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.

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.

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.

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.

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.