Parsing the Chicago School legacy: Towards a critical human ecology

Although the Chicago School of Sociology serves as a shared reference point for scholars from across the subfields of urban studies, it is rarely engaged in any depth. The prevailing sense, it seems, is that there is little to be gained by seriously engaging with the work itself or critiques of it. Against this, I argue that sustained reflection on the Chicago School is productive for both liberal and critical urban studies scholarship. I thus parse the School's legacy while arguing for creative, critical engagement with its manifold lineages. After reviewing criticisms and amendments from critical race theory, postcolonial studies and Marxism, I propose a revised understanding of the Chicago School that jettisons its naturalistic metaphors while retaining the basic precepts of its epistemology. This results in an approach that uses similar methods and modes of explanation as the Chicago School within an epistemology attuned to power relations. I discuss inspiring examples of authors who have made efforts in this direction and outline avenues for future work.