field. One program founded to research African-American urban residents, the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, was founded in 1959 to study residential segregation and to support affected communities. More recently, studies related to race and urban life started to focus on ethnographic methods to study how individuals lived in relation to the city and their respective systems as a whole. Israel Zangwill wrote one of the first books on the Ghettos of Europe and how they impacted the Jewish children that were descendants of the original residents, Children of the Ghetto (1892), he also wrote two other books about the European Ghettos. Louis Wirth was the next scholar to write about the Ghettos, he wrote about them from a sociological perspective. Louis Wirth and Roberts Ezra Park also became the first sociologists to publish about the immigrant neighborhoods in America with suggestions on their future design. Roberts Ezra Park was the student of George Zimmel in Chicago. Other famous scholars that studied segregation, American Ghettos, and impoverished neighborhoods include Du Bois (1903), Haynes (1913), Johnson (1943), Horace Cayton (1944), Kenneth Clark (1965), William Julius Wilson (1987). Areas of research This field is transdisciplinary because it uses theories from a variety of academic fields and places them within an urban context. A wide variety of academic fields refers to the urban environment as a location studied, such as Environmental Studies, Economics, Geography, Public Health, and Sociology. However, scholars in this field research how specific elements contribute to how the city operates, such as how housing and transportation will change. In addition, researchers also study how residents interact within the city, such as how race and gender differences lead to social inequalities, or concentrated disadvantage in urban areas. Criticism Researchers struggle how to define basic terms precisely, such as how a city is defined, due to how the roles of cities change. Researchers must be careful in how they describe urban areas, as their work can be manipulated as positive elements for city boosters wanting to promote a specific city. See also Index of urban studies articles List of urban theorists Urban theory Urban ecology Urban economics Urban geography Urban planning Urban sociology Urban vitality References External links Guide to the University of Chicago Center for Urban Studies Records 1967-1968 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center + Poverty in the United States Race in the United States Black