Constructing a Fault(y) Zone: Misrepresentations of American Cities and Suburbs, 1900–1950

The way we think about the geography of American cities and suburbs in the first half of this century has, for several decades, been framed by the writings of Ernest W. Burgess, Homer Hoyt, Chauncy Harris, and Edward Ullman. Burgess's zonal model has been especially influential, gaining ascendancy in the postwar period. Contemporaries knew, and recent historical research has shown, that this model was faulty in several important respects. It gained influence as later scholars simplified its conception of the suburban commuter fringe, at first to a contrast between industrial and residential suburbs and then to the singular myth of the middle-class enclave. Suburban affluence came to be contrasted with inner-city poverty. This revised zonal model implied the existence of a political, social, and economic fault zone between city and suburbs and differed markedly from that which Burgess had developed. It gained influence even over historical research because it was associated with the influential Chicago school, because it lent itself to analytical treatment by the mode of social science that had become dominant by the 1960s, and because of the decline of American cities in the postwar era.