Urban sociology rose to prominence within North American academics through a group of sociologists and theorists at the University of Chicago from 1915 to 1940 in what became known as the Chicago School of Sociology. The Chicago School of Sociology combined sociological and anthropological theory with ethnographic fieldwork in order to understand how individuals interact within urban social systems. Unlike the primarily macro-based sociology that had marked earlier subfields, members of the Chicago School placed greater emphasis on micro-scale social interactions that sought to provide subjective meaning to how humans interact under structural, cultural and social conditions. The theory of symbolic interaction, the basis through which many methodologically-groundbreaking ethnographies were framed in this period, took primitive shape alongside urban sociology and shaped its early methodological leanings. Symbolic interaction was forged out of the writings of early micro-sociologists George Mead and Max Weber, and sought to frame how individuals interpret symbols in everyday interactions. With early urban sociologists framing the city as a 'superorganism', the concept of symbolic interaction aided in parsing out how individual communities contribute to the seamless functioning of the city itself.