The Concentric Zone model, developed by Ernest Burgess, divides urban areas into zones radiating out from the central business district. It proposes that certain land uses and resident groups will be located in certain zones based on socioeconomic status and accessibility to the urban core. The model views cities as ecosystems with competition for land near the urban center.
Key Takeaways
- Also Known As: Burgess’s model is also called the Chicago concentric zone model and the Burgess zonal hypothesis, one of the earliest theoretical models of urban social structure.
- Five Zones: Burgess divided the city into a central business district, a transitional zone, a working-class zone, a residential zone and a commuter zone, moving outward from the centre.
- Radial Growth: Each zone expands outward into the next as the city grows, so the rings are moving frontiers rather than fixed districts.
- Crime Pattern: Crime is highest in the transitional zone and lowest in the commuter zone, a pattern the model attributes to the zone’s position and turnover rather than to the ethnicity of its residents.
- Ideal Type: Burgess never claimed any real city looks exactly like his diagram; the model describes a tendency, not a map, and real cities modify it with topography, transport and history.
- Modern Evidence: Since 2015, quasi-experimental research on cities such as Berlin has confirmed that a dominant centre really does organise the surrounding city, though the pull is sharply localised rather than evenly graded.
What Is the Concentric Zone Model?
The concentric zone model, commonly referred to as the Burgess model, explains urban social structures in terms of socioeconomic clusters grouped in concentric circles around the city center. It was proposed by sociologist Ernest Burgess in 1925.
In creating this model, Burgess sought to explain the clear divisions in socioeconomic status within and immediately outside of Chicago.
Chicago was booming. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world in the 1920s. Wave after wave of European immigrants arrived, and after the First World War, Black Americans moved north from the rural South too.
The University of Chicago’s sociology department sat inside this growth. It treated the city as its laboratory. Researchers mapped the same neighbourhoods Burgess later divided into zones.
Burgess identified five zones radiating outward from the centre, first set out in 1925 (Burgess, 1925). A later 1928 paper on residential segregation drew zone boundaries partly by the proportion of African American residents in an area (Burgess, 1928).
Later scholars have criticised this approach. Describing the pattern in the neutral language of natural ecological process makes it look like impersonal competition, not documented discriminatory practices in lending and housing.
However, modern criminologists have taken a more broad socio-economic stance in determining where to draw lines between areas.
According to the concentric zone model, cities can be broken down into roughly circular, concentric areas. This geometry happens because the city evolves through radial expansion — outward growth from the centre, with each zone pushing into the one beyond it.
Central Business District
In the center of a city’s concentric circle is the central business district, otherwise known as the Loop.
This is the oldest part of the city and the point of maximum accessibility, where competition for land is most intense. Only the highest-bidding activities can afford to locate here.
These are major offices, banks, department stores and government buildings; less profitable uses are pushed outward. Residential population in the CBD is comparatively low, and the zone is commuted into daily by the inhabitants of the other four zones.
The CBD also drives the model’s growth. It needs ever more space, so it expands outward into the ring right next to it.
Transitional Zone
The transitional zone lies just outside the CBD. Recent immigrant groups, deteriorated housing, factories and abandoned buildings define it. Later criminological writing has called this ring the city’s least desirable residential area.
The zone combines poverty with recent arrival and physical dereliction. This decay is structural, not moral.
It follows from the zone’s position in the city’s growth process, not the character of the people living there. Residents, landlords and local authorities all let it decay.
According to the concentric zone model, criminal activity is most common in this second, transitional zone. Residents here face the greatest normlessness and discrimination, which makes adapting to a new society hardest.
This has consequences. As a result, this area experiences high rates of social disorganization and dysfunction, causing deviance to flourish. However, as each generation of immigrants assimilates, they move upward in the social structure and outer zones, leaving behind disorganization, dysfunction, and deviance.
In this perspective, deviance is a structural phenomenon, not a function of the characteristics of any ethnic or racial group.
Working-Class Zone
Further out is the working-class zone, with single-family tenements. Second-generation immigrant families who have accumulated enough to leave the transitional zone occupy it.
This is a stable, working neighbourhood. Burgess describes it as close enough to the city centre that workers can reach their workplaces on foot or by a short transit ride. It is the first rung of the residential ladder the model describes.
Households here are more likely to own their homes or stay for the long term. Turnover falls sharply compared with the transitional zone next door.
Residential Zone
Outside of the working class zone is the residential zone, which consists of single-family homes with yards and garages. The inhabitants of these zones are generally well-educated, middle-class families.
Land gets cheaper the further it sits from the centre. Households spend that savings on space: bigger plots, detached houses, and gardens instead of shared yards. This is the same competition for land that builds the CBD, just working in the opposite direction.
Commuter Zone
Finally, the commuter zone consists of suburbs and those who can afford larger, more expensive housing. It also means paying for transportation to and from entertainment and work.
Burgess treated these suburbs as dormitories. They are places to sleep, dependent on the centre for jobs and services. Many also sit outside the city’s own tax boundary, so residents use central services without paying for them.
What it could not foresee is jobs and shops moving to the suburbs themselves. That is exactly what happened after 1945.
Limitations of the Concentric Zone Model
Much of this criticism targets a claim Burgess never made. He offered the model as an ideal type: an abstract construct that isolates a tendency, not a description of any real city, including Chicago.
On this reading, a city that is not circular is not evidence against the hypothesis. It is the starting point for asking what modified the underlying tendency in that case.
That distinction matters for what follows.
The concentric zone model has drawn heavy criticism from modern urbanists. According to Quinn (1940), there are two types of criticism that scholars have brought up regarding the Burgess zonal hypothesis:
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No Ideal Pattern: argues that an ideal concentric pattern could not exist at all.
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Gap Too Wide: concedes a tendency toward the ideal pattern, but says real cities diverge from Burgess’s model too widely for it to work.
Irregularities in Cities
Perhaps the most widely cited criticism of the Burgess zonal hypothesis is that it does not travel well outside the United States. Paris is a clear case.
In Paris, wealthy residents live in the areas surrounding the city centre. The inner ring consists of older attached homes with high property values.
The urban poor live in the suburbs on the outskirts instead of the inner city. This pattern recurs across Europe.
Mountainous South American cities show the same inversion. In Medellín, Colombia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, informal settlements occupy the high-elevation, outermost regions of the city.
Even Chicago only approximates its own model. It originated there, yet its zones form concentric semicircles rather than complete circles because the city sits on Lake Michigan, and even these semicircles contain significant irregularities.
Other North American cities depart further still. In Montreal, Canada, the zones form irregular ovals and crescents, while New Haven, Connecticut, dispenses with circular zones altogether (Quinn, 1940).
The model also struggles to account for gentrification: the renovation of a run-down inner-city area for higher-income residents, which displaces the people who lived there before. Ruth Glass named the process in 1960s London (Glass, 1964).
On the model’s own logic this should not happen: people who can afford to leave the centre should have already left.
Smith (1979) argued the real driver is the rent gap: the difference between what run-down land currently earns and what it could earn once redeveloped. Once that gap is wide enough, investment flows back in.
Defining Distance
Distance can be defined both spatially and temporally. A one-mile stretch on a flat street takes far less time to walk than a mile winding uphill through many intersections.
This difference between spatial and temporal distance matters. Burgess’ zonal hypothesis never accounts for it, which affects how zone boundaries can be drawn in real cities.
Time cost shapes how zones develop, especially in cities built on a rectangular grid. There, a “circle” of equal travel time is itself rectangular, since it can take the same amount of time to cross the grid in any direction (Quinn, 1940).
Finally, the model assumes an even, unchanging landscape. In practice, hills and water features can make particular locations unusually desirable or undesirable, regardless of distance from the centre.
Contemporary Research
Recent research does not test circular rings as a serious hypothesis. Instead, it tests the propositions the model actually rests on — chiefly, whether a dominant centre organises the surrounding city.
Aim. Ahlfeldt, Redding, Sturm and Wolf (2015) set out to measure the forces that hold economic activity together in one place. They tested whether these forces are genuinely localised.
Method. The researchers built a quantitative model of city structure. They estimated it using data for thousands of individual Berlin city blocks in 1936, 1986 and 2006.
They used the Berlin Wall’s division of the city, and its later reunification, as a natural experiment. The Wall cut West Berlin off from the historic centre for reasons unrelated to the city’s economic geography, and reunification restored the connection.
Results. The researchers found large advantages from being near the centre, but these advantages decayed sharply with distance. Land prices, employment and population reorganised around the accessible centre exactly as the model predicted.
These patterns collapsed when the Wall cut off access to the centre, and recovered when the Wall fell.
Conclusion. A dominant centre really does organise a city’s internal structure, through strong but sharply localised agglomeration forces. Because the effect is so localised, a city can readily support several distinct clusters rather than one single graded gradient.
This is closer to Harris and Ullman’s multiple-nuclei model (the idea that a city grows around several separate hubs, not one) than to Burgess’s single centre.
Has the Socio-Economic Gradient Reversed?
Burgess’s second claim is that the poor live near the centre and affluence rises with distance from it. Couture and Handbury (2020) tested whether that gradient still holds in American cities.
Aim. To document and explain the rising share of college-educated residents near American city centres since 2000.
Method. The researchers tracked the changing location of college-educated residents by age and city size, and built a model of residential choice to test competing explanations. They also examined nearby restaurant and nightlife spending.
Results. The revival was driven specifically by younger graduates in larger cities, not by graduates generally. It tracked back to a taste for nearby restaurants, bars and nightlife, more than any other explanation tested.
Conclusion. City centres have revived because well-paid young graduates now delay having children and want to live near consumption amenities, not because suburban living has become less desirable overall.
This does not overturn Burgess’s gradient. It explains why the gradient shifted. The old trade-off, cheap housing near the centre instead of space further out, only pulls in people who do not need extra space.
Is the Neighbourhood You Live In Still the Right Measure?
The model’s deepest assumption is that where a household lives tells you its social position. Two recent studies question this from opposite directions.
Musterd, Marcińczak, van Ham and Tammaru (2017) tracked socio-economic segregation across twelve European capitals from 2001 to 2011, and found it had increased. How much a city segregated by income depended on its welfare state and housing system, both policy choices rather than ecological competition.
The second test cuts even deeper. Moro, Calacci, Dong and Pentland (2021) used mobility data from 4.5 million phone users across eleven American cities. They measured the income mix people actually encounter in the places they visit, not just where they sleep.
Neighbours in the same census tract, they found, can experience very different degrees of exposure to other income groups, depending on where they actually go.
Even so, residence is not nothing. Together, these findings make it the weakest of Burgess’s three claims: real, but too narrow alone to capture how segregated a life actually is.
Human Ecology: The Origins of the Model
The Plant-Ecology Analogy
The concentric zone model grew out of Burgess’s wider theory of human ecology. Human ecology studies how people and activities are distributed across a city, using ideas borrowed from plant and animal ecology. Plant biology shaped this field directly.
Warming (1909) proposed that plants live in “communities.” They interact in different ways, and species-rich communities compete more intensely with each other than with the environment itself.
Two ideas from this analogy do real explanatory work. Land, like light or water, is a scarce resource with a spatial distribution, so competition for it produces determinate outcomes.
The claim that community change follows a describable, repeatable sequence is also genuinely borrowed from plant ecology. This made the model testable. It predicts the order in which things happen, not just an end state.
Park and Burgess took this framework over in full, applying it to the growth of Chicago.
Symbiosis, Dominance and Succession
Park and Burgess borrowed the biological idea of symbiosis, organisms living in close proximity, to describe human communities. People in a city cooperate toward shared goals while also competing for resources.
Two more borrowed ideas followed.
The researchers also borrowed Warming’s ideas of dominance and succession. Dominance is the point where an incoming group becomes powerful enough to set an area’s character. Succession follows. The new group has fully replaced the one before it.
This change is cumulative. Each departure makes the next more likely, which is why change tends to be fast and complete once it starts. It also happens block by block, not evenly across a whole zone, so real neighbourhoods end up patchworked rather than uniform.
The vocabulary is not neutral, though.
Critics call this “invasion.” That word makes a social process sound natural, and can wrongly imply blame. The Chicago School did not intend that, but the language carries it anyway.
Park, Burgess and McKenzie (1925) extended this general theory of human ecology. The pattern they found was striking.
People with similar characteristics clustered in rings, radiating outward from the centre of Chicago, and the character of each band changed sharply at its boundary.
From these observations came the Burgess zonal hypothesis, also called the concentric ring model.
Rival Models of Urban Structure
Two later models challenge the concentric picture directly. Both agree the central business district organises the city; they disagree about the shape that organisation takes.
Hoyt’s Sector Model
Homer Hoyt (1939) studied residential land values across many American cities. Growth, he found, does not radiate evenly. Instead, it is channelled by transport routes and terrain.
Residential districts of a given type extend outward from the centre as wedge-shaped sectors rather than as rings. Each sector keeps its character along its whole length.
Industry follows rail lines and river valleys. High-value housing, once established in a favourable direction, extends outward within that same direction as the city grows.
Hoyt reported that this pattern fit several cities. Examples include Seattle, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Charleston and Richmond.
The sector model does not replace Burgess’s model; it corrects it on one axis. Both models agree on this much: land value falls with distance from the centre. They disagree on whether the pattern is banded by distance or wedged by direction.
Harris and Ullman’s Multiple-Nuclei Model
Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman (1945) rejected a premise both earlier models shared. Neither model was enough. A single ring did not fit every city, and neither did a single sector. Large cities, they argued, grow around several discrete nuclei, each specialising in a different function.
A city might have a central business district, but also a separate wholesale district, a heavy-industry district, a university complex and a port, among others.
Activities cluster into separate nuclei for four reasons. Some need specialised facilities only certain places provide, and some benefit from clustering with similar activities. Others repel each other outright, or simply cannot afford the rents of the best sites.
The result is a patchwork, not a pattern. Residential districts locate near whichever nucleus matters to them, reflecting each city’s specific geography and history.
Anderson and Egeland (1961) tested Burgess’s and Hoyt’s models directly against census data. Neither model won outright. Each was right about a different dimension of the city: zones described family status, while sectors described economic status.
Example: Shaw and McKay’s Delinquency Study
Shaw and McKay built directly on Park and Burgess’ human ecology. They wanted to know where juvenile delinquency accumulates in a city.
Aim. To test whether high rates of juvenile delinquency cluster near heavy industry, physically deteriorated housing, and highly transient populations, as the concentric zone model predicts.
Method. Shaw and McKay (1942) mapped industrial land use against the home addresses of juvenile delinquents across Chicago. They also examined rental prices and home-ownership rates by distance from the city centre.
Results. A zone of manufacturing and industry surrounded the central business district, just as Park and Burgess had found. This industrial zone was itself surrounded by a high-turnover ring with correspondingly high delinquency.
This ring also had more vacant and condemned homes than elsewhere in the city. Rents and home-ownership rose with distance from the centre. Delinquency fell as they rose.
The researchers explained the pattern through invasion, dominance and succession. This is the three-stage process by which an incoming group enters an area, comes to predominate, and finally replaces the previous occupants.
As one (typically ethnic) group moved into another’s neighbourhood, they argued, this disrupted the area’s social organisation and produced high delinquency.
Conclusion. High delinquency in these high-turnover communities existed because renters had less motivation and fewer resources than owner-occupiers to maintain the neighbourhood’s social organisation.
References
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Anderson, T. R., & Egeland, J. A. (1961). Spatial aspects of social area analysis. American Sociological Review, 26(3), 392–398. https://doi.org/10.2307/2090666
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