Blackwell Reference Online

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Invasion-succession (hereafter IS) has enjoyed considerable popularity among social scientists as a framework for understanding community change. In its simplest form, IS refers to the replacement of one population group or land use by another within a particular geographical environment. Due to mounting awareness of the complexities surrounding the process of change, however, the IS model no longer occupies the status of conventional wisdom that it did throughout much of the last century. The historical roots of IS can be traced to the work of sociologists at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. Borrowing ideas from plant and animal ecology, Park (1952) , McKenzie (1968) , and their colleagues stressed unfettered competition for valued resources (such as a desirable location or housing) as the driving force behind IS. Competition was believed to spur a natural, orderly, and irreversible transition from an equilibrium stage dominated by the incumbent group to a new equilibrium dominated by the “invading” group. According to the Chicago sociologists, the notion of passage through a sequence of stages could be helpful for depicting social change along multiple dimensions – demographic, cultural, economic – and across settings ranging from the local to the global. Despite the Chicago School's broad view, the scope of IS has narrowed substantially over subsequent decades ... log in or subscribe to read full text