What is concentric zone theory in Criminology

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Índice Show

History and Overview
Irregularities in Cities
Defining Distance
Impact and Importance

I. CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY Burgess’s concentric zone theory was presented in 1924. He presented a descriptive urban land use model that divided cities in a set of concentric circles expanding from downtown to the suburbs. His representation came from Burgess’ observations of various American cities, especially Chicago. Burgess model assumes a relationship between the socio-economic status of households and the distance from the Central Business District. The further from the district, the better the quality of housing, but the longer the commuting time. Making this Accessing better housing is done at the expense of longer commuting times and costs as well. According to Burgess, urban growth is a process of expansion and reconversion of land uses, with a tendency of each inner zone to expand in the outer zone. According to Burgess’ theory, a large city is divided in six concentric zones, Burgess’s model has its cons according to critics. It is said to be a product of its time. That is, it won’t work the same with present cities. The model was developed when American cities were growing very fast and when motorized transportation was still uncommon as most people used public transit. Thus the concept cannot be applied to those from the second half to the twentieth century where highways have enabled urban development to escape the reconversion process and to take place directly in the suburbs. The model in this case was developed for American cities and is limited elsewhere.

Ernest Burgess of the University of Chicago, sought to explain clear divisions of socioeconomic status within and immediately outside of cities. The disparities from one city block to the next were extremely apparent and Burgess created a tool that has proven to be extremely helpful to future crime study. Working with the city of Chicago, Burgess examined and identified 5 city zones, each with its own particular attributes. Though Ernest’s original publication from 1928 on concentric circles very blatantly divided these zones by concentration of African Americans within the inner zones (Burgess, 1928), the general make-up of these areas today is predominantly comprised of minorities and those of lower socioeconomic status.

The zone distinction within cities will become much more apparent in future discussions about social disorganization and its dominance within inner zones.

Zone II is distinct in its impoverished condition. Houses are dilapidated and abandoned, education standards and facilities are low, and crime is abundant. Brought to light by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay of the University of Chicago, the term social disorganization became a predominant theme in explaining the occurrence of dysfunction and crime within these inner zones.

The Zone of Transition is one of much despair and hardship. Houses and apartment complexes are left ignored by landlords and tenants allowing them to go into major disrepair. Drug dealing, addiction, and prostitution are visible on most street corners as few means of legitimate methods of work are available to those residing in these areas. High resident turnover occurs as those that find the means are able to move into higher zones. These community traits leave these neighborhoods unstable and ever-changing, yet through cultural transmission, the general subculture of crime and deviance persists (Siegel, 2009). While the outermost concentric zones adapt to “conventional norms”, respect for law enforcement, and a shared interest in the maintenance of communities (Siegel, 2009), inner-city subcultures fail to make the same connections as they are continuously ignored and disenfranchised. Lacking any form of social control, such as family, regular law enforcement, social services, etc., deviance transitions from one generation to another, especially via juveniles and gangs (Lersch, 2011). The continuous cycle of crime and violence in conjunction with the lack of support from outside sources allows these zones to maintain the disorganization as a concrete subculture.

There are criticisms of every theory, yet, they are important and worth mentioning for purposes of future research. Despite the popularity of social disorganization theory, it has been hypothesized that these zones perhaps do not experience heightened crime levels so much as heightened levels of attention to crime.

Discrimination against the impoverished and minorities allows for these neighborhoods to receive increased scrutiny (Lersch, 2011). Upon being targeted by law enforcement because of their neighborhood identity, criminal activity and deviance will have more interaction with law enforcement and the judicial system. This is known as the labeling theory. Once labeled a deviant by association or law enforcement interaction, there is a tendency for future stigmatization by the system (Lersch, 2011).

Summary

The concentric zone model, commonly referred to as the Burgess model, explains urban social structures in terms of socioeconomic clusters grouped in concentric circles around the city center.
It was proposed by sociologist Ernest Burgess in 1925.
Burgess's circular zones consist of a city center, a transitional area where immigrants and the poor live, a working-class area with single family tenements, a middle-class family residential area, and, finally, the commuter zone. Those from each of these residential zones commute to the city center.
According to Burgess's zonal hypothesis, crime occurs most frequently in the transitional zone and least frequently in the commuter zone.
Burgess's concentric zone model fits into the larger construct of human ecology, a field that he and his collaborator Park devised to describe the interactions of people from different social groups within an ecosystem.

History and Overview

Ernest Burgess's concentric zone model, also known as the Chicago concentric zone model and the Burgess zonal hypothesis, is one of the earliest theoretical models used to explain urban social structures.

In creating this model, Burgess sought to explain the clear divisions in socioeconomic status within and immediately outside of Chicago.

Eventually, Burgess identified 5 city zones, each of which had its own attributes. Burgess's original (1928) publication blatantly divided areas based on their population of African Americans.

However, modern criminologists have taken a more broad socio-economic stance in determining where to draw lines between areas.

According to the concentric zone model, cities can be broken down into roughly circular, concentric areas. This geometry happens because the city evolves through radial expansion. In the center of a city's concentric circle is the central business district, otherwise known as the Loop.

This is the oldest part of the city and often socio economically prosperous. This zone is commuted to by the inhabitants of the other four zones.

Just outside of the central business district lies the transitional zone, consisting of recent immigrant groups, deteriorated housing, factories, and abandoned buildings. Lersch (2013) describes this "Zone in Transition'' as "the least desirable area to live in the city."

This area combines those who are poor with immigrants and criminals (Burgess, 1928), and have dilapidated housing and infrastructure due to neglect by residents, municipalities, and landlords.

Further out is the working-class zone with single family tenements. This zone is occupied by those who can move out of the second zone and second generations of immigrant families (Lersch, 2013). Burgess describes this working-class zone as close enough to the city center that workers can reach their workplaces on foot.

Outside of the working class zone is the residential zone, which consists of single family homes with yards and garages. The inhabitants of these zones are generally well-educated, middle-class families. Finally, the commuter zone consists of suburbs and those who can afford larger and more expensive housing as well as transportation to and from entertainment and work.

According to the concentric zone model, most criminal activity happens in the second innermost, transitional zone. This happens because people in the zone of transition experience the most anomie and discrimination, causing them to struggle to adapt to the stresses and demands of their new society.

As a result, this area experiences high rates of social disorganization and dysfunction, causing deviance to flourish. However, as each generation of immigrants assimilate, they move upward in the social structure and to outer zones, leaving behind disorganization, dysfunction, and deviance.

In this perspective, deviance is a structural phenomenon, not a function of the characteristics of any ethnic or racial group.

Critique

The concentric zone model has drawn heavy criticism from modern urbanists. According to Quinn (1940), there are two types of criticism that scholars have brought up regarding the Burgess zonal hypothesis:

Criticism arguing that an ideal pattern could not exist
Criticism admitting a tendency toward a theoretical ideal pattern, but arguing that the gap between real cities and burgess's concentric model make it unworkable

Irregularities in Cities

Perhaps one of the most important and important criticism of the Burgess zonal hypothesis is its common inapplicability to cities outside of the United States. Paris is an example of one such city where the concentric zone model is not accurate.

In this city, wealthy citizens live in the areas surrounding the city center. The inner ring of the city consists of older attached homes, which often have high property values. Rather than being housed in the inner city, the urban poor of Paris live in the suburbs on the outskirts of the city. This is a trend that can be seen throughout Europe.

Mountainous South American cities are another testament to inaccuracies in the concentric zone model. In Medellin, Colombia and Rio de Género, Brazil, for example, the high-elevation, outermost regions of the city are skirted by poor settlements, sometimes referred to as favelas.

Even in Chicago — the city that originated the concentric zone model — the zones fit more closely into a pattern of concentric semicircles than complete circles, and this semicircle pattern has important irregularities.

Within other cities in North America, such as Montreal in Canada, the zones take the form of irregular ovals and crescents; and New Haven, Connneticut eschews circular zones altogether (Quinn, 1940).

The concentric zone model also suffers in the light of gentrification — the process whereby buildings and land and previously poor areas are bought and resold at higher prices, replacing a lower class population with a higher-class one.

Defining Distance

Distance can be defined both spatially and temporally. It may take far less time to walk a one-mile stretch on a flat street than one winding up a hill with many intersections. This difference between ways of measuring distance is a complicating factor that Burgess' zonal hypothesis fails to account for, with implications for how zones can be drawn in cities.

The impact of time cost on how zones develop can be seen in cities that have a rectangular grid pattern. In this case, a circle of "time" could be rectangular, as it could take equal amounts of time to get from one part of the grid to another (Quinn, 1940).

Finally, the concentric zone model has been criticized for assuming an even, unchanging landscape. Certain features — such as hills and water features — may make some locations unusually desirable or undesirable for residential purposes.

Impact and Importance

The concentric zone model shaped and was shaped by environmental criminology. Besides the concentric zone model, Burgess (1928) was notable for developing what he called human ecology. This field provides context and justification for Burgess's thinking on crime.

Human ecology was directly influenced by plant biology. Warming (1909) proposed that plants lived in "communities" where they interact with each other in different ways. Generally, communities with many different species tended to be in greater competition with each other than the environment.

Park and Burgess used the biological concept of symbiosis — the interactions between organisms living in close proximity to each other — in the context of human communities where people work together toward common goals while also competing for resources.

The researchers also applied Warming's concepts of dominance and succession in communities to describe a situation where a stronger group would disrupt the community through change, eventually reestablishing order by replacing (that is, succeeding) a group that was previously dominant.

In the context of the concentric zone model, this is similar to describing how certain populations of people move in and out of areas over time.

Park, Burgess, and McKenzie (1967) expanded on this general theory of human ecology by observing that groups of people with similar characteristics tended to cluster in rings with a radius of roughly one mile from the center of Chicago outward. These patterns changed dramatically from one ring.to the next. From these observations sprung what the researchers called the Burgess zonal hypothesis, or the concentric ring model.

Example

Using Park and Burgess' human ecology — and the concentric zone model — Shaw and McKay sought to study where high levels of juvenile delinquency accumulate. They proposed that areas with high rates of juvenile delinquency were close to areas of heavy industry, were physically deteriorated, and populated with highly transient residents.

The researchers hypothesized that areas where populations frequently shifted experienced high rates of delinquency because of invasion, dominance, and succession as the members of one (typically ethnic) group moved into another group's neighborhood, disrupting the social organization of an area.

Shaw and McKay (1942) mapped industrial areas and the home addresses of juvenile delinquents. The researchers, like Park and Burgess, found that a zone of manufacturing and industry surrounded the central business district, and this industrial zone was surrounded by a ring where groups frequently moved in and out, and subsequently high rates of delinquency.

Finally, Shaw and McKay found that the more vacant and condemned homes there were in an area, the higher its delinquency rate. All of these characteristics correspond to those that Park and Burgess (1928) describe to be of high-crime areas.

Also following Park and Burgess' theory, Shaw and McKay examined the effect of rental prices on rates of delinquency. Again, the researchers found that, as rental prices rose, rates of delinquency decreased, and as home ownership rates increased, levels of delinquency dwindled.

The farther away from the city center, the more rents and rates of home ownership increased (Shaw and McKay, 1942). Adding to Park and Burgess, the researchers believed that high rates of delinquency existed in these high-turnover communities because those who rented had less motivation and resources to maintain social organization within their neighborhood.

Charlotte Nickerson is a member of the Class of 2024 at Harvard University. Coming from a research background in biology and archaeology, Charlotte currently studies how digital and physical space shapes human beliefs, norms, and behaviors and how this can be used to create businesses with greater social impact.

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Nickerson, C. (2022, March 03). Concentric Zone Model by Ernest Burgess. Simply Sociology. https://simplysociology.com/burgess-concentric-zone-model.html

References

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Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas.