CHAPTER 1, THE URBAN WORLD

A city is a collective body of persons sufficient in themselves for all purposes of life-
Aristotle, Poltitcs

INTRODUCTION

As you open this book the globe is changing from a predominantly rural world to one
where the majority of us live in urban places. For the first time in history we now live in
an urban world. This text seeks to explore and explain the patterns of urban life in the
post-9/11 21st century. Its goal is to help us better understand the cities and suburbs
where most of us live and to give us some awareness of the major urban changes
taking place elsewhere on the globe. To do this we begin at the beginning since without
knowing how we got here it is difficult to make sense of what is happening, both in North
America and in the developing world where the great bulk of urban growth is taking
place. We need to remember that metropolitan areas are not museums but are
constantly undergoing physical and social change

THE PROCESS OF URBANIZATION

Cities, it turns out, are a relatively new idea. Archaeologists tell us that the human
species has been on the globe several millions of years. However, for the
overwhelming number of these millennia our ancestors have lived in a world without
cities. Cities and urban places, in spite of our acceptance of them as an inevitable
consequence of human life, are in the eyes of history hardly a blink. Cities are a
comparatively recent social invention, having existed a scant 7,000 to 10,000 years.
Their period of social, economic, and cultural dominance is even shorter.

Nonetheless, the era of cities encompasses the totality of the period we label
“civilization.” The story of human social and cultural development—and regression—is
in major part the tale of the cities that have been built and the lives that have been lived
within them. The saga of wars, architecture, and art--almost the whole of what we know
of human triumphs and tragedies–is encompassed within the period of cities. The very
terms “civilization” and “civilized” come from the Latin civis, which refers to a citizen
living in a city. The city was civilization; those outside were barbarians. Among the
ancient Greeks the greatest punishment was to be ostracized (banned) from the city. In
Roman times civitas was concerned with the political and moral nature of community,
while the term urbs, from which we get urban, referred more to the built form of the city.
The vital and occasionally magnificent cities of the past, however, existed as small
islands in an overwhelmingly rural sea. Just over 200 years ago, in the year 1800, the
population of the world was still 97 percent rural. 1 In 1900 the world was still 86 percent
rural. A hundred years ago the proportion of the world’s population living in cities of
100,000 or more was only 5.5 percent, and 13.6 percent lived in places of 5,000 or
more. While cities were growing very rapidly, most people still lived in the countryside
or small villages. Today we live in a world that for the first time numbers more urban
residents than rural. Demographically, the 21st century is the first urban century (Figure
1-1).2

URBAN GROWTH

The rapidity of the change from rural to urban life is at least as important as the amount
of urbanization. A hundred and twenty-five years ago not a single nation was as urban
as the world is today. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth
century, the most rapid urban growth took place in European countries and in countries
largely settled by Europeans, such as the United States. These were the places that
first developed modern agricultural, transportation, and industrial technologies. England,
the first country to enter the industrial age, was also the first country to undergo the
urban transformation. A century ago England was the world’s only predominately urban
country.3 Not until 1920 did half the United States population reside in urban places, and
not until 1931 was that true of Canada. Figure 1-2 dramatically indicates how the urban
population of the world has increased over the last century and will continue to expand
until 2020. The rapid growth of cities during the nineteenth and particularly the
twentieth centuries is referred to as the urban revolution.

We take large cities for granted. Almost everyone reading this book has spent at least
part of their lives living in a central city or suburb, so it is difficult for us to conceive of a
world without large cities. However, 100 years ago only 12 cities housed a million or
more inhabitants.

The rapidity and extent of the urban revolution can perhaps be understood if one
reflects that if San Antonio, with a 2000 population of 1.2 million, had the same
population two centuries ago, it would have been the largest urban agglomeration that
had ever existed in the worked at any time.4 By contrast, the Population Reference
Bureau estimates that more than 400 cities have over a million inhabitants. More than a
third of these cities first reached the million mark in 1990s. We now live in an urban
world where the mega-metropolises; Tokyo-Yokohama and greater Mexico City have
populations of over 20 million. Within the United States the 2000 census reports the
New York-New Jersey-Long Island metro area at 20.1 million residents and Los
Angeles-Riverside-Orange County (California) at 15.8 million. Chicago-Gary (Indiana)-
Kenosha (Wisconsin) was third largest at 6.9 million.

MEGACITIES
Today, almost all urban growth is taking place in rapidly growing cities of the developing
world. Most people are not aware that the overwhelming majority of urban growth in the
world today (over 95 percent) is taking place in economically developing countries, also
referred to as less developed countries (LDCs). Since 1950 the population living in
developing world cities has increased fifteenfold. Twenty-first century world urbanization
patterns will be quite different from those of the twentieth century.

Developed western nations are experiencing little city growth. Of the over 400
previously noted cities of over a million inhabitants, some two-thirds are in developing
countries. Few of us could name more than a few dozen of such million-plus
developing world cities. The United Nation uses the term megacities to designate places
of over 10 million inhabitants. The World Bank estimates that there are 26 megacities.
Of these 26 mega-cities, 21 are found in developing countries. Mumbai (previously
designated Bombay) India, for example, even with falling growth rates is still adding half
a million new city residents each year. It is difficult for us to keep up either intellectually
or emotionally with these changes.

The United Nations estimates that 15 new megacities will be added to the globe
between 2000 and 2015, all of them in the developing world. As of 2000, the United
Nations estimated a population of 26.3 million for the mega-city of Mexico City; 24
million for Sao Paulo, Brazil; 16.6 million for Calcutta; and 16.3 million for greater Cairo.
Some demographers, such as this author, think these estimates are high by several
millions, but by any measure these megacities dwarf anything the world has ever
experienced.

Some of our difficulty in understanding or coping with urban patterns and problems can
be attributed to the recency of the emergence of this urban world with its huge mega-
cities. Living as we do in urban-oriented places, it is easy for us to forget two important
facts: (1) Almost half the world’s population is still rural-based, and (2) even in the
industrialized West, massive urbanization is a very recent phenomenon. This rapid
transformation from a basically rural to a heavily urbanized world and the development
of urbanism as a way of life has been far more dramatic and spectacular than the much
better known population explosion. The bulk of the world’s population growth is now
occurring in the cities of the developing world. The population explosion is, in reality, a
third world urban explosion. Today, the number of people living in developing world
cities outnumbers the entire population of the world only 100 years ago.

THE URBAN EXPLOSION

Urban growth accelerated cumulatively during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
By 1800, London, the largest city on earth, reached almost 1 million, Paris exceeded
500,000, and Vienna and St. Petersburg had each reached 200,000. A century later as
the twentieth century began, ten cities had reached or exceeded 1 million: London,
Paris, Vienna, Moscow, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Calcutta, Tokyo, New York,
Chicago, and Philadelphia. This urban explosion, which will be discussed in greater
detail later, initially began over 200 years ago in the more developed nations of Europe.
Among the more important reasons for this spurt in European population were (1)
declining death rates, (2) the beginning of scientific management of agriculture, (3)
improved transportation and communication systems, (4) stable political governments,
and (5) the development of the Industrial Revolution. While details differ from country to
country, the pattern for Western nations is similar. Improvements in agriculture raised
the food surplus above previous subsistence levels. Then, in rather short order,
entrepreneurs and later governments transferred this extra margin into the
manufacturing sector. The result was urban expansion and growth fed by a demand by
the burgeoning manufacturing, commercial and service sectors for the concentrated
labor force. Today the developed world is three-quarters urban. By contrast, only forty
percent of those in developing countries live in urban areas.5

Heavy urbanization in the developing world is largely a post-World War II phenomenon

(see Chapter 14, Developing Countries). The pace of urbanization in developing
countries has been far more rapid than that found during the nineteenth century in
Europe or North America. The urban population living in developing countries is
expected to explode from just under 2 billion today to 3.5 billion in 2005. Note in Table
1-1 the dramatic projection of African, and especially Asian, urban growth over the next
half century. At the same time the United Nations anticipates a declining population in
Europe.

Whether we are delighted by the variety and excitement of urban life or horrified by the
anonymity and occasional brutality of cities, population concentration—that is,
urbanization—is becoming the way of life in developing as well as developed nations.
Attempts to return to a supposedly simpler rural past must be viewed as futile
escapism. Longings for a pastoral utopia where all exist in rural bliss have no chance of
becoming reality. We live in an urban world; and for all our complaints about it, few
would reverse the clock.

DEFINING URBAN AREAS

Before proceeding further, it is necessary to define some of the terms we will be using. It
is not altogether as simple as it might seem, since countries differ in how they describe
a place as urban. About thirty definitions of urban populations are currently in use, none
of them totally satisfactory.

Urban settlements have been defined on the basis of an urban culture (a cultural
definition), administrative functions (a political definition), the percentage of people in
nonagricultural occupations (an economic definition), and the size of the population (a
demographic definition). In the United States, we define places as urban by using
population criteria along with some geographical and political elements. In actual
practice the various criteria tend to overlap and be reinforcing.

Let us look briefly at some of the criteria that can be used. In terms of cultural criteria, a
city is “a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions.”6 The city thus is the place, as
sociologists put it, where relations are “gesellschaft” (larger-scale “societal” or formal
role relationships) rather than “gemeinschaft” (more intimate-scale “community” or
primary relationships) and forms of social organization are organic rather than
mechanical (see page 14). In short, the city is large, culturally heterogeneous, and
socially diverse. It is the antithesis of “folk society.” The problem with the cultural
definitions of an urban place is the difficulty of measurement; for example, if a city is a
state of mind, who can ever say where the boundaries of the urban area lie?

The United Nations has urban data for some 228 countries and accepts each nation's
definition of what it considers urban.7 This makes cross-nation comparisons difficult.
Economic activity is used in defining what is urban in 39 countries. In terms of
economic criteria, a country has sometimes been described as urban if less than half its
workers are engaged in agriculture. Here “urban” and “nonagricultural” are taken to be
synonymous. This distinction, of course, tells us nothing about the degree of
urbanization or its pattern of spatial distribution within the country. Distinctions have also
been made between the town as the center for processing and service functions and
the countryside as the area for producing raw materials. However, while in the past
these distinctions may have had utility, today it is difficult to distinguish among areas by
means of such criteria. How far out do the producing and service functions of a New
York or a Los Angeles extend?

Politically or administratively a national government may define its urban areas in terms
of functions. Roughly half the nations for which the United Nations has data use
administrative criteria.8 The difficulty is that there is no agreement internationally on
what the political or administrative criteria shall be. Often those residing in the capital of
a country or a province are designated as urban. In some countries such as Kenya and
Thailand, all incorporated places are urban, regardless of size. In Canada until 1971 all
incorporated places were automatically urban.

Finally, some 51 countries use size of population as the criterion in deciding what is
urban and what is not. Demographically, a place is defined as being urban because a
certain number of people live in it, a certain density of people live in it, or both.
Measurement and comparison of rural and urban populations within a country are
relatively simple when demographic criteria are used, although the problem of making
comparisons among nations still remains. Only 250 persons are necessary to qualify an
area as urban in Denmark, and only 1,000 in Canada, while 10,000 are needed in
Greece. According to the definition used by the United States Bureau of Census for the
2000 census, the urban population of the United States comprises all persons living in
urbanized areas, all person outside of urbanized areas who live in places of 2,500 or
more, and all persons living in unincorporated settlements of fewer than 2,500 persons
living in "urbanized zones" on the fringes of metropolitan areas. By this definition, three-
quarters of the United States population are urban.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, worldwide the percentage of the

population living in urban places varies from 5 percent in Rwanda to 100 percent in
Kuwait and Singapore.9 Table 1-1 shows percent of urbanization by world regions.

URBANIZATION AND URBANISM

In this work we will distinguish between “urbanization,” which is the number of people in
urban places, and “urbanism,” which is the sociocultural consequences of living in urban
places, the human side of urbanization. As we will see in Part Five, Worldwide
Urbanization, cities in the developing world are among the largest and the fastest
growing in the world. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that the growth of cities and
a high level of national urbanization are not the same thing; in the Western world both
things happened at the same time, but it is possible to find extremely large cities in
overwhelmingly rural countries. Some of the world’s largest cities—for example,
Shanghai, Mumbai, and Cairo—exist in nations that are still largely rural. Having
extremely large cities does not necessarily indicate an urban nation.

Urbanization

“Urbanization” not only refers to the changes in the proportion of the population of a
nation living in urban places but also to the process of people moving to cities or other
densely settled areas. The term is also used to describe the changes in social
organization that occur as a consequence of population concentration. Urbanization is
thus a process—the process by which rural areas become transformed into urban
areas. In demographic terms, urbanization is an increase in population concentration
(numbers and density); organizationally, it is an alteration in structure and patterns of
organization. Demographically, urbanization involves two elements: the multiplication of
points of concentration and the increase in the size of individual concentrations.10

Urbanization, described demographically as the percentage of a nation’s total

population living in urban areas, is a process that clearly has a beginning and an end.
Four-fifths of the United States 2000 population of 281 million is now urban; the
maximum level of urbanization is probably somewhere around 90 percent. (Nations that
comprise only one city, such as Singapore, can be 100 percent urban.) Even after a
nation achieves a high level of urbanization, its cities and metropolitan areas can
continue to grow. While there is a limit to the percentage of urbanization possible, the
practical limit for the size of cities or metropolitan areas is not yet known.
Urbanism

While urbanization has to do with metropolitan growth, urbanism refers to the social
patterns and behavior associated with living in cities. Urbanism, with its changes in the
values, mores, customs, and behaviors of a population, is often seen as one of the
consequences of urbanization.11 Urbanism is a social and behavioral response to living
in certain places.

Under the conceptual label “urbanism” is found research concerning the social
psychological aspects of urban life, urban personality patterns, and the behavioral
adaptations required by city life. Urbanism as a way of life receives detailed treatment
in Chapter 6: The Suburban Era, Chapter 7: Urban Lifestyles, and Chapter 8: Social
Environment of Metro Areas.

It should be noted that it is possible to live in an area with a high degree of urbanization
(population concentration) and a low level of urbanism (urban behaviors) or—less
commonly—a low level of urbanization and a high level of urbanism. Examples of the
former can be found in the large cities of the developing world, where the city is filled
with immigrants who now reside in an urban place but remain basically rural in outlook.

Cairo, for example, is typical of developing cities in that over one-third of its residents
were born outside the city. Many of these newcomers are urban in residence but remain
rural in outlook and behavior. On the other hand, if the urbanization process in the
United Sates becomes one of population decentralization, the United States might have
some decline in level of urbanization, while urban lifestyles become even more
universal.12

The explicit belief in most older sociological writings—and an implicit premise in much of
what is written about cities today—is that cities produce a characteristic way of life
known as “urbanism.” Moreover, urbanism as a way of life, while often successful
economically, is said to produce personal alienation, social disorganization, and the
whole range of ills falling under the cliché “the crisis of the cities.”

A classic statement of the effects of urbanization on urban behavior patterns is Louis

Wirth’s article “Urbanism as a Way of Life.”13 According to Wirth, “For sociological
purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, permanent settlement of
socially heterogeneous individuals.”14 Wirth further suggested that these components of
urbanization—size, density, and heterogeneity—are the independent variables that
create a distinct way of life called “urbanism.” Urbanism, with its emphasis on
competition, achievement, specialization, superficiality, anonymity, independence, and
tangential relationships, is often compared—at least implicitly—with a simpler and less
competitive idealized rural past. (The adequacy of this approach is addressed in detail
in Chapter 7, Urban Life-Styles.)
Today urbanism as a way of life is virtually universal in nations with high levels of
urbanization such as the United States, with their elaborate media and communications
networks. Even the attitudes, behaviors, and cultural patterns of rural areas in the
United States are dominated by urban values and life-styles. Rural wheat farmers,
cattle ranchers, and dairy farmers- with their accountants, professional lobbies, and
government subsidies- are all part of a complex and highly integrated agribusiness
enterprise. They are hardly innocent country bumpkins, preyed upon by city slickers.
By comparison, urban consumers often appear naïve regarding contemporary rural life.

The degree to which even two score of years ago urbanism already had permeated
every aspect of American culture was documented in Vidich and Bensman’s study of an
upstate New York hamlet with a population of 1,700. Their book, which they titled Small
Town in Mass Society, presented a detailed and careful picture of how industrialization
and bureaucratization totally dominated the rural village.15 Everything—from 4-H Clubs
and Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, through the American Legion and national
churches, to university agriculture agents, the Social Security Administration, and
marketing organizations to raise the price supports for milk—influenced how the village
residents thought, acted, and lived. The town was totally dependent on outside political
and economic institutions for its survival.

The small-towners, though, had an entirely different conception of themselves and their
hamlet. They saw themselves as rugged individualists living in a town that, in contrast
to city life, prided itself on friendliness, neighborliness, grass roots democracy, and
independence. Their town was small, self-reliant, and friendly, while the city was large,
coldly impersonal, and full of welfare loafers. In spite of the absence of a viable local
culture, and the clear division of the town by socioeconomic-class differences, the myth
of a unique rural life-styles and social equality persisted. Contemporary small-town
America is totally enmeshed in an urban economic and social system despite its pride in
its independence of the city and cosmopolitan ways. The small town even relies on the
mass media to help reaffirm its own fading self-image. Even the most isolated rural area
in Montana has access to 200+ channels of satellite TV, web access, and e-mail.
Distances have shrunk. You can view American news in small towns in Indonesia, while
the Internet provides an international information superhighway.

Today in North America, young people in both rural and urban areas follow the same TV
and rock concert stars. Partially accepting separatist religious groups such as the
Amish, there is no longer a unique rural culture independent of urban influence.

ORGANIZING THE STUDY OF URBAN LIFE

Over the years scholars have studied cities in many different ways. Academics in a
variety of disciplines have concerned themselves with a wide variety of questions such
as why cities are located at particular places and not others; what the growth patterns of
cities are; who lives in cities; how different ethnic and racial groups arrange themselves
therein; how living in cities affects social relationships; and whether city living produces
certain behaviors and social problems.

If these and numerous other questions addressed in this book are to have meaning for
the student, the questions have to be more than an ad hoc list of interesting topics. The
material has to be related and organized in some general fashion in order to provide a
common understanding and body of knowledge.

The material that follows can be organized—with an occasional bit of squeezing—under

the previously mentioned heading of urbanization and urbanism. Under the more
abstract heading of urbanization are included those questions and issues dealing with
the city as a spatial, economic, and political entity. This traditionally was referred to by
sociologists as the human ecological approach since it is broadly concerned with how
the ecology of the city developed, particularly the interrelationship and interdependence
of organisms and their environment. In recent decades an alternative approach called
political economy has become widely used by urban scholars. Those taking a political
economy perspective are less likely to give weight to ecological factors. Rather, in
explaining the decline of the central city, suburbanization, edge cities, and the explosion
of third world cities, they look to the explicit political and economic decisions made by
multinational and political institutions. Those advocating a political economy approach
are concerned with how economic forces shape urban patterns. Research, for example,
might be done on how property values are manipulated to encourage gentrification.16
(Political Economy and other conflict approaches are discussed in detail in Chapter 4,
Ecology and Political Economy Perspectives.)

What both ecological and political economy approaches have in common is that they
both focus on the larger macro-level urban units and social and economic questions.
The urbanization, ecological, or political economy focus is generally on the big picture.
They use cities- or, at its most micro level, the neighborhoods- as the unit of analysis. A
human ecologist, for example, might research the possibility of a predictable pattern of
neighborhood change over time, while a political economy advocate might look at how
major economic institutions decide growth patterns. Such macro-level approaches are
heavily used in Part I: Focus and Development and Part II: American Urbanization.

Urbanism as a way of life, on the other hand, is far more micro-level oriented. It focuses
on small groups or individuals. This sociocultural or social-psychological approach
focuses on how the experience of living in cities affects people’s social relationships and
personalities. The concern of this approach is primarily with the psychological, cultural,
and social ramifications of city life. For example, one of the questions regarding the
social-psychological impact of city life that we will examine in some detail is whether
living in a city, suburb, or rural area produces differences in personalities, socialization
patterns, or even levels of pathology. To put it in oversimplified form, are city dwellers
different? While human ecology focuses on how social and spatial patterns are
maintained, and political economy focuses on economic systems, the social-
psychological approach is concerned with human effects.
Historically, urbanization scholars and urban social psychologists have gone their own
way, while largely ignoring their opposite numbers. Some textbooks also perpetuate the
division by all but ignoring alternative approaches, or by treating alternative
explanations as discredited straw men. This is unfortunate, for the different perspectives
complement each other in the same way that the social science disciplines of political
science, economics, and sociology provide alternative focuses and approaches. This
book, written by one trained in the urban ecology tradition who finds much of value in
the political economy model, makes a conscious effort to present all positions fairly as a
means to better understand the patterns of metropolitan areas and of the lives of those
of us living within them. I believe it is necessary to have an understanding both of
urbanization and of urbanism as a way of life, or if you prefer the alternate terminology,
of urban ecology, urban political economy, and urban social psychology.

CONCEPTS OF THE CITY

Urban Change and Confusion

The scientific study of urbanism and urbanization is a relative newcomer to the

academic scene. Systematic empirical examination of cities and city life only began
during the first half of the 20th century, a period in which American cities were
experiencing considerable transformation in terms of both industrialization and a
massive influx of immigrants from the rural areas of Europe and the American South.
To many observers of the time, the city, with its emphasis on efficiency, technology, and
division of labor, was undermining simpler rural forms of social organization. The social
consequences were disorganization, depersonalization, and the breakdowns of
traditional norms and values. Classic early 20th century social protest novels such as
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1990) reflect
this breakdown. An anonymous poem of 1916, called “While the City Sleeps,” mirrors
this negative view of urban life:
Stand in your window and scan the sights,
On Broadway with its bright white lights.
Its dashing cabs and cabarets,
Its painted women and fast cafes.
That’s when you really see New York.
Vulgar of manner, overfed,
Overdressed and underbred.
Heartless and Godless, Hell’s delight,
Rude by day and lewd by night.

Rural Simplicity versus Urban Complexity

In the usual description of the transition from simple to complex forms of social
organization, there is, at least, implicitly, a time frame in which rural areas represent the
past and traditional values, and the city represents the future with its emphasis on
technology, division of labor, and emergence of new values. Early movies reinforced this
view. In silent movies the villain invariably was the city banker, while the hero was a
simple farm boy. Similarly, in cowboy movies the villain invariably lived in town, while the
hero rode in from the open country. The picture of a fast-paced, alienating, stimulating,
and anonymous city life, along with the contrasting romanticized picture of the warm,
personal, and well-adjusted rural life is, of course, a stereotype. Such stereotypes
affect not only social behavior, but also social policy—even if they are poor reflections of
reality. For example, in spite of the emphasis on the isolation, anonymity, and mental
stress of the city, there are indications that city residents are actually happier and better
adjusted than their rural cousins.

With the exception of the largest cities, Fischer found, for example, that on a worldwide
scale there is greater evidence of rural as opposed to urban dissatisfaction,
unhappiness, despair, and melancholy.17 Also, research by Palen and Johnson on the
relationship between urbanization and health status in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
American cities found that inhabitants of large cities were consistently healthier than
inhabitants of rural areas or small towns.18 Contrary to the stereotype, mental health is
also probably superior in the city, and possibly is improving in Manhattan.19

Early Social Theories and Urban Change

The cleavage between the city and the countryside is, of course, not a uniquely
American idea. The great European social theorists of the nineteenth century described
the social changes that were then taking place in terms of a shift from a warm,
supportive community based on kinship in which common aims are shared to a larger,
more impersonal society in which ties are based not on kinship but on interlocking
economic, political, and other interests. These views had, and continue to have,
profound impact on sociological thought.20

European Theorists

Many of the core ideas of the classical (so-called) Chicago School writings of the 1920s
and 1930s were based implicitly on the thoughts of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-
century European social theorists. Of these, the most influential were the Germans
Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Max Weber (1864-1920), and
Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and the Frenchman Emile Durkeim (1858-1917).

These theorists sought to explain the twin changes of industrialization and urbanization
that were undermining the small-scales, traditional, rural-based communities of Europe.
All about, they saw the crumbling of old economic patterns, social customs, and family
organizations. The growth of urbanization was bringing in its wake new urban ways of
life. They sought to theoretically explain these changes.

Commonly, the changes were presented by the theorists in terms of typologies, which
sociologists refer to as ideal types. The term ideal type doesn’t mean “perfect”; rather,
an ideal type is model. An ideal type doesn't represent a specific reality; it is, instead, a
logical construct. One ideal type model was rural society; its opposite was urban
society.

Probably the most important nineteenth-century European social theorist was Karl Marx,
who was born in 1818 in Trier into an agrarian Germany that had yet to undergo the
Industrial Revolution. Yet Marx spent most of his adult line in an industrializing London
where factories, and exploitation of the new class of wage workers, were part of daily
life. In the booming cities, a few industrialists enjoyed a level of wealth and comfort
more luxurious than that of kings of old, while workers slaved twelve hours a day, six
days a week, for subsistence wages and lived in unspeakable tenements and slums
(see “Engels on Industrial Slums, “ in Chapter 2).

Not surprisingly, Marx saw economic structure as the infrastructural foundation of

society. It therefore follows that change in society is through conflict over resources and
the means of production. Ultimately, the final struggle of mature urban industrial
capitalism would be between the capitalists, who owned factories and the means of
production, and the urban proletariat, who provided the underpaid labor. However, for
Marx, before this could occur, there first had to be a shift from agrarian feudal society to
the new, urban, property-owning bourgeoisie. (Since a bourg, or burg, is a town, a
“bourgeois” is a definition of a town dweller.) According to Marx:

The greatest division of material and metal labour is the separation of town and
country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition
from barbarism to civilization, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs
through the whole history of civilization to the present day. . . . Here first became
the division of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on
the division of labour and on the instruments of production.21

In early 20th century urban sociology Ferdinand Tonnies had great impact with his
elaborate discussions of the shift from gemeinschaft—a smaller country or village
community based on ties of blood (family) and kinship—to gesellschaft—a larger, more
complex society or association based on economic, political, or other interests.22 In rural
gemeinschaft, people were bound together by common values and by family and
kinship ties, and they worked together for the common goal. At the gesellschaft pole of
the typology, on the other hand, personal relationships count for little, with money and
contract replacing sentiment. City people were individualistic and selfishly out for
themselves. For Tonnies this change from common good to private advantage arose as
a consequence of the growth of money-based capitalism. Further, he saw this
evolutionary change as inevitable, but not desirable. Tonnies mourned the increasing
loss of community. A century later his idea of the warm local town in contrast to the
impersonal city still continues to influence popular views of urban life.

Others were more positive regarding urban life. The great French sociologist Emile
Durkheim similarly saw societies moving from a commonality of tasks and outlook to a
complex division of labor. Societies based on shared sentiments and tasks were said to
possess “mechanical solidarity,” while those based on integrating different but
complementary economic and social functions were said to possess “organic
solidarity.”23 In Durkheim’s view, the collective conscience of rural society is replaced by
a complex division of labor in urban society. The latter is both far more productive
economically and far more socially liberating. Durkheim was more positive about urban
life than Tonnies; while Durkheim saw the division of labor undermining traditional life,
he also saw cities creating new forms of mutual interdependence.

Expanding beyond the European city, the German sociologist Max Weber made an ideal
type distinction between “traditional society” based upon ascription and “rational society”
based on the “technical superiority” of formalized and impersonal bureaucracy.24 Weber
saw that with the rise of the nation state the autonomous city of the medieval period was
no more.

All the above theorists looked at the city from a macro-level. More psychologically
oriented was Georg Simmel, whose famous essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
concentrated on how urbanization increases individuals'’ alienation and mental
isolation.25 Simmel's concern was on how the individual could survive the city's intense
social interaction and still maintain her or his personality. Simmel saw the city as a place
of intense stimuli that stimulated freedom but also forced the city dweller to become
blasé and calculating in order to survive. Simmel’s ideas were very important in
influencing America's first urban sociologists and are the base of much of the work of
the so-called Chicago School of sociologists. The influence of Simmel's ideas is
discussed further in Part Three: Metropolitan Life.

Finally, a twentieth-century antropology version of the dichotomy between rural and

urban places is the distinction made by the anthropologist Robert Redfield between
what he characterized as “folk” and “urban" societies. Folk peasant societies were
described as:
 . . . small, isolated, non-literate, and homogeneous, with a strong sense of group
solidarity. The ways of living are conventionalized into that coherent system
which we call “a culture.” Behavior is traditional, spontaneous, uncritical, and
personal; there is no legislation, or habit of experiment and reflection for
intellectual ends. Kinship, its relationships and institutions, are the type
categories of experience and the familial group is the unit of action. The sacred
prevails over the secular; the economy is one of status rather than market.26

Interestingly, Redfield never did define “urban life,” simply saying that it was the
opposite of folk society.

Assumptions The theoretical frameworks described above contain three general

assumptions: (1) The evolutionary movement from simple rural to complex urban is
unilinear (that is, it goes only in one direction: from simple to complex); (2) modern
urban life stresses achievement over ascription (that is, what you do is more important
than your parentage); and (3) the supposed characteristics of city life apply not just to
specific groups or neighborhoods but to urban areas as a whole. As you read through
this text, note whether these assumptions are supported or rejected. All these models
have at least an implicit evolutionary framework: Societies follow a unilinear path of
development from simple rural to complex urban. Rural areas and ways of life typify the
past, while the city is the mirror to the future. This change is assumed to be both
inevitable and irreversible.

A subset of the belief that the city fosters goal-oriented, formal, secondary-group
relationships—rather than face-to-face primary-group relationships. Unspoken but often
implicit in this is the value judgment that the old ways were better, or at least more
humane. The city is presented as more efficient, but the inevitable price of efficiency is
the breakdown of meaningful social relationships. The countryside exemplifies stable
rules, roles, and relationships, while the city is characterized by innovation,
experimentation, flexibility, and disorganization. In cultural terms the small town
represents continuity, conformity, and stability, while the big city stands for
heterogeneity, variety, and originality. In terms of personality, country folk are supposed
to be neighborly people who help one another—they lack the sophistication of city
slickers but also lack the city dweller’s guile. In short, country folk are “real,” while city
people are artificial and impersonal.

Fortunately, the newly emerging discipline of urban sociology did not calcify into
explaining supposed differences between the rural and the urban, but rather began to
examine the urban scene empirically and systematically. Eventually the original rural-
urban dichotomy was abandoned, and hypotheses began to be developed on the basis
of empirical research.

This emphasis on the importance of actual studies and research data is one of the
characteristics of urban sociology. The Chicago School of sociology sets this pattern.
The Chicago School

Urban research (and in fact virtually all sociological research) until World War II is
largely associated with a remarkable group of scholars connected with the University of
Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s. The “Chicago school” found sociology a loose
collection of untested theories, interesting facts, social work, and social reform. It
converted sociology into an established academic discipline and an emerging science.27

Foremost among the Chicago School pioneers was Robert Park (1864-1944), who
emphasized not moral preachments about the sins of the city but detailed empirical
observation. Park had held a variety of jobs, including newspaper reporter and personal
secretary to national black leader Booker T. Washington. He was constantly fascinated
by studying the city, and passed his enthusiasm on to several generations of graduate
students. He was also most interested in how the supposed chaos of the city actually
was underlaid by a pattern of systematic social and spatial organization.28

Early empirical sociologists, studying under Park, described the effects of urbanization
on immigrant and rural newcomers to the city, and the emergence of “urbanization as a
way of life.” Works such as The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, The Ghetto,
The Jack Roller, and The Gold Coast and the Slum are minor classics describing the
effects of urbanization.29

However, it remained for Louis Wirth (1897-1952), a student of Park, to consolidate and
expressly formulate how the size, density, and heterogeneous natures of cities produce
a unique urban way of life. Wirth’s essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” although much
challenged, remains the most influential essay in urban studies.30 Wirth suggested that
large cities inevitably produce a host of changes that, although economically productive,
are destructive of family life and close social interaction. Wirth’s ideas are examined in
detail in Chapter 7: Urban Lifestyles.

For now, however, let us temporarily put aside the questions of the social psychology of
city living and focus our primary attention on the spatial and social organization of urban
places. We will begin our discussion of the urbanization process by examining how and
why cities have come into existence.
1
As of 1800, only 1.7 percent of the world's population resided in places of 100,00 people or
more, 2.4 percent in places of 20,000 or more, and 3 percent in communities of 5,000 or more.
Philip Hauser and Leo Schnore (eds.), The Study of Urbanization, New York, 1965, p.7.
2
2004 World Population Data Sheet, Population Reference Bureau, Washington, D.C., 2004.
3
Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1899, Table 3.
4
The best source of data for cities in earlier eras is Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox, 3,000 Years
of Urban Growth, Academic Press, New York, 1974.
5
United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 1999 Revisions, United Nations, New
York, 2000
6
Robert E. Park, "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban
Environment," in Robert E. Park, E.W. Burgess, and Robert D. McKenzie (eds.), The City,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1925.
7
United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 1999 Revision, United Nations, New York,
2000
8
Martin P. Brockerhoff, "An Urbanizing World," Population Bulletin, Population Reference
Bureau, Washington, D.C., September 2000, p. 6.
9
2001 World Population Data Sheet, Population Reference Bureau, Washington, D.C., 2001.
10
Hope Tisdale Eldridge, "The Process of Urbanization," in J.J. Spengler and O.D. Duncan
(eds.), Demographic Analysis, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1956, pp. 338-343.
11
Leo Schnore, "Urbanization and Economic Development: The Demographic Contribution,"
American Journal of Economics and Sociology 23:37-48, 1964.
12
Brian J. L. Berry, :The Counterurbainzation Process: Urban America since 1970," in
Urbanization and Counterurbanization, Vol. II: Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, Sage, Beverly
Hills, Calif., 1976, pp. 17-39.
13
Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology 44:1-24, July 1938.
14
Ibid., p. 8
15
Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, N.J., 1958.
16
Mark Gottdiener and Joe Feagin, "The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology," Urban Affairs
Quarterly (2412): 163-187, 1988; Ray Hutchinson, "The Crisis in Urban Sociology," in Ray
utchinson (ed.) Research in Urban Sociology, JAI Press, Greenwich, Conn., 1993, p. 3-26; David
A. Smith, "The New Urban Sociology Meets the Old: Rereading Some Classical Human
Ecology," Urban Affairs Review 30(3): 432-457, 1995.
17
Claude S. Fischer, "Urban Malaise," Social Forces 52(2):221, December 1973.
18
J. John Palen and Daniel Johnson, "Urbanization and Health Status," in Ann and Scott Greer
(eds.), Cities and Sickness, Sage, Beverly Hills, Calif., 1983, pp. 25-34.
19
Leo Srole, "Mental Health in New York," The Sciences, 20:16-29, 1980.
20
Michael P. Smith, The City and Social Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1979.
21
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, R. Pascal (trans.), International
Publishers, New York, 1947, pp. 68-69.
22
Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society, Charles P. Loomis (trans.), Harper & Row, New
York, 1963.
23
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, George Simpson (trans.), Free Press,
Glencoe, Ill., 1960.
24
H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (trans. and ed.), Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Oxford
University Press, Oxford University Press, New York, 1966.
25
Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt
Wolff (trans.), Free Press, New York, 1964.
26
Robert Redfield, "The Folk Society," American Journal of Sociology 52:53-73, 1947.
27
For an evaluation of the Chicago legacy, see Lyn H. Lofland, "Understanding Urban Life: The
Chicago Legacy," Urban Life 11:491-511, 1983.
28
Robert E. Park, "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban
Environment," in Robert Park, E.W. Burgers, and Roderick McKenzie (eds.), The City,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1925.
29
William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 vols.,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1918-1920: Louis Wirth, The Ghetto, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1928; Clifford R. Shaw, The Jack Roller, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1930; and Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1929.
30
Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology, 44:1-24, July 1938.
Chapter 2: Emergence of Cities

The past is prologue- Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION

This chapter begins at the beginning of urban life. It outlines the dramatic growth from
the first tentative agricultural villages to the massive industrial cities of the last century.
In brief, what is being discussed is the rise of civilization. Our goal is not to memorize a
series of dates and places, but rather to develop some understanding of the process of
urban development- that is, how and why cities developed. Archeological,
anthropological, and historical material is included, not because there is anything sacred
about beginnings as such, but because having some understanding of the origin and
function of cities helps us to better understand contemporary cities and how and why
they got to be what they are today.

THE ECOLOGICAL COMPLEX

One model that helps us to understand change is the ecological complex. An

ecosystem is defined as a natural unit in which there is an interaction of an
environmental and a biotic system – that is, a community together with its habitat. At
the upper extreme, the whole earth is a world ecosystem. In recent decades the
ecological framework has been criticized by political economy scholars for not giving
sufficient attention to deliberate changes planned by economic elites.1 This is a valid
criticism when discussing industrial and postindustrial cities. However, for viewing early
preindustrial cities, an ecological framework is a useful tool.

In basic terms, the ecological complex identifies the relationship between four concepts
or classes of variables: population, organization, environment, and technology. (Some
add a fifth category of “social.”) These variables are frequently referred to by the
acronym “POET.”
Population refers not only to the number of people but also to the growth or contraction
through either migration or natural increase. An example of the first is the growth of
Houston from 1975 to the present through in-migration from frost belt cities. Population
also refers to the composition of the population by variables such as age, sex, and race.

Organization, or social structure, is the way urban populations are organized according
to social stratification, the political system, and the economic system. For example, one
might want to examine the effect of Houston’s political system and related tax system in
encouraging population growth through in-migration.

Environment refers to the natural environment (e.g., Houston’s absence of snow, or

Vancouver's mild maritime climate) and the built environment of streets, parks and
buildings.

Technology refers to tools, inventions, ideas, and techniques that directly impact urban
growth and form. Examples in Houston’s case are the private automobile and air-
conditioning. Air-conditioning has made the sun belt not only prosperous but possible.
Without air conditioning the fast-growing states of Florida and Texas would still be the
relative economic backwaters they were 50 years ago. Humid Houston, the control
center for the world’s gas and oil industry, would be unthinkable without air-
conditioning. Similarly, Dallas would never have emerged as a business center, and
Austin’s rise as a computer technology center would have been impossible. (Microchip
manufacturing requires a constant 72 degrees and 35 percent humidity.) It should be
kept in mind that how technology is used, and who has access to it, has social and
political ramifications.

The ecological complex is not a theory, but it does provide a way of reminding us of the
interrelated properties of life in urban settings and how each class of variables is related
to and has implications for the others.2 Each of the four variables is casually
interdependent; depending on the way a problem is stated, each may serve as either an
independent (or thing-explaining) or a dependent (thing-to-be-explained) variable. In
sociological research, organization is commonly viewed as the dependent variable to be
influenced by the other three independent variables, but a more sophisticated view of
organization sees it as reciprocally related to the other elements of the ecological
complex.
IFor example, if we are looking at the destruction of the Brazilian rain forests, we can
view rapid population growth and availability of modern technology as “causing”
massive environmental degradation and destruction of the earth’s ozone layer. On the
other hand, one could view the environmental variable as “causing” the social
organizational response of the international environmental movement.

A major advantage of the ecological complex as a conceptual scheme is its simplicity,

since the economy of explanation is a basic scientific goal. For example, using the
example of smog in Los Angeles, one can see that as transportation technology
changed, the environment, organization, and population of the city also changed. In
Los Angeles a favorable natural environment led to large-scale increases in population,
which resulted in organizational problems (civic and governmental) and technological
changes (freeways and factories). These in turn led to environmental changes (smog),
which resulted in organizational changes (new pollution laws), which in turn resulted in
technological changes (antipollution devices on automobiles and a limited, but very
expensive, subway system).

This example illustrates how sociologists can use the conceptual scheme of the
ecological complex to clarify significant sets of variables when studying urban growth
patterns. This can be of considerable help in enlightening policy options. Note, for
example, the dominant importance of environmental factors in the first cities and how
this, in time, is modified by technological and social inventions. The role of technology
becomes increasingly important in the 19th century (railroads, telephones, elevators,
high-rise buildings).

A problem with the ecological complex is that the categories themselves are somewhat
arbitrary, and the boundaries between them are not always precise. The ecological
complex, however, is simply a tool to help us better understand the interaction patterns
within urban systems. It is not intended to be a fully developed theory of urbanization.
Perhaps the greatest limitation of the original ecological complex is that it subsumes
cultural values under the variable of organization. A very strong case can be made that
"culture" should be a separate reference variable in its own right. Thus as previously
noted, some would add an “S” for social to make the acronym POETS. Another
limitation is that the ecological complex as such does not explain how, when, to what
degree, and under what circumstances the categories of variables interact.
Nonetheless, the ecological complex remains a useful explanatory tool for organizing
large bodies of material and showing relationships. It is less useful when addressing
specific questions requiring conceptual precision.
POLITICAL ECONOMY MODELS

The ecological approach has been challenged by the emergence of a variety of political
economy models. These conflict-based paradigms or models are commonly referred to
as political economy models. Originally these were neo-Marxist in nature, but some
contemporary models have moved beyond Marxism.3 Today, both ecological and
political economy models are undergoing considerable change. (Political-economic
conflict theories are discussed in detail in Chapter 4: Ecology and Political Economy
Perspectives.)

Political economy models differ in specifics, but they all stress that urban growth is
largely a consequence of capitalist economic systems of capital accumulation, conflict
between classes, and economic exploitation of the powerless by the rich and powerful.
The capitalist mode of production and capital accumulation are seen as being
manipulated by real estate speculators and business elites for their private profit. The
assumption is that “societal intervention is dominated by antagonistic social
relationships,” “social development is unstable in societies with antagonistic owner
relationships,” and “power inequality is a basic element in societal relationships.”4

Critical theorists criticize ecological models as being ahistorical and mechanistic, and
stress that social conflict is an inevitable consequence of capitalistic political
economies. Thus, they discount the ecological model’s reliance on transportation and
communication technologies in explaining urban-suburban development. Rather, they
place greater emphasis on the deliberate and conscious manipulation by real estate and
government interests in order to promote growth and profits. Suburbanization, for
example, is not viewed as resulting from individual choices made possible by access to
outer land through streetcar and automobile, but rather as the deliberate decision of
economic elites to disinvest in the city and to manipulate suburban real estate
markets.5 The strength of political economic models is their attention to the influence of
economic elites on political decision making and the role played by real estate
speculators. The weakness is the assumption that local government acts largely at the
bidding of economic elites, and thus citizen’s wishes have little impact on growth
patterns or on local government.

Both ecological and political economy models will be used throughout this text.
FIRST SETTLEMENTS

Our knowledge of the origin and development of the first human settlements and our
understanding of the goals, hopes, and fears of those who lived within them must
remain forever tentative. Because the first towns emerged before the invention of writing
about 3,500 B.C.E., we must depend for our knowledge on the research of
archeologists. Understandably, historians, sociologists, and other scholars sometimes
differ in their interpretations of the limited archeological and historical data. Lewis
Mumford has stated the problem aptly:

Five thousand years of urban history and perhaps as many of proto-urban

history are spread over a

few score of only partly exposed sites. The great urban landmarks Ur, Nippur,
Uruk, Thebes, Helopolis,

Assur, Nineveh, Babylon, cover a span of three thousand years whose vast
emptiness we cannot

hope to fill with a handful of monuments and a few hundred pages of written
records.6

This chapter, which outlines the growth of urban settlements, must necessarily be based
in part on scholarly speculation about what happened before the historical era.
Fortunately, though, our interest is not so much in an exact chronology of historical
events as in the patterns and processes of development.

Agricultural Revolution

Hunting and Gathering Societies. It is generally believed that before the urban
revolution could take place, an agricultural revolution was necessary.7 Before the
invention of the city, nomadic hunting-and-gathering bands could not accumulate, store,
and transport more goods than they could carry with them. Hunting-and-gathering
groups were small, ranging from 25 to at most 50 persons. Hunting-and-gathering
societies were equalitarian, lacked private property, and had no fixed leadership. Since
the group was mobile, parents could pass on little in goods to their children. Each
generation started with equal resources. Settled agriculture changed everything by
allowing population growth, limited economic specialization, and a more complex social
organization. However, there was not a total absence of culture. The hunter-gatherers of
Japan's Jomon culture produced pottery with a cord pattern in the 10th millennium
B.C.E.8

Settled Agriculture. Eventually, some groups gained enough knowledge of the

relationship between the seasons and the cycle of growth to forsake constant
nomadism in favor of permanent settlement in one location. The Neolithic period is
characterized by this change from gathering food to producing it. There is fairly clear
evidence that a transformation from a specialized food-collecting culture to a culture
where grains were cultivated occurred around 8,000 B.C. in the Middle East.

Herd animals such as oxen, sheep, donkeys, and finally horses were first used during
this period, allowing the available supply of food to be substantially increased and the
first solid steps toward permanent settlement of a single site to be made. Animals such
as the horse and the donkey could also serve, in addition to humans, as beasts of
burden and a source of pulling power. In all likelihood, decreases in the very high
mortality rates and increases in population occurred at this same time.

Only when the agricultural system became capable of producing a surplus was it
possible to withdraw labor from food production and apply it to the production of other
goods.9 The size of the urban population was thus directly related to the efficiency of
agricultural workers, and agriculture remained primitive millennia.

However, while a food surplus was essential to the emergence of towns, it was not
essential that the surplus come from agriculture. Perhaps as early as 15,000 years ago,
during the Mesolithic period, hamlets from India to the Baltic area based their culture on
the use of shellfish and fish.10 Within these Mesolithic hamlets possibly were seen the
earliest domestic animals, such as pigs, ducks, geese, and our oldest companion, the
dog. Mumford suggests that the practice of reproducing food plants through plant
cuttings – as with the date palm, the olive, the fig, and the grape – probably derives
from Mesolithic culture.11 Small villages could manage by food gathering if their
ecological sites were especially bountiful.
Early settlements had a rudimentary division of labor and hierarchical social order.
Jericho – which some argue was the first “city,” with some 600 people around 8,000
B.C. – had a fairly complex architectural construction.12 The inhabitants, for example,
had sufficient civic organization and division of labor to build defensive walls and towers
in a period when they had barely begun to domesticate grains. They also built mud
houses of sun-dried bricks. Further north in what is now Turkey, permanent villages
emerged about the same time.

Population Expansion

The first population explosion - an increase in tribe size to the point where hunting and
gathering could no longer provide adequate food, further encouraged fixed settlements.
This was most likely to occur in fertile locations where land, water, and climate favored
intensive cultivation of food. Archeologists suggest that population growth, in fact,
forced the invention of agriculture.13 Hunting, gathering, and primitive plant cultivation
simply could not support the growing population.

Since the plow did not yet exist – it was not invented until sometime in the fourth century
B.C.E. – farmers of this period used a form of slash-and-burn agriculture.14 This method
required cutting down what you could and burning off the rest before planting – an
inefficient form of farming, but one with a long history. It was even used by the American
pioneers who first crossed the Appalachian Mountains into the new lands of Kentucky
and Ohio. It was still being used in isolated areas of the Appalachians in the first
decades of the twentieth century. The first farmers in ancient times soon discovered that
slash-and-burn farming quickly depleted the soil, forced them to migrate – and probably
spreading their knowledge by means of cultural diffusion.

The consequences of these developments were momentous: with grain cultivation, a

surplus could be accumulated and people could plan for the future. One of the early
permanent Neolithic farming communities - Jarmo, in the Kurdista area of Iraq - was
inhabited between 7,000 and 6,500 B.C.E. It has been calculated that approximately
150 people lived in Jarmo, and archeological evidence indicates a population density of
27 people per square mile (about the same as the population density today in that
area).15 Soil erosion, deforestation, and 10,000 years of human warfare have offset the
technological advantages of the intervening centuries.
The early inhabitants of Jarmo had learned to domesticate dogs, goats, and possibly
sheep. The farmers living there raised an early form of domesticated barley and wheat
but still had to hunt and collect much of their food. Since the earliest farmers lacked
plows to break the tight grassland sod, they worked the hillsides where grass was
scarce and trees broke the earth. Similarly, America’s tightly packed western prairie soil
remained untamed until the steel plow was invented in the 19th century.

Village farming communities like Jarmo had stabilized by about 5500 B.C.E., and over
alluvial plains of river valleys like that of the Tigris-Euphrates. A similar process took
place in the great river valleys of the Nile, the Indus, and the Yellow. The invention of
agriculture was quite possibly an independent development in China and was certainly
independent in the new world. The civilizations of Mesoamerica were physically isolated
from those of the Middle East and Asia and thus had to invent independently, since they
were unable to borrow. In pre-Mayan Mesoamerica, elaborate systems for irrigating and
raising corn were developed.

Although China's cities evolved somewhat after those of the Middle East, the latest
archaeological evidence suggests the concept of the city probably was not borrowed
from Mesopotamia but developed independently.16 Certainly by the time of the Shang
dynasty (1600-1100 B.C.E.) China had cities that apparently were laid out according to
a plan, complete with ceremonial buildings and palaces, as well as dwellings.

In Mesoamerica, cities were not a product of cultural diffusion but rather a separate
invention. Mayan cities in Central America developed somewhat later than those in
Mesopotamia or China. New research confirms that the city of Caral in Peru existed in
2600 B.C.E., a thousand years earlier than cities in the Americas were thought to
exist.17

The Mayans had a major civilization and large cities dating from roughly 500 B.C.E.
Since these cities had no walls, it was thought until the 1990s that the Mayans were
peaceful. They weren't. Decoding of Mayan writing indicates that Mayan religious rituals
and wars were all remarkably bloody. Dispute arises as to whether the Central America
Mayan sites were true cities with resident populations or rather huge ceremonial sites.
Most contemporary scholars incline toward seeing them as true cities. In 2000, one of
the richest Mayan cities and royal palaces yet discovered was found buried deep and
virtually intact in a neglected part of the Guatemalan rain forest.18 The city, named
Cancuen or "place of the serpents" after the name of its dynasty, rose to power about
300 A.D. and continued beyond 600 A.D. Because of constant warfare, none of the
other Mayan dynasties lasted so long. The Mayan era of greatest city building was
between A.D. 600 and 800. Then between A.D. 800 and 900, most of the great cities of
Central America were abandoned, for reasons that are still debated and unclear.19 It
appears that populations increased while resources declined due to overfarming and
drought. Cities were abandoned and taken over by the jungle. Population growth may
have brought environmental collapse.

At its peak, Teotihuacan in central Mexico numbered perhaps 150,000 persons or more.
By the time the Spanish invaders arrived in 1521, both Mayan society and cities had
collapsed due to a combination of continuous warfare, self-destructive political divisions,
and environmental collapse. However, their successors, the Aztecs, had built a city at
Tenochititlan (Mexico City), which dazzled Cortez and his Spanish troops. No such cities
existed north of the Rio Grande.

INTERACTIONS OF POPULATION, ORGANIZATION, ENVIRONMENT, AND

TECHNOLOGY

The relationships between population, organization, environment, and technology are

clearer in their consequences than in their timing. The immediate result of the
agricultural revolution was a spurt in population size, since a larger population could be
maintained on a permanent basis. Stable yields meant that larger numbers of people
could be sustained in a relatively compact space. The creation of an agricultural
surplus made permanent settlements possible. Agricultural villages could support up to
twenty-five persons per square mile, a dramatic improvement over the maximum of
three to five persons per square mile in the hunting-and-gathering societies. Technology
had spurred population growth.

The establishment of sedentary agricultural villages with growing populations increased

the pressure for more intensive agriculture and complex patterns of organization.
Agriculture in the river valleys required at least small-scale irrigation systems,
something not necessary in the highlands. Rudimentary social organization and
specialization began to develop; periodic flooding made it necessary for the village
farmers to band together to create a system of irrigation canals and repair the damage
done by the floods. The existence of irrigation systems also led to the development of
systems of control and the emergence of more detailed social stratification within the
permanent settlements.
Relatively permanent settlements in one place also allowed the structure of the family
itself to change. In a hunting-and-gathering society, the only legacy parents could pass
on to their progeny was their physical strength and knowledge of rudimentary skills.
Agriculturalists, though, can also pass land on to their children, and all land is not equal.
Social stratification emerged over generations, with some children born into prosperity
and others into poverty.

Extended family forms can also more easily emerge under sedentary conditions – for
example, a patriarchal society where polygyny is practiced. Patriarchal family systems,
such as those found in the Bible, can have major economic as well as sexual
advantages for those in charge, since extra wives mean extra hands to tend the animals
and cultivate the fields. More important, many wives mean many sons – sons to work
the fields, help protect what one has from the raiding of others, provide for one in old
age, make offerings to the gods at one’s grave, and carry one’s lineage forward. The
last was particularly important in many societies. For example, in the Old Testament the
greatest gift that God could bestow on Abraham was not wealth or fame or everlasting
life, but that his descendants would number more than the stars in the sky and grains of
sand.

Environmentally, those located on rivers had advantages not only of soil fertility, but also
of transportation and trade. Particularly blessed were those settlements of Mesopotamia
and the Nile River valley that could exploit the rich soil of alluvial riverbeds. The very
name "Mesopotamia," which refers to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
in what is now Iraq, means "land between rivers."

Egypt was among the first to adopt sedimentary agriculture. By the middle of the fourth
millennium B.C.E., the economy of the Nile valley in Egypt had shifted once and for all
from a combination of farming and food-gathering to a reliance on agriculture. In this
great river valley, two and sometimes three a year were possible because the annual
floods brought rich silt to replace the exhausted soil. (The Aswan Dam now blocks the
annual floods.) To the dependable crops of wheat and barley was added the cultivation
of the date palm. This was a great improvement. In the Mesopotamia the palm provided
more than simple food; from it were obtained wood, roofing, matting, wine, and fiber for
rope. Grapes were also crushed and fermented in the Middle East about 3000 B.C.E.20

The use of rivers for transportation further encouraged the aggregation of population, for
now it was relatively easy to gather food at a few centers. Thus, in the valleys of the
Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow population surplus developed,
which in turn permitted the rise of the first cities. By the third century B.C.E., Egyptian
peasants from the fertile river flood plain could produce approximately three times the
food they needed. The city served as a “central place” where goods and services could
be exchanged.

CITY POPULATIONS

By contemporary standards, the largest cities were little more than small towns.
However, in their own day they must have been looked upon with the same awe with
which nineteenth century immigrants viewed New York, for these cities were ten times
the size of the Neolithic villages that had previously been the largest settlements.
Babylon, with its hanging gardens, one of the wonders of the ancient world, embraced a
physical area of only roughly 3.2 square miles. The city of Ur, located at the confluence
of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was the largest city in Mesopotamia. With all its
canals, temples, and harbors, it occupied only 220 acres.21 Ur was estimated to have
contained 24,000 persons; other towns ranged in population from 2,000 to 20,000
inhabitants.22 Such cities, however, remained urban islands in the midst of rural seas.

Hawley estimates that although these cities were large for their time, they probably
represented no more than 3 or 4 percent of all the people within the various localities.23
Even Athens at its peak had only 612 acres within its walls – an area smaller than 1
square mile; ancient Antioch was roughly half this size. Carthage at its peak was 712
acres. Of all the ancient cities, only imperial Rome exceeded an area of 5 square miles.
Even the biggest places before the Roman period could scarcely have exceeded
200,000 inhabitants, since fifty to ninety farmers were required to supports one person
in a city.24 In an agricultural world, the size of cities was limited by how much surplus
could be produced and what technology was available to transport it.

EVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Early cities were important not because of their size, but because they frequently not
only tolerated but actively encouraged innovations in social organization. Even though
few in number, the urban elite were the principal carriers of the all-important cultural and
intellectual values of civilization. Needless to say, the city also held economic and
political sway over the more numerous country dwellers. The Arab philosopher-
sociologist Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, pointed out that the concentration of
economic power and the proceeds of taxation in the cities led to a profound difference
between the economic pattern of the city and that of the country. The concentration of
governmental and educational functions in the city also stimulated new demands that
affected the patterns of production and supply.

Division of Labor

A surplus in the food supply not only allowed populations to grow; it also allowed the
emergence of some nonagricultural specialists. The city’s greater population density,
along with its sedentary way of life, made possible the development of an urban culture
emphasizing trade, manufacturing, and services. However, early cities were at least as
important as administrative and religious centers. Cities were as much symbolic places
for the worship of the sacred as practical places for secular concerns. The earliest cities
began to evolve a social organization immensely more complex than that found in the
Neolithic village. The slight surplus of food permitted the emergence of a rudimentary
division of labor. No longer did each person have to do everything for himself or
herself. The city thus differed from a large village not only because it had a larger
number of people, but because it had a larger and more extensive division of labor. The
consequence was hierarchy and stratification. Surplus permitted inequality.25

Archeological records indicate that the earliest public buildings were temples,
suggesting that specialized priests were the first to be released from direct subsistence
functions. Early Sumerian cities were basically theocracies, that is, they were ruled by
priests. That the priests also assumed the role of economic administrators is indicated
by the ration or wage lists found in the places where the temples were located.26 In
Egypt the temples were also used as granaries for the community surplus. This surplus
could be used to carry a community through a period of famine. The technology of food
storage was a major achievement of the city. The biblical story of Joseph- who was sold
by his jealous brothers into slavery in Egypt, only to become advisor to the Pharaoh and
predict seven good years of harvest followed by seven lean years of famine- points out
the vulnerability of the nomadic Israelites to their physical environment, and the relative
control of the more advanced Egyptians over their environment. Even if the nomadic
Jews had received Joseph’s warning, they would have been unable to profit from
it. They lacked the transportations and storage technology of the more urban Egyptians.
The Egyptians had learned how to move a surplus through time as well as through
space. Long-term planning – whether to avoid famines, build pyramids, or construct
temples – was possible only where a surplus was assured and storage was available.
Kingship and Social Class

For a long time the temples were the most largest and most complex institutions;
kingship and dynastic political regimes developed later. Apparently, warrior-leaders
were originally selected by all other males and served only during times of external
threat. Eventually, those chosen as short-term leaders during periods of war came to be
retained even during times of peace. As the process evolved in China in the fifth century
B.C.:

Perhaps whole settlements sometimes found it was easier to set up as warriors,

and let the people

around them work for them, than to labor in the fields. The chiefs and their
groups of warriors, no

doubt, provided the farmers with “protection” whether they wanted it or not,
and in return for that service

they took a share of the peasant’s crop.27

It is hardly necessary to add that the size of the warrior’s share of the peasant’s crop
was fixed by the warrior, not the peasant. The growth of military establishments did
contribute, though, to technological innovations – metallurgy for weapons, chariots for
battle, and more efficient ships.

It was but a small step from a warrior class to kingship and the founding of dynasties
with permanent hereditary royalty. The gradual shifting of the central focus from temple
to palace was accompanied by the growth of social and economic stratification. Artists
working in precious metals became regular attachments to palace life. Records of sales
of land indicate that even among the agriculturalists there were considerable
inequalities in the ownership of productive land. As a result, social differences grew.
Some few members of each new generation were born with marked hereditary social
and economic advantages over the others. If they couldn’t afford the luxuries of palace
life, they nonetheless lived in considerable comfort.
Archeologically, the emergence of social classes can be seen clearly in the increasing
disparity in the richness of grave offerings.28 The tombs of royalty are richly furnished
with ornaments and weapons of gold and precious metals; those of others, with copper
vessels; while the majority have only pottery vessels or nothing at all. The building of
burial pyramids was the ultimate case of monumental graves. In China a social
evolution led to the replacement of hereditary feudal lords with centrally appointed
mandarins selected by examination. This bureaucratic system survived over 3,000
years until its abolishment in 1905.

TECHNOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION

We are just discovering the elaborate water collection and distribution systems of the
ancient Mayan culture of Central America. The system allowed the Mayan elite to
develop large cities in areas that had long dry spells. The failure to maintain the water
system may have led to the civilization’s collapse about A.D. 90029 In early cities,
technology was spurred on by the existence of the palace elite. The military required
armor, weapons, and chariots, and the court demanded ever-more ornaments and other
luxuries. This demand created a constant market for nonagricultural commodities, and
the result was the establishment of a class of full-time artisans and craft workers. The
near-isolation of earlier periods was now replaced with trade over long distances, which
brought not only new goods but also new ideas.

The first city was far more than an enlarged village – it was a clear break with the past,
a whole new social system. It was a social revolution involving the evolution of a whole
new set of social institutions. Unlike the agricultural revolution that preceded it, this
urban revolution was far more than a basic change in subsistence. It was “pre-eminently
a social process, an expression more of change in man’s interaction with his fellows
than in his interaction with his environment.”30

Once begun, the urban revolution created its own environment. Inventions that have
made large settlements possible have been due to the city itself – for example, writing,
accounting, bronze, the solar calendar, bureaucracy, and the beginning of science. Ever
since Mesopotamia, the city as a social institution has been shaping human life.31

URBAN REVOLUTION
A number of years ago V. Gordon Childe listed ten features that, he said, define the
“urban revolution,” that is, features that set cities apart from earlier forms of human
settlement. The features are:

1. Permanent settlement in dense aggregations

2. Nonagriculturalists engaging in specialized functions

3. Taxation and capital accumulation

4. Monumental public buildings

5. A ruling class

6. A technique of writing

7. The acquisition of predictive sciences – arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy

8. Artistic expression

9. Trade for vital materials

10. The replacement of kinship by residence as the basis of membership in the

community32

We now know that all 10 are not necessary. For example, monumental urban places
developed in Mesoamerica without the wheel, the raising of animals, the plow, or the
use of metals. (Actually, Mayan civilization did have the wheel, but for some reason
used it only on children’s toys.) They did, however, have other advantages; probably
the most significant was the knowledge of how to cultivate large surpluses of
domesticated maize (corn). The Mayans also had made major advances in
mathematics, including the invention of the concept of zero. They were accurate
astronomers and had an exact calendar; both skills were used for religious purposes but
had secular consequences (e.g., indicating when to plant). Social organizations, culture,
and technology were interrelated.
Lists, such as Childe's, are most useful in indicating what we have come to accept as
the general characteristics of cities. What is important for our purposes is that cities
possessing these characteristics did emerge in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley.

SURVIVAL OF THE CITY

The stable location of the city was not an unmixed blessing. It was not simply for the
convenience that gardens and pasturelands were found within city walls. Cities had to
be equipped to withstand a siege, since the earliest cities were vulnerable not only to
conquest by other peoples but also to periodic attacks by nomadic raiders. For the
numerous cities built on the banks of rivers, floods were also a recurrent problem.
Middle Eastern cities also were perpetually under attack by nomadic tribes.33 The Bible,
for instance, devotes considerable attention to the successes of the nomadic Israelites
in taking and pillaging the cities of their more advanced enemies. The description of the
fall of the Canaanite city of Jericho tells us that:

The People went out into the city, every man straight before him, and they took
the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman,
young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword – and they
burnt the city with fire and all that was therein (Joshua 2:20-24).

That “Joshua 'fit' the battle of Jericho … and the walls came tumbling down” is known to
all those who have heard the stirring spiritual, even if they have not read the Old
Testament. While the walls Joshua is believed to have miraculously brought down with
trumpet blasts about 1500 B.C.E. have not been located with certainty, the remains of
other walls dating back to 8000 B.C.E. have been excavated. As with some other long-
inhabited ancient sites, the walls had been breached many times – sometimes by
invaders, sometimes by earthquakes. Actually destroying everything and everyone in
the city was remarkably shortsighted. By Solomon’s time a more complex social
organization had evolved where subjugated peoples were taxed yearly rather than
destroyed.

There also were threats to the inhabitants within the city walls, the most dangerous
being fires and epidemic diseases. Plagues spread easily in cities. City life was more
exciting, but it was not necessarily more secure or healthful than life in the countryside.
THE HELLENIC CITY

As we have noted, environmental factors played a decisive role in early cities. The
history of the city can be considered the story of human attempts, through the use of
technology and social organization, to lessen the impact of environmental factors. An
example is Athens, widely regarded as the apex of ancient Western urbanism. Not only
was the Greek soil thin and rocky and of marginal fertility, but the mountainous
hinterland made inland transportation and communication almost impossible. Aside from
the sacred ways to Delphi and Eleusis, the roads were mere paths, suitable only for
pack animals or porters. It is estimated that the cost of transporting goods 10 miles from
Athens was more than 40 percent of the value of the goods.34

But Greece was blessed with fine harbors. Consequently, Athens turned to the sea. A
Greek ship could carry 7,000 pounds of grain 65 nautical miles a day, and do it at one-
tenth the cost of land transportation. (Storms and sea pirates, however, often made this
an ideal rather than a reality.) There were also technological contributions to Greek
prosperity: the use of the lodestone as a basic nautical compass and the development
of more seaworthy ships.

Social Invention

The greatest achievement of the Greeks was not in the area of technology but in that of
social organization. The social invention of the polis, or “city-state,” enabled families,
phratries (groups of clans), and tribes to organize for mutual aid and protection as
citizens of a common state. Because they acknowledged a common mythical ancestry
among the gods, different families were able to come together in larger bodies.
Gradually the principle of common worship was extended to the entire
community. Citizenship within the state and the right to worship at civic shrines were two
sides of the same coin.

Citizens were those who could trace their ancestry back to the god or gods responsible
for the city and thus could participate in public religious worship. An Athenian citizen
was one who had the right to worship at the temple of Athena, the protector of the city-
state of Athens. Thus religion had strong social consequences since it conferred
citizenship. The ancient city was a religious community, and citizenship was at its basis
a religious status.35 Socrates’ questioning the existence of the gods was considered a
grave offense because, by threatening the established religion, he was undermining the
very basis of citizenship in the city-state. His crime was not heresy but treason. As
punishment for such a subversive act, he was forced to drink poison hemlock.
Unfortunately, the Greeks never devised a system for extending citizenship to political
units larger than the city-state. This was to be the great accomplishment of the
Romans.

Being a citizen of the city was of supreme importance to the Greeks. When Aristotle
wished to characterize humans as social animals, he said that man is by nature a
citizen of the city. To the Greeks, being ostracized, or forbidden to enter into the city,
was an extremely severe punishment. To be placed beyond the city walls was to be cast
out of civilized life. The terms pagan and heathen originally referred to those beyond the
city walls; our adjective urban and our nouns citizen and politics are derived from the
Latin terms for the city. As previously noted, the English terms city and civilization are
both derived from the Latin civis.

Physical Design and Planning

Physically, the Greek cities were of fairly similar design, a phenomenon that is not
surprising given the amount of social borrowing that took place among the various city-
states and the fact that cities were built with military defense in mind. The major city
walls were built around a fortified hill called an acropolis. Major temples were also
placed upon the acropolis. The nearby agora, or open place, served as both a meeting
place and, in time, a marketplace. All major buildings were located within the city
walls. Housing, except for the most privileged, was outside the walls but huddled as
close to the protective walls as possible.

In describing the Greek polis, there is a strong tendency to focus on the image of the
Athenian Acropolis harmoniously crowned by the perfectly proportioned
Parthenon. Separated by seas and centuries, it is perhaps natural for us to accept
Pericles’ own praise of his fellow Athenians as “lovers of beauty without extravagance
and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness.” Yet it is easy to forget that the "classic"
white stone of the Parthenon was originally painted garish colors. Traces of red paint
can still be seen millennia later. Below the inner order and harmony of the Parthenon
was a sprawling, jumbled town in which the streets were no more than dirty, winding,
narrow lanes and unburied refuse rotted in the sun. Housing for the masses was squalid
and cramped. Although the town planner Hippodamus designed a grid street pattern for
Piraeus, the port city of Athens, Athens itself had no such ordered arrangement. Athens
was the center of an empire, but little of its genius was given to urban design of
municipal management.

Population

During its peak the city achieved a population of possibly 250,000 including slaves and
noncitizens (slaves constituted perhaps one-third of the population). The major limit on
population growth was the limited technological base. The city was still dependent on
the surplus of agricultural activities. Much of the land within Athens itself was given over
to gardening. The great sociologist Max Weber put the Greek city-states in perspective
when he wrote, “The full urbanite of antiquity was a semi-peasant.”36

Expansion of Greek cities was also limited by preference and policy. The ancient
Greeks preferred fairly small cities. Both Plato and Aristotle firmly believed that good
government was directly related to the size of the city. Plato specified that the ideal
republic should have exactly 5,040 citizens, since that number had 59 divisors and
would “furnish numbers for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings, including
taxes and divisions of the land.”37 Why Plato chose the number 5,040 isn’t known, since
his totalitarian state would be governed not by citizen vote but by a small group of
guardians presided over by a philosopher-king. Lewis Mumford suggests two possible
reasons for the limited size: A larger population would be more difficult to control strictly,
and there may have been the desire to keep the population low enough to live off the
local food supply.38 He also notes that when noncitizens such as children, slaves, and
foreigners are added to the calculation, the total population of the city-state is
approximately 30,000, or about the size chosen later by Leonardo da Vinci and
Ebenezer Howard for their ideal cities. Aristotle informs us that Hippodamus envisioned
a city of 10,000 citizens divided into three parts: one of artisans, one of farmers, and
one of warriors. The land was likewise to be divided into three parts: one to support the
gods, one public to support the warriors defending the state, and one private to support
the farm owners.39 This illustrates the classic Greek interest in balance.

Aristotle’s views on the ideal size of the city are less specific, although he recognized
that increasing the number of inhabitants beyond a certain point changes the character
of the city. In his view, the city-state had to be large enough to defend itself and to be
economically self-sufficient, but not so large as to prevent the citizens from knowing
each other’s character. In other words justice should not be blind. As he stated it:
 A state then only begins when it has attained a population sufficient for a good
life in the political

community; it may somewhat exceed this number, but as I was saying there
must be a limit. What

should be the limit will be easily ascertained by experience. – If the citizens of a

state are to judge and distribute offices according to merit, then they must know
each other’s characters: where they do not possess this knowledge, both the
election to offices and the decisions of lawsuits will go wrong – Clearly then the
best limit of the population of the state is the largest number which suffices for
the purposes of life and can be taken at a single view.40

Diffusion of People and Ideas

City-states were restrained from growing overly large by the policy of creating
colonies. When a city began growing too large a colony city was established. Between
479 and 431 B.C.E., over 10,000 families migrated from established cities to newer
Greek colonial settlements. Colonization both met the needs of empire and provided a
safety valve for a chronic population problem. This diffusion of population led in turn to a
spread of Greek culture and ideas of government far beyond Peloponnesus. The
military campaigns of Alexander the Great (356- 323 B.C.) also spread Greek culture
and led to the establishment of new cities to control conquered territory (e.g., Alexandria
in Egypt).

ROME

If Greece represented philosophy and the arts, Rome represented power and
technology. The city as a physical entity reached a high point under the Roman
Caesars. Not until the 19th century was Europe again to see cities as large as those
found within the Roman Empire. Rome itself may have contained 1 million inhabitants at
its peak, although an analysis of density figures would make an estimate two-thirds that
number seem more reasonable; scholarly estimates vary from a low of 250,000 to a
high of 1.6 million. These wide variations are a result of different interpretations of
inadequate data. The number given in the total Roman census, for example, jumped
from 900,000 in 69 B.C.E. to over 4 million in 28 B.C.E. No one is quite sure what this
increase indicates – perhaps an extension of citizenship, perhaps the counting of
women and children, perhaps something else.41 Readers should remind themselves that
all figures on the size of cities before the 19th century should be taken as estimates
rather than empirical census counts. At their most accurate, such figures are formed by
multiplying the supposed number of dwelling units in a city at a given period, and then
by estimating average family size.

Size and Number of Cities

Expertise in the areas of technology and social organization enabled the Romans to
organize, administer, and govern an empire containing several cities of more than
200,000 inhabitants. The population of the Roman Empire exceeded that of all but the
largest twentieth-century superpowers. According to the historian Edward Gibbon, “We
are informed that when Emperor Claudius [ A.D. 41-54] exercised the office of censor,
he took account of six million nine hundred and forty-five thousand Roman citizens, who
with women and children, must have amounted to about twenty million souls.” He
concludes that there were “about twice as many provincials as there were citizens, of
either sex and of every age; and that the slaves were at least equal in number to the
free inhabitant of the Roman world. The total amount of this imperfect calculation would
rise to about one hundred and twenty million.”42 The total world population at this time
was roughly 250 million so Rome controlled half the world’s population.

Gibbon further states that ancient Italy was said to contain 1,197 cities - however
defined - and Spain, according to Pliny, had 360 cities.43 North Africa had hundreds of
cities, and north of the Alps major cities rose from Vienna to Bordeaux. Even in far-off
Britain there were major cities at York, Bath, and London. What made all this possible
for hundreds of years was a technology of considerable sophistication and – most
important – Roman social organization. Wherever the legions conquered, they also
brought Roman law and Roman concepts of government. Rome’s domination resulted
in an urban imperialism.

Housing and Planning

“Rome, Goddess of the earth and of its people, without a peer or a second” remains the
wonder of the ancient world. Yet despite the emperor Augustus’s proud claim that he
found a city of brick and left one of marble, much of the city centuries later was still
composed of buildings with wood frames and wood roofs on narrow, crowded alleys.
Fire was a constant worry, and the disastrous fires of A.D. 64 that some say Nero
started left only four of the city’s fourteen districts intact.

Wealthy Romans lived on the Palatine Hill, where the imperial palaces overlooked the
Forum with its temples and public buildings and the Colosseum. However, as was the
case in Athens, Roman municipal planning was definitely limited in scope. Magnificent
though it was, it did not extend beyond the center of the municipality. Once one
branched off the main thoroughfare leading to the city’s gates, there was only a maze of
narrow, crooked lanes winding through the squalid tenements that housed the great
bulk of the population. The masses crowded in the poor quarters were offered periodic
“bread and circuses” to keep their minds off revolt. Magnificent public squares and
public baths were built with public taxes for the more affluent Romans, not for the
masses. As the city grew, the old city walls were torn down and rebuilt to include
buildings that had been constructed on the outer fringe. In time even the Forum became
crowded and congested, as the ruins still standing amply testify.

The city was supplied with fresh water through an extensive system of aqueducts. The
most important of these, which brought water from the Sabine Hills, was completed in
144 B.C.E. Parts of aqueducts still stand – testament to the excellence of their
engineering and the skill of their builders. (However, use of lead pipes in homes
gradually poisoned the wealthy, who could afford piped running water.) Rome even had
an elaborate sewer system – at least in the better residential areas. It is an unfortunate
comment on progress to note that present-day Rome still dumps untreated sewage in
the Tiber River. (The beautiful North American city of Victoria similarly dumps its raw
sewage into the Pacific.)

In many ways provincial Roman cities such as Paris, Vienna, Cologne, Mainz, and
London exhibited greater civic planning than Rome itself. These cities grew out of
semipermanent military encampments and thus took the gridiron shape of the standard
Roman camp (The pattern can be seen today on football fields and also is the origin of
the square city block.) The encampments and later the cities were laid out on a
rectangular grid pattern with a gate on each side. The center was reserved for the
forum, the coliseum, and municipal buildings such as public baths. Markets were also
generally found in the forum.

Elsewhere in the empire, the major distinction was between preexisting cities and new
provincial towns and cities. In the east were Egyptian, Hellenic, and other cities which
the Romans simply took over and expanded under Roman jurisdiction. In the west
(western Europe and Britain), on the other hand, there was no preexisting system of
cities; here the Romans created a wholly new system of Roman rather than Hellenic
cities. Eastern cities differed from each other physically as well as politically. On the
other hand, because of their commonality of origin, the western European provincial
Roman cities were all remarkably similar in design (for more detail on Hellenic and
Roman planning, see Chapter 13, Planning, New Towns, and New Urbanism). The
differences between the older eastern and newer western segments of the empire were
never fully resolved, and the empire eventually split into eastern and western sections.

Transportation

Rome was an exporter not of goods, but of ideas – such as Roman law, government,
and engineering – which enabled it to control the hinterland. It was an importer of
necessary goods and, therefore, depended on the hinterland not only for tribute and
slaves but for its very life. The city of Rome could feed its population and also import
vast quantities of goods other than food because of an unrivaled road network and
peaceful routes of sea trade. (The roads were built and the galleys powered largely by
slaves.) Some 52,000 miles of well-maintained roads facilitated rapid movement of
goods and people. Parts of some of the original roads are still in use today, and the
quality of their construction surpasses that of even the most rigorous contemporary
federal standards.

With the elimination of Carthage as a rival, the Mediterranean truly became “Interium” or
local sea. Foodstuffs for both the civilian population and the legions could be
transported easily and inexpensively from the commercial farming areas of Iberia and
north Africa. When the African grain-producing areas were lost to the Vandals, and the
barbarians in Germany, Gaul, and England pressed the empire, disrupting vital
transportation routes, the decline of Rome was inevitable. Rome lived off its hinterland.

Life and Leisure

The prosperity of the Roman Empire during its peak and the leisure it afforded the
residents of the capital were imperial indeed. By the second century after Christ,
between one-third and one-half of the population was on the dole, and even those who
worked (including the third of the population who were slaves) rarely spent more than
six hours at their jobs. Moreover, by that period, religious and other holidays had been
multiplied by the emperors until the ratio of holidays to workdays was one to one.44

To amuse the population and keep their mind off uprisings against the emperor, chariot
races and gladiatorial combats were staged. The scene of the races was the colossal
Circus Maximus, which seated 260,000 persons, and gladiatorial fights were staged at
the smaller Colosseum. When the emperor Titus inaugurated the Colosseum in A.D.
80, he imported 5,000 lions, elephants, deer, and other animals to be slaughtered in a
single day to excite the spectators. The role Christians came to play in these
amusements is well known. Our contemporary beliefs about proper civic amusements
were not necessarily shared by earlier eras of urbanites.

EUROPEAN URBANIZATION UNTIL THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

The dissolution of the Roman Empire in A.D.476 marked the effective decay of cities in
western Europe for a period of 600 years. This is not the place to detail why Rome fell; it
is sufficient to note that under the combined impact of the barbarian invasion and
internal decay, the empire disintegrated and commerce shrank to a bare minimum.
Once-proud Roman provincial centers disappeared or declined to a point of
insignificance. By the end of the sixth century, war, devastation, plague, and starvation
had destroyed the glory that was Rome. From the status of the megalopolis, the city
was reduced to its early medieval character of a collection of separate villages whose
population had taken shelter in the ruins of ancient grandeur and had dug wells to
replace the aqueducts. The small population was supported by the pope, rather than by
the emperor, from the produce of papal territory.45

Nonetheless, while the social and physical city withered and decayed into poverty and
ruins, the idea and myth of Rome and a Roman Empire remained alive even in the
darkest medieval periods, and led eventually in the Renaissance to a new burst of
urban activity. The throttling of Mediterranean trade by the advance of Islam in the
seventh century, and the pillaging raids of Norsemen in the ninth century, did further
damage to what remained of European commercial life. In the east, however, cities
continued to prosper. Constantinople, built by the emperor Constantine between A.D.
324 and 330, survived as the capital of the Byzantine Empire until its conquest by the
Turks in 1453.
The Medieval Feudal System

The preceding pages discussed the development of the city through the Roman period.
Here emphasis is placed on the reemergence of European urban places after the
decline of Rome and on how such cities laid the basis for the industrial city with which
we are all so familiar.

The fall of Rome meant that each locality was isolated from every other and thus had to
become self-sufficient in order to survive. Local lords offered peasants in the region
protection from outside raiders in return for the virtual slavery – called serfdom – of the
peasants. Removed from outside influences, local social structures congealed into
hereditary hierarchies, with the local lord at the top of the pyramid of social stratification
and the serfs at the bottom.46 It is important to note that the economic and political base
of the feudal system, unlike that of the Roman period, was rural, not urban. Its center
was not a city but the rural manor or castle from which the local peasantry could be
controlled. Long-range trade all but vanished. The economy was a subsistence
agriculture based solely on what was produced in the local area; transportation of goods
from one area to another was extremely difficult. Lack of communication, the virtual
absence of a commonly accepted currency, and the land-tenure system that bound
serfs to the soil all contributed to a narrow, inward-looking localism.

However, not all former provincial cities were totally abandoned; a few managed to
survive with greatly reduced populations. These often came under the secular control of
the residing bishop. The Catholic church had based its diocesan boundaries on those of
the old Roman cities, and as the empire faded and then collapsed, the bishops
sometimes came to exercise secular as well as religious power. By the ninth century,
civitas had come to be synonymous with these “episcopal cities.”47

According to Henri Pirenne, the “episcopal cities” were cities in name only, for they more
clearly resembled medieval fortresses than true cities. They had a maximum of 2,000
or 3,000 persons and were frequently even smaller.48 By the time of Charlemagne
(ninth century) the cities – or towns – had lost most of their urban functions:

The Carolingians used the ancient cities as places of habitation, as fortified

settlements from which
 to dominate the surrounding countryside. The surviving physical apparatus of
the old town the

walls, and buildings, served because it already existed, a convenient legacy

of an earlier age.49

Town Revival

Cities began to revive, very slowly, in the eleventh century. According to Pirenne, most
of these new towns were not continuations of ancient cities but new social
entities. Originally they were formed as a byproduct of the merchant caravans that
stopped to trade outside the walls of the medieval "episcopal cities" such as Amiens,
Tours, and Cologne. Under the influence of trade, the old Roman cities took on new life
and became repopulated, while new towns were also being established. Mercantile
groups formed around the military burgs, along seacoasts, on riverbanks, and at the
junctions of the natural routes of trade and communication.50

Over time the seasonal fairs that were held outside the town gates came to take on a
more or less permanent year-round character. Since at this time the merchants were not
allowed inside the town walls, they settled in the outside shadow of the walls and in
some cases built their own walls, which attached to those of the town. These
faubourgs, or medieval suburbs, came to be incorporated into the town proper, and by
the 13th century merchants had an accepted and important role in the growing medieval
towns. Revitalized city life was most prominent in Italy when city-states such as Venice
established extensive commercial ties with the Byzantine and even the Arab
empires. Trade with Constantinople enabled the Venetians to prosper and in time create
a mini-empire of their own based upon the skills of their sea captains and the size of
their fleets.

Two external factors during the Middle Ages also greatly contributed to the growth of
towns elsewhere in Europe: (1) the Crusaders and (2) the overall population growth. A
great impetus for the revival of trade came from the medieval religious crusades. The
Crusaders returned from the urban Byzantine Empire with newly developed tastes for
the consumer goods and luxuries of the east. The crusading movement provided an
excellent opportunity for the town entrepreneurs to put their commercial instincts into
practice.51 Sociologically, the marketplace made merchants negotiators responding to
market conditions.
Trading activities greatly accelerated despite the pillaging that traders suffered from
highwaymen and the endless feudal taxes and dues the traders were forced to pay to
local lords as they transported goods through their territories. Still, the increasing
stability led to a more constant food supply, which in turn resulted in lower death rates
and improvement in the rate of natural increase of the population.

Technological innovations also contributed to population growth. The moldboard plow,

which had been used in Roman times, was rediscovered. This heavier plow could turn
the tight soils of northern Europe, and it came to be commonly used during the 10th
century. The substitution of three-field rotation for the two field system permitted three
plantings a year rather than two. The effect of these improvements was to double
production and permit stable growth.

England at the time of William the Conqueror (1066) had a population of approximately
1.8 million. Three hundred years later the population had increased to roughly 2.7
million. Some of this increased population migrated to the small but growing towns.
Without such increases, the growth of towns would hardly have been possible.

While the feudal order was basically rural, certain elements of the medieval legal and
social system indirectly encouraged the growth of towns. Feudal lords were forbidden
by custom to sell their lands, but lords badly in need of new funds could sell charters for
new towns within their lands. Also, by encouraging the growth of older towns, such lords
could increase their annual rents. Towns were frequently able to purchase or bargain for
various rights, such as the right to hold a regular market, the right to coin money and
establish weights and measures, the right of citizens to be tried in their own courts, and
– most important – the right to bear arms.52 Over time cities became more or less
autonomous and self-governing. City charters, in fact, bestowed the right of citizenship
upon those living within the urban walls. As a result, medieval cities attracted the more
skilled and the more ambitious of the rural population. In a sense the towns did not grow
out of the feudal social order, but in opposition to it. English common law developed in
this way.

Characteristics of Towns
Medieval cities were quite small by contemporary standards, having hardly more
inhabitants than present-day towns or villages. Even during the Renaissance, cities of
considerable prominence often had only 10,000 to 30,000 inhabitants.53 Only Paris,
Florence, Venice, and Milan are thought to have possibly reached populations of
100,000.54 These figures are of course scholarly estimates of past size, rather than
counts taken at the time.

Thick walls enclosed the medieval city; watchtowers and sometimes even external
moats added to its military defense. The main thoroughfares led directly from the outer
gates to the source of protection and power – the cathedral or the feudal castle. The
religious cathedral dominated the medieval skyline as the skyscraper dominates the
contemporary urban skyline. Outside the medieval burgs, land was reserved for
expansion, so that when the population increased, the older fortifications could be torn
down and new city walls built farther out. The magnificent ring-like boulevards of Vienna
and Paris are reminders of the medieval origins of these cities. When the walls were
finally demolished in the later part of the nineteenth century, the resulting open space
was used to construct the now-famous boulevards.

Within the medieval towns or burgs could be found a new social class of artisans,
weavers, innkeepers, money changers, and metal smiths known as the bourgeoisie.
This new class of merchants was in many ways the antithesis of the feudal
nobility. They were organized into guilds, and their way of life was characterized by
trade and functionally specialized production, not by the ownership of land. The rise of
the medieval bourgeoisie undermined the traditional system and prepared the way for
further changes, for, as a German phrase put it, “Stadtluft macht frei” (“City air makes
one free”).55

What eventually formed was a distinct form, a full urban community. Such communities,
as defined by the German sociologist Max Weber, were economically based on trading
and commercial relations. Each exhibited the following features: (1) a fortification, (2) a
market, court of its own, and at least partial autonomous law, (3) a related form of
association, and (4) at least partial political autonomy and self-governance.56 Weber
argues convincingly that such a totally self-governing urban community could emerge
only in the West, where cities had political autonomy and urban residents shared
common patterns of association and social status.

By the 14th century it was clear that the growth of town-based commerce was turning
Europe toward an urban-centered, profit-oriented economy. The more ambitious cities
were starting to flex their economic muscles. The Italian port cities grew wealthy on
trade and began to expand their influence over the surrounding hinterland. Economic
competition among the Italian city-states was augmented by warfare. Florence
eliminated the competition of Pisa and Siena by conquering them militarily. The cities to
the north were equally active in carving out a hinterland under the economic domination.
Rouen was the economic center for 35 villages, Metz controlled 168, and Lijbeck
claimed 240 dependent villages within its territory.57

Plague

Urban development, however, received a major blow in the 14th century by the outbreak
of the plague. The plague was spread from the east by fleas that lived on rats found on
ships. However, even the devastation of the plague could not reverse the long-term
growth of cities, although in the short run it wrought havoc to a degree that is difficult to
exaggerate. In its first three years, from 1348 through 1350, the plague, or “black
death,” wiped out at least a fourth of the population of Europe. One scholar of the
plague simply says that “it undoubtedly was the worst disaster that has ever befallen
mankind.”58 Before the year 1400, mortality due to the plague rose to more than a third
of the population of Europe. Cities, with their congestion, were especially
vulnerable. Over half the population of most cities was wiped out; few cities escaped
with losses of less than a third. Florence went from 90,000 to 45,000 inhabitants and
Siena from 42,000 to 15,000, and Hamburg lost almost two-thirds of its inhabitants.59
As put by the traditional nursery rhyme:

Ring around a rosie,

Pocket full of posies.

Ashes, ashes we all fall down.

(Rosies were the pox marks the plague made on a victim, and posies were supposed to
ward off the plague.) Overall some 35 million Europeans died of the plague.

The path of the black death, which began in India and spread to the middle east and
then Europe, followed the major trade routes. Thus, the effects were most pronounced
in seaports and caravan centers.60 The greatest losses occurred at the emerging
centers of development and change. While the blow to the cities was severe, the effect
of the plague on the rural manorial system was fatal. The feudal social structure never
really recovered. Those peasants who were not killed by the plague fled to the towns,
thus depriving the manors of their essential labor force. Serfs fleeing the plague often
found that labor shortages had turned them into contract laborers or even town artisans.
Population declines changed the economic structure.

The structure of basic social institutions such as the Catholic church was also
dramatically altered by the black death. Many of the senior and most learned clergy
perished; those who survived were more concerned with taking care of themselves than
their flocks. While some clergy did far more than their duties, others deserted their
perishes when plague threatened. Their participation in the general loose living and
immorality of the time contributed to the religious upheavals that swept Europe for the
next two centuries and culminated in the Protestant Reformation.

Since the plagues were considered to be a consequence of the wrath and vengeance of
God, some people became fanatically religious, while the majority embraced the
philosophy of “Live, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” In the words of one
scholar, “Charity grew cold, workers grew arrogant, revenues of Church and State
dropped, people everywhere were more self-indulgent and frivolous than ever.”61
Chroniclers stress the lawlessness, depravity, and dissolute behavior of the time. In
London, “In one house you might hear them roaring under the pangs of death, in the
next tippling, whoring, and belching out blasphemies against God.”62 The plague had
given the rural-based feudal system a blow from which it never recovered. From this
point onward the history of western civilization was again to be the history of cities and
city inhabitants.

Renaissance Cities

By the 16th century, Europe had fully recovered from the plague, and numerous cities,
particularly the Italian city-states, had developed a wealthy patrician class that had the
interest, resources, and time to devote to the development and beautification of their
cities. Renaissance cities such as Florence embarked on major building programs. The
revival of interest in the classical style and in classical symmetry, perspective, and
proportion had a profound effect on the design of both public and private structures. The
artistic talents even of artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were used to
beautify the cities; Leonardo also developed proposals for urban planning. Rather than
simply building at random, the more prosperous city-states hired architects to make
planned changes. The classical effect can be seen in the use of straight streets and
regular squares, and particularly in the use of perspective. The early medieval city with
its semirural nature had aptly symbolized that age. A 16th and 17th century
Renaissance city, such as Florence, symbolized the humanistic ideology of its age and
proudly proclaimed its secular urban culture.63

While the Renaissance city gained ever-greater economic and cultural dominance over
rural areas, it also marked the beginning of the end of the city as a self-governing unit
independent of the larger nation-state. During the medieval period, kings and city
dwellers had been natural allies, since both wished to subdue the power of the local
nobility. In order to cast off the last fetters of feudal restraint, the city burghers supplied
the monarch with men and – most important – money to fight wars; the monarch in turn
granted ever-larger charter powers to the towns.

Once the monarchs had subdued the rural lords, however, they turned their attention to
the prosperous towns. Gradually the independent powers of the cities were reduced as
they became part of nations in fact as well as in name. The structure of social
organization in Europe was changing to the larger geographical unit: the nation-state.
The loss of political independence, however, was compensated for by the economic
advantages of being part of a nation-state rather than a collection of semi-independent
feudal states and chartered cities. National government usually meant better and safer
roads and therefore easier and cheaper transport of goods and a larger potential market
area. Merchants also had the advantages of reasonably unified laws, a common
coinage, and standardized measures of weight and volume – all things that today we
take for granted. Emergent business classes prospered from the certainty and stability
provided by the king’s national government. The capitalist city was coming into
existence.

Influences of Technology. The technological developments of gunpowder and the

cannon changed the nature of the walled city. The traditional defenses of rampart,
bastion, and moat were of limited utility in stopping cannon fire. Cities that hoped to
resist the armies of a king had to shift their attention from interior architecture and urban
planning to the engineering of fortifications. Only elaborate defensive outworks could
stop cannon fire, and so the city unwittingly became the captive of its own horizontal
defenses. While one can certainly question the urbanologist Lewis Mumford’s view that
the decline of the city as a place of comfortable habitation began with the end of the
Middle Ages, it is certainly true that the city of the 17th century was changing.
Unable to grow outward, the cities began to expand vertically and fill in open spaces
within the city walls. The increased crowding that resulted had a bad effect on both the
quality and length of life. For example, extending the second floor of houses over the
street decreased sunlight below; this led to vitamin D deficiency, which caused rickets in
children. Filthy living conditions, combined with minimal sanitation and an absence of
any knowledge of public health practices, resulted in the rapid spread of contagious
diseases and consequently high death rates. As John Graunt’s pioneer research in the
17th century on the London Bills of Mortality demonstrated, London actually recorded
more deaths than births. Only heavy migration from the countryside allowed the city to
grow in population rather than decline as would otherwise have been the case with such
a high mortality rate. As late as 1790 the city of London had three deaths for every two
births.64 European cities only grew because the possibilities of jobs attracted rural in-
migrants.65

Demographic Transition. Urban growth was closely tied to the growth of the
population as a whole, and until the middle of the 17th century, the population of the
world had been growing at a very slow rate: 0.4 percent a year. As a result, by the
beginning of the 18th century the world population was roughly 500 million, or double
that at the time of Christ. Then momentous changes occurred that resulted in what we
call the demographic transition or demographic revolution. Population growth suddenly
spurted in the latter part of the 18th century, not through increases in the birthrate – it
was already high – but through declines in the death rate. Population increases
continued to the 19th and 20th centuries. The term demographic transition refers to this
transition from a time of high birthrates matched by almost equally high death rates,
through a period of declining death rates, to a period where birthrates also began to
decline, and eventually to a period where population stability is reestablished – this time
through low birthrates matched by equally low death rates.

Changes in Agriculture. Much of the decline in death rates can be attributed to

technological changes in agriculture that assured both a better and a more reliable food
supply. Without such increases in food supply cities could not grow and expand. As late
as the beginning of the 19th century, the produce of nine farms was still required to
support one urban family. (Today each American farmer supports approximately 75
other persons.)

At the beginning of the 18th century English agriculture was still primitive. One-quarter
of the farmland was left fallow and thus unproductive each year. Pasturelands and water
rights were held in common, as were the woods that provided hunting and firewood.
Then, within the span of half a century, English agriculture was revolutionized. Jethro
Tull published the results of 30 years of research on his estates, and the new ideas
were quickly adopted by much of the landed aristocracy. Tull advocated planting certain
crops on fallow land to restore nutrients to the earth, thus radically increasing the usable
acreage. (Today we still use the expression “being in clover” to indicate prosperity.) He
also recommended deep plowing and a system of foddering animals through the winter.
Seeds were now planted in rows rather than through broadcasting into the air.

At the same time it was being discovered that selective breeding of animals was far
superior to letting nature take its course. Previously it had been believed that animals
could only grow larger by eating more. Striking changes can be seen by comparing the
weight of animals at the Smithfield Fair in 1710 and 1795; the average weight of oxen
went from 370 pounds to 800 pounds, that of calves from 50 to 150 pounds, and that of
sheep from 38 to 80 pounds. More animals also meant more fertilizer for the fields.

Accompanying these agricultural improvements in England were the notorious

Enclosure Acts, which took the village commons from joint ownership and gave them to
the lord enjoying ancient title to the land. While disastrous for the local yeoman, the
larger enclosure could be worked more efficiently by the lords who were using the new
agricultural knowledge. The result was an increase in both the quantity and quality of
the food supply. While it is extremely hazardous to generalize about living conditions,
there apparently was an improvement over earlier centuries. Death rates began to go
down, and populations expanded rapidly.

The abandonment of traditional subsistence agriculture and the orientation to a market

economy meant that rationality was replacing tradition, and contract was taking the
place of custom. The calculation implicit in the land enclosure acts destroyed small
peasant landowners but made it possible for London and other cities to be assured
foodstuffs and thus to grow as manufacturing and commercial centers. The movement
of agricultural surpluses was facilitated greatly by the construction of new toll roads,
which were built in great numbers after 1745.

INDUSTRIAL CITIES

Technological Improvements and the Industrial Revolution

Roughly at the same time that agricultural improvements were both increasing yields
and releasing workers, inventions were being made that would allow for the growth of
new industries. Eighteenth-century inventions in the manufacture of cloth, such as the
flying shuttle and the spinning jenny, were capped in 1767 by Watt’s invention of a
usable steam engine. The steam engine provided a new and bountiful inanimate source
of energy. The cotton industry boomed, and it was soon followed by other industries.
The machines, rather than eliminating the need for workers, rapidly increased the
demand for an urban work force.66 A factory system began to emerge based on
specialization and mechanization. As a consequence, new forms of occupational
structure and a more complex stratification system began to develop. In the
mechanized, capital-intensive industries, urban bondage replaced rural bondage for
poor laborers.

The Second Urban Revolution

The first urban revolution was the emergence of cities, and the second was the 18th
century changes that for the first time made it possible for more than 10 percent of the
population to live in urban places. This new urban revolution started in Europe. Without
population growth and the release of workers from the land, it is hard to see how the
early industrial cities could have grown at all, for as noted earlier, unhealthful living
conditions in the cities meant that they were not able to maintain, much less increase,
their population without in-migration from rural areas.

Rapid expansion of population and national economic expansion did not, however,
translate into healthful living conditions in the bulging European towns that were turning
into cities. Eighteenth-century London was a model of filth, crowding, and disease. The
early stages of industrialism hardly did much to improve the situation. While the rural
mortality decreased, urban mortality was kept high by unbelievably poor sanitary
conditions. The novels of Charles Dickens, such as Oliver Twist (1838), give and
accurate portrayal of life in such cities. Cholera and other epidemics were common until
the middle of the 19th century, and until the 1840’s many of London’s sewers emptied
into the Thames just a few feet above the ducts that drew drinking water from the river.
It was fortunate that the fascination and opportunities of the city continued to attract
rural migrants, since without migration the cities would not have grown but died. Until
the latter part of the 19th century, the Old English observation that “The city is the
graveyard of countrymen” was all too accurate.
1
Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, Alan Sheridan (trans.),
M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Mass., 1977.
2
Otis Dudley Duncan, “From Social System to Ecosystem,” Sociological Inquiry,
31:145, 1961.
3
See the discussion by John Logan, Robert Beauregard, and Herbert Gans in
Community and Urban Sociology, Section Newsletter, American Sociological
Association, Summer 1995, pp. 6-7.
4
Mark Gottdiener and Joe Feagan, “The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology,” Urban
Affairs Quarterly, 24, 174, 1988.
5
Joe Feagan and Robert Parker, Building American Cities: The Real Estate Game,
Prentice-Hall Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1990.
6
Lewis Mumford, The City in History, It’s Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects,
Harcourt, Brace, and World, New York, 1961, p. 55.
7
Not everyone agrees with an implicit evolutionary typology such as the one used in
this chapter. Bruce Trigger, for instance, strongly argues against an evolutionary
approach in explaining the emergence and growth of cities, and states that “what seems
to be required is a more piecemeal and institutional approach to complex societies,”
Bruce Trigger, “Determinants of Urban Growth in Pre-industrial Societies,” in Peter
Ucko, Ruth Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (eds.), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism,
Schenkman, Cambridge, Mass., 1972, p. 576.
8
"Voices of the World," National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., August 1999.
9
Jane Jacobs reverses the order presented here, suggesting that intensive agriculture
was the result rather than the cause of cities. This theory suggests that population
growth forced agricultural improvements. See Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities,
Random House, New York, 1969.
10
Mumford, op. cit., p.10.
11
Ibid.
12
Kathleen Mary Kenyon, Archeology in the Holy Land, 3d ed., Praeger, New York, 1970;
th
4 ed., Methuen, London, 1985.
13
Kent J. Flannery, “The Origins of Agriculture,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 2: 271-
310, 1973.
14
E. Cecil Curwen and Gudmund Hatt, Plough and Pasture: The Early History of
Farming, Collier Books, New York, 1961, p. 64.
15
Robert Braidwood, “The Agricultural Revolution,” Scientific American, September,
1960, p. 7.
16
Ray Huang, China: A Macro History, M.E. Sharpe, London, 1988.
17
John F. Ross, "First City in the New World," Smithsonian, August, 2002, pp. 56-64.
18
Robert Cooke, "Palace Found in Rain Forest," Los Angeles Times/ Washington Post
News Service, September 8, 2000.
19
Colin Woodard, "Wrestling Prizes of the Maya from the Yucatan Jungle," Chronicle of
Higher Education, October 20, 2000, p. A22.
20
National Geographic, op. cit., 1999.
21
V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, rev. ed., Penguin Books, New York,
1964, p.87.
22
Ibid., p.86
23
Amos H. Hawley, Urban Society, Ronald Press, New York, 1981, pp. 32-33.
24
Kingsley Davis, “The Origin and Growth of Urbanization in the World,” American
Journal of Sociology, 60:430, March 1955.
25
Gerhard E. Lenski and Jean Lenski, Human Society: An Introduction to
Marcosociology, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1987.
26
Robert M. Adams, “The Origin of Cities,” Scientific American, September, 1960, p. 7.
27
Herrlee Glessner Creel, The Birth of China: A Study of the Formative Period of
Chinese Civilization, Reynal and Hitchcock, New York, 1937, p. 279.
28
Adams, op. cit., p. 9.
29
“Did Maya Tap Water Power?” Washington Post, Feb. 18, 1991, p. A3
30
Creel, The Birth of China, p. 279.
31
Adams, “The Origin of Cities,” p. 9.
32
V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review, 21: 4-7, 1950.
33
Stuart Piggot, “The Role of the City in Ancient Civilization,” in Robert Moor Fisher
(ed.), The Metropolis in Modern Life, Russel and Russel, New York, 1955.
34
Gustave Golz, Ancient Greece at Work: An Economic History of the Homeric Period
to the Roman Conquest, M. R. Dobie (trans.), New York, 1967, pp. 291-293.
35
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws
and Institutions of Greece and Rome, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1956 (first
published 1865), p. 134.
36
Max Weber, The City, Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (trans.), Free Press, New
York, 1958.
37
Plato, The Laws, Book V, Prometheus Books, Cincinnati, 2000.
38
Mumford, op. cit., p. 180.
39
Aristotle, Politics, Book VII, ii, (Richard Kraut, trans.), Oxford University Press, New
York, 1998.
40
Aristotle, Politics, Book VII, op. cit.
41
William Petersen, Population, Macmillan, New York, 1969, p. 369.
42
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Dell, New York, 1979
(first published 1776), p. 53.
43
Ibid., pp. 54-55
44
Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height
of the Empire, E.O. Lorimer (trans.), Yale University Press, New Haven Conn., 1940.
45
Mason Hammond, The City in the Ancient World, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1972, p. 324.
46
Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, Frank D.
Halsey (trans.), Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1939, particularly pages
84-85. For an excellent discussion of the Byzantine Empire, Islam, India, Japan, and
southeast Asia, see S. N. Eisenstadt and A Shachar, Society, Culture, and Urbanization,
Sage, Newbury Park, Calif., 1987.
47
Weber, op. cit., p. 49.
48
Pirenne, op. cit., p. 76.
49
Howard Saalman, Medieval Cities, Braziller, New York, 1968, p. 15.
50
Fritz Rorig, The Medieval Town, University of California Press, Berkley, 1967, p. 15.
51
For a superb analysis of the importance of trade to the development of Europe, see
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II, Sian Reynolds (trans.), Harper and Row, New York, 1973.
52
Mumford, op, cit., p. 263.
53
Frederick Hiorns, Town Building in History, Han-ap, London, 1956, p. 110.
54
Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, I. E. Clegg (trans.),
Harcourt, New York, 1956, p. 173.
55
In its precise sense, the phrase refers to the medieval practice of recognizing the
freedom of any serf who could manage to remain within the walls of the city for a year
and a day.
56
Weber, op. cit., p. 81.
57
John H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, Van Norstrand, New York,
1958, p. 35.
58
William L. Langer, “The Black Death,” in Kingsley Davis, Cities, Their Origin, Growth,
and Human Impact: Readings from Scientific American, Freeman, San Francisco, 1973,
p. 106.
59
Ibid., pp. 106-107.
60
Andre Siegfried, Routes of Contagion, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1965.
61
George Deauz, The Black Death, Weybright and Talley, New York, 1969, p. 145.
62
Langer, “The Black Death,” p. 109.
63
For an excellent discussion of European urbanization, see Jan de Vries, European
Urbanization 1500-1800, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984; and Paul
M. Hohenburg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1950, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
64
Mary Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, Harper Torchbooks,
New York, 1964, p. 25.
65
Eric Lampara, “The Urbanizing World,” in H. J. Dyds and Michael Wolfe (eds.), The
Victorian World, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976.
PREINDUSTRIAL AND INDUSTRIAL CITIES: A COMPARISON

A comparison of the social structures of preindustrial and industrial cities helps us

understand how the cities we live in differ from preindustrial cities and from the cities of
the developing nations of the third world. The industrial and preindustrial cities here
described are “ideal types” – that is, they do not exist in reality but are rather
abstractions or constructs obtained by carrying certain characteristics of each type of
city to their logical extremes. Such ideal types can never exist in reality, but they are
most useful in accentuating characteristics for the purposes of comparative historical
research.

In his much-quoted article “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” Louis Wirth gives a number of
characteristics that he suggests are common to cities, and in particular, to industrial
cities.* For Wirth, a city is a permanent settlement possessing the following
characteristics: (1) size, (2) density, (3) heterogeneity. The city is the place where large
numbers of persons are crowded together in a limited space – persons who have
different skills, interests, and cultural backgrounds. The result is the independence,
anonymity, and cultural heterogeneity of city dwellers.

Modern industrial cities, he says, are characterized by (1) extensive division of labor, (2)
emphasis on innovation and achievement, (3) lack of primary ties to a localized
neighborhood, (4) breakdown of primary groups, leading to social disorganization, (5)
reliance on secondary forms of social control, such as the police, (6) interaction with
others as players of specific roles rather than as total personalities, (7) destruction of
close family life and a transfer of its functions to specialized agencies outside the home,
(8) a diversity permitted in values and religious beliefs, (9) encouragement of social
mobility and working one’s way up, and (10) universal rules applicable to all, such as
the same legal system, standardized weights and measures, and common prices. The
industrial city thus is achievement-oriented and prizes a rationally oriented economic
system. It is predominantly a middle-class city. In brief, urbanism as a way of life prizes
rationality, secularism, diversity, innovation, and progress. It is change-
oriented. According to Wirth, “The larger, the more densely populated, the more
heterogeneous the community, the more accentuated the characteristics associated
with urbanism will be.”** (Wirth’s views are discussed in detail in Chapter 7, Urban
Lifestyles).
Gideon Sjoberg paints a different picture for preindustrial cities.*** He suggests that a
number of factors we associate with cities are generic only to industrial cities. In
contrast to Wirth, he suggests that preindustrial cities serve primarily as governmental
or religious centers and only secondarily as commercial hubs. Specialization of work is
limited, and the production of goods depends on animate (human or animal) power.
There is little division of labor; the artisan participates in every stage of manufacture.
Home and workplace are not separate as in the industrial city; an artisan or merchant
lives in back or above the workplace. Justice is based not on what you do but on who
you are. Standardization is not of major importance. Different people pay different prices
for the same goods, and there is no universal system of weights and measures. In brief,
the preindustrial city stresses particularism over universalism. Class and kinship
systems are relatively inflexible; education is a prerogative of the rich. A small elite
maintains a privileged status over the disadvantaged masses.

The continuity with rural values is obvious. Emphasis on traditional ways of doing
things; the guild system discourages innovation. Ascription rather than achievement is
the norm; a worker is expected to do the job he or she is born into. A person lives and
works in a particular quarter of the city and rarely moves beyond this area. Social
control is the responsibility of the primary group rather than secondary groups; persons
are known to one another and are subject to strict kinship control. Formal police forces
are unnecessary. Family influence is strong, with the traditional extended family
accepted as the ideal. Within all classes, children, and especially, sons are valued.
There is great similarity in values, and little diversity in religion is tolerated. Opportunity
for social mobility is severely restricted by a caste system or rigid class system. There is
little or no middle class, which is the backbone of the industrial city; one is either rich or
poor.

The preindustrial city lacks what the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim called
“moral density,” or what we today call “social integration.” By contemporary standards
the preindustrial city is neither socially nor economically integrated. The walled quarters
of the preindustrial city are largely independent units; their physical proximity to one
another does not lead to social interaction. The city as a whole may possess
heterogeneity, but actual social contacts rarely extend beyond one’s own group.

No real city of course conforms exactly either to the industrial model or the preindustrial
model. Models are best used as aids that sharpen our comparative understanding of
differences; they should never be mistaken for actual places.
*Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology, 44: 1-24,
July, 1938.

**Ibid., p. 9.

***Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City: Past and Present, Free Press, New York,
1960.

ENGELS ON INDUSTRIAL SLUMS

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), Karl Marx’s close associate and collaborator, was an
acute observer of the social horrors of nineteenth-century urban industrialization. He
likewise was a fine writer with a mastery of detail and mood rivaling Dickens’s. Note his
description of life in the industrial slums of Manchester:*

“The view from the bridge – mercifully concealed from smaller mortals by a parapet as

high as a man – is quite characteristic of the entire district. At the bottom the Irk flows,

or rather stagnates. It is a narrow, coal-black stinking river full of filth and garbage
which

it deposits on the lower-lying bank. In dry weather, an extended series of the most
revolting blackish green pools of slime remain standing on this bank, out of whose
depths bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and give forth a stench that is
unbearable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the level of the water … Above
Ducie Bridge there are tall tannery buildings, and further up are dye-works, bone meals,
and gasworks. The total entirety of the liquid wastes and solid offscourings of these
works finds its way into the River Irk, which receives as well the contents of the adjacent
sewers and privies. One can therefore imagine what kind of residues the stream
deposits. Below Ducie Bridge, on the left, one looks into piles of rubbish, the refuse,
filth and decaying matter of the courts on the steep left bank of the river. Here one
house is packed very closely upon another, and because of the steep pitch of the bank
a part of every house is visible. All of them are blackened with smoke, crumbling, old,
with broken window panes and window frames. The background is formed by old
factory buildings, which resemble barracks. On the right, low-lying bank stands a long
row of houses and factories. The second house is a roofless ruin, filled with rubble, and
the third stands in such a low situation that the ground floor is uninhabitable and is as a
result without windows and doors. The background here is formed by the paupers’
cemetery and the stations of the railways to Liverpool and Leeds. Behind these is the
workhouse, Manchester’s “Poor Law Bastille.” It is built on a hill, like a citadel, and from
behind its walls and battlements looks down threateningly upon the working-class
quarter that lies below …

“Passing along a rough path on the river bank, in between posts and washing fines, one
penetrates into this chaos of little one-storied, one roomed huts. Most of them have
earth floors, cooking, living and sleeping all in one place in one room. In such a hole,
barely six feet long and five feet wide, I saw two beds – and what beds and bedding –
that filled the room, except for the doorstep and fireplace in several others I found
absolutely nothing, although the door was wide open and the inhabitants were leaning
against it. Everywhere in front of the doors were rubbish and refuse, it was impossible
to see whether any sort of pavement lay under this, but here and there I felt it out with
my feet. This whole pile of cattle-sheds inhabited by human beings was surrounded on
two sides by houses and a factory and on a third side by the river … (A) narrow
gateway led out of it into an almost equally miserably-built and miserably-kept labyrinth
of dwellings.”

*Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (first
published in 1845), Publishers Moscow, 1973.

Chapter 3: The Rise of Urban America

Thy alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears.

America, the Beautiful

INTRODUCTION
In this chapter we cross the ocean to the wilderness of North America and trace the coming of age of the
North American city. As you read through the following pages, note the major role played by
environmental factors during the colonial period. (All of the major early cities were seaports.) During the
19th century, by contrast, technology changes, particularly the railroad, came to have an important- if not
dominant- impact. Dramatic population growth through immigration and changes in urban governance
and organization also played a major role in the growth and development of cities. This chapter, then,
takes us from Jamestown up to the contemporary era.

COLONISTS AS TOWN BUILDERS

We are rather new at being an urban continent. The first European colonists to arrive in North America
found a land without indigenous cities. By contrast, Mayan societies in Central America had built major
city-based civilizations 1,000 years before Europeans arrived. However, unlike the Spanish colonists, the
first English settlers found no existing urban civilizations, although the Indians of the northwest coast, with
their reliable food supply from the sea, had established well-built settled villages with an elaborate social
structure. Also, at Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado the “ancient ones” had built cliff dwellings, but they
had been abandoned before the first Spanish explorers arrived.

By and large, the North American Indian population was nomadic or lived in agricultural villages such as
the Taos in the southwest. Cahokia, located in the Mississippi River valley of southern Illinois, was the
most populous pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, thriving from about A.D. 900 to A.D. 1400 as a
farming and trade center. The Native American population may have numbered less than 1 million at the
time of the Jamestown settlement (1607).1 (Jamestown was the first English settlement. The French had
established a fishing base in Nova Scotia three years earlier.)

From the first, the town-building orientation of the colonists contrasted with Indian ways. The North
American Indians lived in nature rather than building upon it. They viewed themselves as part of the
ecology, part of the physical world. Their goal was not to master nature but to identify their niche and their
relationship with the world around them.2 The Europeans came, on the contrary, not to adjust to the
environment but to dominate and reshape it. The Puritans, for example, believed themselves to be God’s
chosen people. Moreover, the Europeans brought a land tenure system based on private ownership of
land – something quite alien to the Native American way of life. Native Americans used the land but didn’t
think they owned it any more than they owned the waters or the sky.

The colonists’ emphasis on conquering nature was fatal for the Indians since the colonists, seeing them
as a part of the environment, treated them as just another environmental problem that had to be mastered
before civilization could be introduced. There was no niche for the Indian in the town-oriented civilization
of the colonists.

What has just been said is, of course, an overgeneralization, but from our urban perspective the important
point is that the concept of the city, and all the good and evil it represents, came to North America with the
first European colonist. This concept, with all the special technology, social organizations, and attitudes it
entailed, was an importation from post-Renaissance Europe. This meant, among other things, that North
American cities had no feudal period.3

The plans of the various companies that settled the English colonies in North America called for the
establishment of tight little villages and commercial centers. The first successful settlements at
Jamestown and Plymouth Colony were in fact small towns. Thus, early English settlers were not primarily
agriculturists but rather town dwellers coming with town expectations. In fact, the initially limited number of
farmers was a problem. Jamestown nearly perished from an excess of adventurers and a dearth of skilled
artisans and farmers. As John Smith wrote back to the English sponsors of the Jamestown colony,

When you send againe I intreat you rather send but thirty Carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners,
fisher men, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided; then a tousand of
such as we haus: for except we be able both to loge them, and feed them the most will consume
with what of necessaries before they can be made good for anything.4
To the colonists the wilderness of the new world appeared strange and hostile, and the early colonists sorely missed
their towns. William Bradford movingly describes the world of the Pilgrims of 1620:

They had no friends to wellcome them nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weather-beaten
bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire too, to seek for succoure … Besids, what
could they see but a hidious and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what
multituds ther might be of them they knew not.5

MAJOR SETTLEMENTS
The following pages note the role played by population organization, environment, and technology
(POET) in shaping the cities of North America. Five seaport communities spearheaded the urbanization of
the 17th-century English colonies. The northernmost was Boston on New England’s “stern and rockbound
coast”; the southernmost was the newer (1680) and much smaller Charles Town (Charlestown) in South
Carolina.6 Barely making an indentation in the 1,100 miles of wilderness separating these two were
Newport, in the Providence Plantations of Rhode Island; New Amsterdam, which in 1664 became New
York; and William Penn’s Philadelphia on the Delaware River at the mouth of the Schuylkill River.

Environment played a heavy role in the early development of these first five cities. All five were seaports,
either on the Atlantic or, as in the case of Philadelphia, with access to the sea. Later towns such as
Baltimore had similar environmental advantages. As seaports they became commercial centers funneling
trade between Europe and the colonies. In terms of social structure all were Protestant and against the
established church, except for the ruling class of Charleston and (partially) New York. As Bridenbaugh
points out, the social structure of these towns was fashioned by a background of relatively common
political institutions; and the economic and cultural roots, whether English or Dutch, lay for the most part
in the rising middle class of the old world.7 In Canada, by contrast, settlements were government and
trade outposts. Quebec City and Montreal were garrisons from which fur traders and missionaries
ventured into Indian lands.

The five important English urban settlements had certain characteristics. First, all had favorable sites. As
noted, all were coastal seaports or, in the case of Philadelphia, were on a navigable river with access to
the sea. Second, all were commercial cities emphasizing trade and commerce. Third, all had hinterlands
or back country to develop, although Newport would find its hinterland increasingly cut off by Boston in
the 18th century. Fourth, all were small, both in population and size. Finally, all of these cities were
fundamentally British. Even New York, which was more cosmopolitan than many European cities, was
controlled by a British upper stratum.

New England
The story of early New England is the story of its towns, for New England from the very beginning was
town oriented. The Puritan religious dissenters who originally settled in New England starting with their
landing at Plymouth Rock in1620 came heavily from the towns and cities of old England. They numbered
in their midst many tradespeople, mechanics, and artisans. In the New World these religious dissenters
sought to create tight urban communal utopias rather than spreading themselves widely over the
landscape. Massachusetts Bay, according to John Winthrop, was to be “as a City upon a Hill.” In that
colony there existed a social system of a nature unknown outside New England. The cordial union
between the clergy, the bench, the bar, and respectable society formed a tight, self-reinforcing social elite.

Boston early outstripped its rivals in both population size and economic influence and kept its lead for a
century in spite of Indian wars that twice threatened its existence. Boston had barely 300 residents in the
1630s, but by 1650 there were over 2,000 residents, and a visitor could report – with some exaggeration
perhaps – that it was a sumptuous “city” and “Center Towne and Metropolis of this Wildernesse.”8
By 1742 Boston had a population of 16,000. The barrenness of Boston’s hinterland inclined Bostonians to
look toward the sea, and the town grew to prosperity on trade and shipbuilding. Before Boston was a
generation old, it had “begun to extend its control into the back country, and to develop a metropolitan
form of economy that was essentially modern.”9

Newport, the second New England city down the coast, was founded in 1639 by victims of religious
bigotry in Massachusetts. Newport’s growth was steady but far from spectacular; in a hundred years the
population grew from 96 to 6,200. However, although Newport remained relatively small, its growing
commerce and well-ordered community life gave it a significant place in emerging urban America. In
Newport, as in Boston, education was encouraged; in addition, Newport, due to the influence of leaders
such as Anne Hutchinson, had religious toleration.

The Middle Colonies

Manhattan from the beginning had the most cosmopolitan population of the colonial cities, a fact reflected
in the diversity of the languages spoken there. Father Isaac Jogues recorded that as early as 1643 there
were already “men of 18 different languages.” Partially because of this mixture of national and religious
backgrounds (Dutch Calvinists, Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Huguenots, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and
even a sprinkling of Jews, [Congregation Shearith Israel being organized in 1706]), New York was by far
the liveliest of the towns, a position many people maintain it still holds. Interestingly enough, as of 1720 a
third of New York’s population was black. By 1746 one-half of all New York households owned slaves.10
With the gradual abandonment of slavery in the North – largely for economic reasons – the proportion of
blacks declined substantially over the next century.

New York also had decisive environmental advantages that contributed heavily to its eventual emergence
as “the American City.” First, Manhattan had a magnificent deepwater natural harbor. Second, New York
was blessed with a fertile soil. Third, the city had easy access to the interior hinterland by way of the
Hudson River. The New England towns, by contrast, found their economic growth greatly hindered by the
lack of an accessible, fertile hinterland.

Philadelphia, William Penn’s “City of Brotherly Love,” laid out in 1692, was the youngest of the colonial
cities. This was in many ways an advantage, for by the time the city was organized, the Indians had
departed and the land was already being settled. A policy of religious toleration and an extremely rich and
fertile hinterland allowed rapid growth. By the time Philadelphia was six years old it had 4,000 inhabitants;
by 1720 the number had reached 10,000.11 Accounts of the day noted the regularity of the town’s gridiron
pattern with its central square, and most frequently the substantial nature of its buildings.

A City, and Towns were raised then,

Wherein we might abide.
Planters also, and Husband-men,
Had Land enough beside.
The best of Houses then was known,
To be of Wood and Clay,
But now we build of Brick and Stone,
Which is the better way.12

The South

The southernmost of the colonial cities was Charles Town (Charleston), founded in 1680
on a spit of land between the mouths of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. The town grew
slowly; two decades after its founding it only had only 1,100 inhabitants and had “not yet
produced any Commodities fit for ye market or Europe, but a few skins – and a little
cedar.”13 For decades rice, indigo, and skins formed the basis of its commerce. Far
more than northern cities, Charleston retained a negative trade balance with Great
Britain.

Charleston’s social organization and structure was unique among the major cities. The
major difference was that by the 1740s over half of Charleston’s inhabitants were
slaves. The middle class artisans and shopkeepers who were the backbone of the
northern cities were caught in Charleston between the aristocratic pretensions of the
large landowners and the increasing skills of the trained slaves. The result was civic
atrophy, the major local event being the opening of the horse-racing season. Charleston
had few municipal services and could not claim even a single tax-supported school.

Canada

To the north of the English colonies the French established Quebec in French Canada
as early as 1608, and Montreal, which would develop into a cosmopolitan world city, in
1642. However, unlike the English colonies, the early French Canadian cities were not
really major points of settlement or manufacture. Rather, they were garrisons and
trading posts specializing in trading for furs with Native peoples.14 From the cities
missionaries were also sent out to convert the Indian tribes. Canada had only 70,000
Europeans in 1765 when it became a British possession. In 1791 Canada was divided
into Upper-Canada, which was English, and Lower-Canada, which was French (“Upper”
meant farther up – or west – on the St. Lawrence River). Upper-Canada’s initial
European population was largely Loyalists fleeing the new American republic to the
south. Not until the mid-19th century would Canadian cities become manufacturing and
economic centers. Until the 1970s economic and social power remained largely in the
hands of descendents of Loyalists.

COLONIAL URBAN INFLUENCE

The relatively small populations by contemporary standards of the cities and towns of
colonial North America should not distract us from their seminal importance. Politically,
economically, and socially these five towns dominated early colonial life. In addition to
their commercial function they also served as places where new ideas and forms of
social organization could be developed. Because the colonial cities had to meet
uniquely urban problems, such as paving streets, removing garbage, and caring for the
poor, collective efforts developed.

As a result of the town-based settlement pattern, by 1690 almost 10 percent of the

colonial population was urban, possibly a higher percentage than that found in England
itself at the same time. With the subduing of the Indians and the opening up of the
hinterland for cultivation, the percentage (not, of course, the actual number) of urban
dwellers decreased between 1690 and 1790. The opening up of frontier hinterlands
permitted greater population dispersal than had previously been possible. Not until 1830
was the urban percentage of the total population as high as it had been at the close of
the 17th century.15

The cities set the political as well as the social tone. And the merchant classes became
increasingly dissatisfied with British policy. The Crown’s tax measures had a bad effect
on business. Boston was called “the metropolis of sedition”; and as Lord Howe,
commander of the British forces at the time of the Revolution, noted, “Almost all of the
People of Parts and Spirit were in the Rebellion.”16 This was not surprising, since
Britain’s revenue policy had struck deep at urban prosperity. Business and commercial
leaders were determined to resist the crown rather than suffer financial reverses. This
helps to explain the middle class and upper class nature of much of the support for the
American Revolution. Urban-based merchants, rather than farmers, were the most
upset by “taxation without representation.”

Cities of the New Nation: 1790-1860

The first United States census, taken in 1790, revealed that only 5 percent of the new
nation’s 4 million people lived in places of 2,500 or more. America’s population was
overwhelmingly rural, but this demographic dominance was not reflected in the
distribution of power or the composition of leadership groups. The urban population had
an influence on government, finance, and society as a whole far out of proportion to its
size. The Federalist Party, which elected John Adams as the second president, was
largely an urban-based party representing the commercial and banking rather than
agrarian interests.

Although three-quarters of the national population still lived within 50 miles of the
Atlantic Ocean, and only 5 percent of the population lived west of the Allegheny
Mountains, there were already clear and widening differences between townspeople
and rural dwellers. The farmers’ orientation was toward the expanding western frontier,
while the townspeople were still oriented toward Europe. Because of their status as
ocean ports, the American coastal cities frequently had more in common with the Old
World, and certainly better communication with it, than with their own hinterlands.
Traveling from Washington to New York took eight days by horse or coach in 1790.

The census showed that the largest city in the young nation was New York, with 33,000
inhabitants. Philadelphia was the second largest city, with a population of 28,000.
Twenty years later New York had over 100,000 persons. Such rapid growth of the cities
after the Revolutionary War was not only the result of foreign and rural immigration; an
exceptionally high rate of natural replacement also played a large part. Precise data are
lacking, but the birthrate is estimated to have been at least 55 per 1,000, or near the
physiological upper limit. Each married woman in 1790 bore an average of almost eight
children. One result of the high birthrate and the immigration from Europe of young
adults was a national median age of only sixteen years. (By comparison, the median
age for the white population in 2000 was 37 years.) Between 1790 and 1860 the
population would increase dramatically, doubling every 23 years – a rate equivalent to
that in some developing countries today.

The sheer abundance of land and the almost unlimited possibilities for fee-simple tenure
meant freedom from Europe’s lingering feudal constraints.17 As put by a European
visitor, “It does not seem difficult to find out the reasons why people multiply faster here
than in Europe … There is such an amount of good land yet uncultivated that a newly
married man can get a spot of ground where he may comfortably subsist with his wife
and children.”18

The percentage of the population that is urban has grown every decade except 1810-
1820. The decline in that decade was chiefly due to the destruction of American
commerce from the Embargo Acts and the War of 1812. That war came close to
destroying the coastal cities; and partially as a result of isolation from English
manufactures and products, the American cities began developing manufacturing
interests. Even Thomas Jefferson, an ardent opponent of cities, was forced to concede:

He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to

dependence on that foreign nation or to be clothed in skins and to live like wild beasts in dens

and caverns. I am not one of them; experience has taught me that manufacturers are now as
 necessary to our independence as to our comfort.19

Rapid Growth

The period before the Civil War saw a rapid expansion of existing cities and the
founding of many new ones. The invention of the railroad played a major role in this
growth. During the period from 1820 to 1860, cities grew at a more rapid rate than at
any other time before or since in American history.20 Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Memphis,
Louisville, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Portland, and Seattle are all early and mid-19th
century cities. In the far West, the discovery of gold and then of silver did much to spur
town building. Some later became ghost towns, but San Francisco prospered as the
major city of the west.

The influence of environmental factors on the growth of 19th-century cities can be seen
from the fact that of the nine cities which by 1860 had passed 100,000 mark, eight were
ports. The one exception really wasn’t an exception; it was the then independent city of
Brooklyn, which shared the benefits of the country’s greatest harbor.21

By the eve of the Civil War the first city of the nation was clearly New York. It had both a
magnificent and a large hinterland to sustain growth, and relatively flat terrain westward
from the Hudson River. Nonetheless, what assured New York of its dominance was the
willingness to speculate on the technologies of first the Erie Canal and then the railroad.
Mayor DeWitt Clinton at the canal opening prophesied that it would “create the greatest
inland trade ever witnessed” and would allow New York to “become the granary of the
world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of moneyed
operations.” He was right. The completion of the canal from Albany o Buffalo in 1825
meant goods could move by waters from the Great Lakes to New York City. It gave New
York an economic supremacy that has yet to be surpassed. New York’s quick
acceptance of railroads as a technological breakthrough, and the possibilities thus
presented, further solidified the city’s dominant position.

By the time of the Civil War not only was New York the most important American city; it
also had become a major world metropolis. New York grew from just over 60,000 in
1800 to over 1 million in 1860. Of the world’s cities only London and Paris were larger.
By 1860, in addition to serving as the nation’s financial center, New York also handled
one-third of the country’s exports and a full two-thirds of the country’s imports. New
York’s increase in size was matched by the increasing heterogeneity of its inhabitants,
with their different tastes, aspirations, and needs – all of which could be best satisfied
only in the large city.

Land speculation spurred the growth of cities. Fueled by a stream of immigrants and a
greed for profits, cities went through periods of wild land speculation and building, only
to be followed by economic collapse and depression. Cincinnati, the “Queen city of the
West,” for example, experienced a boom during the 1820’s, and during that decade its
population expanded rapidly as a result of the development and use of steamboats. In
other cities the technology of the railroad played a similar role in spurring growth.

Only in the deep South, where cotton was king and slavery remained, did the building of
cities languish. In the plantation owners’ view, cotton fields came before manufacturing
and commerce. The dominance of agriculture can be seen in the development – or,
more correctly, the lack of development – of Charleston. At the beginning of the 19th
century Charleston was the fifth largest American city; by 1860 it had slipped to 26th
place.22 As a consequence of the Civil War, a devastating earthquake, and economic
stagnation, Charleston was not numbered even among the 50 largest cities in 1900.
The city had lost its economic reason for existing. The post-Civil War stagnation of
Charleston is reflected in the saying that Charleston was “too poor to paint and to proud
to whitewash.”

Marketplace Centers

Before the Civil War, American cities, while undergoing tremendous growth, retained
many preindustrial characteristics. The urban economy was still in a commercial rather
than an industrial stage. Businesspeople were primarily merchants who intermittently
took on subsidiary functions such as manufacturing, banking, and speculating. In 1850,
85 percent of the population was still classified as rural; 64 percent was engaged in
agriculture.

Physically, the city prior to the Civil War was compact enough to walk around, with a
radius extending not more than 3 miles. The separation of workplace and residence so
common in contemporary American cities was limited. Local transportation by omnibus
(an urban stagecoach) was slow, uncomfortable, and relatively expensive. Residences,
businesses, and public buildings were intermixed with little specialization by area: “The
first floor was given over to commerce, the second and third reserved for family and
clerks, and the fourth perhaps for storage. People lived and worked in the same house
or at least in the same neighborhood.”23

The separation that did occur was the obverse of the pattern of the wealthy in the
suburbs and the poor in the city that we have come to accept as the American norm.
(See Chapters 4 and 5 for discussion for theories of contemporary urban growth.) In
early American cities, the well-to-do tended to live not on the periphery but near the
center. In an era of slow, uncomfortable, and inadequate transportation, the poor were
more often relegated to the less accessible areas on the periphery.24

THE INDUSTRIAL CITY: 1860-1950

The Civil War accelerated the shift from a mercantile or trade economy to an industrial
one. Aided by new protective tariffs and inflated profits stimulated by the war, northern
industrialists began producing steel, coal, and woolen goods, most of which had
previously been imported. The closing of the Mississippi was a boon to Chicago and the
east-west railroads.

A century after its founding (1880), the American nation had grown to 50 million and
stretched from coast to coast. The lands of the Louisiana Purchase and the Northwest
Cession were already settled, while the western prairie was being peopled and plowed.
However, in retrospect, this was the end, not the beginning, of the age of agriculture.
The census of 1880 for the first time indicated that less than half of the employable
population worked in agriculture. Meanwhile, foreign immigration was swelling the cities,
and urban areas held 28 percent of the population. A century ago (1900), the census
counted 76 million persons. Today, we have 385 million people. In 1890, New York was
the nation’s largest city with 1.5 million people (Brooklyn, then separate, had 800,000
more people).25 The other cities with over a million persons were Chicago and
Philadelphia. By 1900 4 out of 10 Americans lived in cities.26

During the last quarter of the 19th century, urbanism for the first time became a
controlling factor in national life. This was a period of economic expansion for the
nation. Capital-intensive industrialism was changing the nature of the economic system,
rapidly changing America from a rural to an urban continent. The extent of this change
can be seen in Table 3-3. Note especially the dramatic growth during the past 50 years.
While the frontier captured the attention of writers and the imagination of the populace,
the bulk of the nation’s growth during the 19th century took place in cities. (The classic
statement on the significance of the west was Fredrick J. Turner’s famous 1893 paper,
“The Frontier in American History.” A major urban response did not come until almost
half a century later, with Arthur M. Schlesinger’s “The City in American History.”)27 By the
turn of the 20th century, 50 cities had populations of over 100,000; the most notable of
these new cities was the prairie metropolis of Chicago, which had bet heavily on the
technology of the railroad. Chicago mushroomed from 4,100 at the time of its
incorporation in 1833 to 1 million in 1890 and 2 million in 1910. Between 1850 and 1890
Chicago doubled its population every decade. Nationally, in 100 years between 1790
and 1890 the total population grew 16-fold, while the urban population grew 139-fold.

Technological Developments

Towns opened the frontier. Urban technology was used to overcome the environment.
This was particularly true west of the Mississippi, where the technological breakthrough
of the railroad had reversed earlier patterns of settlement. Josiah Strong, writing in
1885, noted:

In the Middle States the farms were the first taken, then the town sprang up to supply its wants,

and at length the railway connected it with the world, but in the West the order is reversed

-first the railroad, then the towns, then the farms. Settlement is, consequently, much

more rapid, and the city stamps the country, instead of the country stamping the city. It is the cities and the
towns which will frame state constitutions, make laws, create public opinion, establish social usages, and fix
standards of morals for the West.28

The railroad was crucial in the development of the West. During the second half of the
19th century, the railroads expanded from 9,000 to 193,000 miles – much of it built with
federal loans and land grants. The railroads literally opened up the West. The building of
the Canadian Pacific in Canada had a similar effect. Both Calgary and Vancouver
boomed in response to the railroad. In the American South new railroad-based cities
such as Atlanta and industrial Birmingham were growing in size and power.
At the same time, changes in farming technology were converting the self-sufficient
yeoman into and entrepreneur raising cash crops for market. Horse-drawn mechanical
McCormick reapers, steel plows, and threshers heralded the shift from self-sufficient to
commercial farming.

Spatial Concentration

The great cities of the east and Midwest, with their hordes of immigrants, frantic pace,
municipal corruption, and industrial productivity, built much of their present physical
plant in the era of steam stretching from the 1880s to the depression of the 1930s. It is
important to remember that the late 19th century city was a city of concentration and
centralization accentuated by industrialization. Initial industrialization encouraged
centripetal rather than centrifugal forces. Since steam is most cheaply generated in
large quantities and must by used close to where it is produced, steam power thus
fostered a compact city and encouraged the proximity of factory and power supply.
Manufacturing was concentrated in a core area that surrounded the central business
district and had access to rail and often water transportation. This in turn concentrated
managerial and wholesale distributing activities and, above all, workers near the
factory.

The limited transportation technology meant that workers had to live near the factories;
this gave rise to row upon row of densely packed tenements. The distant separation of
residence and place of work was a luxury only the very wealthy in the commuting
suburbs could afford. Surrounding the factories, slumlords built jaw-to-jaw tenements on
every available open space. These tenements were then packed to unbelievable
densities with immigrant workers – first Irish, then German, Jewish, Italian, and Polish –
who could afford no other housing on the pitiful wages they made working 12 hours a
day, six days a week. Slums provided the immigrant workers with housing close to the
factories, but at a horrendous price in terms of health and quality of life.

In the brief 12-year period between 1877 and 1889, inventions such as steel-frame
buildings, the light bulb, electric power lines, electric streetcars, electric elevators, the
telephone, subways, and the internal combustion engine were introduced.29 Such
inventions spurred the growth of cities.

The compact trade and commerce-oriented central business districts of northern

industrial and commercial cities reflected the needs of the 19th century. Before the
widespread use of the automobile and telephone, it was necessary that business offices
be close to one another so that information could be transmitted by means of
messengers. High central-city land values were an inevitable result of the common
business demand for a central location. Nineteenth-century inventions such as a
practical steam elevator and steel girded buildings further enabled the core area to
become even more densely inhabited. Prior to the late 1880s office buildings were
supported by massive outer walls and about 10 stories was the maximum size. (The
Washington Monment reflects this construction method – the stone blocks at the base
are 15 feet wide while those at the top are 18 inches wide.) However, steel girded
buildings no longer had to be supported by massive outer walls; now the walls were
literally hung from a building’s steel frame. Offices and businesses could be stacked
vertically upon one another as high as foundations, local ordinances, and economics
would allow.

The fact that New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, to name only a few,
are essentially cities built before the 20th century, and before the automobile, is a
problem we have to cope with today. Any attempt to deal with present day transportation
or pollution problems has to take into account the fact that most American cities were
planned and built in the 19th century. We still live largely in cities designed, at best, for
the age of steam and the horse-drawn streetcar.

Incidentally, a quick way of determining the earlier boundaries of a city is to note the
location of older cemeteries. Since cemeteries were traditionally placed on the outskirts,
large cemeteries within present city boundaries effectively show earlier extent of urban
growth.

Twentieth-Century Dispersion

While 19th century technology fostered concentration, technologies of the last hundred
years have fostered metropolitan-area dispersion. Three technological inventions
contributed to this change: the telephone, electricity, and transportation advances,
especially the electric streetcar, the automobile, and the truck. The telephone meant
that the city business could be conducted other than by face-to-face contact or
messenger. It enabled businesses to locate their factories separate from their offices.

Electricity meant factories no longer had to be next to a steam plant. Power could be
brought in from a distant electric plant. Before the electric streetcar, separation of places
of living from places of work was a luxury restricted to the affluent of well-to-do.
Nineteenth-century suburbs developed along commuter railroad lines and were the
private preserves of those who had both the time and money to commute. The North
Shore suburbs of Chicago are an example. Common people, on the other hand, walked
or rode the horse streetcars to work. At the beginning of the 20th century, the average
New Yorker lived a quarter of a mile, or roughly two blocks, from his or her place of
work. Chicago at that time contained 1,690,000 inhabitants, half of them living within 3.2
miles of the city center.30

The electric streetcar changed all of this. Perfected in 1888 in Richmond, Virginia, the
streetcar moved twice as fast as the horse-drawn car and had over three times the
carrying capacity. The new system of urban transportation was almost immediately
adopted everywhere. By the turn of the century horsecar lines, which had accounted for
two-thirds of all street railways a decade earlier, had all but vanished. Electric trolleys
accounted for 97 percent of all mileage in 1902, with 2 percent still operated by cable
car lines and only 1 percent by horsecars.31

The result was the rapid development of outer areas of the city and the proliferation of
middle class streetcar suburbs.32 With one’s home somewhere along the streetcar line,
it was possible to live as far as 12 miles away from the central business district and
commute relatively rapidly and inexpensively. This led to an outward expansion of the
city and the establishment of residential suburbs in strips along the right-of-way of the
streetcar line. Those with high positions in the electric traction industry and corrupt
politicians with influence made fortunes when streetcar lines were built to outlying areas
where they just happened to own vacant lots.

The discussion should help us to keep in mind that technology is not a neutral force.
The benefits of the streetcar – and later the automobile – technology especially assisted
the middle classes in establishing ethnically and racially exclusive suburban
neighborhoods. (For elaboration see Chapter 6: The Suburban Era.)

Land lying between the “spokes” formed by the streetcar lines remained undeveloped.
The cities thus came to have a rather pronounced star-shaped configuration, with the
points of the star being the linear rail lines.33 This is a shape cities would hold until the
area of the automobile.
Where street rail lines intersected, natural breaks in transit took place and secondary
business and commercial districts began to develop. These regional shopping areas
were the equivalent of the peripheral shopping centers of today. With the coming of the
automobile, the city areas between the streetcar lines filled in, and by the 1920’s most
of the major cities had completed the bulk of their building. The depression of the 1930s
effectively stopped downtown building; thus, many central business districts remained
basically unchanged until building resumed again in the 1960s.34 Outlying areas
similarly saw little change until the post-World War II suburbanization boom (Chapter 6).

POLITICAL LIFE

Corruption and Urban Services

Urban corruption has a long American history. In 1853 New York was described in
Putnam’s Monthly as possessing “Filthy Streets, the farce of a half-fledged and
inefficient police, and the miserably bad government, generally, of an unprincipled
common council, in the composition of which ignorance, selfishness, imprudence, and
greediness seem to have an equal share.” Over the following score of years the
situation deteriorated. Virtually everywhere venality and urban politics became
synonymous. As Arthur Schlesinger charitably put it, “This lusty urban growth created
problems that taxed human resourcefulness to the utmost.”35 A particularly high price
was paid in the area of municipal governance. Political institutions that were adequate
under simplified rural conditions but inadequate to the task of governing a complicated
system of ever-expanding public services and utilities presented an acute problem. The
contemporary observer Andrew White was more direct, “With very few exceptions the
city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom … the most
expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.”36 Or as the noted British scholar
James Bryce put it, “There is no denying that the government of cities is one
conspicuous failure of the United States.”37

Boss Tweed of New York, who plundered the city of up to and $200 million, was even
more explicit: “The population is too helplessly split into races and factions to govern it
under universal suffrage, except by bribery or patronage or corruption.”38 The political
machines were renowned for graft and voting fraud. Immigrants were encouraged to
“vote early and often” for the machine candidates.
Political Bosses

Although the political bosses emptied the public treasury, they also provided poorer
citizens with urban services, jobs, and help in solving problems. The bosses were
buffers between slum dwellers and the often hostile official bureaucracy. In return for the
immigrants’ vote, the boss provided not abstract ideals but practical services and
benefits. The boss was the one to come to when you needed a job, when your child was
picked up for delinquency, or when you drank a bit too much and were arrested for
drunkenness. The boss you arrange something with the police at the stationhouse or
even “go your bail” if the offense was serious. The boss was certain to attend every
wedding and wake in the neighborhood, and often provided cash to get the newlyweds
going or cover funeral expenses for the widow. The boss produced. As a Boston ward
heeler Martin Lomasney straightforwardly expressed it, “There’s got to be in every ward
somebody that any bloke can come to – no matter what he’s done – to get help. Help,
you understand; none of your law and justice, but help.”39

In managing the city the bosses distinguished between dishonest graft and honest graft,
of “boodie.” The former would include shakedowns, payoffs, and protection money for
illegal gambling, liquor, and prostitution. “Boodie,” on the other hand, involved using
your control over contracts for municipal services and tax assessments to maximize
your advantage. In a famous passage, the boss George Washington Plunkett in a
famous passage explained how it worked.

Just let me explain by examples. My party’s in power in the city, and it’s going to undertake

a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park

at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the
neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plans public, and there is a rush to get my land,
which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good

price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course it is. Well, that’s honest graft.40

In an urban environment committed to the principle of free enterprise, politicians saw no

reason for all the profits to go to businesspeople rather than politicians.

While the “better classes” viewed all machine bosses as rogues and thieves, the bosses
were apparently far more personable and friendly than the elite captains of industry in
the business community. A study of 20 city bosses described them as warm and often
sentimental men who had come from poor immigrant families. All were naïve urbanites,
most noted for loyalty to their families.41 The political machine provided a route for social
mobility for bright and alert young immigrants. Police departments were also an avenue
of upward mobility for first and second generation European immigrants. Without the aid
of the ward bosses, new immigrants would have had an even rougher time than they
did. For the immigrants, the boss rule was clearly functional. As expressed by
sociologist Robert K. Merton, “The functional deficiencies of the official structure
generate an alternative (unofficial) structure to fulfill existing needs somewhat more
effectively.”42

Immigrants’ Problems

The role of immigrants is treated in detail in Chapters 9 and 10. Suffice it to say here
that the dimensions of the European immigrant flood are hard to overemphasize –
probably some 40 million persons between 1800 and 1925. From the 1840s onward,
waves of immigrants landed in the major northeastern ports. The first of the mass ethnic
immigrations was that of the Irish, who were driven from their home in the late 1840s by
the ravages of the potato blight. Later, Germans and Scandinavians poured into the
Midwest, particularly after the development of steamships and the opening of the
railroads to Chicago.

Immigration accelerated after the Civil War, spurred on by the need for industrialization.
This was a period of industrial and continental expansion. Between 1860 and 1870, 25
of the 38 states took official action to stimulate immigration, offering not only voting
rights but also sometimes land and bonuses.43

By 1890 New York had half as many Italians as Naples, as many Germans as Hamburg,
twice as many Irish as Dublin, and two and a half times the number of Jews in
Warsaw.44 The traditions, customs, religion, and sheer numbers of migrants made fast
assimilation impossible. Between 1901 and 1910 alone, immigration officials counted
over 9 million immigrants. These newcomers came largely from peasant backgrounds.
They were packed into teeming slums and delegated to the lowest-paying and most
menial jobs. Native-born Protestant Americans suddenly became aware of the fact that
40 percent of the 1910 population was of foreign stock – that is, immigrants or the
offspring of immigrants.45 The percentage was considerably higher in the large northern
industrial cities, where over half the population was invariably of foreign stock.
To WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) writers around the turn of the century, the sins
of the city were frequently translated into the sins of the new immigrant groups pouring
into the ghettos of the central core. Slum housing, poor health conditions, and high
crime rates were all blamed on the newcomers. Those on the city’s periphery and in the
emerging upper class and upper middle-class suburbs associated political corruption
with the central city. Native-born Americans tended to view city problems as being the
fault of the immigranrs, frequently Catholic, or Jewish, immigrants who inhabited the
central-city ghettos. Even sympathetic reformers such as Jacob Riis portrayed central-
city slums as anthills teeming with illiterate immigrants. The masses in the ghettos were
a threat to democracy.46 (The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South
to urban North will be discussed in detail in Chapter 9.)

Reform Movements

The writings of “muckrakers” like Lincoln Steffens, who in his articles on “The Shame of
the Cities” exposed municipal corruption, gave considerable publicity to the grosser
excesses of municipal corruption, such as deals with utility franchises. To destroy the
power of the bosses and their immigrant supporters, reforms were pushed in city after
city. Reformers of the period had a distinctly middle-class orientation. Social reformers
such as Jane Addams, who founded Hull House to teach “Americanism” and job skills,
and Margaret Sanger, who in 1916 opened the first birth control clinic for immigrants in
Brooklyn (today Planned Parenthood), were upper class or upper-middle-class city
dwellers who saw themselves as having a mission to “save” the lower classes. To the
general public the problems of the city were viewed then, as today, as problems of and
by the poor in the central core.

While the bosses represented personalized politics, reform represented abstract WASP
goals such as good citizenship, efficient administration, and proper accounting. The
Progressive Movement at the turn of the century, at least in its urban manifestation, was
in many respects an attempt by the upper middle class to reform the inner city. This, of
course, meant white, Protestant, middle-class groups regaining political power. Political
reformers joined with businesspeople in organized groups such as the National
Municipal League to “reform” city government by getting rid of ethnic political bosses.

The National Municipal League provided model charters and moral impetus. By 1912
some 210 communities had dropped the mayor and city-council system and adopted
the commission form of government. In 1913 Dayton adopted the first city-manager
system, and during the following year 44 other cities followed suit. Under the city-
manager system, a nonpolitical manager is appointed to run the city in a businesslike
manner. However, in the largest cities the political machines, while they lost a few
battles, managed to weather the storm. The coming of World War I directed the
crusading energies into new channels, and the Roaring Twenties was not a decade
noted for municipal reform. While there are exceptions, such as William Hoan, the
reform socialist mayor of Milwaukee, many cities during the 1920s had a colorful and
corrupt mayor like James (“Gentleman Jimmy”) Walker in New York or Big Bill (“The
Builder”) Thompson in Chicago.

However, in spite of all the city’s problems the 1920s mark the first “modern” decade. As
of 1920 half the U.S. population was urban but, more importantly, the decade marked
the beginning of the modern age. The car, the telephone, and the radio all became part
of middle-class life during the 1920s. While the clothes styles and cars strange to us
today, the people thought and acted in modern ways. By comparison, earlier decades
seem out of another era.

URBAN IMAGERY

Ambivalence

America has never been neutral in regarding its great cities; they have either been
exalted as centers of vitality, enterprise, and excitement or denounced as sinks of crime,
pollution, and depravity. Our present ambivalence toward our cities is nothing new; even
the founding fathers had great reservations about the moral worth of cities. The city was
frequently equated by writers such as Thomas Jefferson with all the evils and corruption
of the Old World, while an idealized picture of the yeoman farmer represented virtue in
the New World. Thomas Jefferson expressed the sentiments of many of his fellow
citizens when he stated in 1787 in a letter to James Madison,

I think our governments will remain virtuous as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will

be as long as there shall be vacant land in any part of America. When they get piled upon one

another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become as corrupt as in Europe.47

In a famous letter written in 1800 to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson even saw some virtue in
the yellow fever epidemics that periodically ravaged seaboard cities. Philadelphia, for
example, lost over 4,000 persons, almost 10 percent of its population, in the epidemic of
1793. Jefferson wrote to Rush:

When great evils happen I am in the habit of looking our for what good may arise from them as consolations
to us and Providence has in fact, so established in the order of things, as that most evils are the means of
producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view
great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man. 48

This, however, is not the entire picture, for in spite of these sentiments Jefferson
proposed a model town plan for Washington, D. C., and after the War of 1812 came to
support urban manufacturing. Also, although in his writings Jefferson advised against
sending Americans to Europe for education lest they be contaminated by urban
customs, he himself enjoyed visiting Paris and was a social success there. Other
Americans were similarly inconsistent.

Benjamin Franklin, never one to be far from the stimulation, pleasures, and excitement of the city, went so
far as to say that agriculture was “the only honest way to acquire wealth ... as a reward for innocent life
and virtuous industry.” Ben Franklin was many things during his long, productive life, but never a farmer;
and his own way of life indicates that he never considered an innocent life or conventional virtue to be
much of a reward. Writers as diverse as de Tocqueville, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all had
strong reservations about the city.49 In the 20th century the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright carried on
the antiurban ideology by referring to cities as “a persistent form of social disease.”

According to de Tocqueville:

I look upon the size of certain American cities, and especially on the nature of their
population, as a real danger which threatens the future security of the democratic
republics of the New World; and I venture to predict that they will perish from this
circumstance, unless the Government succeeds in creating an armed force which
while it remains under the control of the majority of the nation, will be independent
of town population, and able to repress its excess.50

Cowley’s line “God the first garden made, and the first city Cain” expresses an attitude toward
cities shared by many Americans. Thoreau sitting in rural solitude watching a sunset, is an
acceptable image. Thoreau, sitting on a front stoop in Boston watching the evening rush hour,
creates an entirely different image.
Americans, even while pouring into the cities, have traditionally idealized the country. A 1989 Gallup poll
indicates that, given the choice, almost half of American adults would move to towns will less than 10,000
inhabitants or to rural areas.51 The clearing of the wilderness by the pioneers, and the taming (eradication)
of savages – human and animal – were considered highly laudable. By contrast, the building of cities by
the sweat and muscle of immigrants was ignored. It is as if we consider the history of immigrants
somewhat discreditable and thus best forgotten.

Vigorous attacks on the city came from writers such as Josiah Strong, who condemned it as the source of
the evils of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Strong’s book Our Country sold a phenomenal – for that
date – 175,000 copies. He effectively mirrored the fears of small-town Protestant America that urban
technology and the growth of foreign immigrant groups were in the process of undermining the existing
social order and introducing undesirable changes such as political machines, slums, and low church
attendance. Several excerpts give the general tone of his “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” argument:

The city has become a serious menace to our civilization … It has a particular fascination for the
immigrant. Our principle cities in 1880 contained 39.3 percent of our entire German population,
and 45.8 percent of the Irish. Our ten larger cities at that time contained only nice percent of the
entire population, but 23 percent of the foreign …
Because our cities are so largely foreign, Romanism finds in them its chief strength. For the
same reason the saloon together with the intemperance and liquor power which it represents, is
multiplied …
Socialism centers in the city, and the materials of its growth are multiplied with the growth of the
city. Here is heaped the social dynamite; here roughs, gamblers, thieves, robbers, and desperate
men of all sorts congregate; men who are ready on any pretext to raise riots for the purpose of disruption
and plunder; here gather the foreigners and wage-workers who are especially susceptible to socialist
arguments; here skepticism and irreligion abound; here unequality is the greatest and most obvious, and the
contrast between opulence and penury the most striking; there the suffering is the sorest.52

An extremely influential lecture by Fredrick Jackson Turner at the turn of the 20th century, “The
Winning of the West,” also struck a responsive chord: it glorified the pioneer and the virtues of
the West. Needless to say, such homage was not paid tenement dwellers working under
oppressive conditions, who were simply trying to raise decent families. Today, television
perpetuates the same myth when it gives us drama after drama concerning life in the 19th century
American west but nothing about the 19th century American city dweller. The cowboy, not the
factory hand, is the American hero.

Criticism of the city contained some contradictory premises, although these were generally not noticed:
while it was being castigated for not exhibiting rural or agrarian values, it was also being taken to task for
failing to be truly urban and reach the highest ideals of an urban society. In short, the city was at the same
time supposed to be both more rural and more urban.

Distrust and dislike of the city simmered during the latter part of the 19th century and finally crystallized
around the issue of the free coinage of silver, with silver representing the agrarian West and gold the
commercial and industrial East. William Jennings Bryan’s campaign for the presidency in 1896 was a
major attempt by the agricultural antiurbanites to gain national political power. As Bryan put it in his
famous “cross of gold” speech: “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up
again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the
country.”53 But by the end of the 19th century Bryan’s day had passed, and although agricultural
fundamentalism still had some strength, it was no longer a commanding ideology. The city, not the farm,
represented the future.
Myth of Rural Virtue
The myth of agrarian virtue continues to live in politics. One of President Calvin Coolidge’s campaign
photographs in 1924 showed him as a simple farmer haying in Vermont. However, the photograph said
more than was intended, for the President’s overalls are obviously fresh, his shoes are highly polished,
and if one looks carefully, one can see his expensive Pierce Arrow, with secret Service men waiting to
rush him back into Washington D.C. once the picture-taking at a Virginia – not Vermont – farm was
completed.54 Within more recent times President Reagan similarly posed for publicity photos of himself
cutting wood on his “ranch,” while Bill Clinton ran as a small town boy from Hope, Arkansas. Similarly, in
2000 George Bush portrayed himself as growing up in a small town and exemplifying small-town values.
Actually he was raised in a cosmopolitan urban environment.

Demographically, since 1920 America has been a nation of urban dwellers, and with every census the
percentage of urban dwellers climbs higher. Only 1.6 percent of the nation’s population resides on
farms.55 Even the fifth of the population that does not live in urban places is clearly tied to an urban way of
life. As noted in Chapter 1, the profits of wheat farmers, cattle ranchers, dairy farmers, and other
agribusiness people are tied more to government price-support systems than to weather or other natural
factors. In 2000 the $28 billion paid in farm subsidies accounted for fully half of all money made by
farmers.56 In states such as Montana the reality is that federal subsidies provide the great bulk of rural
income.

Today our picture of how rural life is lived and the nature of the basic rural virtues is the creation of mass
media based in cities. Television shows written in New York and produced in Hollywood try to create an
image of small towns filled with friendly folk with “down-home” wisdom, rather like a Norman Rockwell
painting. Urban advertising also hits hard at the same bogus theme – commercials often depend heavily
on nostalgia, with old cars, fields of wheat, and the front porch swing.

What all this reflects is a deep ambivalence regarding cities and city life. A Gallup poll indicates that only
19 percent consider city life to be the ideal. Suburbs (24 percent), small towns (34 percent), and farms (22
percent) are all rated higher.57 As a people, we glorify rural life but live in metropolitan areas. North
America is the most urbanized of the continents (except Australia), but our attitude toward cities is
frequently unrealistic. We live urban, but we treat our major cities as though we don’t trust them and wish
they would fade away and stop causing problems.

SUMMARY

European colonists arriving in North America found a land without cities. While Native Americans sought
to live within the environment, the colonists sought to dominate nature. Early settlers were primarily in
towns. New England towns such as Boston and Newport were cultural and religious as well as
commercial centers. Middle Colonies cities such as New York and Philadelphia had environmental
advantages, which they turned to commercial advantage. In the South reliance on slave labor inhibited
the development of an urban middle class. Canadian towns were garrisons and trading posts more than
manufacturing places.

North American colonial cities represented only a small fraction of the population, but politically and
socially the towns were dominant. The American Revolution was largely town based. Early 19th century
American cities were largely commercially based and located along waterways. During the second half of
the 19th century, the technology of the railroad overcame environmental limitations. The railway, and
railway-based towns, opened up the West. Cities were at the forefront of settlement.

The Civil War (1861-1865) saw northern cities develop as industrial centers, as opposed to mercantile or
trade centers. Steam power encouraged urban concentration. For efficiency, industrial factories were
located surrounding the city center. The factories were on rail lines that not only moved in raw materials
and shipped finished products but also brought in the coal that fed the steam boilers that produced the
factories’ power. Factory laborers working 12-hour days were packed into surrounding tenements. Most of
the late 19th- and early 20th-century workers were immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who
were commonly blamed for the crowded slum conditions under which they were forced to live.

Political bosses and their political machines provided necessary services to the new immigrants – and did
it with a human face. Reform politics at the turn of the 20th century often represented WASP attempts to
reclaim control of the cities. City-manager systems, for example, were designed to remove power from
immigrant-dominated city councils and to put power into the hands of an appointed city manager.

Americans have long been ambivalent about their great cities. Founding fathers such as Thomas
Jefferson feared large cities, and 19th century WASP writers and politicians denounced the city as the
center of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” America still has a myth of urban vice and rural virtue.
Contemporary politicians such as George W. Bush attempt to portray themselves as having small-town
roots and values.

BOX 3.1 A Note on Urban Pollution

It is revealing, if depressing, to recognize that the problems of pollution and environmental

destruction are not new to North American cities. Until late in the 19th century most American
cities, such as Baltimore and New Orleans, still relied on open trenches for sewage. The only
municipal garbage collection provided by most cities until after the Civil War was that provided
by scavenging hogs and dogs and other carrion eaters. Colonial Charleston even passed an
ordinance protecting vultures because they performed a public service by cleaning the carcasses
of dead animals.* In 1666 a Boston municipal ordinance ordered the inhabitants to bury all filth,
while “all garbage, beasts, entralls, etc.,” were to be thrown from the drawbridge into Mill
Creek.** Colonial Boston’s system of burying what you can and throwing the rest into the
nearest river was used by many cities well into the modern era.

A description of Pittsburgh dating from the late 19th century details its air pollution in terms that
suggest air pollution was good for health:

Pittsburgh is a smoky, dismal city, at her best. At her worst, nothing darker, dingier, or more dispiriting can be
imagined. The city is in the heart of the soft coal region; and the smoke

from her dwellings, stores, factories, foundries, and steamboats, uniting settles in a cloud over the narrow valley in
which she is built, until the very sun looks coppery through the sooty haze. According to a circular at the Pittsburgh
Board of Trade, about twenty per cent, or one-fifth of all the coal used in the factories and dwellings of the city escapes
into the air in the form of smoke… But her inhabitants do not seem to mind it; and the doctors hold that this smoke
from the carbon, sulfur, and the iodine contained in it, is highly favorable to the lung and cutaneous diseases, and is the
sure death of malaria and its attendant fevers.***

Public waterworks were luxuries found in few communities until well after the Civil War. Some medium-
sized cities such as Providence, Rochester, and Milwaukee relied entirely on private wells and water
carriers. Sanitation fared little better. Boston, which had attained a level few communities could equal, had
under 10,000 water closets for its residents.**** Until the 20th century, facilities were all but nonexistent in
the congested tenements of the slums.

*Charles N. Glaab, (ed.), The American City: A Documentary History, Dorsey, Homewood, Ill., p. 115.
**Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, Capricorn Books, New York, 1964, p. 18.
***Willard Glazier, Peculiarities of American Cities, Hubbard, Philadelphia, 1884, pp. 322-323.
****Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick,
N.J., p. 13.

Carl Sandburg’s Chicago

Probably the most quoted image of the raw vitality, strength, and brutality of the early twentieth century
American city is Sandburg’s poem, “Chicago.”* An excerpt follows:

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me that you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true
I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again,
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of
women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger. And
having so answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at
this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to
them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud
to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here
is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a
savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white
teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man
laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a
battle.

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and
under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth,
half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of
Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
*Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, Holt, New York, 1916.

ENDNOTES
1
Some estimates range as high as 10 million Native Americans prior to the arrival of the Europeans, but
whatever the initial indigenous population, smallpox, cholera, and other European-introduced diseases
rapidly destroyed most of the population.
2
Not everyone agrees with this view. Shepard Krech, in The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Norton,
New York, 1999, says the image of the ecological Indian as a preserver of the environment is
unsubstantiated myth and far from scientific reality.
3
Lewis Mumford would not agree with this statement. Mumford saw New England villages and towns as
the last flickering of the medieval order. See, for example, Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones: A Study of
American Architecture and Civilization, Liveright, New York, 1924.
4
John Smith, The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, University
Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966 (first published London, 1624), pg. 72.
5
Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, (William T. Davis, ed.), Scribner, New York, 1908, p. 96.
6
Howard P. Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Society, 5th ed., Prentice-Hall, Saddle River, N.J.,
2000, chap. 1.
7
Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, Capricorn Books, New York, 1964.
8
Quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schutty (eds.), Cities in American History: The First
Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742, Knopf, New York, 1972.
9
Carl Biddenbaugh, quoted in Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America, 2
ed., Macmillan, New York, 1976, pp. 25-26.
10
Howard P. Chudacoff and Judith E. Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society, 5th ed., Prentice-
Hall, Saddle River, N.J., 2000.
11
Ibid., p. 27.
12
Richard Frame, “A Short Description of Pennsylvania in 1692,” in Albert Cook Myers (ed.), Narratives of
Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, Scribner, New York, 1912; reprinted in Ruth E.
Sutter, The Next Place You Come: A Historical Introduction to Communities in North America, Prentice-
Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973, p. 90.
13
Constance McLaughlin Green, The Rise of Urban America, Harper and Row, New York, 1965, p. 21.
For further information on Charleston, see David A. Smith, “Dependent Urbanization in Colonial America:
The Case of Charleston, South Carolina,” Social Forces, 66: 1-28, September, 1987.
14
Peter McGahan, Urban Sociology in Canada, 3rd ed., Harcourt Brace, Toronto, 1995, p. 46.
15
Glaab and Brown, op. cit., p. 21.
16
Green, op. cit., p. 51.
17
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City, Harper and Row, New
York, 1972, p. 16.
18
Quoted in James H. Cassidy, Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, pp. 154-155.
19
P. L. Ford, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Putnam, New York, 1904, pp. 503-504.
20
Charles N. Glaab (eds), The American City: A Documentary History, Dorsey, Homewood, IL, 1963, p.
65.
21
Chudacoff and Smith, op. cit., p. 20.
22
Nelson M. Blake, A History of American Life and Thought, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963, p. 156.
23
Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed, American Skyline: The Growth and Form of Our Cities and
Towns, New American Library, New York, 1956, p. 59.
24
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1968, p. 13.
25
Bryant Robey, “Two Hundred Years and Counting: The 1990 Census,” Population Bulletin, 44:1, April,
1989, p. 7.
26
For an impact of all these changes see Witold Rybczynski, City Life, Simon & Schuster, New York,
1995.
27
Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 27: 43-66,
June 1940.
28
Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis, Baker and Taylor, New York, 1885,
p. 206.
29
Janice Perlman, “Mega Cities and New Technologies,” paper presented at XI World Congress of
Sociology, New Delhi, India, July, 1986.
30
Paul F. Cressey, “Population Succession in Chicago: 1898-1930,” American Journal of Sociology,
44:59, 1938.
31
Glaab and Brown, op. cit., p. 144.
32
For an excellent account of this phenomenon, see Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The
Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900, Antheneum, New York, 1970. Also see Kenneth T. Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985; and J. John Palen, The Suburbs, McGraw-
Hill, New York, 1995.
33
Richard Hurd, Principles of City Land Values, The Record and Guide, New York, 1924.
34
For more on central business districts, see Chapter 11: Cities and Change.
35
Schlesinger, op. cit.
36
James Bryce, Forum, vol. X, 1890, p. 25.
37
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1, Macmillan, London, 1891, p. 608. Reprinted by
Putnam, New York, 1959.
38
Arthur B. Schlesinger, Paths to the Present, Macmillan, New York, 1949, p. 60.
39
Quoted in Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Literary Guild, New York, 1931, p.
618.
40
Chudacoff, op. cit., p. 163.
41
Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses, Duke University
Press, Durham, N.C., 1930, p. 350.
42
Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1957, p. 73.
43
Zink, op. cit., p. 350. For a study of the role of the twentieth century boss, see Andrew Theodore Brown
and Lyle W. Dorsett, K.C.: A History of Kansas City, Missouri, Pruett Publishing, Boulder Colorado, 1978.
44
Glaab and Brown, op. cit., p. 125.
45
Donald Bogue, The Population of the United States, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1969, p. 178.
46
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, Scribner, New York,
1890; republished by Corner House, Williamstown, Mass., 1972.
47
Quoted in Glaab, op. cit., p. 38.
48
Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh (eds.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. X, The Thomas
Jefferson Memorial Association, Washington, D. C., p. 173.
49
Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City, Harvard and M.I.T. Presses,
Cambridge, Mass., 1962. Quoted in Glaab, op. cit., p. 38.
50
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve (trans.), New York, 1839, p. 289.
51
Gallup Poll, New York Times, October 8, 1989.
52
Strong, op. cit., chap. 11.
53
Glaab and Brown, The American City, p. 59.
54
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, Knopf, p. 31.
55
Bureau of Census, “Condominium Status and Farm Residence,” Current Population Reports, 1995, p.
2.
56
Timothy Egan, “Failing Farmers Learn to Profit from Wealth of U.S. Subsidies,” New York Times,
December 24, 2000, p. 1.
57
Gallup Organization, op. cit., p. 89.

1
Some estimates range as high as 10 million Native Americans, but in any case, small
pox, cholera, and other European introduced diseases destroyed most of the
indigenous population.
3
Lewis Mumford would not agree with this statement. Mumford saw New England
villages and towns as the last flickering of the medieval order. See, for example, Lewis
Mumford, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization,
Liveright, New York, 1924.
4
John Smith, The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles,
University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966 (first published London, 1624), pg. 72.
5
Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, William T. Davis (ed.), Scribner, New York,
1908, p. 96.
6
Constance McLaughlin Green, The Rise of Urban America, Harper & Row, New York,
1965, p. 2.
7
Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, Capricorn Books, New York, 1964.
8
Quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schutty (eds.), Cities in American
History: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742, Knopf, New York, 1972.
9
Carl Biddenbaugh, quoted in Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of
Urban America, 2 ed., Macmillan, New York, 1976, p. 12.
10
Green, The Rise of Urban America, p. 22.
11
Ibid., p. 27.
12
Richard Frame, “A Short Description of Pennsylvania in 1692,” in Albert Cook Myers
(ed.), Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, Scribner, New
York, 1912; reprinted in Ruth E. Sutter, The Next Place You Come: A Historical
Introduction to Communities in North America, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1973, p. 90.
13
Constance M. Green, The Rise of Urban America, Harper and Row, New York, 1965,
p. 21. For further information on Charleston, see David A. Smith, “Dependent
Urbanization in Colonial America: The Case of Charleston, South Carolina,” Social
Forces, 66: 1-28, September, 1987.
15
Glaab and Brown, A History of Urban America, p. 21.
16
Green, The Rise of Urban America, p. 51.
17
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City, Harper
and Row, New York, 1972, p. 16.
18
Quoted in James H. Cassidy, Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the
Statistical Mind, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, pp. 154-155.
19
P. L. Ford, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Putnam, New York, 1904, pp. 503-504.
20
Glaab, The American City, p. 65.
21
Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915, Rutgers University Press,
New Brunswick, N. J., 1963, p. 4. See Howard P. Chudacoff, The Evolution of
American Urban Society, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1975, chap. 9.
22
Nelson M. Blake, A History of American Life and Thought, McGraw-Hill, New York,
1963, p. 156.
23
Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed, American Skyline: The Growth and Form
of Our Cities and Towns, New American Library, New York, 1956, p. 59.
24
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth,
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1968, p. 13.
25
Bryant Robey, “Two Hundred Years and Counting: The 1990 Census,” Population
Bulletin, 44:1, April, 1989, p. 7.
29
Janice Perlman, “Mega Cities and New Technologies,” paper presented at XI World
Congress of Sociology, New Delhi, India, July, 1986.
30
Paul F. Casey, “Population Succession in Chicago: 1898-1930,” American Journal of
Sociology, 44:59, 1938.
31
Glaab and Brown, A History of Urban America, 2 ed., p. 144.

32
For an excellent account of this phenomenon, see Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar
Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900, Antheneum, New York, 1970.
Also see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, Oxford University Press, New York,
1985; and J. John Palen, The Suburbs, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1924.
33
Richard Hurd, Principles of City Land Values, The Record and Guide, New York,
1924.
34
For more on central business districts, see Chapter 12, The Question of Urban Crisis.
35
Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” pp. 35-44.
36
Quoted in James Bryce, Forum, X, 1890, p. 25.
37
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1, Macmillan, London, 1891, p.
608. Reprinted by Putnam, New York, 1959.
38
Quoted in Arthur B. Schlesinger, Paths to the Present, Macmillan, New York, 1949, p.
60.
39
Quoted in Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Literary Guild,
New York, 1931, p. 618.
41
Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses,
Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 1930, p. 350. For a study of the role of the
twentieth century boss, see Andrew Theodore Brown and Lyle W. Dorsett, K.C.: A
History of Kansas City, Missouri, Pruett Publishing, Boulder Colorado, 1978.
42
Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1957,
p. 73.

Chapter 4: Ecology and Political Economy Perspectives

Prediction is difficult. Especially about the future. -Casey Stengle

INTRODUCTION

Much has been written of the American city: its internal structure, its forms of social
organization, its peoples and lifestyles, and its problems. The sociologist Louis Wirth
suggested that these various topics could be viewed empirically from three interrelated
perspectives: (1) as a physical structure comprising a population base, a technology,
and an ecological order, (2) as a system of social organization involving a characteristic
social structure, a series of social institutions, and a typical pattern of social
relationships, and (3) as a set of attitudes and ideas, and a constellation of personalities
engaging in typical forms of collective behavior, and subject to the characteristic
mechanisms of social control1. In this chapter we shall be concerned with the first two of
these perspectives: the spatial and social structure of the city and how it affects and is
affected by the city as a system of social organization. We will aslo examine how those
espousing political economy or world systems theories of urban development see
sociospatial patterns as the outcome not of ecological forces but as a result of the
contradictions and conflicts in capitalist society. Wirth's third area of focus, urbanism as
a system of lifestyles and values, will be discussed in Chapter 7: Urban Lifestyles.

Development of the Urban Ecology

The classical urbanization model, urban ecology (sometimes called "human ecology"),
developed out of a concern with the form and development of modern American city,
and particularly with the relationship between the community's social and physical
structure. Early urban ecology is associated with the so-called Chicago School of
scholars working at the University of Chicago in the first half of the 20th century.
Members of the Chicago School were concerned with systematically documenting both
the patterns of urban change and the consequences of these changes for social
institutions such as the family. Led by researchers such as Robert Park, Ernest
Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, the Chicago School produced a prodigious number
of studies.

The interest of the Chicago sociologists was not simply in mapping where groups and
institutions were located, but also in discovering how the sociological, psychological,
and moral experiences of city life were reflected in spatial relationships. As expressed
by McKenzie, human ecology "deals with the spatial aspects of symbiotic relationships
of human beings and human institutions."2 Park was interested in how changes in the
physical and spatial structure shaped social behavior. He felt that "most if not all cultural
changes in society will be correlated with changes in its territorial organization, and
every change in the territorial and occupational distribution of the population will effect
changes in the existing culture."3 This postulate of "an intimate congruity between the
social and physical space, between the social and physical distance, and between
social equality and residential proximity is the crucial hypothetical framework supporting
urban ecological theories."4

Ecology in its broadest sense is the study of the relationships among organisms within
an environment. It is the study not of the creatures and objects themselves but rather of
the relationships among them. The community together with its physical habitat form an
"ecosystem." Park and Burgess gave particular importance to the role played by
competition, especially economic competition, in shaping the city's physical and social
organization. The Chicago School's emphasis on competition came not from Marx's
analysis of capitalism so much as from the ecological models being used to study the
then-new subjects of plant and animal ecology. Ecological reasoning thus traces its
theoretical underpinnings to Charles Darwin's research on evolution.
Urban ecology is concerned with examining the independence and interdependence of
specialized roles and functions (recurrent patterns of behavior) within the society. In
examining the relationship between people and their environment and people within
their environment, the level of analysis focuses on the aggregate level. The issue is the
properties of populations rather than the properties of the individuals who constitute
them. Thus, it is based on the study of groups rather than individuals - and this focus on
the group or aggregate is basic to sociology, as opposed to disciplines such as
psychology in which the focus is on the individual. Urban ecology does not – and cannot
– explain the beliefs, values, and attitudes of individuals while they are performing
certain activities.5 The term function, as used by by ecologists, means recurrent patterns
of activities that depend on other activities. Structure, to the ecologist, is the orderly
arrangement of the parts that make up a whole, the loci within the functions or activities
that are performed.

Classical ecological theories of the human community were consciously based on

evolutionary theories explaining plant and animal development. Just as a person driving
from the desert into the mountains finds that different soil, water, and temperature affect
the bands of growth of the plants; by analogy, in a drive from a city’s business district to
its outlying suburbs, there are differing zones of development. In all these theories,
competition – the Darwinian struggle for existence – played a core role. In the city, as a
consequence of economic competition for prime space, there emerged distinct spatial
and social zones. The internal structure of the city thus evolved not as a consequence
of direct planning, but through competition, which changed areas through the ecological
processes of invasion, succession, and segregation of new groups (e.g., immigrants)
and land uses (e.g., commercial use displacing residential use). Economic competition
was thus seen as the engine driving the spatial and social organization of the city.

Ecologically oriented sociologists stressed the social as well as the economic aspects of
competition for urban space. They also stated that within the city individuals and groups
also compete for power and for control of particular neighborhoods or space. In their
study of ethnic and racial neighborhoods, they examined the relationship between
residential proximity and social equality. They found that in the large city, where one’s
social position is not widely known to everyone, spatial distance was often substituted
for social distance – thus the importance of a fashionable address in the “right”
neighborhood.

Note that ecological models place emphasis on competition and changing technology.
By comparison, neo-Marxist and political economy models emphasize the deliberate
planned actions of government officials and economic elites in shaping urban patterns.
Both ecological and political economy models have in common the belief that change
occurs through conflict. They differ in whether the source of that conflict comes more
from economic competition or from deliberate planned political and economic decisions.

Invasion and succession

The history of the American city is the story of the invasion of one land use by another.
Chicago ecologists were concerned with how change in community areas comes about.
The end result when one group or function finally takes the place of another is called
succession.6 None of the patterns of land use within a city are permanently fixed,
although sometimes zoning laws attempt to fix them. Areas once characterized by
single-family houses have been converted to apartment, commercial, or industrial use –
and sometimes today back to residential use; this is succession. Viable communities
always are in the process of changing. Ecological patterns are dynamic. Cities that do
not change become historical tourist attractions or stagnant backwaters.

Today one of the most spectacular instances of invasion and eventual succession is
found in urban ethnic changes. Today, the new ethnic group “invading” an area is often
Latino or Asian. Another example of population invasion is the flow of limited numbers of
affluent young whites to inner sections of the central city. This in-migration is not to
areas of new housing, but rather to older neighborhoods in a state of some decline. This
rehabilitation, or “gentrification,” of the central city neighborhoods is discussed in
Chapter 11: Cities and Change.

Early sociologists of the Chicago school were particularly interested in the segregated
areas. The Chicago sociologists called these areas natural areas, since they were
supposedly the results of ecological processes rather than the planning or conscious
creation by any government unit. When zoning laws were established, the regulations
generally recognized such natural areas of apartment houses, single-family
neighborhoods, commercial areas, warehouse districts and the like so as to maintain
existing land-use patterns. A number of minor sociological classics, such as Wirth’s
book The Ghetto and Zorbaugh’s book The Gold Coast and the Slum, deal with so-
called natural areas.7 (The so-called defended neighborhoods discussed in Chapter 7:
Urban Lifestyles might be considered a contemporary version of natural areas.)

Criticisms of Ecology

As noted earlier, the heavy emphasis on competition in traditional human ecology, plus
the nonsocial nature of some of the variables, disturbs contemporary political economy
critics. Those taking a political economy approach see the city shaped more by
deliberate political decisions than do ecologists who emphasize economic competition
more. Political economy scholars argue that spatial patterns are the result of deliberate
actions taken by capitalists, or that they are the outcome of the contradictions in
capitalist development.8

A less valid criticism of ecology was that it borrowed concepts from other disciplines. As
one critic put it, “As the ecologists have admitted, practically all their basic hypotheses
have been derived from natural science sources – and the influence of certain
geographers and economists is apparent.”9 To such critics the multidisciplinary base of
human ecology was a weakness rather than a source of strength. However, as
expressed by Leo Schnore, “the central role given to organization – both as dependent
or independent variable – places ecology clearly within the sphere of activities in which
sociologists claim distinctive competence, i.e., analysis of social organization.”10

Not everyone has agreed with ecology's macro-level focus. The “sociocultural” school
of ecology renewed emphasis on cultural and motivational factors in explaining urban
land-use patterns. Sociocultural ecologists tend believe that early human ecology
overemphasized economic factors while ignoring social-psychological variables. Walter
Firey demonstrated in a study of land use in central Boston, for example, that many
acres of valuable land in the central business district had been allowed to remain in
uneconomic use, such as, for example, parks and cemeteries.11 He suggested that
“sentiment” and “symbolism” play an important part in determining spatial distributions,
as in maintaining Boston Common.

BURGESS’S GROWTH HYPOTHESIS

The most famous early product of the spatial-organizational concerns of the Chicago
school was Burgess’s concentric-zone hypothesis, first presented in 1924.12 We discuss
the Burgess hypothesis today because it provides a good model of American urban
growth up until roughly 1970, and the patterns set in that earlier time still influence how
how most cities look today. Later models of urban growth all use the Burgess model as
a point of departure. Burgess suggested that city growth was not random or haphazard
but the consequence of ecological factors. The Burgess hypothesis suggests that cities
grow radially through a series of concentric zones: from the valuable land of the central
business district (CBD), through the zone of transition, the zone of workingmen’s
homes, and the zone of better residences to the commuter’s zone (see Figure 4-1).
Competition for prime space, plus demographic considerations such as population
growth and social factors such as social power and prestige (used to explain elites'
move to the suburbs), were the factors that drove this model.

When introductory sociology students are exposed to the concentric-zone hypothesis it

is all too frequently as a static picture of city structure. This is unfortunate, for what
Burgess was positing was a growth model, not a model of how things are as much as a
model of how things change- changes such as from the simpler preindustrial model in
which there is no clear segregation of city land for specific functional purposes, to the
more complex industrial city pattern of segregated land usages (e.g., central business
district, manufacturing, and different residential zones). Burgess's hypothesis is a model
or "ideal type," of how industrial cities evolve spatially as a result of competition for
prime space.

Burgess suggested that the most valuable property goes to those functions that can use
space intensively and are willing to pay the costs. Thus the ecologist would expect the
land located at the center of the transportation network to be occupied by intensive
space users such as department stores, major business headquarters, and financial
institutions. An economic model of land use developed by William Alfonso points out
that only those who can pay the most can occupy CBD land.13 Costs include not only
price, but also taxes and nuisance factors (congestion, noise, pollution, etc.) from other
nearby land users. In the industrial city of the first half of the twentieth century, centrally
located land was taken by economic units, such as department stores, which could
effectively use space and required heavy pedestrian traffic. Consumption-oriented
commercial activities still tend to be the most centrally located; production-oriented
activities are in the next ring out; and residences are the least centralized.

Residential users cannot pay the high cost of central location and do not want the
pollution, noise, and congestion of trucks rumbling down the street and a factory next
door. Consequently, there is a tendency toward an inverse relationship between the
value of land and the economic status of those who occupy it. In inner areas higher land
costs are compensated for by density of use. Through crowding, a slumlord can
compensate for higher costs by density of use. Since land in outer suburban areas is
less valuable, less intensive use, such as single-family houses on large lots, becomes
economically feasible. Thus, as you move out from the center of the city to the
periphery, land values and rental per acre tend to grade downward, while the rental
housing per unit grades upward. Where people live spatially reflects their position
socially.

Concentric Zones

So that they can serve as a baseline form from which to examine more recent patterns
of change, zones are presented here essentially as they existed during the first half of
the twentieth century.

Zone 1 was the central business district: the economic and (usually) the geographical
center of the city. The heart of the zone was the retail shopping district, with its major
department stores, theaters, hotels, banks, and central offices of economic, political,
legal, and civic leaders. Consumption-oriented commercial activities tended to locate at
the very core of the CBD, while the outer fringes, with lower rents, contained the
wholesale business district: markets, warehouses, and storage buildings. Today the old
warehouse districts are often the site of trendy restaurants and apartments. At the same
time, most American cities, such as Baltimore, Detroit, and Omaha lack even a single
downtown department store.14 Meanwhile, the function of providing downtown office
space and convention centers is increasing.15

Until the inner city deindustrialization of the 1970s, Zone 2 – the zone in transition –
contained both older factory complexes, many from the last century, and an outer ring of
deteriorating neighborhoods of tenements. The zone in transition was the area where
immigrants received their first view of the city. Immigrants settled in the cheap housing
near the factories because they could not compete economically for the more desirable
residential locations. The zone in transition was known as an area of high crime rates
and social disorganization.

As the immigrants moved up in socioeconomic status, they moved out spatially and
were in turn replaced by newer immigrants. Thus, a nonrandom spatial structure or
pattern emerged, with groups of lower socioeconomic status most centrally located.
Today most of the warehouses and slums have been destroyed by urban renewel or
have been turned into gentrified neighborhoods prized for their central location.

Zone 3 was the zone of “working people’s homes.” This was the area settled by second-
generation families, the children of the immigrants; it was the place where one moved to
from the inner core. Typically, the father of the family had a blue-collar job, while the
children planned to move out of the old neighborhood, perhaps to live in the suburbs
(See Chapter 9, Changing Suburbanization Patterns). Blue-collar families shown in TV
sitcoms invariably resided in Zone 2.

Zone 4 was called the “zone of better residences.” This was the outer city zone of the
great middle class – small business owners, professional people, sales workers, and
those holding white-collar jobs. However, even in the 1920s this zone was in the
process of changing from a community of single-family houses to one of apartment
buildings (that is, there was an invasion of new land-use patterns).

Burgess's final zone was the “commuter zone” or suburbs. Before World War II the
commuter zone was comprised of the upper-middle-class and upper-class dormitory
suburbs. Here were found the classic suburban life patterns – the husband leaving in
the morning for the city and returning in the evening; the wife raising the children,
maintaining the house, and participating in civic affairs. Chapter 6: The Suburban Era
discusses changes in suburban lifestyles.

Burgess's model has had considerable practical consequences. For example, while few
real estate agents realize it, the Burgess-based filtering-down housing model, which
suggests that housing and neighborhoods inevitably filter from higher-status to lower-
status populations, was used to determine housing values. As Chapter 11: Cities and
Change details, this led to policies of disinvestment in the central city. Urban
gentrification, by contrast, turns Burgess’s pattern inside out. Not only older residences,
but also central commercial property and warehouses are now being converted into
housing.

Limitations

Over the years Burgess’s hypothesis has come under severe criticism on both
theoretical and empirical grounds. Burgess’s zonal boundaries “do not serve as
demarcations in respect to the ecological or social phenomena they circumscribe, but
are arbitrary divisions.”16 This is an overstatement, but it is clear that Burgess’s zones
are not totally homogenous units. When evaluating Burgess’s hypothesis, we have to
keep in mind that he was proposing a "model" or "ideal type" of what American cities
would look like if other factors did not intervene – but, of course, other factors do
intervene. Burgess’s own statements make it clear that he recognized the effects of
distorting factors. He said:
If radial extension were the only factor affecting the growth of American cities, every city
in this country would exhibit a perfect exemplification of these five urban zones. But
since other factors affect urban development (including) situation, site, natural and
artificial barriers, survival of an earlier use of a district, prevailing city plan and its
system of transportation, many distortions and modifications of this pattern are actually
found.17

The question, then, is not whether the zonal pattern is an exact description, for is
obviously is not. The question is whether the growth patterns of American cities were
well described by Burgess’s model. To date, empirical tests have both supported and
failed to support Burgess’s hypothesis.18 Research shows that a rough version of
Burgess's model does appear to have held up, at least for larger and older American
cities, until the suburban era of the last 30 years or so.19 Schwirian and Matre, on the
other hand, found a more mixed pattern in their study of Canada's 11 largest cties.20 As
later chapters will demonstrate, for more recent decades population growth, job growth,
and office growth have concentrated heavily in the suburbs.

SECTOR AND MULTIPLE-NUCLEI MODELS

Based on his study of 142 cities, Homer Hoyt proposed what has become known as the
“sector theory.”21 Hoyt said that rather than growth through rings, growth took place in
homogenous pie-shaped sectors that extended radially from the center toward the
periphery of the city. His research indicated that residential areas extended rapidly
along established lines of travel where economic resistance was least. A pattern of land
use was said to develop in which each use – industrial, commercial, high-income
residential, or low-income residential – tended to push out from the city core in specific
sectors or wedges that cut across concentric zones.

Thus, high-income housing could radiate from the core in one wedge, a racial ghetto in
a second, industrial firms in a third, and working-class residences in a fourth. The sector
theory focuses attention on the role of transportation arteries. Although originally
developed to explain city patterns, the sector theory easily explains development out
along interstate and other major highways. Thus it is a particularly useful modification of
the Burgess hypothesis when discussing the postwar development of suburbs.

AThe multiple-nuclei theory of spatial growth rejects the idea of a unicentered city
altogether and instead holds that as a city grows it develops distinct centers of activity,
and that in contemporary cities these different land uses have different centers.
Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman argued that land-use patterns developed around
what were originally independent nuclei.22 Four factors were said to account for the rise
of the different nuclei:

1. Certain activities require specialized facilities. Retailing, for example, requires a

high degree of accessibility, while manufacturing needs ample land and railroad
service.
 2. Like activities group together for mutual advantages, as in the case of the central
business district.
3. Some unlike activities are mutually detrimental or incompatible with each other.
For example, it is unlikely that high-income or high-status residential areas will
locate close to heavy industry.
4. Some users, such as storage and warehousing facilities, which have a relatively
lower competitive capacity to purchase good locations, are able to afford only
low-rental areas.23

In many respects the multiple-nuclei hypothesis better describes the entire metropolitan
area than it does the central city. Contemporary suburbia, with its mixture of outlying
shopping malls, office and industrial parks, and residential areas, does indeed exhibit a
multinucleated pattern when seen from the air.

Amos Hawley stressed the importance of the transportation net in a multinucleated

theory of growth.24 He notes that within metropolitan areas there is not one retail
business district, but a hierarchical, multinucleated system of districts. Second- and
third-rank business districts particularly develop at transportation intersections where
traffic converges from four directions. Greater specialization of both services and
products is found at the CBD, while outlying centers offer more standardized services
and items. We will explore this further in Chapter 5: Metro and Edge City Growth.

URBAN GROWTH OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA

The Burgess concentric-zone pattern of urban growth, which suggest an increasing

status gradient as one goes from the city core to the periphery, has never been very
satisfactory model of patterns of urban growth outside North America.25

In cities with a nonindustrial heritage, there appears to be an inverse zonal hypothesis.

That is, instead of the poor in the inner core and the elite farther out, the central core is
occupied by the elite, whereas the disadvantaged fan out toward the periphery.26 In such
cities, it is common to find a pattern in which upper-class and upper-middle-class
groups occupy the city proper and poor in-migrants settle on the “suburban” periphery in
squatter shantytowns. These favelas, barriadas, gecekondulas, or bustees can be found
on the periphery of almost every major city in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

There is good reason to question just how applicable Burgess’s theory is to older
European cities.27 In the older cities the elites preempted the prestigious central
locations and the poor were forced to live in more peripheral locations. Manufacturing
and commerce, when located within the city, were restricted to specific areas. Thus, in
London the central districts of Westminster, Marylebone, and Kensington have
continued to retain their upper-class airs for two centuries. Moscow, before the Russian
Revolution, clearly had the urban structure of a preindustrial city with its inverse zonal
pattern.28
As European cities industrialized during the 19th century, central land was already filled,
so heavy industry was confined to “suburban” areas where there was sufficient land.
Thus, Paris has a concentration of automobile and aircraft factories to the south and
east of the city. The poorest areas of Paris are not in the city, but in the government-built
high-rise suburbs where North African newcomers live. Thus in France protesters are
routinely bussed in from the suburbs. By contrast, the inner-city middle-class districts
vote for the more conservative candidates – exactly the opposite of the American
stereotype.

Gideon Sjoberg sees this pattern of identification of high-status groups with central-city
location as a persistence of a “feudal tradition” that is not present in American cities. In
his view, “In many European cities, including those in Russia, the persistence of the
feudal tradition has inhibited suburbanization because high status has attached itself to
residence in the central city.”29

However, New York doesn’t have a feudal tradition, but it still has a pattern of the well-
to-do locating in certain areas of Manhattan. Cosmopolites, whether in London, Paris, or
New York, simply prefer to live where they can easily get to work, where they can find a
full cultural life, and where they can easily get a cappuchino or find a deli open at 2 A.M.
It can be argued that, particularly in Europe, upper-class urban populations live in the
city because they feel it is an exciting and attractive place to live.

THE POSTMODERN CITY: THE LOS ANGELES SCHOOL

Probably the most discussed new way of looking at cities is provided by the so-called
Los Angeles School of urban scholars. Scholars of the Los Angeles School such as
Michael Dear, Michael Davis, and Edward Soja set themselves up in direct opposition to
the Chicago School.30 What they suggest is that Los Angeles, with its fragmented spatial
and social pattern, rather than Chicago with its dominant central core, is the model for
the future. The culturally and socially diverse Los Angeles metro area is not an
exception to the pattern, they argue; it is the new pattern. That is, L.A. and southern
California are a "polygot, polycentric, polycultural pastiche that is deeply involved in
rewriting American urbanism."31

Thus, the L.A. School turns the older Chicago School on its head by arguing that the
multicultural way of life is the new postmodern norm in which the periphery is now the
core. As Charles Jencks writes, "Los Angeles, like all cities, is unique, but in one way it
may typify the world city of the future: there are only minorities. No single ethnic group,
nor way of life, nor industrial sector dominates the scene. Pluralism has gone further
here than in any city in the world and for this reason it may characterize the global
metropolis of the future."32 Los Angeles is not an exception to the rule; it is the rule.

The assertion that Los Angeles represents the new paradigm for the city has not been
without critics. Robert Beauregard suggests, for instance, that the overuse of
superlatives and the suggestions that Los Angeles is the "first" on one or another
measure slips from science into an academic boosterism that is at odds with empirical
research and critical theory.33 This problem emerges when the writers lose the critical
mind-set in which a city illuminates some important urban trend in the making, replacing
it with superlatives to suggest the city in question is the prototype of a new pattern.34

We now go on to examine political economy models, for just as the Chicago zonal
hypothesis was part of a larger ecological model, the Los Angeles School is usually
seen as being subsumed under the heading of political economy models.

POLITICAL ECONOMY MODELS

With its premise that economic competition for space produces the spatial order of
cities, urban ecology remained the dominant model of urban change until the 1970s,
when it was challenged by the emergence of political economy paradigms. Political
economy advocates argue that you have to look beyond the city to national (and
possibly world) patterns to understand massive changes such as city declines,
suburbanization, or deindustrialization. Some argue that such neo-Marxist conflict-
based models now have become the dominant paradigm.35

A note on terminology: In the 1970s, models critical of capitalist patterns were

commonly identified by their advocates as neo-Marxist, in the 1980s they were referred
to as the "new urban sociology," and since the 1990s they have commonly been
referred to as "urban political economy." These name changes often (but not always)
reflect real theoretical changes. Today there is some difficulty making statements that
cover all political economy adherents. While most of those using the political economy
identification remain Marxist or neo-Marxist, some others are clearly not. For example,
Manuel Castells, whose seminal Marxist analysis, The Urban Question, provided a
basic critique of existing sociology and the theoretical underpinning for Marxit urbanism,
in later works revised his thinking away from his earlier class conflict-based Marxist
approach.36 What is common to the political economy perspective is that it focuses on
the role played by human agency, and especially the actions of the corporate economic
elites and political institutions that do their bidding. Political economy emphasizes not
impersonal economic forces producing uniform ecological patterns but how urban
systems are structured to give advantage to some groups and disadvantage to others.

"Like urban ecology, political economy is concerned with systems of dominance and
subordination operating across spatial boundaries. Unlike urban ecology, these systems
are seen as driven by the actions (or inactions) of particular groups pursuing their
particular interests, sometimes with a vengeance. The focus is on how various political
economic systems usually operate, which groups tend to hold more power, and who
tends to benefit and who is likely to lose from 'the way things are' in cities."37 Urban
political economy thus looks at social power and how urban decisions favor the powerful
at the expense of others. Also, while the Chicago School researchers initially was (sic)
on cities of North America and the developed world, urban political economy has given
considerable attention to cities in the developing world, especially cities in Latin
America.

Figure 4-2, prepared by David Smith and Michael Timberlake, presents a schematic
description of key elements in the political economy perspective. The figure shows how
macrostructures establish ever-narrower parameters for urban outcomes and
infrastructures going from the global world system down to the specific infrastructure of
a city. The city's (or nation's) role is seen as being shaped and constrained by the
particular historical period or particular economic specialization required during times of
economic expansion or contraction. Thus, while ecological approaches are likely to rely
on the statistical analysis of large data sets, political economy is more likely to look to
case studies of particular cities emphasizing how political struggles and decisions shape
the urban social and built environment.

POLITICAL ECONOMY ASSUMPTIONS

All theoretical models are built on a number of assumptions underlying the work and
analysis. The following five assumptions are taken from the work of Joe Feagan and
have been modified and simplified somewhat by David Smith and Michael Timberlake.38

1. Cities are situated in a hierarchical global system, and global linkages among
cities help define the structure of the world system. Cities and urban life in both
developed and developing countries are largely shaped by their specific location and
involvement in the world system. Groups in some areas, both historically and in the
present day, "exploit" groups and resources in other regions. As a result, major social
differences (e.g., patterns of urbanization) across the globe have much to do with how
the region fits into the international; division of labor and with how local systems of
class, race/ethnicity, and gender relations have developed in connection with the
operation of the world system.

2. The world system is one of competitive capitalism. The world system is drive, to
a significant degree, by the logic of capitalism and is, therefore, competitive. Locally
based actors (e.g., local politicians and business people) attempt to outbid one another
for access to capital, cheap labor, and resources. Competitive capitalism when
transmitted to geographical space involves the creation and destruction of the land and
built environment we term "cities." It also leads to the concentration and shifts of
populations within urban space into neighborhoods, slums, and suburbs.

3. Capital is easily moved; locations of cities are fixed. Gains and losses are
usually calculated within corporations. Owners and managers of companies act to
maximize the profitability and ensure the survival of their firms. Actions to do this often
include moving capital (in the form of factories and production facilities, corporate
offices, etc.) from one location to another to attempt to improve the "bottom line."
Investments and disinvestments often have profound effects on the locals and localities,
many of which are cities. This can lead to "capital drain" and "deindustrialization" in
these places.

4. Politics and government matter. The state in modern capitalist states is linked to
the economic processes that form cities. Both local and national politics play a major
role in setting the rules and "greasing the skids" for business profitability. Contrary to the
assumption that capitalist economies are driven by free market, states fundamentally
help determine the flow of capital over the globe, including from one city or region to
another. The policies of political jurisdictions - on corporate taxes, road building, the
regulation of workers, and so on - help define the local business climate, which in turn
strongly influences patterns of urban growth or decline.

5. People and circumstances differ according to time and place, and these
differences matter. Specific economic and state forms do not develop automatically or
inevitably. They develop as the results of conscious actions taken by social classes,
acting together or singly, in particular historical or structural circumstances. In other
words, cities are shaped by real flesh-and-blood people making decisions in particular
situations. Decisions are made by people, not "variables" or "social forces." People may
support or oppose the existing system, or they may support alternatives.

EXAMPLES OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY APPROACH

Now that the major characteristics of the political economy approach have been
defined, we will look at some example of how it is applied.

The Baltimore Study

David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, in a well-known study analyzed the real estate
market in Baltimore as an example of how capitalists, motivated by profit, use
government programs to change the spatial use of the city.39 Harvey discussed that the
city was not one housing market but a number of different markets. The poor lives in
public housing or used government housing programs, the middle class often used FHA
(Federal Housing Authroity) or VA (Veterans Administration) government-backed home
loans, and the upper-middle class used savings or commercial bank loans. Harvey
suggested that the capitalist economy builds the city it needs, and it uses government
policies and programs to protect its profits and investments. Real estate investors see
little financial sense in putting capital into decaying and poorer neighborhoods. Profits
are greater in high-rent neighborhoods and outer suburbs. Thus, they deliberately
disinvest in the central city. In effect, they create blight.

Government urban renewal programs using public funds are then used to physically
restore blighted areas and put in infrastructure improvements so that real estate
investors can again make a profit. According to Harvey, financial capital (investment
capital) rather than industrial capital (business or manufacturing capital) determines the
future of the cit y. Urban growth or urban blight are not some sort of automatic
processes. Rather, they are consequences of directed actions by financial capitalists
seeking to maximize profit without regard to the needs of the urban population.

Harvery also argued that capitalism consistently produces more surplus investment than
can be used (chronic over accumulation) and that changes in the built environment such
as suburbanization, gentrification, and urban renewal are ways of using surplus
capital.40 Private mass-market housing is also used as a means of preventing
population unrest and providing social stabilization.

Urban Growth Machines

John Logan and Harvey Molotch present a conflict, but non-Marxist, analysis of urban
growth. They say that an "urban growth machine" ideology influences American urban
growth.41 Pushed by bankers, developers, corporate officials, and real estate investors,
the growth machine ideology influences local governments to view cities not as places
where people live, work, and have social relationships, but solely as a place where it is
necessary to create a "good business climate." A good business climate means that a
growth machine is created in which increasing the value of commercial property comes
ahead of community values, neighborhood needs, or a livable city. In their terms, "Cities
become organized enterprises devoted to (raising) the aggregate rent levels through the
intensification of land usage."42 Municipal officials broadcast the advantages of growth,
such as a larger tax base and more jobs, while ignoring problems of growth, such as
greater traffic congestion, environmental damage, higher home costs, and loss of
community.

Local residents, in contrast to business and local government officials, see their
neighborhoods as places for living and often wish to maintain their character through
controlling traffic flows, restricting building heights, and keeping open spaces. Their
communities are social space to them, not just economic sites. Conflict comes when
local populations seek to limit negative impacts of growth on their community while the
growth machine defines all growth that raises property values as good growth.
Local governments are largely in the pockets of major economic interests. Thus,
revitalizing the city means downtown improvements for business, not assistance to local
communities. Inner-city poverty is ignored unless it affects business. The global
economy means that local groups have less political influence. Business interests are
less tied to local areas and concerned with local needs. Industrial capital goes where
the profits are greatest. The sole question in urban land use thus becomes "Will it make
money?" rather than "Is it good for the city?" The assumption of the political economy
model is that profit shapes the city.

World Systems Theory

When taken to the level of the global economy, urban political economy is often
associated with world systems theory. World systems theory suggests that what
happens to individual cities is not a result so much of what happens in their own region
as to where these cities fit into the world hierarchy of cities. Capitalism organizes cities
around the globe into overarching geopolitical and economic systems.43 Cities of the
economically developed "core" of North America, Europe, and Japan are home to
multinational corporations that dominate the world economy. The professionals working
for the corporations make good livings, and the urban areas in which they live have a
wide range of housing and social choices. The core region is seen as exploiting the rest
of the globe.

Counties in the "peripheral" underdeveloped Third World provide raw materials and raw
labor. Their cities have small elites living in luxury and large numbers living in slums in
poverty. As of 2001 the average worker in the developing world makes less than $2 a
day. Third world cities offer few social amenities to their residents. Cities in "semi-
peripheral" counties such as Brazil, Argentina, and most of eastern Europe fall in
between. They are tied to the core, but lack the control and resource base of core cities.

World systems theory, then, emphasizes that there is a hierarchy of cites in the world,
and this hierarchy is based upon the economic power the city commands. The ability of
a city to attract global investments ultimately determines its rank order among world
cities.44 Major core global cities manage the global economy and offer the most
advanced financial, service, and production operations. This global hierarchy produces
inequalities among world cities.

World systems theory implicitly assumes that so long as world capitalism continues to
dominate the globe the existing core-periphery system of inequality will persist. On the
other hand, critics point out that recent history suggests countries can change their
economic position. South Korea and Taiwan, for example, have moved from
underdeveloped to economically developed in a generation. The strength of political
economy and world systems models is that they focus attention on the historical context
and political issues. Contemporary political economy faces the challenge of continuing
to develop as the urban world changes. Michael Smith argues that it is necessary to
move beyond global cities to thinking of transnational urbanism.45

Challenges

The challenge of the political economy model is to adapt what began as a neo-Marxist
model to a world that has largely abandoned Marxism.46 Since 1989 most "socialist"
regimes have collapsed, and even China, while retaining the socialist title, has largely
adopted a capitalist economic model. However, the political economy model need not
be wedded to a neo-Marxist perspective. Works such as John Logan's on urban growth
machines point out how local political action becomes less effective in an era of
transnational capital and an international division of labor.47 Local people have little
power and leverage when confronting international corporations quite willing to move
jobs abroad to save money, even if it destroys local communities. Such scholarship
expands the political economy model.

Similarly, ecologists need to develop models that focus more on the social patterns and
economic structure of the early 21st century than on those of the early 20th century. The
challenge for urban theorists is to move beyond old issues and revise both the current
ecological and political economy models so that they speak to a 21st century world.

SUMMARY

Cities can be viewed as (1) a physical structure, (2) a system of social organization, or
(3) a set of attitudes and ideas. This chapter is concerned with the first two: the
relationship between the spatial and social organizational aspects of urban places. The
two major models describing how this occurs are the ecological model and the political
economy model.

Urban (or human) ecology traces its underpinnings to Darwin's research on evolution
and stresses the role played by competition within the urban environment. The history of
the American city tells of the invasion and succession of one group or land use by
another. The most famous product of the Chicago ecological school is Burgess's
"concentric zonal" urban growth model. Ernest Burgess suggested cities grow radially
through a series of concentric zones. Occupancy of prime land goes through
competition to the users willing to pay the highest cost, either economic or in terms of
congestion and pollution. Zone 1 was the central business district (CBD), Zone 2 a
factory and tenement zone of transition, Zone 3 an area of working people's homes,
Zone 4 an area of middle-class residences, and Zone 5 the suburbs. Homer Hoyt
suggested an alternative "sector theory" model in which growth proceeds out from the
center not through rings but in fairly homogeneous pie-shaped wedges. The Burgess
hypothesis reasonably describes American urban growth prior to the 1970s. It does not
prove a particularly useful model for non-American cities.

The Los Angeles School suggests that L.A., with its multicultural population and its
dispersed noncore spatial organization, is the model of the postmodern city of the
future. Political economy models challenge the economic competition emphasis of
ecological models. Since the 1970s conflict-oriented political economy models - often
Marxist based - have stressed the importance of power. Conflit models emphasize the
crucial role played worldwide by capitalist economic systems. Political economy models
look to issues of power and how corporate economic elites and political institutions
make decisions that favor global corporate interests at the cost of individuals.

John Logan and Harvey Molotch provide a conflict-based, but non-Marxist, analysis of
urban growth. They suggest that an "urban growth machine" ideology influences local
governments to view cities not as places where people live and work but solely as a
place where it is necessary to create a "good business climate." This means that
increasing the value of land comes ahead of community values, neighborhood needs, or
the livability of the city.

When applied to the global economy, political economy is commonly associated with
"world systems theory" which suggests cities' economic viability depends on where they
fit into the world hierarchy of cities. Cities at the economically developed "core" of North
America, Europe, and Japan contain the multinational corporations that control the
world economy. Peripheral third world countries are permanently relegated to marginal
status and expoited for their raw materials and cheap labor. Traditional world systems
theory suggests that as long as capitalism persists, the core-periphery inequality will
continue and countries can't change from one status to the other. However, recent
history indicates that some countries such as South Korea and Taiwan have moved
from periphery to core status. World systems theory is changing as economic realities
change.
ENDNOTES
1
Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology: 44: 18-19, July, 1938.

2
Roderick Duncan McKenzie, The Metropolitan Community, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1933

3
Robert Park, Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology, free press, New York, 1952, p. 14.

4
Ralph Thomlinson, Urban Structure: The Social and Spatial Character of Cities, Random House, New
York, 1969, p. 9.

5
Some members of the "sociocultural" school of human ecology would dispute this statement.

6
The term function as used by ecologists means recurrent patterns of activities that depend on other
activities. Structure is the orderly arrangements of the parts that make up the whole, the loci within which
the functions or activities are performed.

7
Louis Wirth, The Ghetto, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1928; and Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The
Gold Coast and the Slum, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1929.

8
Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space, University of Texas, Austin, 1985.

9
Warner E. Gettys, “Human Ecology and Social Theory,” in George A. Theodorson (ed.), Studies in
Human Ecology, Harper & Row, New York, 1961, p. 99.
10
Leo Schnore, “The Myth of Human Ecology,” Sociological Inquiry, 31: 139, 1961.

11
Walter Firey, “Sentiment and Symbolism as Ecological Variables,” American Sociological Review, 10:
140-148, 1945.

12
Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” Publications of the
American Sociological Society, 18: 85-97, 1924.

13
William Alonso, “A Theory of Urban Land Market,” in Larry Bourne (ed.), Internal Structure of the City:
Readings on Space and the Environment, Oxford University Press, New York, 1971, pp. 154-159.

14
J. John Palen, The Suburbs, McGraw-Hill, New York, p. 182.

15
For a detailed analysis of CBD changes in Baltimore and Hapsburg, Germany, see Jurgen Friedrichs
and Allen C. Goodman, The Changing Downtown: A Comparative Study of Baltimore and Hapsburg,
Walter de Gruyter, New York, 1987.

16
Milla R. Alihan, Social Ecology, Columbia University Press, New York, 1938, p. 225.

17
Ernest W. Burgess, “Residential Segregation in American Cities,” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 140: 108, November, 1928.

18
Leo F. Schnore and Joy K.O. Jones, “The Evolution of City-Suburban Types in the Course of a
Decade,” Urban Affairs Quarterly, 4: 421-422, June, 1969; Joel Smith, “Another Look at Socioeconomic
Status Distributions in Urbanized Areas,” Urban Affairs Quarterly, 5: 423-453, June, 1970; and Lee J.
Haggerty, “Another Look at the Burgess Hypothesis: Time as an Important Variable,” American Journal of
Sociology, 76: 1084-1093, May, 1971.

19
J. John Palen and Leo F. Schnore, “Color Composition and City-Suburban Differences,” Land
Economics, 41: 87-91, February, 1965.

20
Kent P. Schwiran and Marc D. Matre, “The Ecological Structure of Canadian Cities,” in Kent P. Schwiran
(ed.), Comparative Urban Structure, Heath, Lexington, Mass., 1974.

21
Homer Hoyt, “The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities,” U.S.
Federal Housing Administration, Washington, D.C., 1939.

22
Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman, “The Nature of Cities,” The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 252: 7-17, 1945.

23
Ibid.

24
Amos H. Hawley, Urban Society: An Ecological Approach, Wiley, New York, 1981.

25
Bruce London and William G. Flannagan, “Comparative Urban Ecology: A Summary of the Field,” in
John Walton and Louis H. Masotti (eds.), The City in the Comparative Perspective: Cross National
Research and New Directions in Theory, Sage, Bevery Hills, Calif., 1979, pp. 41-66.

26
Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City, Free Press, New York, 1960, pp. 97-98.

27
London and Flanagan, op. cit., p. 56.
28
Walter F. Abbot, “Moscow in 1897 as a Preindustrial City: A test of the Inverse Burgess Zonal
Hypothesis,” American Sociological Review, 39: 542-550, August, 1974.

29
Gideon Sjoberg, “Cities in Developing and in Industrial Societies: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” in Philip
Hauser and Leo F. Schnore, The Study of Urbanization, Wiley, New York, 1965, p. 230.

30
See, for example, Michael Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Verso, New
York, 1990; Michael Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000; Michael Dear, ed.
From Chicago To L.A.:Making Sense of Urban Theory, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001; and Edward W.
Soja, Postmodern Geographics: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso, New York,
1989.

31
Michael Dear, "Los Angeles and the Chicago School: Invitation to a Debate," City and Community
1(1):6, 2002.

32
Charles Jenks, Hetropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots and the Strange Beauty of Hetro-Architecture, St.
Martins, New York, 1993, p. 7.

33
Robert A. Beauregard, "City of Superlatives," City and Community 2(3):179, 2003.

34
Anthony M. Orum, "Editorial Introduction," City and Community 2(3):179, 2003.

35
Mark Godinnier and Joe Feagin, "The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology," Urban Affairs Quarterly
24(2):163-187, 1998; David A. Smith, "The New Urban Sociology Meets the Old: Rereading Some
Classical Human Ecology," Urban Affairs Review 30(3):432-457, 1995.

36
Manuel Castells, The Urban Question, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977 and The City and the
Grassroots, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983.

37
David A. Smith and Michael F. Timberlake, "Urban Political Economy," in J. John Palen, The Urban
World, 5th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York, 1997, p. 110.

38
Joe Feagin, The Free Enterprise Citym Rutgers, New Brunswick, N.J., 1988, chap. 2; David A. Smith
and Michael F. Timberlake, op. cit., 1997, p. 116.

39
David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1985.

40
David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the Theory and History of
Capitalist Urbanization, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985.

41
John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Urban Economy of Place, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1987.

42
Ibid., p. 13.

43
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1979.

44
I am indebted to Mila Zlatic for stressing this point.

45
Michael Peter Smith, Urban Theory, Blackwell, Malden, Mass.,

46
David A. Smith and Michael F. Timberlake, p. 127.
47
John Logan and Harvey Molotch, op. cit.

BOX 4.1: Ecology of the City: The Barbary Coast of San Francisco

The Chicago School spoke of "natural areas" by which they meant social areas that
developed without the aid of planning or design. During the 19th and early 20th
centuries the most notorious of the natural areas were the vice areas, commonly
located just outside the central business district. Among the most famous of these
districts were Storyville in New Orleans, the Levee in Chicago, Five Points in New York,
and the "Barbary Coast" in San Francisco. Such districts were eventually put out of
business more by technological change than by the famous Societies for the
Suppression of Vice. The automobile and the telephone, for example, made possible
the "call-girl," which put fixed-location brothels out of business. Similarly, today
availability of X-rated videos at suburban video stores, X-rated cable channels, and over
100,000 porno websites has put most central area porno theaters out of business. What
follows is a 19th century writer's view of vice in San Francisco.* Like many "reformers,"
he seems to enjoy lingering over the sins of the city.

"Barbary Coast," proper, is in the northerly part of the city, comprising both sides of
Broadway and Pacific streets, and the cross streets between them from Stockton
streets to the water front... In the early days of San Francisco, Barbary Coast was the
place of refuge and security for the hundreds of criminals that infected the city. When
they passed within its boundary, they were strongly fortified against any assault that the
officers of the law might lead against them... Then villains of every nationality held high
carnival there. The jabber of the Orient, the soft-flowing tone of the South Sea Islander,
the guttural gabbing of the Dutch, the Gallic accent, the round full tone of the son of
Africa, the melodious voice of the Mexicano, and the harsh, sharp utterances of the
Yankee, all mingled in the boisterous revels.

It was the grand theatre of crime. The glittering stiletto, the long blade bowie knife,
the bottle containing the deadly drug, and the audacious navy revolver were much-used
implements in the plays that were enacted...

Were the constraining power of the law and public sentiment removed, Barbary
Coast to-day could soon develop the same kind of outlawry that made it notorious in the
primitive days... Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind, The
petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cut-throats
and murders, all are found there. Dance-houses and concert saloons, where bleary-
eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in
vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs, and say and do everything to heap upon
themselves more degradation, unrest and misery are numerous. Low gambling houses
thronged with riot-loving rowdies in all stages of intoxification are there. Opium dens,
where heathen Chinese and Godforsaken women and men are sprawled in
miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy, or completely overcome by inhaling the
vapors of the naseous narcotic are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution,
loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity,
blasphemy, and death are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there
also.

*B.E. Lloyd, Lights and Shade in San Francisco, San Francisco, 1876, pp. 78-79.

BOX 4.2: A Note on Urbanization and Environment

Our discussion of the ecology of the city would be incomplete without the mention of the
effect of cities on the physical environment. The actual physical shape of cities has been
modified by human design. Much of contemporary Boston, for instance, was under
water at the time of the American Revolution. One of the former underwater zones is
known today as Back Bay. Chicago in a similar fashion created an Outer Drive and
lakefront park system out of filled land, as did New Orleans. In other cases the pumping
out of subsurface ground water and other fluids has led, as in parts of Houston and in
Long Beach, California, to subsidence. In the latter case, from 1937 through 1962 some
913 million barrels of oil, 482 million barrel of water, and 832 billion cubic feet of gas
were extracted, causing parts of this heavily urbanized area to sink as much as 27 feet.*

Cities also create atmospheric changes. Buildings and paved streets retain heat, and
urban areas become heat islands, as anyone who has spent a hot summer day in the
central city knows. What is less well known is that the condensation nuclei produced by
activities in cities increase cloudiness and precipitation over cities.**

Also, by covering the ground with buildings, paved roads, and parking lots, urban
development in effect waterproofs the land surface. Rainfall cannot be normally
absorbed into the soil; instead, storm runoff must be handled by massive systems of
storm sewers. The paving over of city and suburban areas, by preventing water
absorption, actually increases the risk of severe flooding.*** The relationship between
urban residents and their physical environment is much closer than most city dwellers or
suburbanites recognize. Those living in coastal areas subject to hurricanes, or in
localities that flood, or on earthquake-prone fault lines, are particularly sensitive to the
extent to which we are subject to the laws of nature and the environment. During the
1990s both San Francisco and Los Angeles suffered earthquake damage.

Cities, of course, are notorious for their effect on air pollution. One of the worst cases
occurred in London in 1952 when a disastrous temperature inversion kept a deadly
smog over the city for a week, and some 4,000 Londoners dies of smog-related causes
before the smog lifted. Today London has strict air pollution controls; the air is actually
getting cleaner, and the city’s sooty fogs are a thing of the past.

In the United States, a nationwide study tracking the health histories of 552,138 adults
in 151 metropolitan areas was released in 1995.**** The good news is that due to the
Clean Air Act air quality has improved dramatically since 1982. The bad news is that
after factoring in each subject’s age, sex, occupational exposure to pollution, obesity,
and alcohol use, living in a city having high sulfate and fine particle levels raised the risk
of premature death by 15 and 17 percent, respectively. Living in high-pollution cities
such as Los Angeles, Denver, or Salt Lake City can substantially shorten life.

Today, with Texas's weak environmental controls, Houston has the nation's most
polluted air. California, by contrast, has passed laws mandating the use of some zero-
pollution vehicles (i.e., electric vehicles) in order to attempt to clean its air. However, by
far the most serious air and other pollution now occurs in the cities of the developing
world. The air in Bangkok is often so dirty is can be seen, and just breathing the air in
Mexico City is equivalent to smoking two packages of cigarettes a day.

*Donald Eachman and Melvin Marcus, “The Geologic and Topographic Setting of Cities,” in Thomas
Detwyler and Melvin Marcus (eds.), Urbanization and Environment: The Physical Geography of the City,
Duxbury Press, Belmont, Calif., 1972, p. 46.

**Rid Bryson and John Ross, in Dewtyler and Marcus, Urbanization and Environment, p. 63.

***Robert Kates, Ian Burton, and Gilbert F. White, The Environment as Hazard, Oxford University Press,
New York, 1978; and Stanley A. Changon et al., Summary of Mertomex, Vol. 1: Weather Abnormalities
and Impacts, Illinois State Water Survey, Urbana, 1977.

****Curt Suplee, “Dirty Air Can Shorten Your Life, Study Says: Death Rate Much Higher in Worst Cities,”
Washington Post, Mar. 10, 1995, pp. A1 and A15.

[http://www.bolender.com/Sociology/Palen/Palen%204.htm]

Chapter 5: METRO AND EDGE GROWTH

Woe to them that join house to house.

Woe to them that lay field to field till there be no place.

Isaiah 5:8

INTRODUCTION
The United States has undergone profound changes in recent decades. In this chapter,
three major transformations are emphasized. The first is the metropolitan area replacing
the city as the major urban unit. Nine-tenths of the nation's growth (89 percent) now
occurs in metropolitan areas. The second is the emergence of outer or edge cities as
the major locus of metropolitan growth. While inner cities may struggle economically,
edge cities are prospering. It twists the language, but edge cities are now the center of
most urban economic activity. Note that figure 5-1 shows growth, often major growth, in
metro areas outside central cities. By contrast, central cities are growing slower or even
declining.

Finally, there has been a three-decades-long population and industry shift toward the
sunbelt. Along with this move toward warmer climes has been a movement toward
water, and particularly toward the nation's east and west coastlines (see figure 5.2). This
sunbelt change, combined with the coastal in-movement, is the third transformation this
chapter will discuss. Urban sprawl, which is the product of these changes, will receive
major treatment in Chapter 12: Housing Patterns, Sprawl, and Smart Growth.

METROPOLITAN GROWTH

Let us begin by looking at the metropolitan areas where four out of five Americans live
as of 2004.1 Metropolitan areas now house 235 million of the nation's 285 million
population. Over half of all Americans live in the 37 largest "Metropolitan Statistical
Areas" having a population of 1 million or more. The nine largest metropolitan areas,
each with a population of more than 5 million, now hold almost a third of U.S. residents.
The dominance of metropolitan areas is increasing. New Jersey is entirely covered by
metropolitan areas, while in seven other states - California, Maryland, Conneticut,
Rhode Island, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York - over 90 percent of the population
lives in metropolitan areas. In Idaho, at the other extreme, only 20 percent of the
population lives in metropolitan areas.

The 20th century was a period of dramatic metropolitan growth and ascendancy. A
hundred years ago the era of the frontier was closed, and it was clear that future
national growth would have a metropolitan nexus. People were moving off the farms
and out of the small towns into the cities. Rural counties were being depopulated, while
population in the central cities was rapidly increasing. The ecological and demographic
pattern was one of population growth concentrating in ever-larger metropolitan areas.
The census of 1910 recognized this centripetal (inward) population movement by
establishing 44 ad hoc "metropolitan districts" whose boundaries extended beyond
those of the central city. Just under a century ago, roughly one-third of the nation's
population already resided in these newly defined metropolitan areas.
If changes in the definition of metropolitan areas are taken into account, virtually all the
population growth during the 20th century occurred in metropolitan areas. The
exceptions were a brief revival of nonmetropolitan growth during the 1970s and some
rural rebound in the 1990s.2 However, while this rural rebound population is technically
defined as living outside of metropolitan areas, it does not represent a return to farming
or older rural ways of life. Rather, many of the new nonmetropolitan residents live rural
but are employed urban. They are part of a metropolitan sprawl that extends
metropolitan influence to virtually the entire population.

Metropolitan dominance had been foreseen by scholars as far back as the 1920s. The
awareness that cities had become part of a larger urban complex was reflected in the
pioneering works of perceptive writers such as Gras and McKenzie.3 They foresaw that
the city per se was yielding its influence to a larger unit: the metropolitan area. This
movement of 20th century population toward the largest urban concentrations (city and
suburb) both depopulated rural counties and magnified urban problems. The
consequence of the rural out-migration is reflected in the Bureau of Census figures (see
Table 5-1 and Figure 5-1). In 1920, 30 percent of the America population still lived on
farms; by the end of the century this figure had shrunk to under 2 percent.4 In the half
century from 1920 to 1970, the net out-migration from farm to cities was 29 million.5
Today, fewer than 1 person in 50 lives on a farm. For the overwhelming majority of
Americans, the family farm, which was so much a part of our national heritage, is
history.

In-Movement: 1900 to 1950

In he first half of the 20th century, a massive population implosion or in-gathering of

population into metro areas occurred. During this era the central city population often
expanded beyond its legal bounds into suburbs, but the city clearly was dominant over
its metro area. While the central city increasingly found its physical expansion contained
by surrounding suburbs, the social and economic influence of the central city expanded.
Once independent, outlying towns, villages, and crossroads markets found themselves
engulfed in an urban network. The local bank became a branch of a large city bank;
local papers were replaced by metropolitan dailies; and local dairies and breweries went
under, unable to compete with metropolitan-based firms. Where once smaller towns
were moderately self-sufficient, they now either declined in significance or began to
perform specialized functions for the larger metropolitan area. Some previously
independent communities became satellite towns, while others specialized as bedroom
suburbs. The consequence was the emergence during the first half of the century of the
era of the city-dominated metropolitan unit.

In the American city prior to the 1960s, industry was concentrated in an inner belt
located between the central business district (CBD) and the better residential areas. As
the factories prospered, the original space became more and more crowded. However,
central city expansion was both difficult and expensive. Assembly lines or other factory
operations had to be fitted into existing buildings, and even moving goods from floor to
floor was a serious problem. At the same time, surrounding land was already occupied,
which meant that whatever was already on land had to be bought and torn down before
the factory could expand. Transportation was also an increasing problem. Trucks had to
move down busy city streets before lining up to wait to get into inadequate loading
docks. Parking space for workers' cars developed into another major headache.
Nonetheless, factories stayed in the city because they needed access to rail lines to
ship their goods, and most workers did not use private cars but rather came to work on
public transportation.

Downtown, until the 1970s, was where all the major department stores and retail outlets
were located. For major shopping one went downtown, usually by public transit. Since
then, however, retail trade, service establishments, and manufacturing firms have
increasingly followed the population to suburban areas. Not since the 1970s have
downtowns accounted for over half the nation's sales. Suburban shopping malls -
virtually nonexistent 35 years ago - now number over 45,000 and dominate retail sales.
With over three-quarters of employed suburbanites working in suburbs, old
commutation patterns (residents of suburbs commuting to the central city) have also
broken down. The average commute since 1980 has not been from suburb to city but
from suburb to suburb. Downtown is no longer the major metropolitan employment site.
Contemporary American metro areas average less than 10 percent of their employment
in downtown areas.6

Out-Movement: 1950 into the 21st Century

The last half of the 20th century saw a massive flow of urban business, manufacturing,
housing, and retail trade from the center toward the periphery, a pattern that continues
today. For a century, with annexation taken into account, the population of outer
"suburban" areas has grown faster than that of central cities.7 Almost all metropolitan
growth during the last century took place in the suburban ring beyond the central city.
This redistribution of population first began in the larger and older metropolitan areas
and then became general for cities of all sizes except the very newest. Today, over 60
percent of metropolitan-area population lives in the suburbs. (This suburban
decentralization is further treated in Chapter 6: The Suburban Era.) Moreover, the
highest rate of growth in nonmetropolitan counties has occurred in counties having
metropolitan characteristics and/or experiencing overspill from metropolitan counties.
The areas of overspill, or sprawl, simply confirm the patterns of metropolitan
dominance.
COMMUTING AND COMMUNICATION

Technological breakthroughs in electrification, transportation, and communication made

the 20th century outward flow of urban population possible. The 19th century city based
on steam power was transformed into one dependent on petroleum and electricity.
Widespread use of automobiles, trucks, telephones, the Internet, and electric power
increased the movement of persons, goods, and ideas.

Research shows that the factor most closely related to a city's growth during the first
half of the 20th century was its transportation network with other cities.8 Within
metropolitan areas, transportation was also critical to growth. The automobile provided
mobility to the average urban dweller and allowed - and even encouraged - rapid
settlement of previously inaccessible areas on the periphery of the central city. Henry
Ford's Model T changed the automobile from a toy of the rich to a middle-class
necessity. Automobile registration in the United States increased from 2.5 million in
1915 to 9 million in 1920 and 26 million in 1930. Following World War II, car ownership
became common in working-class as well as middle-class families. Currently, there is
one auto for every two persons in the United States. The auto now spatially dominates
American cities. Roughly one-third of all city land is devoted to the movement or storage
of vehicles. Roads, garages, car dealerships, parking lots, and truck facilities define
urban areas.

With the coming of the automobile, the maximum distance that workers could live from
their place of employment and commute within an hour increased from a dozen miles to
perhaps 25 miles or so. (Theoretically, the automobile more than doubled the
commuting radius, but the practical realities of poor roads and traffic congestion set
lower limits.) As f 1920 a Chicago study indicated that the average distance from home
to workplace was 1.5 miles.9 (By the 1980s the distance had increased to 9.2 miles.)
However, far more important today than the actual distance from work is the commuting
time. The average commute is about a half hour; the longest average commute time of
roughly 50 minutes is found in the Atlanta metro area.

What the automobile did for people, the truck did for goods. Prior to the 1920s there
really was no alternative to the railroad for moving intercity goods. Beyond city lines no
national road system existed. Following World War I the Army sent a convoy of trucks
coast to coast to demonstrate the need for a national road. It took the Army convoy 62
difficult days to cross the country. One of the officers leading the 1919 Washington to
San Francisco convoy was Captain Dwight Eisenhower. (Later, as president,
Eisenhower signed the bill creating the national Interstate System, which now bears his
name.)

Trucks were incomparably more flexible than railroads for short hauls, and their
registrations therefore tripled during the 1920s, from 1 to 3.5 million. Trucks were free of
fixed routes and fixed schedules, needed no elaborate terminal facilities on expensive
inner-city land, and could make door-to-door pickups and deliveries. No longer was it
necessary for the factory to be on the rail line. For all but the longest hauls, the speed of
motor trucks was also superior. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, the major
advantage of motor transport was its lower cost per mile within a 250-mile radius of the
city.10 In train transport, on the other hand, the lowest cost per mile was for the longest
trips. The motor truck, then, was by far the superior competitor for the short haul - an
advantage that was increased considerably by the building of new public roads. The
interstate expressway system, begun during the late 1950s, dramatically extended the
truck's advantage. Today, virtually all short-haul goods are shipped by truck. When
goods are needed overnight, they are increasingly shipped by air.

What the motor vehicle did for transportation, the telephone did for communication.
Today when digital cell phones and PDAs are commonplace, it is useful to remember
that not until 1920 did over half of all residences have telephones. Long-distance
phoning was very expensive then. Rural electrification, sponsored by 1930s depression-
era federal government legislation, created electric co-ops to bring electric lights and
appliances to rural households. Today technology goes anywhere and geographical
features such as mountains no longer mean isolation from the mainstream. There is
more than a touch of truth in the joke that the West Virginia state flower is the satellite
dish. Everywhere businesses and offices have been liberated from central-city
locations. During the last two decades, widespread uses of air-delivery services such as
FedEx and the universal use of computers for data transfer have further weakened the
need for a central-city business location. The use of fax, e-mail, cell phones, and the
Internet means a central location is no longer a requirement for adequate
telecommuting. Business sprawl, as well as residential sprawl, are possible. Once
physically inaccessible locations now have addresses on the information superhighway.

POSTINDUSTRIAL CENTRAL CITIES

The changes noted above have radically altered the relationship between central cities
and their suburbs. Cities no longer dominate in either population or employment. During
the last quarter of the 20th century the overall national population of central cities
remained the same, but real change was taking place. Losses in northern cities were
offset by growth and annexations in southern and western sunbelt cities. Suburbs, on
the other hand, grew rapidly. There are now over three suburbanites for ever two
central-city residents. Cities once known for their industrial products have lost most of
their blue-collar manufacturing jobs. Pittsburgh, the Steel City, for example, hasn't had
steel mills in decades. Cities have lost both well-paying union jobs and the entry-level
jobs through which poor city dwellers traditionally entered the labor market. This is not a
recent change. Twenty years ago there already was almost twice as many y persons
employed in manufacturing in the suburbs as in the cities.
Decentralization of business and industry to fringe locations has been somewhat
selective. Operations that require large plants and large amounts of ground space per
worker have a high "nuisance factor" (that is, they create noise, pollution, odor, waste)
and tend to be drawn increasingly toward the periphery. Obsolete central-city plants
cannot compete economically with new, custom-designed single-story facilities. Intel, for
instance, builds its factories around the prodoct. Automobile plants, chemical firms, steel
mills, and petroleum refineries also require large areas of fringe land for their newer
operations. The American auto plants of the last decades have been built not in Detroit
but in rural Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. In 2003 Nissan
opened its largest U.S. plant in Clinton, Mississippi.

Generally, production and distribution have decentralized; and as markets have

decentralized, wholesaling has as well, since wholesaling and warehousing require
large spaces as well as access to markets. The use of trucks and air rather than
railroads for transportation also argues for the more flexible outer locations. By locating
businesses outside the congested city core near the interstate expressways and
airports, businesses reduce transportation costs. Rapid transportation provides a form
of storage en route.

On the other hand, finance, advertising, legal services, management, educational

institutions, and government generally have shown less inclination to decentralize.
While manufacturing, retail trade, and wholesaling typically have large space-per-
employee requirements, most managerial, clerical, professional, and business functions
are highly space-intensive. City offices can pack white-collar workers in cubicles, and
then stack them floor upon floor, in high-rise office buildings.

Central cities are far from dead. While downtowns have clearly lost much of their
retailing function, for decades CBDs have been experiencing new business
construction. The last decade has witnessed a downtown office building boom in cities
such as New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, and Seattle. Boston, for
example, has undergone a renaissance, moving from being a casualty of the
manufacturing shutdown of the 1970s to becoming a model today of high-tech and
service industries.11 Meanwhile, 21st century Chicago is in the midst of its biggest
building boom since the 1920s; from 1998 to 2000, it lagged behind only Atlanta and
Phoenix in the number of building permits issued.12

Management, finance, government, and law still remain at the center of the city because
they do not require great amounts of space per worker and they need access to one
another; a downtown location makes far more sense when services are oriented not to
individuals but to other organizations. In the CBD, communications are easy and
informal - business may be conducted over lunch, for example - and there are many
services and economies available outside the firm itself. Outside specialists are readily
accessible to cover areas such as advertising, legal services, accounting, tax
information, and mailing. Firms located on the periphery must provide all sorts of
services often not required of those in the center, such as parking lots, cafeterias, and
medical services. Top management may also remain in the city so that it does not
become isolated from from the informal information networks regarding competitors,
government policy, and buying patterns that are always found when a number of firms in
the same sort of business are located in the same area. Even in an era of e-mail and
computer-based information systems, face-to-face contact remains important.

Downtowns also have become major tourist and convention sites. New downtown
hotels and convention centers are common to midsized and large traditional tourist
cities. As cities have dropped their crime rates their tourist business has soared. From
1970 t 1990 alone, the 38 largest urban areas added more than 300 downtown hotels,
and more than a hundred cities have built convention centers.13 In New York's Lower
Manhattan, for example, a 92-acre business, hotel, and entertainment complex named
Battery Park City has been constructed at the cost of $1.5 billion.14 Even Harlem, which
for years suffered disinvestment, is now showing major commercial investment in large
retail businesses. Ex-President Clinton has his offices in Harlem. (See Chapter 11,
Cities and Change, for more on gentrification in Harlem.)

Overall, however, the growth of urban-office white-collar employment has not been able
to compensate fully for major blue-collar and retail trade losses. For example, between
1970 and 1986 Chicago lost 211,000 jobs that did not require a high school diploma.
During the same period the city gained 112,000 jobs requiring a college degree.15 The
2000-2003 recession hit cities hard, but overall, cities are not in financial distress;
instead, American cities have entered the 21st-century in reasonable financial condition.

Newer postautomobile cities are far more "suburban" and spread out than older
preautomobile cities.16 Research by Guterbock indicates that older metropolitan areas
have seen sharp decreases in density in their central cores, whereas post-World War II
cities never had high-density apartment neighborhoods in their central cities.17 The
result is a national pattern of moderate- to low-level density throughout metropolitan
areas- in effect, the suburbanization of the central cities. This pattern of sprawling
"suburban-like" cities is most evident in the newer cities of the South, Southwest, and
West.

EDGE CITIES

The 21st century pattern is one of edge cities. The term edge cities was coined by Joel
Garreau in 1991 to describe the pattern of the evolving new multiple urban cores
increasingly found in the outer rings of metropolitan areas.18 Currently North America
has approximately 250 edge cities, usually anchored by a mall or malls. While the
boundaries of edge cities are often imprecisely defined, edge cities do have common
characteristics.19 Edge cities generally are located well beyond the old downtowns, and
usually they are found at the intersection of two major highways, one often being an
interstate. In size they are much larger than any single mall, and while they sometimes
include limited housing (sometimes in gated communities), edge cities are
predominately retail and business centers. Edge cities commonly have more retail
stores than found in old downtowns and, unlike downtown, are usually totally
automobile dependent. According to Garreau's criteria, edge cities have to have at least
5 million square feet of leasable office space and at least 600,000 square feet of retail
space (about the size of a large mall with three anchor stores and 80 to 100 smaller
shops).

Edge cities are the culmination of three major suburban changes that have taken place
in metro areas over the last 50 years. These changes represent three overlapping
waves of out-movement from the central city. The first out-movement, in the 1950s, was
the flow of young ex-GIs and their wives to new suburban homes. (The post-war
suburban housing boom is fully discussed in Chapter 6: The Suburban Era, so we will
only touch on it here.) It is enough to say here that this movement to the suburbs
continues today and has transformed North America from an urban to a suburban
continent.

The second wave, beginning in the 1960s, was the out-movement of retail trade,
especially the out-movement of the large department stores that have anchored the new
suburban shopping malls since the 1970s. The malling of the land continues to the
present day and will be discussed later in this chapter.

The third wave became a major force in the 1970s and still continues today. This is the
out-movement of businesses and manufacturing from inner-city factories and firms to
suburban business or industrial parks. Most economic activity is now suburban used.
The bulk of the nation's blue-collar as well as white-collar jobs are now located in the
suburbs.

Edgeless and Private Edge Cities

Edge cities are difficult to define since they don't look like we think cities should look,
nor are they politically organized like cities are. From earliest history cities had clearly
defined boundaries, often demarcated by an enclosing wall. However, while edge cities
have jobs, shopping, and entertainment, they usually lack any clearly definable borders.
Unlike legally defined cities and suburbs, there are no signposts to tell you when you
are entering or leaving. Edge cities do not have clearly defined legal edges.20 They lack
municipal boundaries because they are not actually legal entities. Legally they often are
nonplace spaces, having names but not legal status. Tysons Corner in Virginia outside
of Washington, D.C., is one of the nation's largest edge cities, having more office space
than Tucson and more major retailing than Washington, but Tysons Corner, even with its
100,000 jobs, doesn't appear as a municipality on Virginia state maps. Legally, Tysons
Corner is just another part of Fairfax County.
Not being legal municipalities, edge cities have another strange characteristic for a
place called a city: they have no civic order or elected government. Being private places
they are not governed by municipal legislation, codes, or ordinances. They are private
property governed not by elected representatives but by corporate policy. Tysons
Corner - like Dallas's Las Colinas, Los Angeles's Marina Del Rey, and Boston's
Burlington Mall - are, in effect, private cities unto themselves.

What makes these places a sharp break with the past is not that they are planned,
newer, shinier, enclosed with air conditioning, or have more glass and marble but that
they are private domains rather than incorporated, legally defined areas. The old
downtowns, whether planned or unplanned, are public spaces open to all. The rules that
govern public dress and behavior are ordinances passed by elected officials. Outer
cities, for all their open courtyards and fountains, and all their calling themselves "town
centers," are fundamentally different. Basic questions, such as who can be in an outer-
city office park or shopping mall and what they can or cannot do while there, are
determined not by civic ordinance but by private corporate policy. The new outer cities
are administered by decree. They may be safe, but they are not democratic. They are
privately managed city-states controlled and managed by a financial, rather than a
municipal, corporation.

Remarkably, this major shift of our outer cities from public to private control has taken
place almost completely without public notice, discussion, or debate. The once-public
city has been privatized without discussion. Residential areas within edge cities are
sometimes even walled off and "gated" with private security guards restricting entrance.

Suburban Business Growth

The building of the interstate expressway system over the last 45 years gave industry a
genuine alternative to a central-city location. Goods could now be cheaply and rapidly
moved by truck rather than rail. Outer suburban land was cheap, and the taxes were
low. Importantly, the plant could be designed from the inside out. A common pattern was
to lay out an assembly line all on one level and then simply build walls around the
workspace. The size and the shape of the building could be determined by the needs of
the factory rather than by the size and shape of a lot or an existing plant.

Thus, in the decades following World War II industry increasingly leapfrogged over
intermediate city residential areas and moved directly from the inner city to suburban
industrial parks. When a firm was serving only local markets, a central city location, with
its ease of access to all parts of the city, made sense. Such a location was reasonable
even if the main transport between cities was done by rail. Today, however, firms with
national markets usually seek a location on or near an interstate expressway. The
industrial park has supplanted the city factory, with twice as many manufacturing jobs
now located in suburbs as in central cities. Not only manufacturing but also white-collar
jobs have been suburbanized. The earlier suburbanization of population provided a
suburban workforce, a workforce that now commutes to work by auto. In turn, the
location of plants is suburbs encouraged even more workers to move to new suburban
tract-type housing developments.

Now employment of all sorts is most likely to have a suburban zip code. Outer Dallas,
for example, has three times the office space of the central business district, while
suburban Atlanta has twice the office space of the center city. Even in the New York
metropolitan area, northern New Jersey now has more office space than Manhattan.
Nor are suburban offices simply back-office operations seeking low rentals; the
executive suite has come to the suburbs. For example, Plano, Texas, north of Dallas,
was a bedroom suburb two decades ago. Today it is the national headquarters for five
major corporations: Frito-Lay, Electronic Data Systems, Murata Business Systems,
Southland Life Insurance, and J.C. Penney. J.C. Penney moved its headquarters to
Plano from New York City. The suburban economy is substantially service oriented,
often with its marketplace patterns being nationally or internationally, rather than locally,
focused.

Sear is an example of the suburban shift. In the 1970s Sears consolidated its operations
in the world's tallest building, the new 110-story Sears Tower in downtown Chicago.
However, as Sears was placing its head in the clouds, its network of urban-based stores
increasingly lost touch with suburban customers. Now Sears has gone suburban. In
1992 Sears moved all of its 5,000 merchandise-group employees of Sears Tower to
suburban Hoffman Estates, 35 miles northwest of Chicago. The new Sears
headquarters, named Prairie Stone, occupies a former soybean filed and boasts 200
acres of reconstructed prairie and wetlands. The highest building is six stories high.

Growth of outer metropolitan-area private economies is increasingly driven by job

growth in high-end service industries such as information technology, biomedical
research, and business services. Suburban Fairfax County, Virginia, outside
Washington, D.C., now has some 2,000 high-tech firms.21 It also recently became the
richest county in America with a median household income of $90,937. The major per
capita location of Internet addresses is not New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago. The
places with the largest per capita number of .com, .net, and .org addresses are Herndon
and Fairfax Counties in Virginia, both metro edge cities of Washington, D.C.

As suburbs have gone from being primarily residential areas to being the primary
location of shopping, manufacturing, and office space, the old Burgess hypothesis of
economic growth out from the CBD through a series of zones has become history.
Business, retail trade, and homeowners have all leapfrogged to the outer ring of the
metro area. Suburbs have become the new commercial and economic cores of
metropolitan areas, and a result our spatial models of the metropolitan area have gone
from core-periphery models to multi-nucleated or multi-centered models.
Malling of the Land

If the dominant urban symbol for the beginning of the 20th century was the skyscraper,
the dominant symbol for the beginning of the 21st century is the shopping mall. As
expressed by Kowinski, "More than locations for consumption, malls have become the
signature structure of the age."22 Some, such as the economist Tyler Cowen, even
praise the commercial culture of the mall as the best of all possible worlds.23 You may
love the malls, or believe their consumerism values represent all that is wrong with the
country, but it is impossible to discuss contemporary metropolitan life without discussing
the role of the shopping mall. The larger malls have become social as well as retail
centers. They have become America's town centers and main streets. Shopping centers
from convenience centers to massive malls now account for over two-thirds of the
nation's nonautomotive retail sales.

Shopping centers are actually a rather new development. The first shopping center, as
we understand the term, was Country Club Plaza, developed in 1923 in Kansas City. At
the end of World War II, there were only eight shopping centers in a;; of North America.
The first of modern malls surrounded by parking places was Northgate, which opened
on the edge of Seattle in 1950. The first enclosed mall, Southgate Center, designed by
the architect Victor Gruen, did not open until 1956 outside Minneapolis. The now
ubiquitous food courts were first introduced by the Rouse Company in the early 1970s.

Today the nation's 45,000 shopping malls are an integral part of the suburban
landscape and range in size from small strip malls to the West Edmonton megamall,
which is the size of 115 football fields and has 800 shops, 19 movie theatres, 110 places
to eat, a 355-room hotel, the world's largest amusement park, a five-acre lake with the
world's largest wave machine, and parking for over 200,000 cars. Malls sometimes
become cities unto themselves. San Jose, California, has an enclosed air-conditioned
center that includes 103 stores, 27 restaurants, and 9,000 parking spaces. Houston's
Galleria, which set the pattern for the multiuse malls to follow, is modeled after a 19th-
century gallery in Milan, Italy; it has three levels, and in addition to the usual department
stores, restaurants, and shops, it also includes an athletic club with 10 air-conditioned
tennis courts and a jogging track. (Some small college athletic departments would
gladly exchange their facilities for those of the shopping mall.) It is connected to two
high-rise office buildings and a 404-room hotel. Malls, with their fountains, film festivals,
and wine-tastings, have come a long way from the mercantile stores of the last century.

The shopping mall is replacing Main Street as the core of the community. Increasingly,
the malls service social as well as commercial functions. (Reflecting this, a shopping
mall in this author's metro area changed its name from "Chesterfield Mall" to
"Chesterfield Town Centre.") Malls, with their "mall rats" and "mall bunnies," provide a
place for young adolescents to gather and socialize. At the other end of the age
spectrum, the mall also provides a safe and weather-free place for seniors to walk and
socialize.24 As downtowns have faded as centers of retail trade, dining, and
entertainment, the shopping mall has become the contemporary version of the Greek
agoras.

Malls and "Street Safety"

Malls are designed to exude an image of a comfortable, safe, and secure place. In good
part this is done by excluding from the mall any persons or activities that might seem
disruptive or disturbing. The strength of traditional downtowns is their ability to produce
suprise and excitement, of not knowing what is around the corner. Malls, by contrast,
emphasize total predictability. No street musicians, no Hare Krishnas, no one soliciting
for charity, and no activities that might in any way disturb or offend its customers. For all
their open courtyards and talk of "town centers," malls are rigorously private, and thus
can ban from the property teenagers who are disruptive, panhandlers, and bag ladies.
No one has the right to walk into a mall just because they feel like going there.

The mall police enforce the image of the mall as a secure place into which outside
problems don't intrude. They walk inside beats and patrol parking lots in highly visible
vehicles with revolving flash lights. However, while the mall security staff may wear the
uniforms, badges, and even weapons of police, they usually are "rent a cop" private
security officers dressed to look like police officers. Their role is basically public
relations. In most states security guards lack police powers to arrest. They can only hold
someone until the real police arrive. Similarly, the stop signs on mall roads, while
looking official, are only advisory since the mall rights-of-way are not municipal or state
roads. To maintain their image of safety, malls use their advertising clout to see that any
crimes committed on mall property are not reported on local TV or in the local
newspaper. Malls and their stores are major media advertisers. In reality malls have
problems with car theft, robbery, and occasionally rape, but to acknowledge that malls
have crimes other than shoplifting would damage the illusion that both mall operators
and their patrons seek to maintain.

NONMETROPOLITAN GROWTH

Historically, metropolitan areas in the United States have grown faster than
nonmetropolitan areas. The classical ecological model implicitly assumed continued
movement of population from rural hinterlands to metropolitan areas. This clearly was
the case for the first 70 years of the 20th century, when the nonmetropolitan sector -
core or fringe - was growing while rural areas consistently lost population. However,
during the 1970s, for the first time, rural counties not only stopped declining but
increased in population. The fastest-growing counties from 1970 to 1980 were
nonmetropolitan. As a result, some academics proclaimed that the pattern of increasing
population concentration in metropolitan areas had come to a close.25 The pattern of
metropolitan dominance was said to be challenged by an emerging pattern of increased
dispersion and deconcentration. However, by the 1980s talk of a "rural renaissance"
had largely faded since the 1980s was a decade of farm depression with metropolitan
areas again growing considerably faster than nonmetropolitan areas. Then the 1990s
saw some rural rebound, and by decade's end some 71 percent of rural counties were
growing again.26 For example, between 1997 and 1998 metropolitan counties grew 1.3
percent, but outlying counties in the same population areas increased 2.6 percent, or
twice as fast.27 This pattern continued into the early 21st century.

Diffuse Growth

What is causing this new rural growth? Is the growth of nonmetropolitan population a
sign of a return to older and simpler rural ways? Are we about to experience a rural
renaissance?

No. We are experiencing a transformation in spatial settlement patterns, but this does
not represent a rebirth of rural ways of life. Rather, what we are witnessing is the out-
movement of population into a new from of community that is more diffuse.28 Most of the
rural rebound has been due to in-migration by previous urban residents rather than to
natural increase. Rural growth is largely due to deconcentration of businesses (L.L.
Bean operates from a small town in rural Maine, and Land's End from a town in rural
Wisconsin) and because of the rural residence preferences of in-movers.

The most rapidly growing nonmetropolitan areas are those economically tied into the
metropolitan nexus but legally beyond the metro area. Often these sprawl areas can't be
sharply defined as suburb, small town, or rural countryside. Catchy phrases like "rural
renaissance" or "rural rebound" tend to trap us in our own rhetoric. As already noted,
both the proportion and the absolute number of persons engaged in agriculture continue
to decrease. Farm population dropped about one-quarter during the last decade, and
less than 2 percent of the U.S. population remains on farms. Clearly, any rural rebound
does not mean a renaissance of the family farm or a return to agricultural pursuits.

Additionally, rural growth is now often related to proving recreational opportunities for
metropolitan residents. Employment-oriented nonmetropolitan growth can be best seen
not as something totally separate from urban areas but rather as an extension of the
metropolitan area's influence beyond the daily commuting range. More than 50 years
ago, Louis Wirth noted that urbanism - that is, urban behavior patterns - had become
the American way of life. Today it is far more so. Even isolated towns in Montana boast
drive-in gourmet coffee stands. As we continue to expand into a national metropolitan
society, distinctions between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan become even more
blurred. The number of MSAs and CMSAs is growing while the boundaries of existing
metropolitan areas are progressively expanding. Growing nonmetropolitan areas don't
look all that different.

National Society?

We are rapidly moving toward a national metropolitan system in which old differences
cease to make a difference. The pattern of discrete metropolitan concentrations is being
challenged by an emerging pattern of increased dispersion and metropolitan
deconcentration. Metropolitan areas are no longer even semi-independent. Local banks
run by local bankers who knew their customers have largely been replaced by a handful
of national banks. National digital cell phone networks, e-mail, the Internet, and FedEx
and its competitors have further reduced the friction of space. While at the turn of the
century the commuter railroad and streetcar made it possible for a vanguard of
businesspeople to move their residences from the city, commuter air travel now puts a
premium on accessibility to an airport. In an era of air travel, the significant factor is no
longer distance. Distance is measured not in miles or kilometers, but by time. Even with
terrestrial travel, the question "How far is it?" commonly anticipates a temporal rather
than spatial response: How long does it take to get there? Increased mobility of goods,
persons, and ideas suggests that a new urban phase - a national urban system - is
being created.

Air shuttles tie cities together: a commuter between New York and Chicago or Los
Angeles and San Francisco is able to catch a flight in either direction almost every half
hour from dawn to dusk. Ironically, shuttle flights linking San Diego, Los Angeles, and
San Francisco make it easier (and faster) to move between these cities than around Los
Angeles itself. It is one of the peculiarities of modern life that the air shuttles from city to
city offer better, more frequent, and even faster transportation than that often available
within cities themselves. Increasingly, we don't even physically commute; rather, we
telecommute. Physical distance is losing importance.

The emerging pattern of a national metropolitan society forces us to rethink traditional

assumptions. In the 1950s, Otis Dudley Duncan suggested that the concept of a "rural-
urban continuum" was losing empirical validity.29 Today, emerging nonmetropolitan
growth patterns suggest that the concept of a metropolitan-nonmetropolitan continuum
is also losing utility. New patterns contradict the old assumption that the social and
economic factors of urbanization are a consequence of the distance from the point of
population concentration. This change has yet to be fully reflected in federal policy or
research.30 Contemporary distinctions between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan are
becoming more blurred with each passing decade. In the contemporary information
society, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish metropolitan and nonmetropolitan
residents on the basis of occupations, consumer habits, and degree of sophistication.31
In many respects the metropolitan-nonmetropolitan differences have ceased to make a
difference. Whether we live in a metropolitan area or not, we are all part of a
metropolitan society.

THE RISE OF THE SUNBELT

Population and Economic Shifts

One of the most dramatic urban changes of the last 35 years has been the historic shift
of population and power from the old industrial heartland of the Northeast and North-
central regions to the metropolises of the West and the South (see Table 5-2). The
growing southern rim, commonly known as the sunbelt, extends roughly from Virginia
on the east through the states of the South and Southwest, up through California on the
west. The rise of Houston from a steamy Texas town of little economic interest to its role
as the oil capital of the world typifies the pattern of sunbelt growth.32 Houston is now the
nation's fourth largest city, exceeded in size only by New York, Los Angeles, and
Chicago. Without the technology of air conditioning this transformation would have been
impossible.

A striking example of the growing sway of the sunbelt is that Peoria, Illinois - long touted
by comedians, politicians, and marketers as the quintessential heartland city - has been
passed in size by the lesser-known Peoria, Arizona. As of 2003 the sunbelt Arizona
suburb of Peoria had gown to 123,319 residents while the Illinois rustbelt Peoria had
declined to 112,670. The old question, "How will it play in Peoria?" takes on an entirely
new meaning. Today, which Peoria provides the truer mirror of America?

Since the 1970s the population below the Mason-Dixon Line and west of the Rockies
has outpaced that of the nation. Meanwhile, older economic areas of the Midwest and
Northeast have been stagnant or declining. These latter northern areas are sometimes
collectively referred to as the frostbelt, snowbelt, or rustbelt. The term rustbelt refers to
the decline of the heavy industry cities. During much of the 19th and 20th centuries the
northern industrial and manufacturing centers defined America's industrial might.
However, by the 1970s the dominant northern cities were experiencing
deindustrialization. The Census Bureau reports that during the last decade the fastest-
growing one-fifth of U.S. counties were in the South (56 percent) and West (24 percent)
while only 1 percent were in the Northeast.33 This pattern of sunbelt growth continues
into the new century (see Table 5-2). Half the national population growth during the past
decade occurred in the three sunbelt states of California, Florida, and Texas. Each of
these states is expected to gain more than 6 million people by 2025, and Texas,
California, and Florida will account for 45 percent of the United States net population
change between now and 2025.34 Table 5-2 indicates that every one of the 12 fastest-
growing metropolitan areas are in the West or South. In fact, all of the 40 fastest-
growing metro areas are in the West or South.35

The sunbelt, long a virtually dependent colony of the industrial Northeast, has
undergone an economic transformation. Older northern frostbelt cities have seen
populations and businesses depart for the "boom" areas of the South and Southwest.
Businesses are said to be attracted to such areas by a "good business climate," by
which is meant lower wages, lower taxes, a lower rate of unionization, and lower land
costs. The sunbelt as an energy-producing area also enjoys a cost advantage,
particularly when oil costs are high. The milder climates require less energy for heat
(this is only partially offset by higher air-conditioning costs). Quality-of-life factors such
as warmer winters and the chance to engage in outdoor activities - such as playing golf
most of the year - also play a role. Also, the racial climate has improved markedly.

Sunbelt cities commonly have been able to annex outlying areas as or before they
develop. This means the cities are far less financially stressed because they can include
within their city boundaries their new "suburban" development. By contrast, almost all
northern cities have had to deal with fixed city boundaries since roughly the 1920s, or
even earlier in the case of cities in the Northeast. During the last quarter of a century
sunbelt cities such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio,
Albuquerque, Phoenix, and San Diego have all become world-class locations. Greater
Los Angeles, in terms of economic activity and cultural influence, is now challenging
New York. It is argued that Los Angeles will be the leading western-hemisphere city of
the 21st century.

Regional Consequences

The result of interregional population shifts has been dramatic. The South, which
historically always had migratory outflows of population, now is the fastest-growing
region in the nation. Since the mid-1960s the South has also replaced the West as the
major locus of new employment growth. During this same period, economically powerful
industrial cities of the North have experienced decline in both population and economic
influence. For example, the central city of St. Louis now has only as many people as it
did in 1890; Cleveland now has as many as during World War I; and Detroit now has no
more than it did in 1920.

This does not mean northern cities and metro areas are in economic decline; most are
not. What it does mean, though, is that population is flowing southward and west,
attracted by new jobs, a mild climate, a lower cost of living, and a lifestyle stressing
outdoor living and informal entertaining. While the North and Midwest still have more
corporate headquarters, there has been movement towards the South and West.36
The fastest-growing sunbelt industries are service industries such as real estate and
tourism, plus the newer, highly skilled industries such as electronics, energy, and
aircraft. These often have a preference for a location in the Southwest, particularly
suburbs of major cities. Federal-level political decisions, such as locating the space
agency in Houston and the national center for silicon research in Austin, have strongly
reinforced growth trends. Even after base cutbacks, military budgets disproportionately
directed monies and employment to areas with substantial military basing, i.e., the
South.

Some even suggest that the advantage of the sunbelt is largely political in origin.
Mollenkopf argues that the advantage comes not from lower wages or nonunionized
work forces but from the comparative political advantages of sunbelt cities being able to
push business-oriented growth policies: these cities’ governments have less need to
placate the poor or minority groups, who exercise less influence than they do in
northern cities.37 Sunbelt populations are more likely to vote conservative and are less
likely to support liberal political candidates or policies – excepting firm support of Social
Security by the retired elderly.

Although the population shift to the South and Southwest was long in coming, the
consequences and implications for urban areas of the old industrial heartland were not
immediately recognized. The Northeast had been long accustomed to viewing the South
as an economic backwater and a cultural desert. Now those in the sunbelt view the old
industrial cities as fighting inevitable decline. For almost two decades, California,
Florida, and Texas have led the nation in building construction. Not only people, but the
taxes as well, have been flowing southward. As a consequence of regional shifts,
northern urban areas that have been the nation’s centers of population and power for a
century or more are finding themselves on the defensive. In national politics the sunbelt
is clearly gaining influence and power, as seen in Figure 5-3. As a result of
Congressional reapportionment based on the 2000 census, Connecticut, New York,
Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin all lost House seats.38

Newer cities of the sunbelt, because of the office-at-home phenomenon, also require
less office space. Greater New York has some 27 feet of office space per person. In
greater Los Angeles by comparison, the figure is a mere 15 square feet per person.
Telecommuting is becoming more common, and the consultant subculture often works
at home.

The impression is sometimes given that most sunbelt growth is a consequence of

runaway northern industries that abandoned the industrial heartland to build low-wage
nonunion plants in the South. This view is inaccurate.39 Steel mills and other heavy
industry did not move south when they closed down in older industrial areas. Rather
than attracting smokestack industries, the sunbelt states developed new economic
activities. As summed up by Kirkpatrick Sale, the writer who first focused national
attention on the changing nature of the sunbelt:
 In broad terms there has been a shift from the traditional heavy
manufacturing long associated with the industrial belt of the Northeast to
the new technological industries that have grown up in the Southern Rim –
aerospace, defense, electronics.40

Sunbelt Problems

However, the sunbelt is not all sunshine. The rise of the sunbelt has also produced
problems. Breakneck growth has brought not only jobs but also massive urban sprawl,
huge traffic congestion, overtaxed water and sewer systems, rising air pollution, and
widespread environmental degradation. Environmental pollution has become a very
serious concern. Houston, for example, as of 2001 had the worst air pollution in the
nation. Additionally, auto congestion, water supplies, and sewage disposal problems are
growing ever more severe.41

Cities such as Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and
San Diego have all had to cope with phenomenal growth, and the responses have not
all been similar.42 Sunbelt cities are being pressured to expand educational
opportunities, social services, housing stock, roadways, and waste management
facilities. All these require financing. At the same time, citizen groups are lobbying for
limits on taxes. Traditionally, cities of the sunbelt have had low taxes but also have
provided lower-level serviced, especially for poorer residents. Today, city officials are
caught newcomers having contradictory expectations of northern-level services and
southern-level taxes. Some spending decisions are made at the state rather than local
level, but how a state spends its resources helps determine the future of its cities. In the
mid-1990s, for example, Texas voters approved issuing bonds to build new prisons but
turned down issuing bonds for building new schools. Texas now has, proportionally, the
world’s largest prison population. However, it is doubtful whether having a large number
of new prisons is going to help attract new businesses to the state.

It should also be remembered that sunbelt cities are not automatically immune to the
population declines that affected frostbelt cities. While 86 percent of the U.S. cities in
the Northeast and 66 percent of those in the industrial Northcentral region lost
population during the last decade, this was also true of 26 percent of the South’s cities
and 12 percent of the West’s. A sunbelt location does not prevent people from moving
out. After outpacing the rest of the nation’s rate of economic growth for three decades,
some long-tern problems are emerging. Low wages once gave the sunbelt a
competitive advantage. However, not only have sunbelt wages gone up, but in a global
economy firms that once moved to Alabama or the Carolinas now move to Mexico or
Southeast Asia. There is no guarantee that the collapse of property values that hit
Houston in the late 1980s and southern California in the early 1990s will not repeat; as
of 2004 both places are prosperous, but the high oil prices that support Houston’s boom
as this is being written can go down as well as up.

Finally, in the application of a high-technology economy, some parts of the South still
have the liability of an academics system that needs upgrading, particularly at the
primary and secondary school levels. As a region, the South has been less willing to
invest the necessary tax money in developing its human capital. Teachers are
comparatively poorly paid and public school systems lad behind the rest of the nation.
High-tech firms require well-educated workers. A condition Mercedes-Benz placed on
opening its auto plant in Alabama was that the local school system be upgraded. Unless
the South invests more in education it may again see itself outshone by northern and
central regions with better-supported educational systems at the primary, secondary,
and university levels.

With the initial southern advantage of lower wage scales, a nonunion business climate,
and cheaper energy costs losing force, there is nothing necessarily permanent about
the sunbelt boom. Increasingly, economic success depends not on geography nut on
having an educated labor force. Businesses just seeking a cheap labor force move to
China.

MOVEMENT TO THE COASTS

A major American migration trend of the early 21st century is toward the Atlantic and Gulf
shores. More than 41 million Americans, one in seven persons, now lives in a county
abutting the eastern or southern seaboard.43 And this figure does not include those with
vacation homes on a shore. The shoreline strip is growing significantly faster than the
rest of the country. All the way from Maine to Texas, seaside property is burgeoning.
Wealth generated by a strong economy, and more flexible work arrangements such as
telecommuting, are resulting in more and more people living permanently near the
shore. Seasonal resort towns are turning into sprawling full-time communities. Cape
Cod, Massachusetts, for example now has a year-round population of 225,000. The
Outer Banks of North Carolina a decade ago were largely deserted after Labor Day;
now even a Wal-Mart has been built on the sand banks.

Less mass movement to the beach has taken place on the West Coast. Especially in
California the beaches and bluffs along the Pacific generally have state protections
against private development. Also on the West Coast, the south-flowing California
current keeps all but the most southern Californian beaches chilly, even in summer.
Along the East Coast, on the other hand, the water is kept warm by the north-flowing
Gulf Stream. However, Mother Nature is not always benign on the Atlantic and Gulf
Coasts. Since 1995 there has been a sharp rise in hurricanes, and the risk of a major
killer hurricane is at an all-time high.
The costs of coastal living are not just paid by those living on the water’s edge. New
populations at the beach mean that existing taxpayers have to subsidize new water,
sewer, and road systems. Major state roads have to built so that when a dangerous
storm hits, evacuation gridlock does not result. One of the reasons people are willing,
literally, to build their castles on the sand in high-risk coastal areas is because they don’t
have to pay many of the costs of building in these high-risk areas. Federal disaster and
insurance programs help them out if a hurricane, storm, or even coastal erosion
damages or wipes out their property.

This is known as the “moral hazard” problem. It occurs when existing federal programs,
by protecting against loss, inadvertently create the very problem they were designed to
prevent. Since government foots much of the bill for coastal disasters, people can afford
to move to unstable coastal areas. Given these circumstances it is not surprising that
we are rushing like lemmings toward the sea. The National Flood Insurance Act even
provides up to $350,000 insurance for properties private insurances firms will not cover.
Currently it covers some 4.2 million properties valued at $524 billion. The federal
government even pays for most beach reconstruction, although the program has come
under attack as being environmentally unsound. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
currently spends $80 million a year just to bring in sand and rebuild beaches. The
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that even without storms
some 30,000 coastal homes sit on land that will be under water in 30 years.44

SUMMARY

Metropolitan areas are replacing cities as the major urban unit, and within metro areas
suburban edge cities are the locus of growth. The first half of the 20th century saw a
major inflow of population into metro areas, and the central city clearly dominated the
metro area economically, socially, and demographically. Since the mid-20th century,
movement has been toward the periphery (and beyond), and suburban areas have
experienced dramatic growth. Today over 60 percent of metro-area populations live in
suburbs, and in some metro areas the figure is far higher. As of 2003 there were 362
Census Bureau-defined Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). The 73 largest of these
were designated as Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas (PMSAs).

The growth of metro areas during the 20th century is closely related to technological
breakthroughs in transportation and communication. Automobile registration has gone
from 2.5 million in 1915 to one car for every two people today. Not until 1920 did half of
all Americans have telephones. Today digital cell phones and PDAs are commonplace,
and businesses no longer require a central-city location. Decentralization to fringe
locations has been somewhat selective. Downtowns with their high-rise buildings are
still cost-effective for finance, advertising, legal services, and management operations
that have limited space requirements. As the 21st century opens, cities from New York to
Chicago to Atlanta to Phoenix are experiencing downtown office building booms.

However, the greatest growth is taking place in America’s approximately 250 suburbs
edge cities. Edge cities are hard to define because they lack clearly defined legal
edges. They are usually not legal entities but placeless places. Edge cities also differ
from central cities insofar as edge cities are legally private places without any civic order
or elected government. This privatization of edge cities has taken place largely without
public debate or even discussion.

The majority of blue-collar as well as white-collar employment is now suburban.

Northern New Jersey has more office space than Manhattan, and most industry has a
suburban zip code. Suburban shopping malls have become the dominant metropolitan
symbol for the beginning of the 21st century. Today there are 45,000 shopping malls that
have replaced Main Street as the center of the community. Malls are designed to project
a safe and secure image, and activities or persons that management views as
potentially disruptive are banned from the corporate-owned and –managed malls.

Nonmetropolitan growth is again taking place, but it does not represent a rural
renaissance or return to farm life. Some nonmetropolitan growth is the result of sprawl
from metropolitan areas and some is occurring in outlying areas providing recreational
opportunities for metro-area residents. Economically and socially we are becoming a
national society.

For the last 30 years, growth in the sunbelt has outdistanced that of the nation. The
sunbelt stretching from Virginia through the South and Southwest to California generally
benefits from lower energy costs and quality-of-life advantages such as warmer winters.
Sunbelt economic growth has not been the result of capturing runaway northern
industries but of developing new economic activities in aerospace, electronics, and
technology. A new population movement is toward coastal locations. One in seven
Americans now lives in a county that abuts the shore. Coastal living is accelerated by
the federal government largely funding insurance against the storm losses and other
costs of building in high-risk coastal areas.
ENDNOTES

1 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Estimates Programs, Population Division, Washington, D.C.,
April 2000.

2 Kenneth Johnson, The Rural Rebound, Reports on America, Population Reference Bureau, September
1999.

3 Norman Scott Brien Gras, Introduction to Economic History, Harper, New York, 1922; and Roderick
MacKenzie, The Metropolitan Community, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1933.

4 U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Residences of Farms and Rural Areas: 1990,” Current Population Reports,
series P-20, no. 457, 1992, p. 2.

5 U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, “Population Profile of the United States:
1981,” Current Population Reports, series P-20, no. 394, Washington, D.C., September 1982, p. 7.

6 Larrt S. Bourne, “Commuting,” in William van Vliet, ed., The Encyclopedia of Housing, Sage, Thousand
Oaks, CA, 1998, p. 72.

7 J. John Palen, The Suburbs, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1995.

8 Mark LaGory and James Nelson, “An Ecological Analysis of Growth between 1900 and 1940,”
Sociological Quarterly 19:590-603, 1978.

9 Beverly Duncan, “Factors in Work-Residence Separation: Wages and Salary Workers, 1951,” American
Sociological Review 21:48-56, 1956.

10 National Resources Committee, Technological Trends and National Policy, U.S. Government Printing
Office, Washington, D.C., 1937.

11 Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson, The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Change in an
American Metropolis, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2000.

12 Tracie Rozhon, “Chicago Girds for Big Battle Over Its Skyline,” New York Times, November 12, 2000,
p. 1.

13 Bernard Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities, M.I.T. Press,
Cambridge, 1989.

14 David Dunlap, “Filling in the Blanks at Battery Park,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 1999, p. RE2.
15 John D. Kasarda, quoted in “Social Scientists Examine Common Challenges Facing Industrial Cities,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 1990, p. A6.

16 Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (eds.), Posturban California: The Transformation of Orange
County Since World War II, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.

17 Thomas A. Guterbock, “Suburbanization of American Cities of the Twentieth Century: A New Index and
Another Look,” paper presented at meeting of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, 1982.

18 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Doubleday, New York, 1991.

19 Ibid., p. 425.

20 J. John Palen, op. cit., p. 187.

21 Samantha Friedman, “Behind the Monuments: Taking a Sociological Look at Life in the Nation’s
Capital,” Footnotes, American Sociological Association, 28:1, July/August 2000.

22 William S. Kowinski, The Malling of America, Murrow, New York, 1985, p. 22.

23 Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998.

24 Dawn Graham, “Going to the Mall: A Leisure Activity for Urban Elderly People,” Canadian Journal of
Aging 10:345-358, 1991.

25 William H. Frey, “Migration and Metropolitan Decline in Developed Countries,” Population and
Development Review, 14:595-628, December 1988.

26 Kenneth M. Johnson, “The Rural Rebound,” Reports on America, Population Reference Bureau,
September 1999.

27 Lawrence Knutson, “Americans Moving to South and West,” Washingtonpost.com, March 17, 1998.

28 John Herbers, The New Heartland, Times Books, New York, 1986.

29 Otis Dudley Duncan, “Community Size and the Rural-Urban Continuum,” in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J.
Reiss (eds.), Cities and Society, Free Press, New York, 1957, pp. 35-45.

30 The Department of Agriculture, for example, divides nonmetropolitan counties into six types: they
“describe a dimension of urban influence in which each succeeding group is affected to a lesser degree
by the social and economic conditions of urban areas. This includes the influence of urban areas at a
distance as well as within counties themselves.

31 William Parker, “Frisbie” and John D. Kasarda, “Spatial Processes,” in Neil Smelser (ed.), Handbook
of Modern Sociology, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA, 1988, p. 636.

32 Joe R. Feagin, Free Enterprise City: Houston in Political-Economic Perspective, Rutgers University
Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1989.

33 Lawrence Knutson, “Americans Moving to South and West,” Washingtonpost.com, March 17, 1998.
34 Paul Campbell, Census Bureau, “Population Projections: States, 1995-2025,” Current Population
Reports, P25-1131, May 1997, p. 2.

35 U.S. Census Bureau, “Metropolitan Areas Ranked by Percent Population Change: 1990-2000,”
Internet Release date: April 2, 2001.

36 Sally K. Ward, “Trends in the Location of Corporate Headquarters, 1969-1989,” Urban Affairs
Quarterly 29:468-478, 1994.

37 John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1983.

38 Steven A. Holmes, “After Standing Up to be Counted, Americans Number 281,421,906,” New York
Times, December 29, 2000, p. 1.

39 Larry Sawers and William K. Tabb (eds.), Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban Development and Regional
Restructuring, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984.

40 Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern
Establishment, Random House, New York, 1975, p. 5.

41 Joe R. Feagin, “Tallying the Social Costs of Urban Growth under Capitalism: The Case of Houston,” in
Scott Cummings (ed.), Business Elites and Urban Development, SUNY Press, Albany, N.Y., 1989, pp.
205-234.

42 Rchard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice (eds.), Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World War II,
University of Texas Press, Austin, 1983.

43 “Growth Reshapes Coast,” USA Today, July 21, 2000, p. 1A.

44 Owen Ullman, “Facing Mother Nature’s Fury,” USA Today, July 24, 2000, p. 6A.

BOX 5.1 Defining Metropolitan Areas

The Census Bureau has a number of ways of defining different-sized metropolitan

areas, a term that commonly refers to a large concentration of 100,000 or more
inhabitants that contains as its core a city with 50,000 or more inhabitants and that is
surrounded by suburban areas. Traditionally, the Bureau of the Census has defined
metropolitan areas in two ways: as urbanized areas and as Metropolitan Statistical
Areas.

Urbanized Areas. According to the Census Bureau definition, an urbanized area

consists of a central city, or cities, of 50,000 or more and their surrounding closely
settled territory, whether incorporated or unincorporated. The term, thus, refers to the
actual urban population of an area regardless of political boundaries such as county or
state lines. All residing in the urbanized area are considered urban, but the population is
also divided into those in the “central city” and those in the remainder of the area, or
“urban fringe.”

Because it is based on density (at least 1,000 persons per square mile), the urbanized
area has no fixed boundaries, and thus changes form census to census to reflect actual
population changes. This potential strength can, however, become a weakness when
one is doing longitudinal research since the urbanized area of study has covered
different land areas in the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses. The proportion of a state’s
population living in urbanized areas in 2000 varied form 85 percent in New Jersey to 15
percent in Vermont.

Metropolitan Statistical Area. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) are what are
commonly referred to when speaking of metro areas. They are officially designated by
the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and are based on territory rather than
population. (Before 1983 MSAs were known as Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas.)
A Metropolitan Statistical Area is a county or group of counties having a central city of
50,000 or more, or twin cities with a combined 50,000 or more. The MSA includes the
county in which the central city is located plus any adjacent counties that are judged by
the Bureau of the Census to be metropolitan in character and socially and economically
integrated with the central city. In New England, where there are no counties, MSAs
consist of townships and cities instead. As of the 2000 census, 362 areas were
designated as MSAs. The 73 largest of these were designated Primary Metropolitan
Statistical Areas (PMSAs). New Jersey was the most metropolitan state with 100
percent of its population living in metro areas. Arizona was second with 88 percent, and
Nevada third with 86 percent (open space in both these states is very open).

Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas. In order to distinguish the very largest

concentrations of metropolitan populations, Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas
(CMSAs) have been designated. A CMSA must have at least a million persons and is
composed of a number of PMSAs. As of 2000, there were 18 Consolidated Metropolitan
Statistical Areas.

All the variously defined metropolitan areas can cross state lines. The New York CMSA,
for example, includes portions of New Jersey and Connecticut. The Philadelphia CMSA
includes, in addition to the section in Pennsylvania, portions of Maryland, Delaware, and
New Jersey.
In 1990, the term Metropolitan Area (MA) becae the overall umbrella term covering
MSAs, PMSAs, and CMSAs. There currently are 362 Metropolitan Areas.

Canada has 25 metropolitan areas, called “CSAs” (Census Metropoltian Areas), each
having an urban core population of at least 100,000.

BOX 5.2 The Ultimate Malls

The Goliath of shopping malls is the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta.*
Edmonton is a city of 967,000 persons, but during after-Christmas sales the mall alone
draws as many as a quarter of a million people a day to its site on the cold Canadian
prarie. This mall attracts 20 million people a year in a country of 30 million people.
Visitor’s come to see a shopper’s fantasyland. There are some 800 stores, 110
restaurants, 19 movie theaters, and even a Caesar’s Palace Bingo parlor, as well as the
world’s largest indoor amusement park, with 24 rides including two 13-story-plus roller
coasters. There are additionally, an 18-hole miniature par-46 golf course, an NHL-size
ice rink, and a dolphin lagoon. And set in a balmy 86-degree atmosphere, the world’s
largest indoor wave pool boasts a sand beach, palm trees, and 22 water slides. On a
lower level, the mall also houses an aquarium. All this in often frigid northern Alberta.

The most spectacular feature, however, is the mall’s 200-foot artificial lake. At the end of
one lake, a replica of Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, rests on a coral
reef, illuminated by a giant skylight. At the other end of the lake, children and parents
line up to cruise the 20-foot-deep lake in one of four 25-person submarines. The mall
actually has more submarines than the Canadian Navy.

In 1992 the Ghermezian brothers, who built the West Edmonton Mall, opened a United
States version in Bloomington, Minnesota (south of Minneapolis), called the “Mall of
America” (the brothers have since sold the mall). The Mall of America originally was
slightly smaller than the West Edmonton Mall, but it has recently been enlarged. The
original Mall of America covered 4.2 million square feet and had 350 stores, 14 movie
screens, and 46 places to eat. Its Knott’s Berry Farm Camp Snoopy has 7 acres of
indoor amusement rides, including a half-mile long rubber-wheeled roller coaster, a log
flume ride, and a Hormel cookout area named Spamland. The Mall of America has 400
live trees, 300,000 plants, and a four-story waterfall. It also has its own zip code, police,
doctors, dentists, and a public school for the children of the mall’s 10,000 employees.
Where all this will end is a matter of professional dispute. Some see entertainment malls
as a new model, while others believe that the megamall, like the brontosaurus, is the
final gasp of a concept that has been pushed to excess. So far the idea “Build it and
they will come” seems to be working.

*Based on material in J. John Palen, The Suburbs, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1995, pp.
199-201.