Urbanism & Sociology
From the Chicago School to the Los Angeles School
Photo by Brad Knight on Unsplash
The two metropolises, that are Chicago and Los Angeles, found themselves confronted in a singularly sharp way with social and economic changes that affected the Western world at specific times in history, namely the industrialization of the 20th century and the globalization of the 21st century.
Thus, two currents of thought and two schools have sprung from the surface of these two metropolises. The Chicago School and the Los Angeles School have one unanimous thing, they both “studied a city that presented a new urban model in response to historical changes or shaped by these”.
Chicago Schoool: modernism
First of all, the Chicago School is an American current of thought that combines several sets of important works in the field of sociology and urban planning. The University of Chicago was the center of sociological researches before World War II. The Chicago School puts forward several theories on city growth.
The example here is, of course, the city of Chicago, Illinois. As early as the 1920s, researchers at the Chicago School have been studying the understanding of how the new migrants, “coming from farms in the Middle West, countryside or Old-World cities”, were going to integrate into the American urban…
