record on ‘what is actually going on rather than what, on the surface, merely seems to be going on’ (The University of Chicago Library, n.d.). In what follows, I discuss these warrants, drawing on professional experiences to assess the Chicago School's pedagogical and methodological afterlives.

First, I want to argue for critical engagement with the Chicago School as a corrective to past scholarly injustices, not as an endorsement of them. That history is part of our scholarly lineage; by 1930, reportedly half the world's sociologists had been trained at the University of Chicago (Deegan, 2001), so its theoretical seeds are widespread. We can better address those legacies when we engage critically. A brief personal example illustrates this. When I joined a Dutch department in 2017, colleagues were still debating whether race was a valid sociological category there. ² A senior colleague scolded me for assigning American authors on racial inequality, accusing me of importing a foreign concept. So, when I learned that Justus, a respected Dutch colleague, assigned a similar scholarship, I felt both relieved and emboldened. Responsible engagement with the Chicago School, in and out of the US, requires acknowledging that its concepts have been used to pathologize Black and immigrant communities, naturalize segregation, and legitimate displacement through urban renewal – while also asking us to understand these misuses to prevent their repetition. Bringing Park, Burgess, and Wirth into a Dutch classroom opened conversations about race and racism that might not have occurred otherwise.

That leads to my next point: the Chicago School's ongoing pedagogical utility. In the acknowledgements section, Justus writes that he ‘most of all wants to thank students in the course Urban Debates for stimulating conversations on classic and contemporary urban theory’. The syllabus for that course begins with the Chicago School and Urban Ecology before moving to Urban Ecology in conversation with Political Economy. This chronological approach helps students trace the historical development of urban knowledge (albeit a Western-centred one) and provides a framework for examining what makes cities unique. Using Wirth's classic article on urbanism, in particular, encourages students to articulate the taken-for-granted aspects of urban life. As Justus notes, ‘if we read Burgess and Wirth as seeking to construe ideal types’, the Chicago School offers conceptual tools for comparing contemporary city life with early systematic approaches. This framework can help a diverse classroom find common ground for discussion and critique.

During my tenure at the UvA, it was common to have a dozen or more nationalities in a single classroom. We needed a shared scholarly language to create a thread of understanding across this diversity. If only to be a foil, or sometimes, a punching bag, the Chicago School offers a set of ideas and provocations that stimulates conversation. Its works are straightforward and accessibly written, yet their blatant racial stereotyping and US-centric focus demand critical discussion. Students learn to articulate why anti-racist and postcolonial critiques are essential to urban scholarship, without being told to accept these perspectives top-down. In this way, critical engagement becomes a form of accountability, not rehabilitation.

Having students read the Chicago School can also help to free them from an epistemological albatross frequent in social science classrooms. That is, students have lived their entire lives as social beings, interacting with others and consuming popular media. They tend to see themselves as experts before they enter the classroom, and part of my job is to help deconstruct that false expertise. Exposure to early urban theory enables students to situate contemporary social problems within longer historical patterns of urban inequality. For example, three weeks after reading Park, Burgess, and Wirth in my undergraduate course at the UvA, I lectured on migration in Europe and the role of cities in integrating new arrivals, focusing on policy debates following the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. Because students had read the Chicago School – and heard my lecture on how the Industrial Revolution drove rapid urbanisation – they could see how the contemporary crisis was part of a longer history of xenophobia. They also recognized how issues then dominating EU news – housing shortages, concentrated poverty, class inequality, and integration challenges – echoed early 20th-century urban concerns. This allowed them to situate media and political panics over refugees within a broader theoretical framework: if cities have always attracted newcomers, how might lessons from those early Chicago studies enrich our analyses today? And if past residents resisted newcomers with discrimination and violence, how can examining responses to that xenophobia inform strategies for addressing stigma and marginalization now?

Whether the education occurs at a research university or liberal arts college, properly taught, students learn to observe the cities they have grown up in and travelled to through a critical scientific lens. This is not because they come to accept everything the Chicago School posited, but via interrogation of what does and does not apply from those older ideas to places like Amsterdam, Houston, or Los Angeles.

This brings me to my third argument in support of Justus’s efforts to inspire our continued engagement with the Chicago School. Reading that body of work can be influential in understanding what it means to study a city with both rigour and rebellion. That era's desire to establish sociology as a distinct science in the United States set a high empirical bar that deserves attention today. As Justus argues, the Chicago School famously combined ethnography, mapping, and statistical analyses. This comprehensive methodological approach enabled student cohorts, under the tutelage of Park and Burgess, to see ethnography as requiring data triangulation – something that was often lost in later methodological debates around grounded theory. Reading Cressey's Taxi-Dance Hall or Drake & Cayton's Black Metropolis reinforces the need to complement participant-observation with other forms of data collection, strengthening ethnography's accuracy and verifiability.

Now, lest you think I am only going to wax poetic about my former colleague, I want to note that I think Justus misses one of the ways the Chicago School has been most impactful, and that was by inspiring the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, including Mike Davis, Michael Dear, Edward Soja, and others. While Justus cites Dear in a footnote, he does not discuss Davis, which is an omission that deserves highlighting. Davis was unapologetic in his disdain for the Chicago School's ecological approach. The LA School adopted Marxist and poststructuralist insights to challenge the lack of attention to power and difference in the Chicago School, highlighting the twenty-first century as one of urban fragmentation, polycentricity, and increased privatization. Walter Nicholls (2011: 192) writes, ‘Crisis and uneven development therefore served as the twin pillars supporting the theoretical assumptions of the LA School, providing them with a starkly different starting point from the functionalism of the Chicago School’. Neither Davis nor others in the LA School would have been able to develop their ideas had they not had the Chicago School first. The dialectic of the Chicago-LA models shows that theory evolves not by being proven correct but by enabling productive rebellion.

Finally, the Chicago School's early fusion of journalism and sociology highlights enduring questions about public knowledge, accessibility, and participation. Just as Park sought to establish his paradigmatic research agenda at a time of political and social upheaval and ‘advocated direct engagement’ (Uitermark, 2026) to understand these changes, we would be well-served to think about ways to make knowledge more engaged and engaging. Let's face it: science faces a crisis of epic proportions. This is true in countries throughout the world. Reading the Chicago School and learning from its contributions is but one avenue for thinking about what public knowledge might look like and why it matters. For scholars involved in participatory action research, the Chicago School's legacy of social reform is worth critical parsing, as well. In these ways, revisiting the Chicago School becomes not merely an intellectual exercise but a call to reassert urban studies’ purpose at a moment when the legitimacy of scientific knowledge is under threat.

The Chicago School, for all its many faults, stands as a foundational body of literature in urban studies. To discard it is not to transcend it, but to forget how urban knowledge is made and contested. Whether we approach the work of Park and his colleagues as teachers or as scholars, we would be wise to keep the Chicago School in the bath while we alkalize the racism, sexism, and nativism out of the water.