5. Finally, playgrounds should, as far as possible, be associated with character-forming agencies like the school, the church, and other local institutions. For however much the older generation may have been detached by migration and movement from their local associations, the younger generation, who live closer to the ground than we do, are irresistibly attached to the localities in which they live. Their associates are the persons who live next to them. In a great city, children are the real neighbors; their habitat is the local community; and when they are allowed to prowl and explore they learn to know the neighborhood as no older person who was not himself born and reared in the neighborhood is ever likely to know it. This is one thing that makes the gang, a little later on, when perhaps it has become an athletic club, important politically. Our political system is based upon the theory that the people who live in the same locality know one another and have the same political and social interests. The gang is not infrequently a vocational school for ward politicians. ROBERT E. PARK CHAPTER VI COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND THE ROMANTIC TEMPER I. THE PROBLEM STATED Recent local studies in Chicago seem to show that the number of competent persons in the community is frequently no real measure of the competency—if one may use that expression in this connection—of the community itself. A high communal intelligence quotient does not always, it seems, insure communal efficiency. The explanation that at once suggests itself is that competent persons presumably are specialists deeply concerned in the little area of human experience in which they have chosen to operate, but profoundly indifferent to the interests of the particular geographical area in which they may happen to reside. It is the incompetent persons, apparently, who still maintain an interest that could in any sense be called lively in the local communities of our great cities. Women, particularly women without professional training, and immigrants who are locally segregated and immured within the invisible walls of an alien language are bound to have some sort of interest in their neighbors. Children in great cities, who necessarily live close to the ground, however, are the real neighbors. Boys’ gangs are neighborhood institutions. Politicians are professional neighbors. When the boys’ gangs are graduated, as they frequently are, into local politics, the local political boss assumes toward them the rôle of patron, and they assume toward him the rôle of clients.