Mapping Chicago, Imagining Metropolises: Reconsidering the Zonal Model of Urban Growth

Chicago’s early boosters, realtors, and urban planners mapped their city as a series of concentric circles. In 1924, sociologist Ernest Burgess extrapolated from these maps to project a model for America’s urban and suburban growth. Despite the persuasive power of Burgess’s zonal model, his own students’ grounded, unpublished work offers a countermodel of more diverse and contested suburbanization, including suburban vice, industry, retail, and class variations. Their alternative maps reinsert human power dynamics into what Chicago’s urban ecologists had promoted as inevitable and homogeneous suburbanization.