SOURCE: "A Sociologist and The City: The Experience of Robert Park," in From Main Street to State Street: Town, City, and Community in America, Kennikat Press Corp., 1977, pp. 110-20.

In the following essay, Goist examines Park's concept of urban life.

Robert Redfield, a widely known anthropologist, once observed: "If one studies the rise of urban communities out of more primitive communities, it is the change in the mental life, in the norms and in aspirations, in personal character, too, that becomes the most significant aspect of the transformation." Redfield used the tools of a social scientist in investigating these and other changes in the villages and towns of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico in the 1930s. In the previous decade Sherwood Anderson had employed the insights, personal experiences, and techniques of the novelist in exploring the impact of similar transformations on individuals in the fictional town of Bidewell...