The Chicago School treated American neighborhoods as ecosystems with life cycles of their own.

Evidence

Robbin’s models were based on observations of the Chicago School of Sociology, which aimed to understand American communities like ecosystems. Neighborhoods, the sociologists thought, could be seen as super-organisms with lives of their own apart from those of the individuals living in them; they would mature and grow or shrink and disappear over time, like a rainforest. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 599

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘neighborhood as super-organism’ ecological frame echoes descriptions of cities as organisms in urban planning and Jane Jacobs; also connects to ecological thinking in later surveillance literatures.