Alienation of social control: The Chicago sociologists and the origins of urban planning

Abstract

This essay explores the origins of modern urban planning in a series of exchanges between city planners and urban sociologists in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was at the 1925 meeting of the American Sociological Society on “The City”, which the pioneer urban sociologist Robert E. Park and his colleagues from the University of Chicago organized, and planners from the Russell Sage Foundation's Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs attended, that this exchange began. There the sociologists articulated a theory of urban life which helped planners unravel the social implications of physical planning. This sociological theory had both shaped and been shaped by an on‐going series of practical reforms in which Park and his students had been involved. At the core of their theory was a fascination with social control (the means by which groups regulated the behaviour of their members) and a reform strategy which is best described as the alienation of social control. Park and his students explored new forms of social control as the means to eliminate those wasteful aspects of metropolitan life which were out of step with the urban‐industrial order. Following the 1925 meeting planners and sociologists began to develop a strategy and a policy of urban planning, a strategy for rationalizing not only the physical and economic structure of the metropolis but its social order as well.

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