Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Robert Park in China: From the Chicago School to Urban China Studies
- 2 “Bewitched by the History Behind the Walls”: Robert Park and the Arc of Urban Sociology from Chicago to China
- 3 Moral Order in the Post-Socialist Chinese City: Generating a Dialogue with Robert E. Park’s “The City”
- 4 Learning from Chicago (and LA)? The Contemporary Relevance of Western Urban Theory for China
- 5 From Chicago to Shenzhen, via Birmingham: Zones of Transition and Dreams of Homeownership
- 6 Urbanization and Economic Development: Comparing the Trajectories of China and the United States
- 7 The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency: Chicago, Shenzhen, and the Experience of Assimilation
- 8 Beijing Ring Roads and the Poetics of Excess and Ordinariness
- 9 Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing
- 10 A Study of Socio-spatial Segregation of Rural Migrants in Shenzhen: A Case of Foxconn
- 11 The Anxious Middle Class of Urban China: Its Emergence and Formation
- 12 Conclusion: Everyday Cities, Exceptional Cases
- Index
7 - The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency: Chicago, Shenzhen, and the Experience of Assimilation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Robert Park in China: From the Chicago School to Urban China Studies
- 2 “Bewitched by the History Behind the Walls”: Robert Park and the Arc of Urban Sociology from Chicago to China
- 3 Moral Order in the Post-Socialist Chinese City: Generating a Dialogue with Robert E. Park’s “The City”
- 4 Learning from Chicago (and LA)? The Contemporary Relevance of Western Urban Theory for China
- 5 From Chicago to Shenzhen, via Birmingham: Zones of Transition and Dreams of Homeownership
- 6 Urbanization and Economic Development: Comparing the Trajectories of China and the United States
- 7 The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency: Chicago, Shenzhen, and the Experience of Assimilation
- 8 Beijing Ring Roads and the Poetics of Excess and Ordinariness
- 9 Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing
- 10 A Study of Socio-spatial Segregation of Rural Migrants in Shenzhen: A Case of Foxconn
- 11 The Anxious Middle Class of Urban China: Its Emergence and Formation
- 12 Conclusion: Everyday Cities, Exceptional Cases
- Index
Summary
Chicago: Assimilation
European immigrants and southern-born African-American migrants were not only the focus of Robert E. Park's work in Chicago, but also laid the foundation for sociological research in the US (Pedraza-Bailey, 1990). Like his European contemporaries, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tonnies, Park investigated the demise of traditional collectivities, the emergence of individuality, and the increasing valorization of civility between strangers as the basis of urban society. Indeed, sociology came of age as industrialization expanded and populations became increasingly mobile in the US and Europe. Migration to industrial centers such as East London and Chicago created “cities within cities” that were “composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races but the same social class” (Park, 1915: 582–3). However unlike his European contemporaries, whose work focused on how migration transformed extant cities—London and Paris, for example—Park and his students grappled to understand the social consequences of im/migration in Chicago, where genocide, settler expansion, European immigration, and African-American migration played roles not only in the construction of the city, but also dominated the city's self-understanding. In contrast to the European experience, the Chicago experience comprised forms of mobility—settlement and violent deterritorialization, as well as contemporary im/migration—that throughout Park's entire lifetime (1864–1944) relentlessly brought together diverse peoples and forced new social patterns and moralities to emerge among and between strangers.
The idea of the city as ongoing process grounded Park's sociology, especially his understanding of assimilation, which included both the gritty reality and utopian potential of modernization. Edward Shils suggests that, for Park, assimilation was “the formation of collective self-consciousness” (1996: 94). Shils further argues that Park considered assimilation an openended but necessary condition for collective living because the majority of Chicago's population came from elsewhere. Moreover, urban planners could neither anticipate nor control how new residents inhabited the city. Consequently, Park understood assimilation to be as important for urban morphology as geography, buildings, and transportation, arguing that:
In the course of time every section and quarter of the city takes on something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants … The effect of this is to convert what was at first a mere geographical expression into a neighborhood, that is to say, a locality with sentiments, traditions, and a history of its own.
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- Information
- The City in ChinaNew Perspectives on Contemporary Urbanism, pp. 125 - 140Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019