GenED ASSIGNMENT

Chapter 10 Cities and Urbanization

Tiny houses combine efficient design with minimal space. The model shown here packs a main room, kitchen, bathroom, and sleeping loft into about 175 square feet.

Humans have become an urban species, with more than half of us living in close proximity to our neighbors. What will our dwellings look like as urban population densities rapidly rise? Many residents in dense cities live in small apartments. The advantages to small housing are clear. Rent is less expensive, as are utilities and public services.

In wealthier countries, there is a cultural bias in favor of larger homes. The American single-family home doubled in size between 1973 and 2010 and today averages 222 square meters (2,392 square feet). Larger homes cost more in materials, land, utilities, and roads. These high costs sort people into neighborhoods on the basis of wealth. This creates an uneven and, some argue, unjust geography of concentrated wealth and opportunity versus poverty and isolation.

Cities that have expanded in recent years, such as Denver and Las Vegas, may not yet recognize the value of reducing the housing footprint. But some of their residents are experimenting with smaller homes. The tiny or small house movement is an attempt to reverse the economic, environmental, and social costs of sprawling suburbs. Small houses are typically about 35 to 40 square meters (377 to 431 square feet). They contain areas for sleeping, activities, and cooking, and a bathroom. Tiny houses seek to apply thoughtful design and compact technology to create a minimal housing unit.

Learning Outcomes

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

· Differentiate basic and nonbasic activities in the urban economy.

· Give examples of advantageous locations for cities.

· Explain how an urban hierarchy diffuses goods and services.

· Compare urbanization in the 19th century with rapidly growing cities today.

· Outline the basic features of urban functions in different world regions.

· Identify the social and economic factors that have driven suburbanization in the United States.

A Look Ahead

Urban Functions

Cities may have first developed for cultural reasons, but the economic reasons for their existence rose in importance over the centuries. Today, we can identify basic and nonbasic sectors of urban economies.

The Locations of Cities

Some cities were founded to utilize advantageous sites, such as mines, while others exploit favorable situations, such as crossroads on transport routes. Cities, towns, and villages form hierarchical networks.

World Urbanization

Urbanization is occurring everywhere, both because of natural increases of the urban populations and because of continuing migration of rural people to cities.

The Internal Geography of Cities

Any city’s internal geography is defined by economic considerations, social considerations, and government actions interacting in the local culture. Cities in other cultural areas often have different layouts.

Cities and Suburbs in the United States

U.S. metropolitan areas have witnessed explosive growth. Job opportunity and housing continue to grow at the periphery, but some central cities that were once hollowed out started growing again at the end of the 20th century. The many local governments in metropolitan areas must devise ways of cooperating on common challenges.

A city is a concentrated nonagricultural human settlement. Every settled society builds cities, because some essential functions of society are most conveniently performed at a location that is central to the surrounding countryside. Cities provide a variety of services, including government, education, trade, manufacturing, wholesaling and retailing, transportation and communication, entertainment, business, and defense and religious services. The surrounding region to which any city provides services, and upon which it draws for its needs, is called its hinterland .

In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—the earliest writing we can read—the ideogram meaning “city” consists of a cross enclosed in a circle. The cross represents the convergence of roads that bring in and redistribute people, goods, and ideas. The circle around the hieroglyph denotes a moat or a wall. Few modern cities have walls, but cities do have legal boundaries, and within those boundaries, a degree of self-government is usually exercised. The process of defining a city territory and establishing a government is called incorporation .

Sometimes several cities grow and merge together into vast urban areas called conurbations. In the northeastern United States, for instance, one great conurbation stretches all the way from Boston to Washington, D.C. This conurbation has been called Megalopolis, which is Greek for “great city.” The world’s largest urban areas are generally called metropolises, Greek for “mother cities” (Figure 10-1).

Figure 10-1 The world’s largest cities.

This map shows the largest metropolitan agglomerations. The percentage of people living in urban areas is higher in already developed countries, but most of the world’s large cities are in developing countries. The rapid growth of cities in these countries reflects both increases in overall national populations and migration into these cities from rural areas.

US Atlantic Seaboard at Night

In several countries, one large city concentrates a high degree of the entire national population or of national political, intellectual, or economic life. These cities are called primate cities . Paris, for example, is the primate city of France, and Bangkok is the primate city of Thailand. Not all countries, however, have a primate city: The United States does not. Whether a country has a primate city depends on its national history and social and economic organization.

Today in all countries, urban populations are growing faster than rural populations. This process of concentrating populations in cities is called urbanization . The United Nations estimates that one-half of the world’s population lived in urban areas by the year 2007, compared with 30% in 1950. Virtually all population growth expected in the coming decades will be concentrated in the urban areas of the world. The degree of urbanization, however, is not the same in all countries, primarily because the proportion of each country’s population living in urban areas varies. But so, too, does the definition of “urban area” vary by country, ranging from settlements as small as 200 persons to as large as 30,000. Most countries use a minimum of 2,000 to 5,000 people (Figure 10-2). In the United States, the minimum threshold population is 2,500; in Canada, an urban population is defined as that population living in incorporated places of 1,000 or more and at densities of over 1,000 per square kilometer (2,590 per square mile). More than half of the world’s urban population live in cities smaller than 500,000. Only 8% live in megacities such as Istanbul, Kolkata, and Los Angeles that have populations of 10 million or more. One of the purposes of this chapter is to explain these patterns.

Figure 10-2 World urbanization.

This map shows the percentage of each country’s population living in urban areas, as defined by that country. Different countries use different definitions of “urban area,” ranging from settlements as small as 200 persons to as large as 30,000, but most countries use a minimum of 2,000 to 5,000 people. In the United States, the minimum threshold population is 2,500; in Canada, an urban population is defined as that population living in incorporated places of 1,000 or more and at densities of over 1,000 per square kilometer (2,590 per square mile). World: Population Urban Settlement Populations

The geographic study of cities, urban geography , considers three topics:

1 The functions of cities and their economic role in organizing territory

2 Urbanization as it occurred in the past and as it is continuing in different countries today

3 The internal geography of cities—that is, the internal distribution of housing, industry, commerce, and other aspects of urban life across different cultures

This chapter will review each of these topics and then examine the growth and internal geography of U.S. metropolitan areas. This chapter concludes with a consideration of cities, natural resources, and the environment. This examination will illustrate many of the principles of urbanization in situations that will probably be familiar to you.

Urban Functions

The first cities appeared in today’s Turkey and Iraq around 4000 b.c. (Table 10-1). Archaeological evidence suggests that settlements probably originated for cultural reasons rather than economic ones. The first permanent settlements may have started as places to bury the dead, or fixed sites for priests to perform ceremonies. Cities came to be embellished as centers of worship or even as the seats of the gods themselves. Many religions teach that the largest house of worship should be the tallest building in a city, and when commercial buildings first overtopped church spires in European and American cities in the late 19th century, many observers found it symbolic of an unfortunate change in society’s values (Figure 10-3).

The earliest settlements also may have served as places to house women and children while the men traveled in search of food. Household objects made by women—such as pots, tools, and clothing—provided a basis for the creation and transmission of a group’s values and heritage. Today, settlements contain society’s schools, libraries, museums, and archives—the repositories of knowledge and the vehicles for passing it to future generations.

TABLE 10-1 Historical Comparison of Select Cities

City	Year	Approximate Size
Uruk, Mesopotamia (Iraq)	3700 b.c.e.	25,000
Memphis, Egypt	3100	30,000
Ur, Babylonia (Iraq)	2030	65,000
Babylon, Babylonia (Iraq)	612	200,000
Pataliputra (Patna), India	300	400,000
Changan (Xi’an), China	195	400,000
Rome	100 c.e.	450,000
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey	500	400,000
Changan (Xi’an), China	622	400,000
Baghdad, Iraq	775	700,000
Cordova, Spain	1000	450,000
Beijing, China	1500	672,000
New York	1925	7,774,000
Tokyo	1975	23,000,000

Early settlements protected groups’ land claims and food sources. Palaces arose to house the group’s political leaders, and soldiers were permanently stationed there. Many settlements were surrounded by defensive walls. Long after the introduction of artillery, walls could still hold off an attacker until help arrived or the attacker ran out of food, so cities still built them. Paris, for example, surrounded the city with new fortifications as recently as the 1840s and did not completely remove them until 1932 (Figure 10-4). Today, cities are still the focus of military and political activities, but few retain walls except for historic interest. Most city walls were replaced in the 19th century by parks or grand boulevards.

The economic role of settlements may have begun simply as warehousing centers to store food, but as societies develop, production and trade join services as most cities’ paramount activities. Cities bring people and activities together in one place for greater convenience. This is called agglomeration . Agglomeration promotes the convenient division of labor, which is the separation of work into distinct processes and the apportionment of work among different individuals in order to increase productive efficiency. Craft workers flourished within city walls, and specialized occupations emerged, sustained by the peasantry of the hinterland. Settlements serve as convenient sites for trading, and local officials often regulated the terms of transactions, kept records, and created a currency system. Cities thus promote and administer the regional specialization of production throughout their hinterlands. With industrialization, cities become centers of production.

Figure 10-3 Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street in New York City.

Trinity Church’s 86-meter (281-foot) high spire, erected in 1839, was for many years the highest point in New York City. Today, the spire is dwarfed by the skyscrapers of New York’s financial district.

The Economic Bases of Cities

Cities depend on their hinterlands, at the very least, for food. The cities must in turn provide services or “export” something to the outside. Many cities produce and export manufactured goods, but the exports of a city are not necessarily things that leave it. They may be things or services that people come to the city to buy. If people go to Houston for heart surgery, for example, then heart surgery is counted as an export of Houston. Vacations are an export of Miami Beach; gambling is an export of Las Vegas. In this economic sense, capital cities export government.

Figure 10-4 Concentric rings of growth.

Paris periodically built concentric rings of protective walls to encompass new neighborhoods as the city expanded. The old gates of St. Denis and St. Martin have been preserved, but the walls have been torn down.

Some of the workers in a city produce the city’s exports, but others serve the needs of the city’s own residents. The part of a city’s economy that is producing exports is called the basic sector , and that part of its economy serving the needs of the city itself is called the nonbasic sector .

Jobs in a city’s basic sector create jobs in the city’s nonbasic sector. For example, if a local factory makes a product that is sold around the world, the factory workers will spend their earnings by shopping locally, getting their hair cut locally, and purchasing other local goods and services. Each job in the basic sector actually supports several nonbasic sector jobs, because earnings from exports circulate and recirculate through the local economy. When a factory worker buys a shirt, the store clerk can get a haircut; the barber in turn might eat at a local restaurant, and so on. Thus, jobs in the basic sector have a multiplier effect on jobs in the nonbasic sector. This is why cities have long desired to attract basic-sector companies, such as manufacturing firms, which spin off other basic and nonbasic jobs. A growing number of jobs also generates more tax revenues to pay for local government services, which in turn improves cities and attracts more employers.

Cities can be classified economically by examining each city’s basic and nonbasic sectors and by comparing these sectors among different cities. New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles, for instance, each contains a number of dry cleaners and doctors. These people, for the most part, work within the nonbasic sectors. In terms of exports, however, workers in New York provide specialized financial services, workers in Seattle write computer software, and workers in Los Angeles make movies. A city’s employment structure reveals its economic specialization. Any city that has an unusual concentration of workers in a specific job category must be exporting that product or service (Figure 10-5). A city that has a concentration of autoworkers, for example, exports automobiles.

Checkpoint: Multiplier Effects

Record your spending for a few days. To whom did you pay money? What sorts of jobs are directly supported by your spending?

The Locations of Cities

Today, as in the past, the location of any city depends on a balance of site factors (characteristics of the place itself) and situation factors (its location relative to other places). Choice sites include defensive hilltops, crossroads, oases, and the locations of mineral resources (Figure 10-6). Some mining towns virtually sit on top of valuable ore deposits but are otherwise isolated. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, cities often developed at waterfalls to exploit hydropower.

The locations of other cities more clearly result from advantageous geographic situations. Cities with the most convenient situations grow, which was illustrated with the example of three villages in Figure  7-20 . Cities frequently grow up at places where two different physical areas meet or along the border between two cultures. These are sometimes called gateway cities . Timbuktu has long been located along a key trade route, on the border between two physical environments (where the Niger River bends farthest north into the Sahara Desert) and also two cultures (nomadic Arabs to the north and settled black peoples to the south).

Figure 10-5 Economic activities in some U.S. cities.

Urban economies vary in size and composition. The pie charts provide a breakdown of each city’s economy. Natural resources include agriculture, forestry, and mining, which are more important to cities that dominate agricultural and mineral-rich hinterlands. Manufacturing remains an important, though shrinking, component of many urban economies but tends to be larger in more populous cities. Wholesale and retail trade are key sectors in port or crossroad cities. Services are a growing part of all urban economies.

North America: Economic Major Economic Activities

Figure 10-6 Registan in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

This city’s main square reflects its past glories as a major stop on the Silk Road trade network between Europe and East Asia. The buildings shown here are Islamic schools.

Many cities spring up as transportation hubs or at bottlenecks, such as at a bridge across a river or where two political jurisdictions funnel trade through border checkpoints. Some cities grow at sites where the method of transportation necessarily changes. These are called break-of-bulk points. A seaport is an example. Another is the head of navigation of a river (Figure 10-7). If there is a waterfall on a navigable river, cargo has to be unloaded from ships and then reloaded beyond the waterfall up or downriver, or else be shifted to rail or truck.

Louisville, Kentucky, for example, was laid out in 1773 at the falls of the Ohio River. The river is navigable both up and downriver from Louisville. The opening of Louisville’s Portland Canal in 1830 allowed ships to pass around the falls, but by then the city was well developed. It provided many services to its rich, developing hinterland and to westward-moving pioneers. The bridge across the Ohio River focused north-south traffic, and later the railroad lines also focused on the city.

If a situation is favorable, a great city may arise on an unfavorable site. The island city of Venice was originally located in a swampy lagoon because it provided a natural defense from invasion. This site also gave easy access to the Adriatic Sea that eventually allowed Venice to build a major commercial empire in the Mediterranean region. Today, it is a preeminent tourist attraction, yet Venice is sinking on the soft mud of the lagoon. Many of Asia’s coastal cities were built by European merchants or conquerors at sites that provided access to the sea and that may have been defensible, but they sit on deltas or the swampy foreshores of tidal rivers. To this day, Karachi, Pakistan; Chennai and Kolkata, India (formerly called Madras and Calcutta); Colombo, Sri Lanka; Yangon, Myanmar; Bangkok, Thailand; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tianjin, China, all face formidable problems of drainage, water supply, construction, and health (Figure 10-8). New Orleans in the United States is a North American example.

Figure 10-7 Basel, Switzerland.

These docks are the furthest upriver on the Rhine River.

Figure 10-8 Hong Kong.

The Wan Chai waterfront on Hong Kong island is a major commercial center built on land reclaimed from Victoria Harbor. Like Venice and other cities built at sea level, it must contend with occasional flooding and seawater inundation.

Urbanization of the Pearl River Delta

One of human geography’s great paradoxes is that one of the world’s largest cities, Mexico City, is located on one of the world’s most unfavorable places to build: a drained lakebed, in an earthquake zone, in a basin of interior drainage, at a high elevation in a dry climate. These conditions combine to cause physical instability, alternating flooding and lack of water, and air pollution. Both human lungs and internal combustion engines are inefficient when high altitude reduces oxygen levels by 23%, and air pollution is aggravated by local windstorms. Mexico City, however, was once the site of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards. The Spaniards maintained the site as their capital, and so have modern Mexicans. Thus, this great city testifies to the power of history and geographic inertia.

Central Place Theory

The relationships between cities and their hinterlands have inspired a model of how cities are distributed across territory. Walter Christaller (1893–1969) began with the simplest imaginary landscape—an isotropic plain on which transportation cost is determined according to straight-line distance. Christaller then asked, “If cities are to serve as convenient centers for exchange and other services across an isotropic plain, how will cities be distributed? What will be the pattern of towns and their hinterlands?”

To answer these questions, Christaller developed his central place theory . It is built on the idea that each city, town, village, or hamlet serves its hinterland as the central place to do business, defined as a market area. Central places of different sizes are also related to one another. The central places with the smallest market areas offer basic goods and services, but a city with its larger hinterland that includes smaller towns and villages offers more specialized goods and services. So a farmer might sell vegetables in the village, but would have to go to the town to buy animals or tools. If he needs a lawyer or a new car, he might have to go to the city.

In a functional region, there are many small towns, fewer and more widely spaced medium-sized cities, and still fewer big cities (Figure 10-9). The relation of these market areas to one another organizes the hierarchical diffusion of goods and services. In an urban hierarchy of places, the more specialized a service or product is, the larger the number of potential customers that is needed for that product or service to be offered. No product or service can be offered without a minimum number of customers. This minimum demand is called the threshold for that product or service. Market area thresholds for inexpensive or basic goods are much smaller than market areas for expensive or rare goods. A coffee shop owner, for example, needs a minimum number of customers to earn a living. Most people periodically visit coffee shops, so the threshold of demand for a coffee shop is low. Each small town or city neighborhood can support at least one. The same is true for fresh bread and milk. By contrast, luxury cars and fine art museums have high thresholds and need large market areas with enough patrons to support the high cost of these enterprises.

Figure 10-9 An urban hierarchy on an isotropic plain.

The relationship between smaller and larger central places and their hinterlands can fit together in different ways. In the model shown here, four levels are shown. Notice that some smaller places are an equal distance from several larger central places. In this case, residents have a choice of central places and may visit each for different needs.

In real landscapes, other factors in addition to distance must be considered. Population densities vary and this affects the size of a market area. In places with high population density, grocery stores will be more numerous and located closer to each other than in low-density areas. Likewise, concentrations of wealth affect market area. If a place has a concentration of rich people, for example, then the density of jewelers will be greater there. This is true of any good or service: It takes many more poor people than wealthy people to meet the minimum threshold for a good or service.

A provider of a service can do one of two things to reach his or her necessary threshold of customers. One option is that the provider can be itinerant (travel from place to place). Alternatively, the provider can set up shop at one convenient place and wait for people to come. Convenience and accessibility are the principal purposes of cities. Agglomeration of services in cities saves travel costs, and it meets the thresholds necessary for more specialized goods and services.

The efficiency of Christaller’s model has informed the planning of new cities in countries with unsettled lands. The land that the Dutch have claimed from the sea behind new dikes is similar to an isotropic plain. There, Dutch geographers have planned new market towns on hexagonal grids. Brazil has adapted the model to settle territories in Amazonia. The government built what it calls an agrovila every 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), with a school, a health care center, and a post office. These are equivalent to the villages in the model. Every 40 kilometers (25 miles) the government placed an agropolis that offers the services of an agrovila, plus sawmills, stores, warehouses, banks, and other commercial services. Each 136 kilometers (85 miles) in this part of Brazil a ruropolis, a city, was established for light industry.

When improvements in transportation allow people to travel farther to obtain services or goods, the smallest central places may lose their reason for existence and disappear. This is happening in the North American farming region from Kansas north into the Canadian prairies, where most small towns developed as commercial centers for farmers. They offered grocery stores, banks, hardware stores, farm implement dealers, automobile dealers, and feed stores. Improvements in agricultural production has increased farm size and reduced the number of farmers. As a consequence, there is less need for the small-scale central places (Figure 10-10). Between 1960 and 1990 alone, over 70% of the 600 towns, villages, and hamlets in Canada’s province of Saskatchewan lost the basic commercial functions necessary to sustain the communities.

Checkpoint: Real Central Places

While some urban planners have consciously used hexagons, they are harder to find in reality. In Google Earth, examine the urban network in East Anglia, United Kingdom, between the towns of Cambridge and Norwich. Also look in the United States at the area from Illinois to Ohio, including Kentucky. What signs of central place theory can you identify?

World Urbanization

Figure 10-10 Ghost Towns.

Depopulation of towns in North America has created ghost towns. The town of Bodie, California, shown here, grew and collapsed with gold mining. Some of America’s Midwestern farming towns are facing the same fate.

Urban geographers compare urbanization as it occurred in the past and as it is continuing today. The rapidity of worldwide urbanization today presents many nations with both challenges and opportunities for the welfare of their populations.

The Rise of Modern Urban Societies

As noted earlier, cities have existed for millennia, but modern urban societies developed in cities at the heart of Europe’s expanding networks of global trade and industrial development. In the 17th century, the Netherlands became the first modern urban country, with more than half its population living in towns and cities. The cities arose as administrative and commercial foci of the Netherlands’ global shipping, banking, and trading activity, and the urban populations could be supported by the Netherlands’ highly productive agriculture. This urbanization occurred before the Industrial Revolution.

In Britain, a larger country with a more varied economy, urbanization occurred with industrialization. More than half of Britain’s people lived in cities and towns by about 1900. Several developments over the previous 200 years had resulted in the concentration of Britain’s population in cities. These included the following:

1 Improvements in agricultural technology—part of the Agricultural Revolution—reduced the need for the number of agricultural workers. Landowners found it profitable to release employees and to evict tenants, resulting in rural depopulation.

2 Displaced workers migrated to the cities. There, many were absorbed by the concurrent labor-intensive activity stage of the Industrial Revolution. An activity is labor intensive if it employs a high ratio of workers to the amount of capital invested in machinery (Figure 10-11). Other newcomers to the city found work in the nonbasic sector. The largest class of urban workers was actually domestic servants.

3 Population pressures were somewhat relieved by emigration, or else by the forcible exportation of criminals and debtors throughout the British Empire. The colonies of Georgia and Australia absorbed many of these deported people.

Figure 10-11 In the Brewery.

Workmen stand in vats and use shovels to mix the malt for brewing beer. Many early industrial processes were heavily labor intensive.

This British experience provided the world’s first experience with modern urbanization, and most of today’s developed countries have similar histories. The growth of cities in Europe followed a similar path as industrialization and population growth fueled urban expansion. European cities grew in three ways. First, cities grew in absolute size. London grew from 676,000 in 1750 to 8.9 million in 1950. Rome increased from 157,000 to 1.7 million over the same period. They were growing because of the explosive European population growth during the middle stages of the demographic transition (described in Chapter 6 ). Second, there was also an increase in the number of cities with large populations. In 1750, there were two European cities with populations of 500,000 or more. In 1850, there were only three, but in 1950, there were more than 40 cities above a half million. Third, the European population has become more urbanized. Less than 3% of Europeans lived in urban areas in 1750. Today, about 71% of the European population lives in urban areas and 19% live in cities with populations of 750,000 or more.

Urbanization Today

Today, urbanization is occurring in many places without economic development, especially in the world’s poor countries. Burgeoning populations overwhelm the cities’ ability to absorb the people and to put them to work. The incoming populations overload the cities’ infrastructures of housing, education, internal transportation, water supply, and sewerage. By one estimate, 90% of sewage from urban areas in the developing world pours untreated into streams and oceans today. Reliable water, electricity, and telephone services are rare. From the tops of new skyscrapers in many modern cities, the view presents vast shantytowns of the desperately poor (Figure 10-12). Living conditions in these teeming cities are no better for the majority than those that existed in Europe in the 19th century. The stresses of rapid urbanization in developing countries has been blamed for the breakdown of family life, recourse to drugs or religious extremism, and the spread of AIDS. The United Nations predicts that by 2030, about 60% of the world’s population will live in cities, most of them in poor countries where infrastructure is inadequate for the population’s demands.

Figure 10-12 Lagos, Nigeria.

This enormous city is home to 8 million people, many of whom live in squatter settlements and work in informal markets.

The factors driving urbanization today are many. Deteriorating conditions in the countryside often cause rapid urbanization. Global agricultural markets and misguided national policies ( Chapter 9 ) have created large numbers of landless rural poor who move to cities. Some local governments in China have seized land used by poor farmers, leading to numerous protests against rising state corruption. Civil wars and insurgent movements ( Chapter 11 ) also make life difficult for rural communities in the developing world. Many internally displaced persons ( Chapter 6 ) seek safety in urban areas.

Today’s rapid urbanism is different for additional reasons. First, television and film reach the countryside, spreading an image of cities as a place of opportunity. Many rural people feel pulled to the city. Second, governments often invest more in cities than the countryside. Building a new hospital in the capital city may be more politically popular than a thousand new water pumps in poor villages. These actions enhance the perceived opportunity in the cities without providing real opportunity. Third, most countries today cannot send large numbers of people to find work in colonies, which previously relieved pressure on European cities.

In many poor countries, rapid urbanization is exacerbated by sharp cultural differences between rural and urban populations. Many cities in today’s poor countries evolved as outposts of international commerce grafted onto the local societies. This created urban populations with cosmopolitan mixes of ethnic groups that are not native to the city and its immediate hinterland. Throughout Latin America, for example, urban populations are predominantly white or mestizo (persons with European and Amerindian ancestry), and measures intended to restrict urban migration are interpreted, often correctly, as racist discrimination against Native Americans. In East Africa, urban populations are often Asian, and in Southeast Asia urban populations are Chinese and Indian. These cultural and ethnic contrasts make it harder to deal with rapid urbanization.

EXPLORATIONS Protests and Cities

By Dr. Tali Hatuka, Tel Aviv University, Department of Geography and Human Environment

Political marches begin with footsteps. As a simple human act, walking is a way for people to turn their opinions into a public event. Where we march is also important because the built environment includes a political landscape. Public buildings, city squares, and monuments are central places in a society. These places have particular social contexts, behavioral codes, and political regulations. These places also provide a space in which to negotiate, oppose, and resist. This combination of constraint and freedom is what makes urban spaces so important to political dissent and so strategic as a tool allowing people to negotiate their claims. Communication networks and social media may help protesters to organize but they cannot replace the importance of people physically occupying public spaces.1 In spite of claims that this physical form of resistance will vanish with the proliferation of cyberspace and global media platforms, walking, marching, and even standing can be vital political acts.

WALKING AS A POLITICAL ACT

Walking as a political act is an ideological action that expresses an opinion or conviction about justice and has significant spatial attributes.2 This form of ideological walking is a way for participants who do not normally have strong relationships with one another to form connections. The sense of purpose that participants share—both externally by encountering a target and internally by agreeing on a shared idea—further extends the role of the space and its symbolic use. By choosing to walk together, protesters reclaim or symbolically “possess” their cities. They are imposing their order over whatever space they occupy, and challenge habitual practices— challenging the rules, laws, and social codes that govern that space.

Figure 10-1-1 The Occupy Movement, 2011.

Protesters converged on hundreds of symbolic sites for several months in the United States and about 90 countries, protesting against economic injustice and for democratic reform.

Figure 10-1-2 Protest in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, 2013. 

A small protest that began over the demolition of a city park grew into mass protests against the Turkish government. The government and police were criticized for using excessive violence against protestors, killing at least four and injuring many more.

THE ROLE OF PLACE

Walking as both a political act and a tool of power connects spectators who play an important role in the protest.3 Noise, symbols, and physical disruption help attract spectators, helping to spread the protest’s message. The form of a march and its route are critical to attracting spectators. Marching in the main plaza of a city or passing by government buildings often indicates the intention of protestors to communicate with (or confront) officials to challenge or sway their decisions. Marching in residential areas or at nongovernmental venues, off the city center, indicates the group’s intention to define alternative spaces of opposition. In democratic countries, the route of political rallies is the result of a bargaining process between rally organizers and the authorities so the event is predictable.4 Any violence that occurs is often a result of failed bargaining or unanticipated encounters.

One example of walking as an act of international resistance was the worldwide protest on February 15, 2003, decrying the imminent invasion of Iraq. Millions of people walked in approximately 800 cities worldwide. This international collective action was unprecedented not only in terms of participants and global reach, but also in terms of international coordination.

ABOVE ALL, PLACE MATTERS

Protests create new geographies of opposition, generating alternative maps for understanding practices of domination. This idea could be applied, with some contextual modifications, to many of the recent protests that have taken place in the Arab world during 2011 (i.e., the Arab Spring), to Israeli social justice protests during the summer of 2011, and to the U.S. Occupy Wall Street protests of the autumn of 2011. Contemporary protests offer a new way of thinking about space, social relations. and territory.

· 1 What makes citizens choose a particular form of protest? 


· 2 How does space function as mediator between these citizens and their political powers? 


· 3 Whose power and control drive negotiations between citizens and regimes during protests? 


Informal Settlements

In response to these obstacles, new arrivals to cities in the developing world often establish informal communities called informal settlements on open land at the edge of urban areas (Figure 10-13). These people build basic housing on land without clear title, meaning they do not legally own the land. So-called squatter settlements are often situated on marginal land such as steep hillsides and tidal basins. These settlements sometimes house migrants from the same rural area. Squatter settlements have different names around the world—for example, gecekondu in Turkey, kampungs in Kuala Lumpur, and favelas in Brazil. They lack public utilities and often pirate electricity from nearby power lines. Over time, some squatter settlements are consolidated as homes are made more permanent and streets are filled in; a few are formally annexed by the city and receive public services. Some are rife with criminal activity while others provide affordable and functional housing to hard-working families.

Figure 10-13 Favelas of Rio.

An estimated 22% of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1.4 million peoples) reside in favelas, communities with irregular or makeshift housing.

Rio de Janeiro

Many cities try to discourage newcomers by restricting housing and economic opportunity (see Rapid Change: “Urbanizing China,” p. 383). They pass building codes, for example, that ban substandard housing. These codes are often ineffective in stopping the growth of slums, but they make squatters’ settlements illegal. Therefore, the squatter-residents do not get city services and will not risk investing to improve the property. The city in turn cannot collect property taxes. The United Nations Human Settlement Program estimated that by 2005 more than 800 million people in the developing world lived in slums. About one in three urban dwellers in these poor countries are slumdwellers. These rates were lowest in North Africa and Western Asia at 14.5% and 24%, and highest in sub-Saharan Africa (62%) and Eastern Asia (43%). Rates in any region are highest (70%–95%) among urban newcomers who usually begin city life in a slum. Cities also try to restrict small businesses in residential areas, but backyard workshops may thrive anyway. Cities may discriminate against new urbanites by restricting education, housing permits, business licenses, or other job opportunities. Street vendors are chased from city centers, for example.

In some countries, frustrated city authorities have even bulldozed squatters’ settlements after giving only one or two days of warning. This has happened in major cities throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless. In 1990, for example, bulldozers flanked by army troops, with air-force planes sweeping overhead, leveled the district of Maroko in Lagos, Nigeria, leaving about 300,000 people homeless. During 2005–2006, the Zimbabwean army virtually declared war on squatters and settlers in Harare, demolishing shanties and markets. Some 1.5 million people were scattered; over 10,000 poor people were rounded up and dispatched to rural areas. The urban poor were perceived as a threat to the 25-year tyrannical rule of the dictator Robert Mugabe, and the action was officially called “Operation Murambatsvina” (“Drive Out Rubbish”). Some cities have cleared slums in advance of global media events. Beijing, Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, and London have displaced many urban dwellers in advance of Olympics games.

The Vitality of Informal Economies

Most of the previous paragraphs about urbanization in developing countries may have seemed pessimistic. They presented urban growth as a problem for which solutions were needed. There is another side to the story, however: It is possible to view the backyard shops, the street hawkers, and the makeshift merchants as examples of opportunity and growth (Figure 10-14). These activities hint that urban migration, balanced between management and liberty, can provide a reservoir of vitality that can be harnessed for national growth.

RAPID CHANGE Urbanizing China

China had large urban populations long before modern Europe. These cities were small compared to the surrounding rural population and performed important administrative functions for a large empire. These early Chinese cities were spread across the interior and some grew to reach 1 million inhabitants by the 11th century. In the 19th century, Britain forced China to allow foreign trade and with this came new coastal cities.

INDUSTRIALIZATION It was not until after World War II, when the Communist Party created the People’s Republic of China, that China’s government encouraged industrialization in its cities. This led to rapid growth of urban populations, although China’s population remained predominantly rural. Between 1949 and 1979, many Chinese cities doubled and tripled in size, and the urban share of China’s population grew from about 10% to 19%. Since 1979, the emphasis on export industries has fueled the rapid urbanization of coastal towns such as Shenzen that were designated Special Economic Zones (Figure 10-2-1). China’s export economy soared during the last few decades and the percent of China’s population living in cities more than doubled during this period.

Figure 10-2-1 Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China.

This is among the world’s tallest buildings. Architects hope that it will produce more power from solar panels and wind turbines than the occupants will consume. Guangzhou is one of China’s largest urban areas with a metropolitan population that will soon reach megacity status, 10 million.

CONTROLLING GROWTH China’s cities would have grown even faster in recent years if the government had not limited migration from rural to urban areas. Officials have long enforced a household registration system under which people are not supposed to move without approval. China’s authorities recognize that unrestrained urban growth will produce distinct social classes, zones of poverty, and potential unrest, all of which might weaken government rule. Despite the registration system, however, many people have moved to the cities. Most are trying to flee the crushing poverty of the Chinese countryside where people earn on average one-third of what city dwellers make. As many as 200 million Chinese peasants have drifted into the cities, where they are called floaters. Their residence in cities is technically illegal, so they have no right to education, medical care, and other government services. The floaters serve useful functions, such as bringing produce to the city or providing services not provided by central planning, but their continuing influx threatens to overburden China’s urban infrastructure. The wealth created in China’s cities has produced a consumer economy for a growing middle class that shops for western brand names and enjoys growing material comforts. And this attracts still more people from poorer rural districts.

The Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, who co-chaired the U.N. Commission for the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, has long noted that in many cities, the productive activities of a substantial share of the population do not appear in official accounts. The people may not have licenses to do what they are doing, they may be avoiding taxes, or for some other reason their activity escapes official notice. These activities comprise the informal, or underground, sector of an economy. Every city in the world has such a sector, but it is particularly important in the cities of the poor countries. The International Labor Organization has estimated that informal employment is a full 72% of nonagricultural employment in sub-Saharan Africa, 65% in Asia, and 51% in Latin America.

Figure 10-14 Informal markets.

Small open-air markets called tianguis, like this one in Mexico City, can be found in towns all over Mexico and Central America.

Life in the world outside the law is a constant risk. People lack title to property, so they build housing poorly; therefore, many die in earthquakes or other natural disasters. An estimated 4 billion people cannot create wealth or recuperate from disaster because of the lack of legal records. Neither capital nor credit will venture where there are no clear property rights, and seizure of property by the politically well connected or powerful is a constant threat.

In an early study of Lima, Peru, De Soto found that the informal economy employed fully 60% of the population and produced 40% of all goods and services. The poor owned and controlled a public transportation network of private taxis and vans, plus land and housing worth billions of dollars. None of this, however, was legal, so it could not be taxed by the government or used as collateral by business owners. If the government simply legalized these activities, these assets would have liquidity and could provide collateral for investment and business enterprise. The government’s refusal to recognize what was happening handicapped the country’s economic growth and vitality.

In Peru from 1995 to 2001, more than 1.2 million households, including 6.3 million people, received title to the properties they inhabited. Title reform enabled more people to work outside the home and more family members to join the labor force, because now no one had to stay home to guard the property. The values of the newly registered properties have soared, and mortgage and consumer credit markets have developed. Studies in the Philippines found that 60% of Filipinos are holding real estate assets worth tens of billions of dollars outside the law, and thus illiquid. In Egypt, 85% of the population lives in homes without property titles. In parts of West Africa, the figure is as low as 2%. De Soto estimated that at the start of the 21st century, only 25 countries in the world had genuine contractual urban societies; the rest were informal.

A modern market economy cannot develop unless property rights are acknowledged and protected, and economic growth will probably occur most rapidly in the developing countries that ensure property rights. Therefore, De Soto has argued, governments must formalize the spontaneous emergence of informal property. Chapter 8 already noted how productivity in agriculture can be raised by guaranteeing property rights. The same guarantees could develop in the cities. China has privatized landowning in the cities faster than in the countryside (see Chapter 9 ), and the privatization has contributed to faster economic growth in the cities. It created a middle class that is using its property as collateral to borrow money to launch enterprises. In both city and countryside, GIS and GPS greatly enhance the ability to record and register land holdings, so the spread of these techniques may spark economic growth and vitality around the world.

If governments view urban migration as a problem, they cannot see how urban immigrants’ industriousness could be an asset for economic growth. Millions of people continue to choose to migrate to the cities, where they do survive or even thrive. There is something terrifically dynamic going on, and geographers, economists, and government officials at all levels are challenged to understand and measure it.

Checkpoint: Informal Settlements

Most towns, even small ones, have some form of informal settlements. For example, in the United States, mobile home parks share some features with shantytowns in other countries, including a lack of clear title to the location. Where are the informal settlements in your town? Who lives there? How do they make a living?

The Internal Geography of Cities

Urban geographers study not only the distribution of cities across the landscape but also their urban form , which is the distribution of land use and activities within cities. These distributions may be caused by economic forces, social factors, or deliberate actions of the government. In different countries and cultures, each of the three factors carries different relative weight.

Economic Forces

One of the first significant efforts to model, or explain, cities was carried out by urban geographers and sociologists in North America during the 20th century. Many of these efforts were associated with a group of scholars known as the Chicago School, whose work began by looking at the complex interplay of economic and other forces in that city, especially among its diverse immigrant communities. The Chicago School developed models of land use that were primarily driven by economic forces. The first was E.W. Burgess’s 1925 concentric zone model.

Figure 10-15 illustrates the concentric zone model of urban growth and land use. The core of the city, called the central business district (CBD) , concentrates office buildings and retail shops. For businesses, accessibility is usually a principal determinant of a location’s rent. The success of a department store, for instance, will depend partly on whether customers can reach the store easily. A city’s most convenient and busiest intersections are most valuable for commerce. Landowners usually maximize the density of use on this valuable land by building up, so a traditional CBD is identifiable by tall buildings as well as crowded streets. Even within the CBD, clusters of functions appear. Lawyers’ offices, for instance, cluster near courts or near the offices of their client firms. Retail stores of one type, such as jewelry stores, may cluster so that consumers can comparison shop. The CBD is surrounded by less-intensive business uses such as wholesaling, warehousing, and even light industry—that is, nonpolluting industries that require relatively small quantities of raw materials. Residential land use surrounds this urban core.

Figure 10-15 Concentric zone model of urban development.

According to the concentric zone urban model, a city grows in a series of rings around the central business district.

The concentric zone model can be modified by considering the effect of transportation routes, which affect accessibility. New means of transport—historically canals, then railroads and tramways—spread out radially from the heart of the city, although their paths are modified by topography. Industrial and residential growth take place in ribbons or fingers along these radial routes, and wedges of open land are usually left between these radial routes.

H. Hoyt proposed an alternative model in 1939, called the sector model (Figure 10-16). This model assumes that high-rent residential areas expand outward from the city center along new transportation routes such as streetcar and suburban commuter rail lines. Middle-income housing clusters around high-rent housing, and low-income housing lies adjacent to the areas of industry and associated transportation, such as freight railroad lines.

The third model, the multiple-nuclei model, shown in Figure 10-17, recognized the development of several nodes of growth within an expanding city area. It was proposed in 1945 by C. Harris and E. Ullman and drew from a combination of the concentric zone and sector models. The city’s multiple nuclei may each concentrate on a different special function and each promotes further nearby development.

Figure 10-16 Sector model of urban development.

In this model of urban form, a city grows out from the central business district in wedges, or corridors, of various land uses.

Figure 10-17 Multiple-nuclei model of urban development.

In this model of urban form, a city consists of a collection of individual nodes or centers around which different types of activities and people cluster.

Harris updated this model to deal with sprawl that over the last half of the 20th century had disseminated urban functions ever farther from downtown areas. His peripheral model, defined in 1997, shows how radial and circumferential highways continue to draw activities out of the central city and to disperse them around the region (Figure 10-18). The story of how this happens will be told shortly.

Social Factors in Residential Clustering

Social considerations play a role in urban residential clustering. The Chicago School models assumed that residential patterns were driven by economic opportunity. Economic growth in one neighborhood allowed residents to grow wealthier and move to better residential areas. As they left their old neighborhood, immigrants seeking affordable rent and entry-level work replaced them. This succession of residential groups was thought to explain the appearance of ethnic neighborhoods in large cities. Immigrants often live with people like themselves, which causes a clustering called congregation . Ethnic groups or immigrants of a common background, for example, may want certain services, such as grocery stores offering their traditional foods (Figure 10-19). Waves of immigration have produced ethnic enclaves in many cities around the world, but these do not always last. As education and work opportunities open for the children of immigrants, they often move away, and these neighborhoods change in profile yet again.

Figure 10-18 The peripheral model of urban areas.

In this model, which describes the growth of U.S. metropolitan areas in the last half of the 20th century, activities disperse throughout a broad region.

Figure 10-19 Halal butcher.

This store in Belleville, Paris specializes in halal meats that are prepared according to Islamic religious requirements. Paris, like other European cities, hosts large communities of Muslims who emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East.

In other cases, however, people live together because discrimination forces them to do so. These people suffer segregation from others. In any specific case, it may be difficult to determine the degree to which people are congregating or are victims of segregation. In the past, Jews were legally segregated in ghettoes, but today the word ghetto can mean any residential concentration of any one kind of people. The factors causing residential clustering of any group—of Chinese Americans in “Chinatowns,” of Italian Americans in “Little Italys,” of Hispanic Americans in “barrios,” or of African Americans in “ghettos”—must be evaluated carefully in each case.

Religion is another social consideration that frequently causes clustering. People who share a religious faith may cluster around their house of worship, and in-migrants of that faith will seek that neighborhood. Language communities frequently form, as do communities of the elderly and communities of gays and lesbians. Almost any factor of social bonding can encourage the creation of an identifiable residential neighborhood. Not surprisingly, these clusters are starting to reflect political preferences in the United States as homebuyers increasingly shop for neighbors, not just neighborhoods. The neighbors’ yard signs, flags, cars, and bumper stickers are visible cues people use when house shopping.

Government’s Role

Government may determine land use. Zoning restricts or prescribes the use to which parcels of land may be put. In U.S. history, local government has often been averse to planning, so zoning has more often been restrictive (dictating what cannot be done) than prescriptive (dictating what should be done). Industrial and commercial districts, for example, are usually kept away from residential neighborhoods. Each incorporated jurisdiction across vast conurbations—clusters of incorporated areas—exercises independent zoning power.

Today, most urban experts believe that the separation of land uses has been overemphasized. It may have been desirable to separate industry from housing when all industry was noisy, polluting, or smelly, but today separating homes from jobs may require excessive commuting. Most new planned communities emphasize the integration of residential and commercial activities, even including some light industry. They offer apartments above downtown shops and offices, for example, as in traditional small towns. The state of New Jersey subsidizes landowners who renovate downtown properties if the renovations create residential space on upper floors. This revitalizes downtowns and encourages the use of public transit—or even walking.

Government sometimes takes direct control over property in order to provide public functions, such as roads or schools. In the United States, this power is subject to a clause in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, called the takings clause, which states that “Private property shall not be taken for a public use, without just compensation.” In other words, governments may take private land—this is called the right of eminent domain —but the governments must pay for it. In 1984, the Supreme Court extended the right of eminent domain to take land for any project “rationally related to a conceivable public purpose” (Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff), and in 2005, the Court extended the meaning of “public purpose” still further to rule that fostering economic development is an appropriate use of eminent domain (Kelo v. City of New London, Conn.). Many people feel that local governments have abused eminent domain powers. The city council of Riviera Beach, Florida, for example, condemned 1,700 houses and apartments housing 5,100 people for a new development of shops, a hotel, a conference center, and yacht slips. Cypress, California, prevented a local church from building an annex in order to give the land to Costco. Such actions have roused complaints of political favoritism. The Supreme Court rulings have thrown the consideration over takings back to the state legislatures and courts, and most states have acted to restrict local governments’ power of eminent domain.

Property owners are insisting that even short of complete seizure of land, some zoning restricts the use to which owners may put their land so severely that the zoning is in effect an unconstitutional taking. Some protest that both environmental and historic preservation legislation are essentially takings. In 2010, a Minnesota court ruled that safety-related zoning restrictions on land around an airport constituted takings that harmed the landowners. The takings clause is a fine point in the interpretation of law, but it is also important because it puts the public interest at odds with private property.

The Western tradition of urban and regional planning

The process of urban and regional planning applies many of the principles of urban geography to specific situations. The concept of designing an “ideal city” has challenged the best minds for centuries. The founder of Western city planning was probably the Greek thinker Hippodamus of Miletus (498-408 b.c.). He laid out that city in today’s Turkey according to a grid plan as early as 450 b.c.

The first modern attempt to formulate the needs of a city as a whole was the work of the British visionary Sir Ebenezer Howard. In Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898), he outlined a plan to stop the unbounded growth of the industrial city and to restore it to a human scale. He wanted to relocate population into new medium-sized garden cities in the outlying countryside. These regional cities would be ringed by greenbelts of farmland and parks. All land would be municipally owned, and each town and its surrounding region would be planned as an interlocking whole.

Howard built two “garden cities” just north of London: Letchworth (1904) and Welwyn Garden City (1919). These inspired the Regional Planning Association of America, a private nonprofit organization, to construct two planned communities in the New York City area: Sunnyside Gardens, Queens (1924); and Radburn, New Jersey (1928) (Figure 10-20). Neither is a complete garden city, but both are harmoniously designed and have greatly influenced urban planning in the United States and Europe.

Probably the most important city planner of the 20th century was the Swiss architect Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887–1965), better known by his professional name, Le Corbusier. In a celebrated plan of 1922, he proposed to bulldoze the crowded, rundown historic core of Paris, preserving only the central monuments. In its place he wanted to build a Radiant City of tall glass offices and apartments, spaced so far apart that each tower would be surrounded by green space and have a fine, wide view (Figure 10-21). The concentration of facilities within high-rise slabs would liberate the city from its environment. It could be placed anywhere. Le Corbusier brought together two conceptions: the machine-made environment, standardized, technically perfect to the last degree and, to offset this, the natural environment, treated as open space, providing sunlight, air, greenery, and views. The degree of control and total design of the city was a hallmark of the “modernist city.”

Figure 10-20 Plan for Radburn, New Jersey.

This planned community, built in 1928, is still a desirable residential settlement. Key elements of the plan include plenty of park space and the separation of pedestrian walkways from car traffic and parking.

Paris was never torn down and rebuilt as a Radiant City, but Le Corbusier planned Chandigarh, a new capital for the Punjab State in India in 1950. The world’s supreme modernist city, however, is Brasília, the capital of Brazil, designed by Lucio Costa in 1957. Unfortunately, the city’s gigantic scale demands a completely motorized population. That is the problem with excessive openness—Corbusier’s “city in a park” can become a city in a parking lot.

Many urban planners worldwide have come to criticize the concept of high-rise living. Low-rise dwellings can achieve the same density of habitation as Le Corbusier’s “towers in a park” can, and many people feel more content living in low-rise dwellings. High-rise public-housing projects, it turned out, can breed a sense of alienation and helplessness, and many have been abandoned and razed across the United States.

Other Urban Models in Diverse Cultures

The concentric zone, sector, multiple-nuclei, and peripheral city models discussed earlier in this chapter were all devised to describe the North American experience, but other models have been proposed to describe characteristics of other cultures. The three interacting processes identified earlier—economic factors (including transportation facilities), social factors (especially residential clustering and segregation), and governmental factors (most notably, planning)—affect all urban settlements, old and new, in all known cultures. These processes sort out the population and the land uses into distinct patterns that can be identified within any city.

The governments of most Western European countries, for example, have always been concerned with preserving the vibrancy and amenity value in their central cities. Therefore, they severely restrict suburbanization, as will be discussed shortly.

Latin American cities offer still another contrast to North American models. There, central business districts thrive (Figure 10-22). This is partly a result of continuing reliance on public transit and partly because high-income populations choose to live close to the central business district. A commercial spine such as a boulevard extends out from the central business district, and amenities such as opera houses, chic stores, and elegant parks follow this spine. Zones of more modest housing and value surround this elite zone, and the periphery is dominated by squatter settlements.

Figure 10-21 Chandigarh Assembly.

India’s northern city of Chandigarh was planned by Le Corbusier in keeping with his Radiant City ideas. He also designed many of its buildings, such as the one shown here. Many of the city’s residents live in high-rise apartment blocks that featured simple, rectilinear designs in concrete, which defines much of the style made popular by Le Corbusier.

Western forms often overlie indigenous forms

As we saw in Chapter 7 , distinct settlement patterns are landscape footprints of distinct cultures, but many of the world’s great cities came into being as a result of trading or political contact between the native peoples and Europeans. The cities that Europeans initiated and founded were planned and built according to European notions of city planning. Their internal geography still shows port zones; enclaves of former European settlements; barracks; colonial government buildings; and racial, religious, and ethnic ghettoes based on the role each group played in the city’s founding and during the colonial period (Figure 10-23).

Figure 10-22 Latin American model of urban growth.

This model contrasts with the North American models. In Latin America, an elite residential sector often follows a spine of high-value land use stretching out from the central business district.

Figure 10-23 Model of a Southeast Asian port city.

Most Southeast Asian port cities are the product of Western influence, so they reflect Western design forms.

In other cases, Western or modernizing interests built a new city alongside a preexisting native city. This was particularly common in those parts of Latin America (particularly today’s Mexico and Peru), Asia, and North Africa where the local peoples had achieved significant urbanization before the coming of the Europeans. Today, the two cities often contrast sharply: Historic cores in forms traditional to the local culture stand beside districts of modern commerce, retailing, industry, and associated residential areas. The modern or Western cities typically demonstrate grid layouts. In some cases a third element—vast slums of newcomers—surrounds both cities. The city of Fez, Morocco, for example, is clearly two cities (Figure 10-24): a modern Western-style city of broad, straight avenues lies on the plain below an older, traditional Islamic city. Western forms continue to be stamped on the world’s cities today. Western architects, engineers, and urban planners, or non-Western individuals educated in Western schools, continue to transform even the older traditional built environments.

Individual cities, however, emerged at different times, for different reasons, and within different cultural contexts. Many great cities still boast historic cores that illustrate indigenous principles of urban planning, and they cannot all be squeezed into three or four simplified models.

Islamic urban form

The non-Western culture with the oldest and most articulate urban planning tradition is the Islamic culture. Traditional Islamic cities illustrate the role of culture in urban form. There are regional differences in cities across the Islamic realm, but most nevertheless show surprising similarity. These cities may seem chaotic to Westerners at first glance, especially to those accustomed to grid patterns, but they present an entirely rational structure. The structure develops from the basic needs of city dwellers but according to specific cultural influences. Among these are the central importance of religious obligations and the prominence of houses of worship in urban design. The resulting design characteristics can be identified from Seville, Granada, and Córdoba in Spain to Lahore in Pakistan, and elements of these principles can be found from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Davao in the Philippines.

The logic of traditional Islamic urban planning is announced in the Koran and has been codified by various schools of Islamic law. Certain basic regulations govern individual rights and the pursuit of the virtuous life in a densely crowded urban environment. For example, Islamic urban planning recognizes the need to maintain personal privacy; it specifies responsibilities in maintaining urban systems on which other people rely, such as keeping thoroughfares or wastewater channels clear; and it emphasizes the inner essence of things rather than their outward appearance. This last principle applies as much to the decoration of houses as to purely spiritual issues.

Take another look at Figure 10-24. At the heart of the traditional Islamic city stands the main mosque, the jami, which is typically the city’s largest structure. Close to it are the main suqs, the street markets and enclosed shopping arcades. These arcades prefigured urban galleries in Europe and enclosed shopping malls in North America. Within the suqs, trades are diffused in relation to the mosque. The tradespeople who enjoy the highest prestige, such as booksellers and perfumers, are closest. Farthest away are those who perform the noxious and noisy trades, such as coppersmiths, blacksmiths, and cobblers. The neutral tradespeople, such as clothiers and jewelers, act as buffers.

Figure 10-24 Fez, Morocco.

The Moroccan city of Fez is really two contrasting cities. A modern Western city lies on the plain to the southwest (left in this figure) of an old Islamic city, the Medina. The new city has straight formal avenues, a railroad station, a university, and a modern hospital. The medina contains old mosques and narrow constricted streets, and it is surrounded by city walls with great gates.

Doha, Qatar

An immense fortified kasbat is attached to the ramparts, on which are located several towers or gates. The kasbat was the place of refuge for the governor or sovereign. It had its own small mosques, baths, and shops, in addition to government buildings and barracks.

Everywhere else, the city is filled in with cellular courtyard houses tied together by winding lanes. Housing is grouped into quarters, or neighborhoods, that are defined according to occupation, religious sect, or ethnic group. The widest streets usually radiate outward from the core to the gates in the city wall. Slightly narrower streets serve the major quarters and define their boundaries, and still narrower third-order streets are used primarily by people who live in the neighborhood (Figure 10-25). Narrow streets provide vital shade, keep down dust and winds, and use little building land.

Interior courtyards of homes, often with trees and fountains, provide shade in hot climates, but, more importantly, they provide an interior and private focus for life sheltered from public gaze. This is true in Mediterranean architecture. The outside of a house may be plain, but the interior and courtyard may display lavish wealth and decoration. The interior vividness parallels the Koranic emphasis on the richness of the inner self compared to a more modest outward appearance.

Figure 10-25 Casablanca, Morocco.

In many traditional Islamic cities—as here, in Casablanca, Morocco—occasional straight streets provide views of minarets, towers for the call to prayer. People are constantly reminded of the importance of religion.

Checkpoint: Modeling Your Town

Make a sketch map of your town or a nearby city that you know. Use categories in the urban models presented in this section to analyze land use. What model best fits what you see on the landscape? What does the model miss?

Cities and Suburbs in the United States

The dominant feature of the metropolitan form in the United States has been the explosive growth of cities across the countryside. Growing cities have spilled over their legal boundaries into areas called suburbs. Some suburbs are entirely residential, but others offer services for the surrounding residential population. In some cases, the suburbs are older cities that have been engulfed by the growth of a larger neighbor, but others are newly incorporated settlements. What defines an area as a suburb is its economic and social integration with a larger population nucleus nearby. Town and village are inexact terms that generally designate settlements smaller than cities, but the settlements may be incorporated.

Many of the developments described in the following discussion are now occurring elsewhere around the world, but they occurred first in the United States—largely because the nation’s prosperity coincided with population growth and urban expansion.

The Growth of Suburbs

Early suburbs

Most large U.S. cities included manufacturing districts by the late 19th century. These were noisy and dirty, and they often attracted a working class, largely comprised of immigrants, whom many long-established residents found to be unpleasantly “different.” These biases pushed those who could afford city life to move to the lower-density neighborhoods further from the city center.

Figure 10-26 Riverside, Illinois.

The designers of New York City’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, planned this real estate subdivision 14 kilometers (9 miles) from the center of Chicago in 1869. The plan included two straight business streets paralleling the railway into the city, but all residential streets were curved to slow traffic (before cars!). Open spaces contribute to the sense of breadth and calm enjoyed by “the more fortunate classes” for whom Riverside was designed. In 1992, Riverside residents refused federal financial assistance for traffic control because federal regulations would have required traffic intersections to be reengineered to 90° angles.

At the same time, a cultural preference for rural or small-town life pulled many people out of the city. Many Americans fell in love with the idea of “the country,” and they favored a return to nature, to the land, or to open spaces—even if only a suburban yard. Therefore, when the railroads put older rural communities within commuting distance of the city, many people who had the time and the money necessary to commute to work from a home outside the city began to do so. In other cases, the wealthy built new towns (Figure 10-26). “Streetcar suburbs” sprang up when streetcar transportation was devised. Some of these planned suburbs eventually became completely built up, merged into other settlements, and lost their identities as they were absorbed into the expanding city.

The automobile ultimately opened the nation’s landscape to suburban growth. For those who disliked urban life, the suburb was the solution. “We shall solve the city problem,” wrote Henry Ford in 1922, “by leaving the city.”

Government policies and suburban growth

The dispersion of housing to suburbs was slowed by the Great Depression in the 1930s and by World War II in the early 1940s. Following the war, however, government policies established a new balance of push-and-pull forces that encouraged the movement of investment, residents, and jobs out of the central cities into the suburbs.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed loans, so down payments shrank to less than 10% of the house price. Suddenly, thousands of families could afford new houses. FHA benefits did not, however, apply equally everywhere or to everyone. The FHA favored the construction of new single-family houses in the suburbs over the rehabilitation of older houses or apartment buildings nearer the city’s center. Also, the FHA opposed what it termed inharmonious racial or nationality groups. In some places, the presence of one non-white family on a block was enough to cut off the entire block from FHA loans. Thus, early government policy helped segregate the suburbs.

The government also granted tax and financial incentives to homeowners, including the deductibility of both mortgage interest payments and local property taxes from gross taxable income.

The Veterans Administration Housing Program, begun in 1944 and called Homes for Heroes, pumped billions of additional federal dollars into housing programs. By 1947, the Levitt Company was completing 30 new single-family homes each day in Levittown, formerly a Long Island potato field, and similar developments were springing up on the outskirts of every other major U.S. city (Figure 10-27). Nationwide, new housing construction starts jumped from 114,000 in 1944 to 1,696,000 by 1950.

Figure 10-27 Levittown, Long Island.

In building Levittown, 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Manhattan, the Levitt family changed U.S. homebuilding techniques. The land was bulldozed and the trees removed, and then trucks dropped building materials at precise 18-meter (60-foot) intervals. Construction was divided into 27 distinct steps. At the peak of production, more than 30 houses were completed each day. Through the years, owners have personalized their homes so much that few visitors today can see that the houses were originally identical.

The suburbs brought homeownership to an increasing share of U.S. families. The percentage of U.S. housing that was owner occupied rose from 44% in 1940 to 62% in 1960 and 65% in 2011, signaling middle-class status for a rising share of the population. Expanding homeownership has increased the number of citizens who have profited from the many homeowner subsidies, and it also has reduced the political possibility of rescinding them. Some scholars argue that the tax concessions were never necessary. Canada, Australia, and other countries achieved comparable levels of homeownership without offering such concessions.

The housing and financial crisis

At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, housing prices in the United States rose rapidly during a period through which interest rates were low. Government tax policy made homeownership even more attractive. These factors combined to encourage many people to consider their homes as investments—that is, to buy the most expensive home on which they could possibly meet mortgage payments, with the assumption that the value of the property would rise. Mortgage debt rose from 15% of gross domestic product in 1945 to about 60% in 2012. This produced a dangerous situation that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Over the decade leading up to 2008, relaxed mortgage and banking laws made more home loans available to more people. Loans were extended to new homebuyers, low-income families, and wealthier homeowners who wanted to buy larger homes. The surge of new buyers increased sales, and the prices of homes soared. Homeowners were also able to borrow money based on the increased value of their homes. Meanwhile, some of the loans started to go bad. In some cases, irresponsible lenders had made complex loans to people who thought they could afford them because the loans had low interest rates for the first few years. Those loans were like time bombs, and after three or five years, homeowners were faced with much larger mortgage payments. Their paychecks that were going toward their home payments, however, were the same size because the wider economy was not growing. Many people suddenly found themselves unable to pay their mortgages.

Some borrowers defaulted on their mortgages, meaning they stopped repaying their loans. Lenders began foreclosing homes, which usually involves evicting the borrower and leaving the bank in possession of the home. The foreclosure rate more than doubled between 2006 and 2009, and it peaked in 2010 (Figure  10-28). Evicted families had trouble finding a place to live. It soon became clear that mortgage lenders and banks had invested heavily in mortgage loans, which were now considered potentially “toxic” investments. This started a financial crisis that mushroomed into recession during 2008 and 2009, as we will see in Chapter  12 . The recession led to more job losses that led to more defaults and foreclosures. Large mortgage lenders disappeared overnight, and would-be homebuyers could not get loans. Home prices fell dramatically, and some people could not sell their homes without losing a lot of money. Other people were “upside down,” meaning they owed more on their mortgage than their house was suddenly worth. About 1 in 11 mortgage borrowers were more than 90 days late on their payments in 2008. The U.S. government encouraged lenders to refinance some mortgages and backed these new loans with government guarantees but lenders were slow to respond. Though the housing market started to rebound in 2013, the long-term consequences of the housing crisis will be felt for years to come in many neighborhoods as old and new homeowners adjust to lower home values, new neighbors, or vacant houses. Suburban growth, however, is sure to continue after the crisis subsides.

Figure 10-28 Foreclosures.

Many homeowners caught by the economic downturn after 2008 could not keep up with mortgage payments. The highest rates were in the western states and Florida, although many communities across the country were devastated.

Urban Sprawl

The unbridled growth of suburbs in many parts of the United States created functional areas so large they required new ways of thinking about cities and their hinterlands. As the population spread out during the 20th century, new suburbs incorporated, and the Census Bureau devised a term for these sprawling conurbations: metropolitan statistical area (MSA) . The Census Bureau defined a metropolitan area as “an integrated economic and social unit with a recognized large population nucleus.” Thus, MSAs are the principal central cities and their suburban counties (except in New England, where the definitions are in terms of cities and towns). When two or more MSAs are next to each other, each is called a primary metropolitan statistical area (PMSA), and a group of adjoining MSAs are called a consolidated metropolitan statistical area (CMSA) . By 2009, the nation’s 366 metropolitan areas contained 84% of the total population. These MSAs covered about 20% of the country’s land surface (Figure 10-29). Metropolitan areas accounted for a staggering 87.5% of the country’s total economic activity in 2011.

Figure 10-29 Distribution of U.S. population.

By 1970, a plurality of the U.S. population (37%) lived in the suburban portions of the MSAs, and by the century’s end, a majority of Americans were suburban.

In 2005, the Census Bureau first defined and collected data for 573 micropolitan areas , defined as developed regions with a core city of fewer than 50,000 people. These suburban areas cover the middle ground between rural and metropolitan living.

The suburban infrastructure

The sprawl of single-family homes is expensive. It first requires roads for individualized transportation, which, in turn, demands energy. Heating and cooling individual homes is also energy intensive. Dispersed housing requires enormous investment in sewerage, water pipelines, telephone lines, and electrical wiring. The cost of providing infrastructure for 100 people in an apartment building is much less than the cost of providing it for the same 100 people spread out in 40 single-family homes over many hectares.

Infrastructure costs are further inflated by the fact that U.S. suburbs have not expanded contiguously outward from the city, like the waves from a stone tossed into a pond. Each developer wants to buy land as cheaply as possible and thus buys land beyond the edge of growth. This is called leapfrogging (Figure 10-30). The infrastructure network cannot be advanced in a regular pattern. Thus, leapfrogging increases initial costs. Later, the leapfrogged areas are filled in, but then some initial infrastructure has to be rebuilt or upgraded to accommodate additional users. Many suburbs, for example, originally relied on individual-home wells for water, and their sewage was treated in individual-home septic tanks. As the suburbs matured and density increased, water supplies became polluted. Homeowners had to pay for wholly new public water mains and sewers. Suburban development also increased stream runoff, so financial losses from flooding have risen virtually every year.

Figure 10-30 Suburban growth patterns in the United States and Great Britain.

This schematic drawing contrasts (a) the leapfrogging typical of U.S. suburban growth with (b) the tighter, more controlled suburban growth typical of Great Britain. The British system saves open space and allows for better and cheaper planning and installation of infrastructure.

Suburbs take up a lot of space, and since 1945, U.S. urban areas have spread at a rate of about 405,000 hectares (1 million acres) per year. This growth has required that a good share of the country’s most productive farmland be paved over, such as the Long Island potato fields covered by Levittown. The best agricultural hinterlands of many cities disappeared, and a rising percentage of the nation’s food is now grown in conditions requiring expensive fertilizer or irrigation. In addition, the food has to be transported farther, consuming still more fuel, perhaps requiring refrigeration or special handling, and further boosting food prices.

Rising housing costs

In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. citizens did not worry about the costs of creating new suburbs. Between 1950 and 1973, median family income doubled in real terms. Demands for housing continued to mushroom with the baby boom and the splintering of families into separate households. The average number of occupants of a U.S. household shrank from 3.67 in 1940 to 2.6 in 2008.

The high infrastructure costs of sprawl necessitated high property taxes, and these eventually provoked voter backlashes. The most notable was California’s Proposition 13 of 1978, which limited property-tax increases. This has hobbled the government’s ability to provide services no matter how much they are needed.

Today, a greater share of U.S. wealth is invested in housing and the necessary infrastructure than in any other nation. A high proportion of Americans enjoy private ownership of spacious, free-standing, well-equipped homes, and this investment has succeeded in bringing a sense of well-being to many Americans. It is becoming clear, however, that this development has brought with it steep economic costs, as well as serious social and economic consequences.

The social costs of suburbs

Americans generally sort themselves out residentially in a distinct manner that has long produced economic, racial, and cultural segregation. In low-density suburbs, local racial and social homogeneity have long been associated with conservative politics and social conformity. Property owners in many suburbs established restrictive covenants, which were legal agreements that the land would never be sold to people of a designated race or religious group. Such covenants are no longer legal, but they were common as late as the 1970s. Homeowners’ associations, however, which regulate some aspects of property ownership, covered 25 million homes in 2011 (of the nation’s 132 million) that house 63 million people, and they continue to grow. Most of these associations not only require that homeowners maintain their yards, but some dictate even when owners can put up holiday decorations or park their cars in their own driveways. Major changes in a home’s structure or exterior appearance must be approved by the association, which can fine homeowners or even foreclose the “offending” homes—without the residents’ knowing until they are evicted.

The reputation of suburbs is perhaps unfair because they are, overall, quite diverse—there have long been poor suburbs as well as rich ones, and there are suburbs with varied ethnic and racial characteristics. In fact, many suburbs today are sites of intense ethnic and racial mixing for working-class and middle-class families seeking a trade-off between urban amenities and neighborhoods better suited for raising children. Denver and other cities that grew during the 2000s now have suburbs that are a mixture of white, black, and Latino, as well as native-born and immigrant families.

The movement of jobs to the suburbs

The suburbs first expanded as bedroom communities for the middle-class workers who left their suburban families each morning to go to work in the city. Soon, however, the interstate highway system (authorized in 1956) and similar limited-access highways not only joined cities but also provided peripheral bypasses around them. These peripheral arteries provided access between suburbs and reduced the geographic advantage of a city’s central business district. Developers put up suburban office buildings, and corporations built spacious office parks. Retailers soon began to build giant shopping malls at highway crossroads.

Manufacturing establishments abandoned the central city, too, for several reasons. Older heavy industrial buildings built for large equipment were too large or run down for new light-industrial needs. In addition, light industries relocated to escape central-city congestion, as well as the higher costs for energy, taxes, wages, and rent. Warehousing also relocated out from the inner-city railroad yards to the suburban highway interchanges. Metropolitan airports in the suburbs grew to provide jobs in both freight and passenger services.

In the 1950s, suburban growth was fed by young married couples who wanted to raise children away from the cities. By the early 1970s, however, the proliferation of jobs in the suburbs became the driving force for new housing. As the suburbs surpassed the central cities in employment, job opportunity became a pull factor for continuing suburbanization (Figure  10-31). Employment growth in U.S. suburbs has been greater than in central cities for every year since 1965. As jobs and housing have continued to expand outward, the extent of any metropolitan area has had to be continually redefined. This outer ring of metropolitan growth is now called an exurb .

Some of the new exurbs, called satellite cities, or edge cities , boast greater retail sales and contain more office space than the old central cities. They even offer amenities formerly found exclusively in the central cities: art galleries, theaters, sports teams, and fine restaurants. These are the outlying nuclei of the periphery model that appear in the suburbs of metropolitan areas. Some edge cities outcompete the old city center for new jobs, investment, and even population density.

Changing commuting patterns and problems

When suburban workers commuted into and out of the city, radial mass-transit systems that focused on the central business district could serve transport needs tolerably well. Today, however, suburb-to-suburb commutes account for more than 50% of all U.S. metropolitan traffic. Only individualized transportation can serve populations that are spread out at low densities, and, as a matter of government policy, gasoline has never been taxed in the United States at rates comparable to those in other wealthier countries. Already in 1960, 64% of workers drove to work, and in 2009, over 86% did. More family members have been going to work, so the number of cars has increased faster than the local overall populations.

The Texas Transportation Institute has been studying traffic in 439 U.S. urban areas. The Institute reports that from 1982 until 2007, the annual delay per peak period (rush hour) grew from 14 hours to 36 hours. The number of urban areas with more than 40 hours of annual delay per peak traveler rose from 1 to 23. The total amount of delay reached 4.2 billion hours, and the amount of wasted fuel lost to engines idling in traffic jams rose to 2.8 billion gallons (at increasing prices per gallon). This accounting does not include the costs of air pollution or of highway accidents. Commuting costs now consume more than 20% of the average U.S. household budget—as high as 23% in metropolitan Atlanta and Houston—and the percentage is rising.

The proportion of people who work from home has grown slowly since the 1990s. The Internet and home computers have made telecommuting an option for some workers. An estimated 4.3% of all workers work some hours or all hours from their home. This leads to fewer commuters. Online retail sales might reduce the number of trips a family takes for shopping. Overall, drivers reduced their number of trips during the 2000s, although this trend may have been due to joblessness and a weak economy.

Developments in the Central City

America’s central cities suffered economic decline through most of the second half of the 20th century. The drain of jobs from the central city and the concomitant development of the suburbs hollowed out many U.S. metropolitan areas. Many central business districts lost their purpose. Commercial, professional, and financial offices relocated to the suburbs, followed by upscale retailing. Many U.S. downtowns came to consist only of a government center, a convention center, and a few hotels; the streets were deserted after 6 p.m. The total populations of many central cities fell after the 1970s, particularly in the core of older cities in the Northeast and Midwest. This decline continued between 2000 and 2010. During that time, the largest declines in the number of people living within 2 miles of city hall were in: New Orleans (losing 35,313 or 30.4%); Baltimore (10,194 or 6.1%); Dayton, Ohio (10,165 or 19.8%); Toledo, Ohio (10,118 or 15.4%); and Saginaw, Michigan (9,674 or 19.5%). Population growth is predominantly in suburban and exurban areas. The fastest-growing metropolitan areas are Palm Coast, Florida (growing 92%); Las Vegas (41.8%); Raleigh, North Carolina (41.8%), and Fort Meyers, Florida (40.3%). Visitors to American downtowns are astounded at the urban infrastructure that seems simply to have been abandoned: housing, sewerage, water pipes, roads and streets, industrial buildings, and more.

Figure 10-31 Population and employment growth in metropolitan Atlanta.

These maps show that in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, as in most other U.S. metropolitan areas, the greatest population growth (a) and job growth (b) are still occurring in the periphery. The city of Atlanta is at the center of the ring highway visible on the map. Central-city neighborhoods began losing population 40 years ago, and inner suburbs had already begun to lose population 30 years ago.

Urban Heat Island: Atlanta, Georgia

Economic decline

Central cities can thrive as long as (1) their economies offer a complete range of job opportunities, ranging from entry-level jobs for the unskilled up to specialized jobs for skilled workers, and (2) family stability, education, and other social systems help urbanites ascend the socioeconomic ladder. In other words, cities do not have to retain their middle classes, but they have to offer the lower classes opportunity to become middle class. Unfortunately, the departure of the middle classes for the suburbs occurred at the same time as two other developments (see Global and Local: “Detroit, The Shrinking City,” p. 403).

First, urban economies were transformed by the out-migration of entry-level jobs, particularly in manufacturing, construction, and warehousing. This out-migration broke the rungs of the ladder of upward mobility. In 1968, the economist John Kain first suggested that the removal of manufacturing jobs to the suburbs and the concentration of the poor in the central cities created a spatial mismatch between the suburban job opportunity and central-city low-income housing. This spatial mismatch, he argued, could explain the high unemployment found in the central cities. The spatial mismatch hypothesis has until today dominated analyses of inner-city unemployment—and therefore the formulation of potential solutions. We will discuss a new alternative hypothesis later in the chapter.

Second, at the very time that many unskilled jobs were leaving the central cities, new waves of unskilled workers—those lacking specialized training or advanced education—were pouring into them. The stream of new migrants to the cities included African Americans from the rural South, Latinos, and other immigrants. This influx continued long after the numbers of entry-level job opportunities began to shrink.

Much of the inner-city housing stock began to deteriorate. This was because government incentives still have made it profitable to give up a house in the city and move to the suburbs. Policymakers had thought that if new suburban houses were available to middle-class people from the cities, the urban poor could move into the older city dwellings. This succession, called filtering, would solve the housing problem for lower-income families. Much of the central-city population remaining behind, however, was financially incapable of maintaining the inherited housing stock. Therefore, many central-city neighborhoods deteriorated. The term inner-city neighborhood became a euphemism for slum.

The service economies

At the end of the 20th century, some central cities began to enjoy new growth in financial, information, and specialized technical services. In these areas, skyscrapers replaced rusty factories (Figure 10-32). New York’s leading export for decades was garments, for instance, but today it is legal and financial services. In 1975, Baltimore’s leading employer was the Bethlehem Steel Company; today it is Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. In 2011 about 10% of all jobs in major metropolitan areas were in health care. This shift in job opportunity exemplifies a switch from blue-collar jobs, usually involving manual labor, to white-collar jobs, which are salaried or professional jobs that do not involve manual labor.

Figure 10-32 Pittsburgh transformed.

No other U.S. city illustrates a transformed economy better than downtown Pittsburgh, which was transformed from a dirty and smoky industrial area (a) into a new park and gleaming service center, a “Golden Triangle” (b). This is where the Allegheny River (at left) meets the Monongahela River (at right) to form the Ohio River.

Analysts of urban economies suggest that cities increasingly compete for jobs and growth on the basis of lifestyle. Surveys have found, for example, that growth in the biotechnology and computing industries is clustered in a few metropolitan areas, including Austin, San Francisco, and Boston. These cities do not enjoy traditional economic advantages such as proximity to raw materials, cheap energy, or low costs of living. They do, however, share two features: a thriving arts scene (reflected statistically by a high number of artists, writers, and other arts workers) and a dense, highly diverse, and tolerant social character portrayed by, among other things, a high number of immigrants and gays and lesbians. Business journals periodically rank cities’ relative attractiveness, and although the mix of criteria chosen is not scientific, a high ranking can boost a city’s fortunes (Table 10-2). Analyst Richard Florida identified “the three Ts” of an economically successful city: tolerance, talent, and technology. These features attract the people who are crucial to economic success: creative workers, engineers and scientists who develop new products and industrial processes, and creative businesspeople, financiers, and other workers who start new businesses and improve old ones. Such people have the skills and the means to live wherever they choose, and they are attracted to cities that offer the amenities and broad quality of life they desire. BusinessWeek magazine has reported that two-thirds of college-educated adults aged 25 to 34 today decide first where to live and then where to work.

In some cities, the holders of the new white-collar jobs—sometimes called yuppies, young urban professionals—triggered a rediscovery and revival of urban life. They first occupied and restored select older residential neighborhoods in a process known as gentrification , but they soon began to convert even former industrial and warehouse buildings into residences. These conversions were usually in owner-occupied forms (condominiums or cooperatives) so that owners could profit from the tax advantages afforded to suburban homeowners. Some observers argued that the conversion of lofts to residences damaged the cities’ chances for industrial resurgence, while others argued that the industries were never coming back, so the conversions were beneficial. Gentrified neighborhoods mix old and new architecture and a vibrant street life with upscale commercial activities such as bookshops, gourmet food and wine shops, and art galleries (Figure  10-33). Yuppies have been joined by empty nesters—that is, older people who had raised families in large suburban homes but found urban attractions and activities more appealing in later life. Historic preservation movements have assisted central cities by winning tax advantages for the reuse of older buildings. New zoning for mixed use revives the cities’ days and nights. Even some businesses that left the central cities in the period 1950–1980 are moving back downtown, discouraged by suburban traffic tie-ups and attracted downtown by relatively low rents and the availability of high-quality workers. Thus, rising educational levels, shrinking family size, and aging all contributed to some central cities’ revival.

TABLE 10-2 Different Ways of Ranking Cities’ Desirability

Professor Richard Florida of the University of Toronto has ranked the following “city-regions” as the most “creative” in the United States:
San Francisco, California	Houston, Texas
Austin, Texas	Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Maryland
San Diego, California	New York, New York
Boston, Massachusetts	Dallas, Texas
Seattle, Washington	Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota
Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina
By contrast, the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) often compiles lists of America’s best places to settle in retirement.
Tucson, Arizona	Northampton, Massachusetts
Greenville, South Carolina	Lexington, Kentucky
Montpelier, Vermont	Texas Hill Country, Texas
Logan, Utah	Oxford, Mississippi
Ames, Iowa	Walla Walla, Washington

Figure 10-33 Gentrification.

The latest phase of gentrification in New York City has pushed into the Borough of Brooklyn, bringing trendy shops and bars to streets like Bedford Avenue.

Brooklyn, New York Waterfront

Most job and population growth is still in the suburbs, but signs of central-city revival are widespread. Census results reveal that Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and many other central cities are enjoying population growth for the first time in decades. Violent crime dropped 34% in America’s 10 largest cities in the 1990s, and young people were increasingly choosing the urban lifestyle. In the newest editions of guidebooks to the best colleges, most of the top-rated schools are urban institutions. Higher education is a mainstay of many central cities’ economies, and frequently the cities retain the graduates. Among the largest 100 U.S. cities, the 25 that began the 1990s with the highest percentage of college graduates ended the decade with even greater concentrations. These 25 cities saw the college-educated share of their population jump 6%, twice the average growth of the other 75 cities. Cities compete to attract and retain these educated workers.

In addition, many cities have cultivated the tourist sectors of their economies and now attract tourists with historic quarters, fine cuisine, shopping opportunities, performing arts, and art exhibitions and festivals. Memphis, Tennessee, for example, attracts 8 to 10 million tourists each year, about 14% of whom are foreigners. The city has borrowed exhibitions of artwork from around the world, and Memphis’s role in American musical history draws many tourists to exhibitions and performances. Many cities are building new museums and performing-arts centers just to pull in suburbanites.

The role of immigrants

As noted in Chapter 5 , immigrants to both the United States and Canada concentrate in major cities, giving those cities a cosmopolitan sophistication. Immigrants have also played an important role in the cities’ economic rejuvenation. Many bring capital or job skills, so for them a city’s traditional advantages of agglomeration and external economies confirms the city’s function as incubator of new businesses. In Los Angeles County, for example, corporations that employ fewer than 100 people offer more than half of all the county’s jobs. Virtually all of the firms making clothing and textiles, toys, processed foods, furniture, and biomedical supplies are owned by foreign-born individuals. Furthermore, many immigrants have moved into declining neighborhoods and repaired deteriorating homes themselves—a process called investing sweat equity rather than money.

Latinos today outnumber blacks in some of the biggest cities in the United States—New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Diego, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, Miami, and San Antonio. In Los Angeles, Miami, and San Antonio, Latinos outnumber non-Latino whites as well. The changing demographic mix in major U.S. cities carries political ramifications, as Latinos, Asians, and other minorities form new political alliances. The growing diversity of cultures and interest groups tends to submerge America’s historic black–white dialogue in a new chorus of voices gaining political expression.

The shortcomings of service economies

Upscale urbanites account for only a fraction of the total inner-city population. The new white-collar jobs being created do not always equal the number of blue-collar jobs being lost. Although most high-paying jobs are in the service sector (doctors, lawyers, executives, sports stars, etc.), most service sector jobs are not high paying. Creative website designers, for example, earn higher incomes than janitors do, but usually janitors outnumber website designers. In New York City during the 1990s, a time of national prosperity, the only net growth in the numbers of jobs was in jobs paying less than $25,000 per year, which was just about the national median for a full-time worker. The average weekly wages of workers in New York City’s finance and insurance industries in 2006 was $8,323. This average figure conceals an extreme concentration of this income among the highest-paid bankers and stock brokers, but it contrasts vividly with the average weekly wage of $594 of workers in the fast-growing accommodation and food services industry and $803 in retail trade. Furthermore, workers who lose their blue-collar jobs often require retraining or education before they can capture one of the new opportunities.

The median household income in U.S. central cities hovers between 70% and 75% of the figure for the suburbs, and central-city unemployment rates hover about one-third above those in the suburbs. Furthermore, the percentage of jobs in most central cities held by commuters is rising—especially the percentage of the best jobs. Some 60% of the salaries earned in Washington, D.C., for example, go to suburbanites, and federal law protects them from D.C. taxes. The labor force participation rates of central-city populations—that is, the percentage of the population that is currently employed or even looking for a job—fall behind those of the nation and of the entire local metropolitan areas. For example, the labor force participation rate for the city of Detroit in 2011 was 48%, whereas for the Detroit metropolitan area it was 53.6%. This suggests that a smaller percentage of the city’s population was working and paying taxes, and also that a higher percentage was receiving public assistance.

Security concerns in the 21st century also distress central cities. Central cities are the most likely targets of terrorism, their populations suffer increased stress levels, and, for the most part, the individual cities must bear the burden of high security costs (Figure 10-34).

Figure 10-34 Cities and terrorism.

Contemporary terrorism targets urban areas to maximize disruptions to economic and social life. Much of Boston was on lock-down following the bombing of the Boston Marathon while special police units, such as the SWAT team shown here, searched for the suspects in residential neighborhoods.

U.S. cities are losing the middle class. Defining “middle” as between 80% and 150% of the median, the Brookings Institution found that the percentage of middle-income households in the 100 largest metropolitan areas had decreased from 30% in 1999 to 28% in 2008. Added to the disappearance of the middle class, poverty increased during the 2000s in U.S. cities. Suburban poverty rates also increased to 9.5% due to rising unemployment and wage cuts.

The urbanization of African Americans and segregation by race and income

African Americans began leaving the American South for northern cities in the early 20th century. They were leaving behind racial segregation, discrimination, and violence in search of greater economic opportunity. About 1.5 million African Americans formed the “Great Migration” between 1910 and 1945, and an additional 6.5 million moved north and west between 1945 and 1970. That second wave of migrants arrived just as the central cities were losing their ability to provide entry-level job opportunities. The migrants also often faced discrimination in employment and segregation in housing. Deteriorating conditions in new African American ghettoes eventually triggered civil unrest. A 1965 riot in the black Watts section of Los Angeles left 34 people dead and more than 1,000 injured and led to military occupation of 119 square kilometers (46 square miles) to halt the violence. The Watts riot was followed by 150 major riots and hundreds of minor ones in cities across America that summer and the next three summers.

Since the 1960s, civil rights have made great advances, and a great many of the black urban in-migrants have achieved success. Others, however, have been left behind. If a family’s first urban generation failed to find employment, skills, and upward mobility, the second and third generations may have failed also. Los Angeles erupted again in April 1992, for example, and in 2001, black neighborhoods in Cincinnati saw three days of rioting after the fatal shooting of the 15th unarmed black man by police since 1995. In 2003, 20 houses burned in Benton Harbor, Michigan, during riots that broke out after the death of a black motorist killed during a police chase.

Residential racial segregation continues. Statistics on America’s 65,000 census tracts (each containing from 1,200 to 8,000 people) show that the average white person lives in a neighborhood that is 79% white and the average black person lives in a neighborhood that is 46% black. Most American cities showed a decrease in segregation in the 2010 Census. Many of the most segregated cities are the old industrial centers that attracted African Americans during the Great Migration. There has been a large “Reverse Great Migration” in the last decade as African Americans have moved to southern and western cities with more job opportunities.

For decades, inner-city African Americans were the farthest from jobs. Some decline in the spatial mismatch occurred during the 1990s and 2000s, and that decline was principally due to the residential movement of black households within metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, in nearly all metropolitan areas with significant black populations, the separation between residences and jobs was much higher for blacks than for whites.

The 2010 census revealed one more changing pattern: Whereas one of America’s most dramatic trends from 1960 to 1990 was the movement of the American poor into urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, that trend reversed itself between 1990 and 2010, and poverty became less concentrated. Concentrations of poverty magnify the problems associated with poverty in general: crime, delinquency, joblessness, drug trafficking, breakdown of the family, and low-performing local schools. Furthermore, when a neighborhood has a concentration of poverty, middle- and working-class people often see it as “dangerous.” They avoid the neighborhood, which becomes increasingly isolated, socially and economically.

From 2006–2010, 67 million people, which was 22.6% of the U.S. population at that time, lived in census tracts in which at least 20% of the households were in poverty. Blacks were disproportionately the most likely to live in poor neighborhoods. An estimated 47.1% of all blacks in America lived in areas with at least 20% or more of the households in poverty. Observers believe that the concentrations of people in poverty dispersed because public housing projects were torn down, central cities enjoyed some economic resurgence, immigrants revived some urban neighborhoods, and millions of poor people left urban slums for other neighborhoods.

Only in pockets of the central cities are conditions at their worst, and even the worst slums of New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles do not compare with the conditions of life for many in Mexico City; Lagos, Nigeria; or Kolkata, India. The inner-city second- or third-generation living in deprivation, sometimes called the underclass, numbers less than 3 million people, which is less than 1% of the national population. Still, the conditions of deprivation and the lack of opportunity contrast starkly with the national self-image.

The network hypothesis

Scholars are formulating a new alternative to the spatial mismatch hypothesis to explain some urban unemployment. They have learned that the primary qualification employers seek in new unskilled workers is reliability. The best way to find reliable new employees is to ask current employees for recommendations. Therefore, networks of working family or friends provide unskilled urbanites seeking entry-level positions with information about jobs, sponsorship for jobs, and role models for work. Hiring is referential, not residential. Many urban black communities, after a generation or two outside the mainstream of labor opportunity, may lack these crucial links because the social networks conducive to upward mobility have deteriorated. Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist, has written, “The primary reason for ghetto unemployment is not the lack of nearby jobs but the absence of social networks that provide entry into the job market.” The theory that it is the lack of these networks that causes unemployment may be called the network hypothesis . Scholars investigating this hypothesis note that significant numbers of inner-city jobs, even those in manufacturing, have often been captured by groups whose residences are distant, even though local residents cannot get work. For example, Kasinitz found that jobs in a manufacturing district of Brooklyn, New York, were captured by Hispanics who commuted from New Jersey, even though unemployment stayed high in contiguous black neighborhoods. Geographer Thomas Cooke concluded that “it is not possible to argue that census tract African American male unemployment rates are related to the number of local job opportunities.”

These studies do not conclusively replace the spatial mismatch hypothesis, but they introduce a new partial factor of explanation. Assumptions about what causes a situation will determine approaches to altering that situation. In this case, our understanding of the causes of inner-city unemployment will determine what solutions we propose.

Governing Metropolitan Regions

As metropolitan regions grow larger and cover numerous local areas, the problems of how to deliver and pay for local services gets more complex. The legal boundaries of most U.S. cities were originally drawn to include some surrounding land for future growth, and when the city outgrew those boundaries, it annexed suburban areas. By the 1920s, however, the suburban populations had begun to incorporate themselves to avoid annexation (Figure 10-35). Suburbanites argued that their action upheld the U.S. tradition of local self-government, and many may have felt that by incorporating their own communities, they were escaping the problems (and people) of the old city, including high social costs and politics that were often corrupt. Only a few central cities—including Austin, Texas; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Oklahoma City—can still expand by annexing new suburban areas.

Figure 10-35 Metropolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, were surrounded by tiers of independently incorporated municipalities, like the rings of growth of a tree. This pattern of suburban incorporation typifies U.S. metropolitan expansion.

Today, autonomous municipal units form a legal retaining wall around almost every large city in the United States. Metropolitan areas cover a great number of municipalities and also myriad special district governments, which are incorporated to deal with specific problems. For example, Nassau and Suffolk counties in suburban New York include two cities, 13 towns, 95 villages, 127 school districts, and more than 500 special districts, most of which exercise taxing powers for services from garbage collection to hydrant rental. The five-county Los Angeles metropolitan region contains 160 separate governments. Los Angeles County alone has 82, and even within the boundaries of the city of Los Angeles, there are seven independent city governments.

The governing bodies of many of the special districts are not chosen in elections in which each citizen exercises an equal vote. Instead, they are either appointed or else chosen in elections in which votes are weighted in terms of payments for a service or use of a service, or by some other measure. As a result, the percentage of public funds spent by officials who are directly responsible to the voters shrinks. Furthermore, the boundaries of special districts may not conform to those of general-purpose governments but instead may overlap them. Overlapping boundaries multiply the difficulties in coordinating the provision of services. All of these factors discourage voter turnout.

Decisions regarding metropolitan land use and the location of industries, recreation facilities, transport facilities, or new housing cannot be made in the best interests of the entire metropolitan population. Instead, they are made on the basis of competition among the local governments, each of which wants to enhance its own property-tax base by attracting commercial developments that pay high property taxes but demand little in the way of local services. For example, fast-growing Santa Clara County, California, has zoned for 250,000 new jobs but only 70,000 new homes. Each community hopes to let surrounding towns cope with the additional costs of schooling, pollution, and congestion.

Many metropolitan areas have created councils of governments (COGs). These are committees of officials representing each of the local governments in the region. COGs, however, exercise limited powers, but each local government can veto any proposed area-wide action. Some U.S. metropolitan regions are creating regional governments to address area-wide problems. State governments in Washington, Minnesota, Connecticut, Virginia, and elsewhere are devising new schemes to redistribute or equalize both the revenues and the costs of housing and schooling throughout metropolitan areas. Dade County, Florida, has assumed responsibility for many public services for Miami and the 29 other cities in the county, and county voters chose to rename the county Miami-Dade.

GLOBAL AND LOCAL Detroit, The Shrinking City

While many U.S. cities confront sprawl, some are in steep decline. The city of Detroit once housed 1.85 million people in 1950. The city of Detroit was once home to the Big Three automakers—Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors (Figure 10.3.1). Many more companies started there to supply parts to the massive factories that employed much of Detroit’s workforce. As long as the auto industry was thriving, the basic sector of Detroit grew, hiring many of the African Americans that left the American South after World War II.

Figure 10.3.1 Detroit, Motor City.

The headquarters of America’s “Big Three” automakers and many related companies dominated the skyline of Detroit.

DOWNWARD SPIRAL The population began to decline after 1970 when most industrial cities experienced a combination of a worsening economy and social unrest. Two additional factors made matters worse for Detroit. Detroit’s economy was almost entirely based on the auto industry as a global center of production. Competition from foreign automakers began to cut into the sales of the Big Three, beginning their slow decline. Rising oil prices caused by Middle East turmoil made production more expensive and slowed the economy in general, lowering sales. Lower sales meant fewer jobs.

The auto industry started moving out of downtown, taking jobs and the employed to the suburbs. The population that remained in Detroit was increasingly poor and less educated. Demand for public services remained but the loss of jobs meant the city had a smaller tax base to pay for schools, infrastructure, and policing. Crime increased and the vicious cycle of postindustrial decline worsened. Today, the city of Detroit is the smallest it has been in a century. The city is demolishing abandoned houses and businesses that have become fire hazards and eyesores (Figure 10.3.2). Some blocks are now empty fields. In 2013, the city filed for bankruptcy protection.

Figure 10.3.2 Detroit, Vacant City.

Economic decline left many buildings to decay. Some homes and stores, like the one shown here, were set ablaze by vandals.

Detroit, Michigan

NEW HOPES Detroit has responded with a new strategic plan to revitalize what remains of its buildings and vacant spaces. Some entrepreneurs have moved into old buildings to start new businesses. These include craft-produced goods, including clothing, web designers, as well as art studios. There is a strong flavor of the “creative class” described in Table  10-2, young and fairly progressive people willing to try melding new business ideas with urban renewal and social justice. Detroit and its residents will need a lot more than good intentions, however. About one in three Detroiters lives in poverty.

Today, many city and suburban governments— backed by downtown business executives, environmentalists, farmers, and church leaders—are banding together to fight continued sprawl by pressuring state and federal governments to end the many subsidies that encourage suburbanization. The government of Ohio, for example, has cut back on building new roads, begun repairing old ones, and prevented new communities from offering tax breaks that might draw businesses from older core metropolises.

The weakness of metropolitan regional governments in North America contrasts sharply with models elsewhere. In the United States, states and municipalities are given primary responsibility for land use. Municipalities often want to encourage population growth because it adds to the local economy. Zoning laws, therefore, often favor developers who leapfrog each other to find cheaper land. In most European and Latin American countries, either strong metropolitan governments exist or else the national governments themselves oversee land use and the growth of metropolitan regions. Britain has for a long time used the authority of the central government to limit urban growth and preserve agricultural land near cities (Figure 10-36). Such policies generally concentrate activities in city centers and regulate land use very strictly to prevent urban sprawl. Also in contrast to the North American model is the fact that homeownership is relatively low, and single-family suburban lots are less common. Europeans are more content to rent smaller dwellings, which take up less land and slow the outward growth of cities.

Figure 10-36 Outside Leicester.

Britain’s central government has long limited urban sprawl. Extensive suburbs like the ones in the United States are relatively uncommon. Not far from the city center of Leicester, England are large fields and green spaces.

Checkpoint: Sprawl

Estimate urban sprawl using Google Earth by measuring the radius from the city center to the edge of the suburban subdivisions around several cities. Choose one city in America, one in Europe, and one in Asia. Research the population of these metropolitan areas. Which has the lowest population to radius ratio (persons per kilometer)?

The World in 2050 Green Cities

As humans become a majority urban species, we are more closely bound to environments we have built ourselves. Rapid urban growth, driven by demographics and economics, has transformed the face of the planet. Human activity is so ubiquitous on Earth that we might be justified in saying that all Earth is today a cultural landscape. Cities of concrete, machines, and lights are an especially concentrated assembly of the technologies that modify the natural environment.

Renovating Cities Rapid world urbanization has required us to rethink our common definition of environment to include the impact of our cities. Cities use a tremendous amount of carbon-based energy to generate the electricity that lights and cools large buildings. And while urban transit systems have the capacity to be more efficient, most urban traffic is vehicular and produces intense pollution. Industrial pollution and human waste add to the concentrated stew of urban effluent that contaminates city and countryside alike.

We must transform our increasingly “cultural” landscape into a healthy and sustainable physical environment. Many buildings in the United States and other countries are now built to LEED standards of “green building.” Several countries have begun “low-carbon” settlements that employ “green” building technologies and renewable energy sources. Abu Dhabi has plans to build Masdar City, a 6-square-kilometer (2.3 square mile) carbon-neutral project (Figure 10.4.1). Whatever these megaprojects achieve, real change has to begin in the world’s existing cities, where people already live.

Figure 10.4.1 Conceptual rendering of Masdar City.

Plans for this “city of the future” place it near the city of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It is intended to be a model for sustainable zero-carbon urban development.

Necessity’s Inventions One place where people are already making changes is their rooftop. Lighter-colored roofing materials reduce heat absorption and require less cooling. Solar panels convert sunlight into electricity or hot water. Rooftop gardens produce food while cooling lower floors (Figure 10.4.2). Geothermal systems use underground temperatures to control indoor air temperature with very little electricity. Some buildings are reusing their gray water (used water but not from human waste) to maintain landscaping. Reusing older building materials also lessens the need for new resources and the energy that goes into producing and transporting them. These and other simple innovations are part of how humans are changing how they live in urban environments.

Figure 10.4.2 Rooftop ecology.

Part of the solution for “greening” existing cities is to take advantage of the spaces that exist. The organic garden shown here is atop an office building in downtown Bangkok, Thailand. The garden cools the building, lessening the need for air conditioning, saving electricity, and reducing carbon emissions.

CHAPTER REVIEW Summary

Urban Functions

· Cities provide important services in a centralized location.

· Cities have hinterlands that provide resources and migrants.

· Ancient cities had important political and cultural functions.

· Urban economies today have basic and nonbasic sectors.

The Locations of Cities

· Some cities were founded to utilize advantageous sites, such as mines, while others exploit favorable situations, such as crossroads on transport routes.

· Gateway cities provide access points into larger territories.

· Cities, towns, and villages form hierarchical networks.

World Urbanization

· Rapid urban growth was a feature of industrialization in Britain and Europe.

· Most urban growth today is in the developing world where cities do not have large industrial sectors.

· Migrants arriving to cities in the developing world often live in informal settlements.

· Many large cities have extensive informal economies that support large portions of the population.

The Internal Geography of Cities

· Models of urban land use help us to identify patterns across different cities.

· Cultural differences shape urban patterns in other regions.

Cities and Suburbs in the United States

· U.S. metropolitan areas have witnessed explosive growth.

· Job opportunity and housing continue to grow outward in their peripheral suburbs.

· Some central cities that were once hollowed out started growing again at the end of the 20th century.

· Local governments in large metropolitan areas must cooperate on common challenges.

Key Terms

· agglomeration p. 374

· basic sector p. 375

· central business district (CBD) p. 385

· central place theory p. 377

· city p. 372

· congregation p. 387

· consolidated metropolitan statistical area (CMSA) p. 394

· edge city p. 396

· eminent domain p. 388

· exurb p. 396

· gateway city p. 375

· gentrification p. 398

· hinterland p. 372

· incorporation p. 372

· informal, or underground, sector p. 384

· informal settlements p. 382

· labor-intensive activity p. 379

· megacity p. 373

· metropolitan statistical area (MSA) p. 394

· micropolitan areas p. 394

· multiplier effect p. 375

· network hypothesis p. 401

· nonbasic sector p. 375

· primate city p. 372

· segregation p. 387

· spatial mismatch hypothesis p. 397

· telecommuting p. 396

· urban form p. 385

· urban geography p. 373

· urban hierarchy p. 378

· urbanization p. 372

· zoning p. 388

Review and Discussion Questions

· 1. What ancient cities are still important?


· 2. What are the basic and nonbasic sectors of an urban economy?


· 3. How are cities distributed across a landscape?


· 4. In what ways does world urbanization today differ from the model provided by the historical experience of England?


· 5. How can governments slow urbanization?


· 6. In what ways does U.S. tax policy subsidize people who buy houses?


· 7. Contrast modern Western urban-planning ideas with the ideas of traditional Islam.


Thinking Geographically

· 1. What are the site characteristics of your city? Why was the site selected?


· 2. What are the situational relationships of your city? What principal transport routes converge on your city?


· 3. What range of nonbasic economies is available in your town’s Yellow Pages?


· 4. Who are the biggest employers in your town? Which enterprises do the biggest dollar volume of business? What are your town’s basic economic activities?


· 5. Are any planned suburbs or exurbs located around your town? What forms of transportation do their residents depend on?


· 6. How many local general-purpose governments and special-purpose governments are in your metropolitan region, or the metropolitan region nearest to you? Study a map of all the forms of independent government in the area. How are the special-district government ruling boards chosen? What kind of regional planning body or government does the region have?


· 7. Some people enjoy living in cities; some people flee cities. What are the benefits and the drawbacks of living in either cities or suburbs?


· 8. What would you do to stop rural–urban migration in any given poor country?


· 9. Quality-of-life measurements can affect a city’s prosperity. What are the basic measurements of urban or regional quality of life? How would your community score?


MasteringGeography

Looking for additional review and test prep materials? Visit the Study Area in MasteringGeography™ to enhance your geographic literacy, spatial reasoning skills, and understanding of this chapter’s content by accessing a variety of resources, including interactive maps, videos, animations, In the News RSS feeds, glossary flashcards, web links, self-study quizzes, and an eText version of Introduction to Geography.

Figure 10.37 United States at night.

This 2012 satellite image of nighttime lights in the continental U.S. emphasizes the density of population centers and urban settlements.

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