Reflecting on the centennial of Park and Burgess's The City and building on Uitermark's timely analysis, I concur that while the Chicago School's original ontological assumptions are flawed, its epistemological approach and core insights remain remarkably generative for contemporary urban research. I explore both the enduring legacy of the Chicago School and new directions in three domains: the embeddedness of neighborhoods in higher-order social structures; the potential of “big data” and computational methods in urban studies; and emerging frameworks for understanding urban social change.
Robert J. Sampson (Tue,) studied this question.