Chicago: Assimilation

European immigrants and southern-born African-American migrants were not only the focus of Robert E. Park's work in Chicago, but also laid the foundation for sociological research in the US (Pedraza-Bailey, 1990). Like his European contemporaries, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tonnies, Park investigated the demise of traditional collectivities, the emergence of individuality, and the increasing valorization of civility between strangers as the basis of urban society. Indeed, sociology came of age as industrialization expanded and populations became increasingly mobile in the US and Europe. Migration to industrial centers such as East London and Chicago created “cities within cities” that were “composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races but the same social class” (Park, 1915: 582–3). However unlike his European contemporaries, whose work focused on how migration transformed extant cities—London and Paris, for example—Park and his students grappled to understand the social consequences of im/migration in Chicago, where genocide, settler expansion, European immigration, and African-American migration played roles not only in the construction of the city, but also dominated the city's self-understanding. In contrast to the European experience, the Chicago experience comprised forms of mobility—settlement and violent deterritorialization, as well as contemporary im/migration—that throughout Park's entire lifetime (1864–1944) relentlessly brought together diverse peoples and forced new social patterns and moralities to emerge among and between strangers.

The idea of the city as ongoing process grounded Park's sociology, especially his understanding of assimilation, which included both the gritty reality and utopian potential of modernization. Edward Shils suggests that, for Park, assimilation was “the formation of collective self-consciousness” (1996: 94). Shils further argues that Park considered assimilation an openended but necessary condition for collective living because the majority of Chicago's population came from elsewhere. Moreover, urban planners could neither anticipate nor control how new residents inhabited the city. Consequently, Park understood assimilation to be as important for urban morphology as geography, buildings, and transportation, arguing that: