Forgetting and remembering the Chicago School of Columbus, Ohio: Roderick D. Mckenzie, neighborhoods and inequality

Roderick D. McKenzie published his dissertation The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Columbus, Ohio in its entirety in serialized form over five issues of the American Journal of Sociology in 1921 and 1922. A sprawling multi-method examination of the social life of Columbus, it is among the earliest of what we might now call a neighborhood study, and suggested theoretical directions later taken up by more famous exemplars of the First Chicago School. For the most part, though, it has been ignored. This chapter suggests two reasons for its relative anonymity: infelicitous timing and the fact that it occupies a liminal category that has made it difficult to leverage in debates about the Chicago School of Sociology. More to the point, it suggests that we might still learn lessons from The Neighborhood these many years later, specifically its deep theorization on the epistemology of neighborhoods that anticipates important concerns in urban sociology today. Moreover, the collective forgetting of The Neighborhood also provides lessons about canonization and about the continuing debates over the Chicago School.