UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO November 2, 1925 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE CITY: SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT. _Robert E. Park_ 1 II. THE GROWTH OF THE CITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO A RESEARCH PROJECT. _Ernest W. Burgess_ 47 III. THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF THE HUMAN COMMUNITY. _R. D. McKenzie_ 63 IV. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE NEWSPAPER. _Robert E. Park_ 80 V. COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY. _Robert E. Park_ 99 VI. COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND THE ROMANTIC TEMPER. _Robert E. Park_ 113 VII. MAGIC, MENTALITY, AND CITY LIFE. _Robert E. Park_ 123 VIII. CAN NEIGHBORHOOD WORK HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS? _Ernest W. Burgess_ 142 IX. THE MIND OF THE HOBO: REFLECTIONS UPON THE RELATION BETWEEN MENTALITY AND LOCOMOTION. _Robert E. Park_ 156 X. A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE URBAN COMMUNITY. _Louis Wirth_ 161 INDEXES 229 CHAPTER I THE CITY: SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT The city, from the point of view of this paper, is something more than a congeries of individual men and of social conveniences—streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices—courts, hospitals, schools, police, and civil functionaries of various sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature. The city has, as Oswald Spengler has recently pointed out, its own culture: “What his house is to the peasant, the city is to civilized man. As the house has its household gods, so has the city its protecting Deity, its local saint. The city also, like the peasant’s hut, has its roots in the soil.”[1]