Abstract
While the likes of Von Thunen and Christaller laid the groundwork for what would eventually develop into an important spatial theory within the social sciences, they were primarily concerned with economics and therefore tended to look past the role of non-economic social relationships. Around the same time, social scientists began building similar models tying location more directly to population distribution. Some of the earliest documented work within the realm of American sociology was that of Charles Galpin (The social anatomy of an agricultural community. Research Bulletin Num. 34. University of Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station, 1915) at the University of Wisconsin who identified distinct spatial arrangements in rural farming communities in Wisconsin. Galpin’s The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community (1916) identified the importance of places. The ‘social anatomy’ metaphor was used to emphasize the fact that the spatial context of key social institutions is a major influence on people’s lives. After the publication of Social Anatomy, the neighboring University of Chicago was developing its own brand of spatial theory, pioneering field of urban sociology, which in essence was a type of theoretical “country come to town.” Thus, it is community sociology in which the roots of spatial sociology most naturally developed, both in rural and urban contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
As we will show later in this chapter, the importance of this map was instrumental in the development of much of the research of the early Chicago School sociologists, including the work of Robert Park who made many of these methods standard in the discipline.
- 2.
An interesting note on this matter is that is what rural sociologists had funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The improvement of “country life” was at the core of research plans published routinely in the American Journal of Sociology during that era (Melvin 1927). It is a far cry from the editorial visions of most of the top journals in the field today.
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Porter, J.R., Howell, F.M. (2012). Roots of Space in Sociology: Community Sociology at the Wisconsin and Chicago Schools. In: Geographical Sociology. GeoJournal Library, vol 105. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3849-2_3
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