To interpret, not just select: Engaging the Chicago School Legacy

This commentary responds to Justus Uitermark's call for renewed engagement with the Chicago School of Sociology, arguing that such engagement should be interpretative as well as selective. While Uitermark urges contemporary urbanists to draw selectively from the School's legacy, I suggest that this risks flattening the internal tensions and conceptual richness that animated its founding figures. Through a close rereading of Robert E. Park, I show that his thought was neither biologically reductionist nor politically naïve. Park's concepts of human ecology, social control, group identity, and politics reveal a pragmatist framework that treats social life as a process of continual transformation rather than fixed order. His use of naturalistic metaphors was not an uncritical borrowing from biology but an attempt to integrate evolutionary reasoning into a human science of communication, opinion, and adaptation. Recognising these complexities requires situating Park's urban writings within the broader sociological context of the Introduction to the Science of Sociology and the intellectual milieu of early 20th-century pragmatism. I conclude by suggesting that a genuinely interpretative engagement with the Chicago School should also attend to its global receptions and recover its unresolved questions about the relation between nature, culture, and social order. These remain vital to the ongoing task of theorising the city and the human sciences today.