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 Circle 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.
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.
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 (Burgess, 1928). Neglect follows. Residents, landlords and municipal authorities alike leave its housing and infrastructure in disrepair.
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.
Burgess describes this zone as close enough to the city centre that workers can reach their workplaces on foot. It is the first rung of the residential ladder the model describes.
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.
Commuter Zone
Finally, the commuter zone consists of suburbs and those who can afford larger and more expensive housing as well as transportation to and from entertainment and work.
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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Criticism argues that an ideal pattern could not exist
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Criticism admitting a tendency toward a theoretical ideal pattern, but arguing that the gap between real cities and burgess’s concentric model makes it unworkable
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, poor settlements known as favelas 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. This is the process by which buildings and land in a previously poor area are bought and resold at higher prices, displacing a lower-income population with a higher-income one.
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 than to Burgess’s single centre.
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. 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.
The researchers also borrowed Warming’s ideas of dominance and succession. A stronger group could disrupt a community through change, eventually replacing — or “succeeding” — the group that had dominated before.
In the model, this describes how different populations move in and out of an area over time.
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
Burgess, E. W. (1925). The growth of the city: An introduction to a research project. In R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, & R. D. McKenzie, The city (pp. 47–62). University of Chicago Press.
Burgess, E. W. (1928). Residential segregation in American cities. The annals of the american academy of political and social science, 140 (1), 105-115.
Park, R. E., Burgess, E. W., & McKenzie, R. D. (1925). The city. University of Chicago Press.
Quinn, J. A. (1940). The Burgess zonal hypothesis and its critics. American Sociological Review, 5 (2), 210-218.
Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas.
