Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
But if the intersection of two business streets determines the trade
center, these same streets divide it into neighborhoods. In Chart I on
this page is offered a schematic representation of a Chicago local
community, Woodlawn, with its economic center at the intersection of the
two main business streets of Sixty-Third Street and Cottage Grove
Avenue. At this intersection land values are five thousand dollars a
front foot. Woodlawn falls into four neighborhoods, A, B, C, and D,
divided from each other by these same intersecting business streets. It
is interesting that each of these neighborhoods has its own public
school. Even more significant is the fact that an attempt to unite two
struggling churches of the same denomination in two of these
neighborhoods into one strong church failed because neither would
surrender its location.
It seems almost axiomatic to state that community and neighborhood work
must take into account the operation of these silent but continuous
ecological forces and work with them rather than against them. Yet how
often are social centers located on the edge, rather than at the center,
of a neighborhood. In the location of a neighborhood center the
consequences which flow from the play of ecological forces must be
heeded, because they condition the development of its work and the
radius of its influence.
_Cultural forces._—Ecological or economic forces are naturally basic to
the play of cultural forces. Culture, as the social heritage of the
group, implies both a locality to which it is indigenous and a constant,
rather than a changing, social situation. Chicago, like other large
cities, has its cultural communities, each of which has, if not a local
area, at least a local center. Hobohemia, Bohemia, Philistia, the
Ghetto, and the Gold Coast are cultural communities.
Movement in the person, as from one social location to another, or any
sudden change as caused by an invention, carries with it the possibility
or the probability of cultural decadence. The cultural controls over
conduct disintegrate; impulses and wishes take random and wild
expression. The result is immorality and delinquency; in short, personal
and social disorganization. An illustration of cultural decadence as a
result of movement is the excessively high rate of juvenile delinquency
among the children of immigrant parents. To what extent have
neighborhood workers gauged the effect of the daily newspaper, the
motion picture, the automobile, and the radio, in releasing the child,
the youth, and the adult from the confines of the neighborhood and of
bringing them into contact with the city-wide, nation-wide, and
world-wide life of our time?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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