The Progressives and the Urban Question: British and American Responses to the Inner City Slums 1880-1920

Abstract

Indictments or diagnoses of social problems often assume that they are either generically urban or confined to the inner city. This assumption is the root of the 'urban question' and has its origins in those early twentieth century reform movements which were collectively described as 'progressive'. Progressive social policies were grounded in socio-geographical formulations of urban society which resembled those described by the Chicago School a generation later. While each approach did propose quite different interpretations of the same graphic patterns, both made those assumptions which provoked the urban question. Structuralist interpretations of urban society have questioned these assumptions in their discussions of the transition from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism. This perspective argues that previous graphic conceptions of modern urban society, and especially of the inner city slums, emphasized the secondary consequences rather than the primary causes of poverty. This emphasis not only deflected attention from the more complex and discrete distributions of social problems within the slums but also obscured some of the adaptations of their residents to their immediate predicament.