CAN NEIGHBORHOOD WORK HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS?
Neighborhood work at present and as now practiced cannot, for two
reasons, be said to be based upon science. First, the social
sciences—and I refer to sociology in particular—have at present little
to offer as a scientific basis for social work; secondly, what knowledge
the social sciences have accumulated has been used little, or not at
all, by neighborhood workers.
_The trend of neighborhood work to a scientific basis._—But if
neighborhood work has not had a scientific basis, it has had, from its
inception, as one of its conscious or unconscious motives, the search
after knowledge as the basis of human relations. Settlement work,
especially, represents not only the most devoted and the most
idealistic, but also the most intelligent, phase of social work of the
past generation. The settlement in its origin was an extension of the
university. It carried over into a new environment the love of truth
and, it may be added, the spirit of science. The residents of the
settlement were brought at once into touch with social reality; that is,
with the concrete facts of human life.
This early venture into intimate contact with social reality may
accordingly be called the first stage in the trend of neighborhood work
toward a scientific basis. But settlement workers soon found that
sympathetic understanding and intimate contacts failed to solve many of
the actual problems of neighborhood work. The recalcitrancy of the boys’
gang, the opposition and manipulations of the ward boss, the competition
of commercialized recreation, the unsolvable cultural conflict between
immigrant parents and Americanized children are only a few of the many
perplexing conditions of neighborhood life in immigrant areas which
resisted the spirit of good will of settlement workers. They therefore
began to study their communities in the attempt to state the factors at
work by an analysis of the elements in the situation. _Hull House Maps
and Papers_, _The City Wilderness_, and _Americans in Process_ are
illustrations of the careful study and keen observation of these very
early efforts to determine and to take account of the many and different
conditions affecting neighborhood work. This interest in the discovery
of factors in the social situation may therefore be called the second
stage in the trend of neighborhood work toward a scientific basis.
Science, however, is concerned not with factors, but with forces. The
distinction is not always clearly drawn between a factor and a force.
“Factors are the elements that co-operate to make a given situation.
Forces are type-factors operative in typical situations.”[69] A factor
is thought of as a concrete cause for an individual event; a force is
conceived to be an abstract cause for events in general so far as they
are similar. A particular gang of boys, the Torpedo gang, of which Tony
is the leader—and which is made up of eight street Arabs—is a factor in
the situation which a certain settlement in an Italian colony in Chicago
faces. But as soon as the attention shifts from this one gang and this
particular settlement to settlements in general and to gangs in general
the transition is made from a factor to a force. A gang is a factor to a
given settlement; the gang is a force from the standpoint of all
settlements.
_The study of social forces in the community._—If neighborhood work can
have a scientific basis, it is because there are social forces in
community life—forces like geographical conditions, human wishes,
community consciousness—that can be studied, described, analyzed, and
ultimately measured. In a series of research projects now in progress in
the Department of Sociology in the University of Chicago, studies are
being made of the social forces of community life. While the city of
Chicago is used as the laboratory for this investigation, it is assumed
that the processes of urban life in one community are in certain ways
typical of city life throughout the United States.
The term “community” is widely used by sociologists, neighborhood
workers, and others, but often with widely divergent meanings. In
research in any field it is necessary to define our concepts and to make
relevant distinctions. In the literature of the subject there is a
growing disposition to emphasize as one of the fundamental aspects of
the community its geographical setting. Whatever else the community may
be, it signifies individuals, families, groups, or institutions located
upon an area and some or all of the relationships which grow out of this
common location. “‘Community’ is the term which is applied to societies
and social groups where they are considered from the point of view of
the geographical distribution of the individuals and institutions of
which they are composed.”[70]
Upon reflection it is evident that markedly different social
relationships may have their roots in the conditions of a common
territorial location. Indeed, it is just these outstanding differences
in communal activities, viewed in relation to their geographic
background, which have caused much of the confusion in the use of the
term “community.” For community life, as conditioned by the distribution
of individuals and institutions over an area, has at least three quite
different aspects.
First of all, there is the community viewed almost exclusively in terms
of location and movement. How far has the area itself, by its very
topography and by all its other external and physical characteristics,
as railroads, parks, types of housing, conditioned community formation
and exerted a determining influence upon the distribution of its
inhabitants and upon their movements and life? To what extent has it had
a selective effect in sifting and sorting families over the area by
occupation, nationality, and economic or social class? To what extent is
the work of neighborhood or community institutions promoted or impeded
by favorable or unfavorable location? How far do geographical distances
within or without the community symbolize social distances? This
apparently “natural” organization of the human community, so similar in
the formation of plant and animal communities, may be called the
“ecological community.”
No comprehensive study of the human community from this standpoint has
yet been made. A prospectus for such a study is outlined in an earlier
chapter by Professor R. D. McKenzie, in this volume, under the title,
“The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community.”[71] Yet
there are several systematic treatises and a rapidly growing literature
of scientific research in the two analogous fields of plant ecology and
animal ecology. The processes of competition, invasion, succession, and
segregation described in elaborate detail for plant and animal
communities seem to be strikingly similar to the operation of these same
processes in the human community. The assertion might even be defended
that the student of community life or the community organization worker
might secure at present a more adequate understanding of the basic
factors in the natural organization of the community from Warming’s
_Oecology of Plants_ or from Adams’s _Guide to the Study of Animal
Ecology_ than from any other source.
In the second place, the community may be conceived in terms of the
effects of communal life in a given area upon the formation or the
maintenance of a local culture. Local culture includes those sentiments,
forms of conduct, attachments, and ceremonies which are characteristic
of a locality, which have either originated in the area or have become
identified with it. This aspect of local life may be called “the
cultural community.” This relationship of cultural patterns to
territorial areas has not yet been adequately studied unless in the
phenomena of language. What, for example, are studies in dialect but one
illustration of how local areas with their entailed isolation
differentially affect customs of speech? Concrete materials for a wider
study of culture in relation to location are increasing, notably upon
preliterate peoples and upon retarded groups geographically isolated, as
the southern mountaineers or the remote inhabitants of Pitcairn Island.
The immigrant colony in an American city possesses a culture
unmistakably not indigenous but transplanted from the Old World. The
telling fact, however, is not that the immigrant colony maintains its
old-world cultural organization, but that in its new environment it
mediates a cultural adjustment to its new situation. How basically
culture is dependent upon place is suggested by the following
expressions, “New England conscience,” “southern hospitality,” “Scottish
thrift,” “Kansas is not a geographical location so much as a state of
mind.” Neighborhood institutions like the church, the school, and the
settlement are essentially cultural institutions, and recognition of
this fact has far-reaching implications for the policies and programs of
these local centers.
There remains a third standpoint from which the relation of a local area
to group life may be stated. In what ways and to what extent does the
fact of common residence in a locality compel or invite its inhabitants
to act together? Is there, or may there be developed upon a geographical
basis, a community consciousness? Does contiguity by residence insure or
predispose to co-operation in at least those conditions of life inherent
in geographic location, as transportation, water supply, playgrounds,
etc.? Finally, what degree of social and political action can be secured
on the basis of local areas? This is the community of the community
organization worker and of the politician, and may be described as “the
political community.” It is upon this concept of the community as a
local area that American political organization has been founded.
These three definitions of the community are not perhaps altogether
mutually exclusive. They do, however, represent three distinctly
different aspects of community life that will have to be recognized in
any basic study of the community and of community organization. A given
local area, like Hyde Park in Chicago, may at the same time constitute
an ecological, cultural, and political community, while another area
like the lower North Side in the same city, which forms a distinct
ecological unit, falls apart into several cultural communities and
cannot, at any rate from the standpoint of a common and effective public
opinion, be said to constitute a going political community. The Black
Belt in Chicago comprises one cultural community but overflows several
ecological areas and has no means of common political action except
through ward lines arbitrarily drawn.
It follows that the boundaries of local areas determined ecologically,
culturally, and politically seldom, if ever, exactly coincide. In fact,
for American cities it is generally true that political boundaries are
drawn most arbitrarily, without regard either to ecological or cultural
lines, as is notoriously the case in the familiar instance of the
gerrymander. Therefore it is fair to raise the question: How far are the
deficiencies in political action through our governmental bodies and
welfare action through our social agencies the result of the failure to
base administrative districts upon ecological or cultural
communities?[72]
This analysis of the community into its threefold aspects suggests that
the study of social forces in a local area should assume that the
neighborhood or the community is the resultant of three main types of
determining influences: first, ecological forces; second, cultural
forces; and third, political forces.
_Ecological forces._—The ecological forces are those which have to do
with the process of competition and the consequent distribution and
segregation by residence and occupation. Through competition and the
factors which affect it, as trade centers, etc., every neighborhood in
the city becomes a component and integral part of the larger community,
with a destiny bound up by its relation to it. In the study of the
growth of the city it is found that the life of any neighborhood is
determined, in the long run, not altogether by the forces within itself,
but even more by the total course of city life. To think of the
neighborhood or the community in isolation from the city is to disregard
the biggest fact about the neighborhood.
Studies of urban growth reveal that the city grows outward from its
central business district (1) in a series of expanding zones.[73] There
is a “zone of transition” (2) encircling the downtown area. This is the
area of deterioration, the so-called “slum”, created in large part by
the invasion of business and light manufacture. A third area (3) is
inhabited by workers in industry who have escaped from the area of
deterioration (2) and who desire to live within easy access of their
work. Beyond this zone is the “residential area” (4) of high-class
apartment buildings or of exclusive “restricted” districts of single
family dwellings. Still farther, out beyond the city limits, is the
“commuters’ zone” (5) of suburban areas or satellite cities within a
sixty-minute ride of the central business district.
Within these zones of urban growth are to be found local districts or
communities, and these in turn subdivide into smaller areas called
neighborhoods. In the long run, geographical factors and the process of
competition fix the boundaries and the centers of these areas. It is
important that neighborhood work be in accordance with, rather than in
opposition to, these silent but continuous influences. A map of local
communities was prepared to show the way in which rivers, railroads,
large industrial establishments, parks, and boulevards divide the city
into its constituent local communities—residential and industrial.
The centers of local communities are to be found at the point of highest
land value in the intersection of two business streets. These local
community centers are also characterized by the concentration of retail
business, of banks, of restaurants, and of the large and magnificent
palaces of amusement, like motion picture houses and public dance halls.
If high land values indicate the center of the community, the lowest
land values generally define its periphera.
[Illustration:
CHART I
SCHEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF THE DIVISION OF A COMMUNITY INTO
NEIGHBORHOODS BY THE INTERSECTION OF TWO BUSINESS STREETS.
]
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?
These changes taking place in community life may be observed in a
dramatic form in commercialized recreation. The day of the neighborhood
public dance hall and the neighborhood motion picture show has passed,
or at least is passing. Young people are deserting the neighborhood
recreation centers and are thronging to centers outside the local
community, to the high-class, magnificent dance gardens and palaces, and
to the so-called “wonder” theaters of the “bright light” areas.
A realignment of the leisure-time movements of urban young people is
taking place, which every agency engaged in neighborhood work must take
into account. Is the neighborhood as a factor in the lives of youth soon
to become a situation of the past? Can settlements and social centers
expect to hold back the tide of the forces of city life?
A map of the residences of dance hall patrons which shows both the
disappearance of the small public dance hall from the neighborhood and
the concentration of large dance halls in “bright light” areas is all
the more significant because it portrays the phenomenon of promiscuity.
By promiscuity is meant primary and intimate behavior upon the basis of
secondary contacts. In the village type of neighborhood, where everyone
knows everyone else, the social relationships of the young people were
safeguarded by the primary controls of group opinion. But in the public
dance hall, where young people are drawn from all parts of the city,
this old primary control breaks down. Is not this the basic reason why
social workers find the dance hall so recurring a factor in personal
disorganization and delinquency? As yet, however, we have no
satisfactory study of the dance hall as a social world of youth. Two new
social types—the “sheik” and the “flapper”—have been created by the
dance hall and the motion picture, but they are regarded as subjects for
jest rather than for serious study.
[Illustration:
FORM 1.—The Neighborhood Triangle.
]
A study by Miss Evelyn Buchan of girl delinquency shows the effect of
the increasing mobility and promiscuity of city life upon the behavior
of youth, and suggests an interesting method of study. To bring into
clearer relief the rôle of mobility and promiscuity as factors in
behavior, a device called “the delinquency triangle” was employed. The
three points of the triangle were located by spotting the home of the
girl, the home of her male companion, and the place of delinquency.
Three typical forms of the triangle soon appeared.
Form 1 represents the traditional form of sex delinquency, where all
three points of the triangle are within the community. This may be
called the “neighborhood triangle.” In this case the intimacy of the boy
and girl might be little more than the continuance in this country of
old-world folkways, but without the protection for the girl in
subsequent marriage which the European peasant mores afford.
[Illustration:
FORM 2.—The Mobility Triangle.
]
Form 2, which is “the mobility triangle,” stands for delinquency of the
type related to increased freedom of movement, where two points of the
triangle or its base, formed by the homes of the girl and the boy, lie
within the same community, but where its apex, or the place of
delinquency, is situated outside. In this case the bright-light area
becomes a place of freedom from the narrower, distant controls of the
home and the neighborhood.
[Illustration:
FORM 3.—The Promiscuity Triangle.
]
In form 3, delinquency is of the type of promiscuity, because here all
the points of the triangle lie in different communities. The intimacy
developing from the casual acquaintance of the metal worker from the
steel mills with the girl from the West Side whom he “picked up” at an
amusement park may be so transient that neither knows the family name or
the address of the other.
The total effect of forces of city life, like mobility and promiscuity,
upon the neighborhood and upon our traditional culture seems to be
subversive and disorganizing. Particularly is this true of deteriorating
areas, where neighborhood work originated, and where it is still, in any
completely developed state, for the most part confined. A series of maps
has been prepared which shows graphically what, of course, is known to
social students—that the zone of deterioration and the areas of the
greatest mobility in the city have the greatest concentration of
poverty, vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, divorce, desertion,
abandoned infants, murder, and suicide.
_Political forces._—The political forces have to do with the more formal
control of public opinion and law. Neighborhood work is concerned with
political forces whenever social action is desired. Our whole scheme of
social work may be regarded, from this standpoint at least, as social
politics. But has the social worker, who is the social politician, the
same intimate knowledge of his neighborhood that the professional
politician possesses? A minimum of information which he needs is a card
catalogue of, plus some direct contact with, all the local dynamic
personalities, including gang leaders, pool hall proprietors, leaders of
all the neighborhood organizations, and of all professional persons,
like representatives of social agencies, physicians, lawyers, clergymen,
at work in his locality. More than that, he needs to know the basic
interests, the driving wishes, and the vital problems of the men and
women, the youth and the children, living in the community.
The knowledge of these forces in neighborhood life will suggest feasible
projects and programs. Too often, however, attempts at social control
rise from ignorant good will rather than from the facts of the
situation. This is particularly true of the many futile efforts to
impose neighborly relationships upon areas which are no longer
neighborhoods.
What, then, is our answer to the question, Can neighborhood work have a
scientific basis? It can have a scientific foundation if it will base
its activities upon a study of social forces. But the social forces of
city life seem, from our studies, to be destroying the city
neighborhood. Is the neighborhood center to engage in a losing fight
against the underlying tendencies of modern urban society? This question
should be squarely faced: Is neighborhood work prepared to base its
justification for existence upon facts rather than upon sentiment?
There are those who are convinced that the function of the neighborhood
center is passing with the decay of the neighborhood in the city. For
myself, I am not so certain. Surely the work of the neighborhood center
must now be conceived and planned in terms of its relationship to the
entire life of the city. The work of neighborhood centers, like that of
all other social agencies, must increasingly be placed upon the basis of
the scientific study of the social forces with which they have to deal.
Especially are studies desired of the actual effect and rôle of intimate
contacts in personal development and social control.
A feasible way for neighborhood centers to place their work upon a
scientific basis would be to stress the impulse to research that has
always been associated with the settlement movement. Thirty years ago
Mr. Robert A. Woods read a paper on “University Settlements as
Laboratories in Social Science.” The argument for research in its
relations to neighborhood work is contained in that article. He
conceived the advantage of research both to social science and to the
settlement. The growing fluidity and complexity of urban life has but
increased the force of his argument.
Neighborhood work, by the logic of the situation, if it is to evolve a
successful technique, will be compelled more and more to depend upon
research into the social forces of modern life.
ERNEST W. BURGESS