The Chicago School of Sociology Maps Crime

• In Event: Historical Studies of Crime

Abstract

The founders of the Chicago School envisioned the city as similar to a natural landscape. In order to understand Chicago, a researcher needed to know what was there. As such, some of the early efforts of the school were to map the location of social institutions (schools, taverns, brothels), to define neighborhoods and their inhabitants, and to plot the homes of delinquents and the location of homicides. Each of these elements could then be layered on Chicago’s map. This early work was generalized into the concentric zone and radial theories and tested in other cities. However, analytic mapping, while sophisticated for the time, was limited by the tedium of collecting and mapping data and by inadequate spatial analytic tools. This presentation emphasizes the cartographic techniques used by the Chicago School rather than its research conclusions.

Author

• Richard Block, Loyola University Chicago