Ernest W. Burgess

Ernest W. Burgess was a Canadian-American urban sociologist, born in 1886 and died in 1966, a leading figure of the Chicago School of sociology who served as the twenty-fourth president of the American Sociological Association. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1916 and is best known for the concentric zone model, which described cities as organized into distinct rings radiating outward from a central business district, each ring with its own characteristic population and land use. With Robert Park he co-authored Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), later called the Bible of Sociology, and with Park and Roderick McKenzie he co-authored The City (1925). He also pioneered the statistical prediction of parole success and marital stability, including work on Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage (1939, with Leonard Cottrell) using unit-weighted regression, and he argued that social disorganization rather than heredity caused urban social problems, a position that pushed back against the eugenics arguments common in his era.