BurgessPark is situated in the London Borough of Southwark, in an area between Camberwell, and Walworth and Peckham.
The idea for BurgessPark came out of the 1943 Abercrombie plan for open spaces in London, and the land has been gradually assembled and landscaped over the subsequent decades, first by the London County Council, then the Greater London Council, and since the mid-1980s, the London Borough of Southwark.
An important stage in the construction of the park was the closure of the Grand Surrey Canal in the early 1970s, which terminated at Addington Wharf on Walworth Road.
Park and Burgess suggested that the struggle for scarce urban resources, especially land, led to competition between groups and ultimately to the division of the urban space into distinctive ecological niches or "natural areas" in which people shared similar social characteristics because they were subject to the same ecological pressures.
Burgess and his students scoured the city of Chicago for data that could be used for maps, gleaning information from city agencies and making more extensive use of census data than any other social scientists of the time (Bulmer 1984).
In particular, Park and Burgess' search for "natural" or "organic" process was criticized as a superficial undertaking that neglected both the social and cultural dimensions of urban life and the political-economic impact of industrialization on urban geography.
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