TABLE 5.1 The 15 Most Populated Urban Areas in the United States, 1790–1850
Americans have a long-standing distrust of cities and city life. Thomas Jefferson (1977) suggested that cities were a source of evil and corruption that would threaten the young democracy’s political system. Despite such sentiments, the growth of urban centers in the United States has been prolific and, as we saw in Chapter 1, has increased in recent decades. For much of our history, everyday American life has been defined in urban terms.
In many respects, development in the United States mirrors the same trends and effects of social forces unleashed in Western Europe. We experienced, for example, the same industrial revolution that England did and contributed significantly to its technological breakthroughs. Everyone has probably heard of McCormick’s reaper or Thomas Edison’s lightbulb. Such inventions helped the United States compete with industrial giants like England in the nineteenth century.
Yet for all its close links to the Old World, the city-building process in the United States exhibits several features that exaggerate aspects of urbanization found elsewhere: (1) the lack of walls or fortifications around cities; (2) real estate development as a major component in the economy of capitalism; (3) the ideology of privatism, which limits the role of the state and emphasizes individual accomplishments as the basis of community; (4) large-scale immigration and population churning within cities; and (5) the regional dispersal of the metropolis. This chapter illustrates these features within the larger context of US urban history.
Many different factors have contributed to urban expansion in the United States. The role of economic forces; transportation, construction, and communication technology; political changes; immigration policy; and success at wars are but some of the major causes for the development of city building. The best explanation for urban patterns is found when connection is made between the production of settlement space and the society’s political economy. According to the sociospatial perspective, this does not mean that the clearly defined stages of metropolitan growth are directly correlated to exact stages of economic development; rather, it means only that important features of each period in economic development are associated in certain ways with important factors in the social and political change of metropolitan space.
Four distinct stages of urban growth in the United States have resulted in the formation of the multicentered metropolitan region. These are (1) the colonial period, 1630 to 1812; (2) the industrial period, 1812 to 1920; (3) the metropolitan period, 1920 to 1960; and (4) the deconcentration and restructuring of settlement space within the multicentered metropolitan region that has taken place since 1960.
Box 5.1 Stages of Capitalism and Urbanization in the United States, 1630 to the Present
| Stages of Capitalism | Stages of Urbanization |
| Mercantile-colonial period | Colonial period: 1630 to 1812 |
| Industrialization period | Industrial period: 1812 to 1920 |
| Monopoly capitalism period | Metropolitan period: 1920 to 1960 |
| Global capitalism period | Multicentered expansion: 1960 to today |
Urban and suburban settlement space in the United States has developed within a free-market economy based on private property and capital accumulation. We know this type of economic system by the name of capitalism. As both Adam Smith and Karl Marx emphasized, capitalism is a dynamic system that brings about changes in the social relations and political systems with which it comes in contact. The stages of urban development correspond to growth periods in the development of US capitalism. These stages of development are often referred to as (1) mercantile capitalism, (2) industrial capitalism, (3) monopoly capitalism, and (4) global capitalism. But these periods do not represent an evolutionary theory of development such as that of V. Gordon Childe (Chapter 2). Although cities in the United States went through these periods, there is no reason that another society has to pass through exactly the same sequence because other countries’ economic transformations differ from ours. Furthermore, according to the sociospatial perspective, stages in metropolitan growth and in the political economy are only loosely coupled, as mentioned above. Nonetheless, discussion of separate phases of city building is an effective way to organize our analysis of the connection between developments in the US political economy and the forms of settlement space over time.
The United States was colonized by European capitalist societies operating according to the political economy of mercantilism, an early stage of global capitalism. In this system, the nation-states of Europe organized the expansion of their local economies at a time when manufacturing was not industrialized and with the aid of the political apparatus of the nation-state. The wealth of countries, it was believed, depended on the well-being of commerce or trade, while domestic manufacture was protected from foreign competition by government tariffs. Mercantilist theory called for the colonization of resource-rich but undeveloped areas of the globe accomplished through the state’s own military and naval power. Wealth would increase if raw materials could be plundered from the undeveloped colonies, while manufactured articles would be produced exclusively in the home countries. By these arrangements, the maximum amount of work would be given to the nation’s own laborers and excess population could be drained off to the colonies.
In the 1700s the cities of the United States were little more than colonial outposts of England, France, and Spain located on the shores of a country with a foreboding and unsettled interior. The attention and the energies of the colonists were directed eastward across the Atlantic Ocean toward the colonial powers and events in Europe. The existence of these cities was guaranteed by the might of the colonial power’s navy and military organization.
Colonial cities were port cities. The docks and warehouses and the shipping, insurance, and trading companies constituted the focus of urban development. Farther back from the port facilities, merchant and counting houses were located, while behind the port district, the beginnings of residential quarters, principally for the colonial businessmen and their families, were located. Artisans of all kinds who engaged in handicraft manufacture of the simple implements required for daily life were also located in the town. Their shops and residences were situated throughout the port district.
As mercantilism developed, it also became a way of relieving population pressures by promoting immigration to the colonies. This, in turn, stimulated a nascent real estate industry in the port cities. Many US cities were laid out to accommodate both mercantile economic functions and residential real estate speculation. Often single entrepreneurs in England were granted permission by the crown to set up their own town as just such a speculative enterprise. The case of Philadelphia, founded in the late 1600s by the Quaker entrepreneur William Penn, illustrates the combined mercantile and real estate venture: “Philadelphia was laid out in 1681 on a plan that was probably the original speculator’s design for an American city, a plot that measured one by two miles and was easily divided into lots that might be sold at a distance” (Vance, 1990:265).
The colonial cities of the United States prospered because of the success of British mercantilism. Each of the largest towns filled an economic function connected with European trade. Boston was the center for colonial provisions; Newport, Rhode Island, specialized in shipbuilding and slave trading; New York trading focused on flour and furs; Philadelphia focused on meat, wheat, and lumber; and Charleston, South Carolina, was known for the export of rice and indigo. Initially Baltimore, Maryland, had few natural advantages, and it lagged behind the growth of these five cities, but in the later 1700s its businesses specialized in the flour-exporting trade, and it prospered. However, towns such as Williamsburg, Virginia, which were laid out solely as political centers, never grew.
Table 5.1 shows the development of cities in the period 1790 to 1850, from the colonial period through the decade just before the Civil War. The table gives us some important information about the growth of early cities under the mercantilist system and the later replacement of these cities by industrial towns in the years following the Civil War. In the early colonial period, we see New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia but also a number of smaller port cities in the Northeast. None of these cities were very large by European standards (compare the figures here with those for European cities shown in Table 2.4). Some cities, such as Philadelphia and Boston, remain important population centers today. Most of the others, however, like Newburyport, Stephentown, or Southwark, would never develop into metropolitan centers.
TABLE 5.1 The 15 Most Populated Urban Areas in the United States, 1790–1850
By the time of the Revolutionary War, US cities played a crucial role due to their demographic and economic power. The first confrontations, such as the Boston Tea Party, took place in cities. The wealth concentrated in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Newport also financed the revolt. Colonial cities became centers of propaganda that disseminated antiloyalist views throughout the colonies. At the time of the revolution, for example, thirty-six newspapers actively operated in the colonies (not all of which opposed the crown). Finally, cities played a major role because they nurtured new political organizations. These organizations became part of the colonial militia when war finally broke out. One example was the Sons of Liberty in the New York colony:
Founded in the fall of 1765 as a secret organization, the Sons of Liberty became a public body with meetings announced in newspapers. . . . In addition to communicating with other groups in the New York colony, the Sons of Liberty also kept in touch with organizations in such other colonial towns as Boston, Baltimore, and Newport. The Sons of Liberty armed themselves and became a paramilitary group ready to resist British encroachments. The group also provided an organizing function, marshalling two thousand people in October 1765 to prevent the landing of stamps to be used for tax purposes. (Hoover, 1971:92)
One legacy of colonial dependency was the absence of autonomous government and the concomitant lack of political responsibility among the citizens of the cities. As colonies they were administered by agents of the English king. Precisely this lack of political influence may have contributed to the revolutionary fervor and the struggle for democracy in Weber’s analysis, because the growing wealth and population of the colonies had no democratic recourse in the administration of port cities. In any event, the absence of autonomy, according to the historian Sam Bass Warner Jr. (1962), fostered a laissez-faire economic and social milieu that developed into the culture of privatism that so closely characterizes US cities even today (see Chapter 13).
Privatism, a legacy of our colonial history, refers to the civic culture that eschews social interests in favor of the private pursuit of individual goals. From the very beginning of our urban experience, residents already believed their principal responsibility lay in the pursuit of self-interest. Unlike the citizens of ancient Athens, for example, who were obligated to pledge their indebtedness to the city that gave them birth, residents of the American colonies were not responsible to the city but only to the colonial power. Over the years, this greatly restrained the development of a civic culture that fosters community values and social responsibility. Instead, the limited vision of privatism remains in place. According to Warner:
To describe the American tradition of privatism is not to summarize the entire American cultural tradition. . . . The tradition of privatism is, however, the most important element of our culture for understanding the development of cities. The tradition of privatism has always meant that the cities of the United States depended for their wages, employment, and general prosperity upon the aggregate successes and failures of thousands of individual enterprises, not upon community action. It has also meant that the physical forms of American cities, their lots, houses, families, and streets, have been the outcome of a real estate market of profit-seeking builders, land speculators, and large investors. (Warner, 1968:4)
A second legacy of colonial dependency was the absence of independent city economic rights. European cities of the late Middle Ages were powerful economic enterprises because they possessed independent charters of governance as well as the legal right to mint their own currency and conduct trade in their name. Colonial America granted no such privileges to its cities, and the cities did not possess chartered rights. There were no city trade monopolies, no special currency, and no city property rights beyond city borders, unlike Western Europe. Trade was organized by the large European conglomerates such as the Hudson’s Bay Company. Any individual or group of entrepreneurs could break away from a US city and settle in the hinterland, forming a separate town. The varied reasons for such fragmentation could be religious, political, or economic. What mattered was only the relative ability to split off and settle elsewhere under the protective umbrella of the colonial powers. Laissez-faire, privatism, and the ease of settlement characterized city life during the colonial period. Privatism’s obverse was the absence of political autonomy characteristic of the urban community as described by Max Weber. Even after the American Revolution, cities failed to acquire independent political rights except as far as these were granted to them by the states. Hence, the legacy of the colonial period remains very much with us today in the form of weak city government and limited city political power.
A third legacy of colonialism was the physical absence of city walls. Max Weber’s ideal city of the Middle Ages possessed defensible fortifications or walls. Elsewhere, forts usually defined the old city center. Thus, the words Kremlin in Russian and Casbah in Moroccan both mean “fortress.” Few US cities built by colonial powers exhibited this trait (although some did have temporary stockades) because the home country provided for the general defense of the region by sustaining a standing army (Monkkonen, 1988). Consequently, unlike the walled cities of Europe in the late Middle Ages, US cities provided for immense locational freedom. Land could always be developed at the fringe. To the clean-cut speculators’ grid of the colonial port city was added a surrounding fringe that could always grow by accretion and land speculation. This particular pattern remains with us today as growth occurs constantly at the fringe of development in a pattern of sprawl.
A final legacy of the colonial city was the role played by land development as a singular source of wealth in the economy. For the residents of the United States— unlike Europeans—land was plentiful and cheap. Very early in the history of this country, it became clear to enterprising Europeans with money to invest that land development was a principal way to acquire greater wealth. But the very nature of exploiting this resource requires concomitant locational activities of a group of people and the ultimate attraction of residential and commercial users. It does little good to stake a land claim, no matter how large, in a wilderness with no friendly residents around, without an attendant scheme for the eventual development of the land, including state protection for the influx of population. Hence, early in US history, land developers adopted the practice of working closely with politicians and colonial authorities to promote the development of select places. This pattern of booster-ism, involving speculators, developers, politicians, and state authorities, or a growth network (Gottdiener, 1985) composed of varied individuals who are like-minded developers of land, was repeated many times in our history and remains characteristic of development today (see Chapter 7). The sheer quantity of undeveloped land presented by the US case represents a graphic contrast to the pattern of urbanization in Western Europe (which has always reined in the interests of developers for the good of the larger society and because of real estate’s scarce supply), although it may have parallels in the recent history of countries such as Australia and Brazil that also have abundant land masses.
It is often noted in elementary school lessons that George Washington, our first president, was employed as a surveyor in his youth. In fact, he and his family were active real estate speculators. Surveying was just one aspect of this work. As one historian put it, land was “the real wealth” of the colonies. Perhaps Washington’s crowning achievement was his participation in the booster effort to develop Washington, DC, as the nation’s capital. In the 1780s, the district was nothing more than an inhospitable swamp of worthless real estate. All that was to change through the efforts of newly achieved political power and economic investment in land. According to an account of the time: “In 1793 George Washington led a procession with two brass bands and Masons in full costume across the Potomac to a barbecue and land auction at which he purchased the first lots of the new capital’s undeveloped swampland. . . . Self-promotion, boosterism, and constant attention to the economic main chance soon came to characterize the young nation’s cities” (Monkkonen, 1988:63).
The settlement of the vast US territory following the Revolutionary War constituted a magnificent drama involving individuals representing the very legends of our country itself. As Gary Nash (1974) has observed, this drama was colored in red, white, and black, because it involved a three-way clash among white former colonists, Native Americans, and black slaves. Frontiersmen such as Davy Crockett shouldered hunting muskets and fought the Indian Wars. Native Americans such as the Apache chief Geronimo and his people were driven from their lands, killed in vast numbers, or resettled to make way for the white people’s development of the interior.
Industrialists such as J. P. Morgan and Jacob Astor accumulated vast sums of money in trade, banking, and real estate, only to lose power and wealth to other upstarts, such as Jay Gould, with equally ambitious schemes. Politicians such as President Grover Cleveland mingled with the active boosters of growth during a time when corruption was a way of life in government. In the middle of it all, the fate of the nation was decided in a civil war. Great spokespeople such as Frederick Douglass articulated the pain of suppression under which black people were living as slaves. Eventually slavery was defeated but so too was the rural way of southern life in a society that shifted from plantation agriculture to industrialized farming and manufacture. Technology, industrialization, city government, and land development took over the stage of urban growth.
It is helpful to think of American capitalism as acting like a large land development agency in addition to its role as an industrial enterprise. During the period of formative growth, entrepreneurs singled out choice locations in the advancing path of expansion and built cities. According to the historian Richard C. Wade (1959), city construction took place in many cases before population influx; that is, urbanization in the United States was often land speculation that proceeded with the aid of local governments. In a sense, the establishment of a town as a political entity harnessed land to the control of growth interests. As a consequence of political reforms during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, it was comparatively easy for groups of capitalist land developers to declare their projects incorporated cities. Hence, with the aid of home rule, the expansion westward during the century between 1812 and 1920, when the majority of the US population became city residents, was an urban expansion and simultaneously an explosion in the number of governments at the local level. By founding towns, developers also used local governments to provide a civic or community structure for people who came there to live.
The real estate projects that opened the American frontier did not proceed in isolation. Entrepreneurs were also merchants or industrialists. Money was invested in commercial enterprises as well as in land. In fact, capital often flowed back and forth between investments in industry and investments in land. This relation will be explained more fully in Chapter 7. Thus Cyrus McCormick, who invented the reaper, made millions in the 1800s from his factory, but his real wealth came from investment of those profits in real estate (Longstreet, 1973).
In addition, the technology of transport became an explicit means through which investors of capital centered in cities competed with one another to build new cities on the frontier. Thus, railroad entrepreneurs such as Leland Stanford were also city builders. Let us consider the era of urban expansion according to these interrelated links among forms of capital, government policies and politicians, and forms of technology.
Prior to the 1820s, the US urban population remained relatively stable at around 10 percent of the total. After that time, a sudden burst of urbanization took place that did not abate until the 1930s. By the 1920 census, over half of all Americans were already living in cities. In the hundred years after 1820, the United States had been transformed into an urbanized nation.
After the War of 1812, urban development continued in the form of networked cities along the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. At this stage, economic interests located within the large East Coast cities turned an about-face by ignoring the mercantilist needs of trade with Europe and actively pursued the development of the interior. In all respects, early westward expansion was highly dependent both on the development of transportation technology and on the protection of white settlers by government against attacks by Native American residents. Land was realized as a capital investment only after transportation and communication infrastructure could be put in place. Roads had to be built. Tracks had to be laid. Telegraph lines were installed. In addition, the safety of work crews for all these efforts had to be ensured. Land was being taken from Native Americans, an effort that required organized government activity and military intervention.
Hinterland development was not simply the consequence of the application of emerging transportation technology, as might be suggested by human ecology. Local capital had to be organized to bring about development. Often entrepreneurs competed with one another over investments in the interior of the country because at the time, the unity of capital under corporate interests that cut across space and united efforts in different cities had not yet fully matured. Consequently, westward expansion was a characteristic of competitive capital and was often marked by the schemes of single individuals who sought to build up business and build a city at the same time.
For example, the earliest urban rivalry involved local capitalists situated in the important East Coast port cities. Their future fortunes depended on the continuing success of their respective trade routes to the interior, because the latter was the source of goods for export and raw materials needed by local manufacturers.
Just after the War of 1812, the shortest route to the West lay across either Pennsylvania or Maryland. There were two roads—the “national road” out of Baltimore and the “Pittsburgh Pike” out of Philadelphia—but these links were inadequate for handling the heavy agricultural products of the interior (Rubin, 1970:128). Instead, produce was shipped south on the Mississippi River to New Orleans, making that city the most important export center.
New York entrepreneurs saw their city facing decline as the frontier expanded west. In 1817, they began construction of a canal that linked the Hudson River at Albany 364 miles westward to Buffalo on Lake Erie. In a bold stroke, they hoped to create the most efficient link to the hinterland, with Buffalo becoming an inland port for the Great Lakes region of the Midwest. The canal was completed in 1825 and was so successful that it inspired a craze of canal building across the United States. From its inception, New York City competed effectively with New Orleans as an export point for agricultural produce.
As a result of the successful Erie Canal venture, Philadelphia and Baltimore financial interests faced decline, if not extinction. As the historian J. Rubin (1970:131) notes, they responded with their own schemes, aided greatly by government laws and subsidies. Initially Philadelphia interests demanded that the state proceed with a canal to Ohio. However, construction failed in the Allegheny Mountains and a rail segment was required. This occurred several times, and Philadelphia ended up with a mixed canal and rail portage system that required several transshipments. The route was hopelessly incapable of competing with New York’s Erie Canal.
Baltimore interests viewed Philadelphia’s problems with trepidation. They saw the difficulty of crossing the Appalachian Mountains via canal. By the 1830s, the steam locomotive had just been perfected in England and, in a venture as bold as the New York effort, they opted for the construction of a railroad line that would connect Baltimore with the Ohio Valley over the mountains. The line was eventually called the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and it was remarkably successful. As a consequence of these improvements, New York and Baltimore prospered while Boston and Philadelphia declined. In addition, the links to the interior in the 1830s helped found the Great Lakes cities of Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, which also prospered because of successful rail and canal traffic to East Coast ports.
In the period between 1830 and 1920, the most significant technological innovation was the joint development of the steel rail and steam locomotive that perfected the long haul for commerce, resources, and people. Of the 153 major US cities existing today, 75 percent were established after 1840 when the railroad matured as an established infrastructure, and only 9 percent of these same major cities were built after 1910 (Monkkonen, 1988:75). It would be simple to suggest that transportation technology alone caused the explosion of urbanization. This would be misleading, however. Technology became the means of growth, but inception and execution were the result both of the quest for wealth among entrepreneurs and of the desires of politicians in government at all levels—local, state, and federal— that joined these ventures, aiding them with political resources. It is precisely this conjuncture of investors, political power mongers, and the dream of wealth that characterizes the second stage of urbanization in the United States. According to the historians Glaab and Brown, for example:
Earlier rivalries had been limited by nature—by the location of rivers and lakes. But railroads were not bound by topography, by the paths of river commerce, or by natural trade patterns. Railroads could be built anywhere, creating cities where they chose. Since the building of railroads was dependent to a considerable extent on subsidies from local communities, railroad leaders were willing to bargain with competing towns to obtain the best possible deal in stock subscriptions, bond issues, and right-of-ways. . . . The “boosterism” associated with the Midwest and areas further west is largely a legacy of the late nineteenth century era of urban rivalry. (Glaab and Brown, 1967:112)
As we will see as well in our discussion of the last two stages of urban growth, this pattern of capital investment, coupled with government subsidies and competition among separate places, is repeated countless times and characterizes urban growth and change in the United States and possibly elsewhere. As the sociospatial approach suggests, development was a consequence of a combination of economic, political, and cultural factors—the frontier myth and the American Dream of wealth combined with cooperative government officials and venture capitalists to urbanize the nation.
What exactly were the proportions involved in the lure of wealth that accompanied town building? Consider the Illinois Central Railroad. Its promoters were also prolific city builders. In 1850, ten towns existed in the vicinity of the railroad’s route. After expansion ten years later, there were forty-seven, and by 1870 there were eighty-one. When the Illinois Central entrepreneurs could not make subsidy agreements with the politicians of existing towns for their right-of-way, they just built their own towns nearby. Champaign, Illinois, for example, was constructed directly by the railroad adjacent to the existing town of Urbana.
Another example shows us the size of the profit realized from real estate investment alone. The town of Kankakee, Illinois, was built by this same railroad in 1855 at a cost of $10,000, and after just one year the owners had already realized $50,000 in lot sales, or a profit of 400 percent, with more city land remaining. As expansion moved west, a similar pattern recurred involving a host of other promoters and their railroads. In San Francisco, which had developed as the premier city of the West Coast during this period, town lots that could be bought for $1,500 in 1850 were worth from $8,000 to $27,000 just three years later in 1853 (Glaab and Brown, 1967:113, 121).
So far we have fostered the impression that city building involved exclusively land development schemes combining capital, government, and transport technology. During the period between 1812 and 1920, however, the United States became a world leader in manufacturing. Forces of industrialization unleashed with such effect in England during this time had similar results here. During the period between 1850 and 1900, for example, US production of textiles multiplied seven times, iron and steel increased ten times, the processing of agricultural products expanded fourteen times, and the production of agricultural implements increased twenty-five times (Hoover, 1971:180).
The very heart of industrialization was the factory, which was the engine that drove the industrial stage of capitalism. But workers and capitalists were not simply disembodied abstractions. They were people who required places to live, raise families, and spend whatever leisure time they had. Industrialization, therefore, produced the factory town or community that contained workers’ families and houses, machinery, and energy sources, all within close proximity.
The first American manufacturing city was Lowell, Massachusetts, which was located on the Merrimack River at a site where the water dropped ninety feet and provided the original power source for its factories. Investors chose this place for a complex of cotton mills and struck on the idea of importing a labor force of young women from the neighboring cities, especially Boston, because they would be easy to control as a source of nonunion labor power. The geographer James Vance gives this account of the city:
In 1845, thirty-three of the large mill buildings ranged along the canals and banks of the Merrimack, making Lowell the largest cotton town in America and one of its few great industrial cities, with a population of thirty thousand. A full third of the population was engaged as operatives in the mills or their workshops, though female employment remained disproportionate with 6,320 females and 2,915 males. (Vance, 1990:347)
Early industrialization in the United States is associated with the names of entrepreneurs who perfected specific products: Singer sewing machines, Yale locks, Armour hams, McCormick reapers, and Remington typewriters are but some of these innovations. Later on, in most cases, the descendants of the originators carried on the family name and its business. In the 1860s, the leading industries reflected early development of manufacturing and the persisting importance of the United States as a supplier of natural resources. Cotton goods, lumber, boots and shoes, and flour dominated. By 1910, according to Geruson and McGrath (1977:68), the major industries reflected the maturation of manufacturing and consisted of machinery, iron and steel, lumber, clothing, and railroad cars, among other products.
We have covered several features associated with urbanization in the United States. One of the most distinctive is the phenomenon of population turnover, or churning, which for a time was quite exaggerated here compared to other countries. From the mid-1800s to 1900s, American cities functioned as giant magnets that attracted immigrants from all over the world. Prior to the 1800s, most people came from the British Isles or as slaves captured from Africa. After 1830, many more arrived from Germany, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe, and China. Between 1800 and 1925, over 40 million immigrants entered the United States. Seventeen million arrived between 1846 and 1900 (Vance, 1990:359).
TABLE 5.2 The 20 Most Populated Urban Areas in the United States, 1890–1950
These figures alone cannot capture the way cities functioned as entry points for people. In effect, cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston processed vast numbers of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, orienting them to life in America before many made their way into the hinterland. At this time the internal demographic differentiation of cities took on the characteristics commonly associated with their residential patterns, namely, mosaics of little worlds comprising ethnic enclaves of immigrants. The robustness of cultural life found there inspired succeeding generations of urban sociologists in their studies.
During the period of urban expansion, population churned throughout the large cities. By one conservative estimate, half of the residents moved each decade only to be replaced by still more immigrants (Monkkonen, 1988). A study of Boston in the year 1890, for example, revealed that with a total population of approximately 450,000 people, at least 600,000 had moved in a decade before, while somewhat more than 500,000 had moved out. In short, the population size of cities during the formative period of expansion is a static figure that disguises the massive movement of people into and out of those cities.
One way to appreciate population churning is to consider the economic and political opportunities created by the phenomenon. Each new immigrant had to be processed by federal, state, and local officials, which meant more government jobs. Schoolteachers were in constant demand, as were settlement house workers, religious functionaries, and the many specialized businesses that catered to the needs of arrivals from foreign lands. City economies thrived not only because of the influx of population but also because it turned over so frequently, making the same services necessary to new people with similar needs as previous arrivals. Above all, the rapid increase in population provided US industry not only with much needed labor power but also with consumers who could use the products being turned out by the factories. Export trade during this period of US history was not as important as the growing domestic market of consumers. In a subsequent chapter, we will take a closer look at the importance of immigration to American cities. Since the 1980s, a new round of significant immigration, this time from Latin America and Asia, has transformed American urban regions again, in the suburbs as well as the cities. Like the period of rapid industrialization we just discussed, the contemporary phase is also tied to economic needs, but this time it is aimed at feeding the demands of both high-tech industries on the one hand, and minimum wage services on the other. As we shall see, areas that received immigrants between 1970 and 2000 experienced economic growth while those that did not declined.
Population influx had a dramatic effect on the internal configuration of cities. Owners of buildings soon discovered that the voracious demand for housing could be met by converting structures to rental units. Later, new buildings called tenements were constructed specifically for rental use. These buildings were designed to squeeze together as many families as possible. The increased density made public health crises common. It also increased the risk of fire. On October 18, 1871, for example, the city of Chicago was almost destroyed by a single fire. Other fires at the turn of the century devastated cities such as Boston and San Francisco. Yet the escalating demand for housing also afforded handsome profits to owners of tenements. According to one estimate, by 1890 as much as 77 percent of all city dwellers were renters, and the annual returns on rentals could be as high as 40 percent (Glaab and Brown, 1967:160).
From our present vantage point, it is simply impossible to grasp the kinds of conditions immigrants lived in during the late 1800s in American cities. The writer Luc Sante published a meticulously researched and now classic book on Manhattan during this time, Low Life (1991). Box 5.2 outlines the basic features of these tenements and the astonishing population density and primitive living conditions that characterized them.
During the 1800s, the spatial organization of the city changed as new forms of building introduced a larger scale to the physical environment, aided greatly by several innovations in construction. The balloon-frame house replaced heavy timber
Box 5.2 Tenement Living in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Manhattan
“The typical tenement of the late 19th century consisted of two buildings, front and rear, and most popularly known as the double-decker. The front structure measured 25 feet by 50, the rear was 25 feet, and they were separated by a 25 ft. court. . . . The interior rooms of the front house got no light or air at all, and neither did the back rooms of the rear, since that structure generally abutted on its counterpart across the block. . . . Below were two subterranean levels, both fully inhabited: basements, thought to be comparable to the upper stories since they lay partly above the ground, and cellers, completely submerged, airless and lightless. In 1864 there were 15,224 such populated cellers. Cellers were the lowest rung of habitation, but this did not prevent landlords from commanding princely sums for them, as much as $200 per month.”
Within these confines horrific unsanitary conditions prevailed leading to diseases of all kinds and, by today’s standards anywhere, alarmingly high infant mortality rates. Fires were also common and, due to the tinderbox nature of construction, tenements that caught on fire burned rapidly and trapped their inhabitants within.
“The density of population is difficult to imagine by present day standards. . . . There were no residential structures more than seven or eight stories high, and the average was four stories, many of these floors inhabited by a single-family. In 1872, for example, the 17th Ward, bounded by 14th street on the north, Avenue B on the east, Rivington Street on the south, and the Bowery and Fourth Avenue on the west, held 1/40th of Manhattan’s total area but 1/10th of its population.”
It housed a population equal to that of Richmond, Virginia, and greater than that of Cleveland.
“The successive waves of immigrants from Europe had brought so many people, particularly in the last 20 years of the 19th century, and had dumped them in such dire conditions, that as many as four or five families were routinely housed in apartments intended for one. Yet even these could count themselves as provisionally fortunate. Less so were the numbers of homeless, dispossessed, or those who had never found one, who were legion.”
SOURCE: Excerpted from Luc Sante, Low Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 30, 32.
construction in the 1830s and made it possible for building to proceed more rapidly and with greater quantity than in the past. In 1848, James Bogardus introduced the use of cast-iron columns and weight-bearing walls supporting the structure of nonresidential buildings, which eliminated the need for heavy masonry construction and opened the internal spaces of buildings so that factories and warehouses could maximize their unimpeded use of floor space. Elisha Otis invented the elevator, and by 1880 its widespread use enabled taller buildings to work more efficiently. Finally, in 1884 William L. Jenny erected the first skyscraper, the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, which was also the “first building with a fully iron structure carrying the weight of the edifice” (Vance, 1990:471). The city of skyscrapers was not far away.
Tall building construction, unimpeded floor space allowing for the efficient placement of machinery, and the remarkable innovation of the elevator transformed the city into an arena of concentrated industry during the last half of the nineteenth century. Mobility of the workforce became a paramount concern at this time. The need for mass transport was met by a series of innovations, starting with the horse-drawn omnibus that carried twelve to twenty passengers (Glaab and Brown, 1967:147). By the 1850s, these were replaced by the horse-drawn railway car, which not only facilitated the movement of people into and out of the “downtown” districts but also provided the means by which the middle class could suburbanize (Warner, 1962). In the 1870s, the horse was finally replaced by the steam-powered locomotive. By 1881 the elevated lines, or “Els,” of New York City were carrying 175,000 passengers a day!
Surpassing all these advances, a major breakthrough occurred in the 1870s, when Nikola Tesla’s discoveries on alternating current were applied to the production of electrical power. The dynamo replaced the battery, and electric trains and trolleys were perfected. Electrification made possible the extensive, nonpolluting trolley system and the underground subway train. This change was remarkable. As Glaab and Brown observe, “In 1890, 69.7 percent of the total trackage in cities was operated by horses; by 1902 this figure had declined to 1.1 percent, while electric power was used on 97 percent of the mileage” (1967:148). The result of all these transformations was the 24/7 city with the diurnal rhythm of city life—masses of workers converging on business districts in the morning, only to disperse at day’s end with the same great spurt aided by efficient and safe mass transit. By the 1920s, the United States had successfully integrated millions of immigrants from over one hundred countries into an industrial labor force. Its large cities were all built and humming with activity. Industrialization and urbanization had not only settled the frontier but led the country to a place among the world’s powers.
During the period of urban expansion, economic interests located within cities competed with one another and land development in the West made people wealthy. This stage ended as individual entrepreneurs and small businesses were gobbled up by large corporations, often located in different cities or even states. The phase of competitive capitalism slowly gave way to a new era, that of monopoly capitalism. In turn, cities grew progressively larger.
City building slowed down considerably in the United States in the 1900s following a series of economic depressions that would culminate in the Great Depression of the late 1920s. Economic activity and urban growth picked up again in the 1930s as government reforms aided economic recovery and the United States mobilized for another world war in the 1940s. During the metropolitan period, cities not only grew larger but also spread out beyond the political boundaries of their local governments. New areas of development became, in turn, new cities; in many cases, urbanization simply engulfed the smaller towns adjacent to the large cities through a region-wide process of suburbanization.
In the metropolitan period, it was becoming necessary to think about the urban phenomenon less in terms of the large city and more in terms of a region consisting of a mix of residential, work, recreational, and shopping places. The US Department of the Census introduced the term standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA; see Chapter 1) to account for the regional nature of development. Large central cities such as New York and Detroit also assumed vast economic importance far beyond their borders because of the businesses that were centered there—finance and cars, respectively. This conjunction of spatial reach and economic might gave the city a new name: the “metropolis” or “mother city.” Visions of the immense city outgrowing its boundaries began to appear in many countries. The German film Metropolis is one such example. Cities such as Tokyo, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and Calcutta all reached an unprecedented scale of size and population.
The metropolitan pattern of increasing size and geographical territory became characteristic of many cities in the United States. Following the Great Depression, urban scientists became interested in the phenomenon of the metropolitan region, and many studies were carried out to discover its social, political, spatial, and economic characteristics (McKenzie, 1933; Schnore, 1957; Bollens and Schmandt, 1965). Research revealed that two processes contributed most to regional growth: greater differentiation of the system of cities, expressed as changes in spatial, functional, and demographic differentiation; and the process of suburbanization.
Metropolitan development and change do not occur because of technological factors alone but are also dependent on political and cultural relations. Economic activities, for example, require a workforce and certain community services, such as adequate schooling and health care, for businesses and their labor pools to survive over time. When there is a proper mesh between the human tissue of family and community life and associated economic activities requiring particular skill levels, both businesses and neighborhoods prosper. The sociospatial perspective emphasizes the fact that the relations among the economy, political structure, and culture are reciprocal.
Accommodations between the social fabric of community life and the needs of business produced the early factory towns, such as Burlington, Vermont, and Birmingham, Alabama, during the early period of family capitalism. One characteristic of this phase was that sources of employment and the labor pool were close together and both were tied to the general fate of the city itself. As the structure of capitalism changed in the 1930s, this equilibrium was shattered, and upheavals in the community paralleled those in business. Neighborhood relations changed when people were thrown out of work after plants closed or businesses altered their skill needs. New demands were placed on school systems, city budgets, and families to aid in the adjustment. In many cases, the success or failure of new ways of doing business depended on how well the community, local government, and families adapted to change. Thus, while economic alterations affect the social fabric, the latter in turn can affect the well-being of the local economy.
Consequently, each time new economic priorities are put in place, they affect the composition of territory and alter community life. The social organization of a particular place—the way it is organized according to locational choices of business, the scale of community, the flows of commuters, definitions of city service districts, the pace and structure of family life, and so on—is affected by the reciprocal relation between the local economy and the social fabric. In this chapter, we will discuss the changes brought about by the Depression restructuring of the 1930s. They involve a process of horizontal integration of business activity coupled with metropolitan regional expansion. In the next chapter, we will consider equally important changes that have occurred since 1960.
Following the Great Depression, the economic system of the United States changed from a comparatively competitive form of industrial capitalism with a relatively large number of firms in each industry to a concentrated form called “monopoly capitalism” (Baran and Sweezy, 1966), where ownership was consolidated in a few hands. One distinguishing characteristic of the new form was the growth of monopolistic (one firm) or oligopolistic (a select few firms) control of major industries. For example, automobile production prior to the 1930s involved a host of firms such as Studebaker, Hudson, Tucker, and De Soto, along with Ford, Pontiac, and Chrysler. These companies were scattered across much of the United States, and their fates were often intertwined with specific cities and communities. After the 1930s, production of automobiles was essentially in the hands of the Big Four—General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors (today it’s down to the first three). While these companies also maintained branch plants across the country, their operations were national in scope and their headquarters were no longer tied to the places where they had their major factories. The Detroit area in particular became the headquarters for much of the auto industry, and decisions made there affected towns across the country. This change in the horizontal integration of large businesses to a more dispersed pattern, coupled with greater concentration of ownership, was also repeated in other industries, including steel, the production of consumer durables (such as electrical appliances), and even the consolidation of retailing outlets by giant department stores following branch marketing schemes (such as Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward).
The changes in the scale of economic organization had spatial effects, especially on local community life, and several classic sociological studies documented them (Vidich and Bensman, 1960; Lynd and Lynd, 1937). Concentration of wealth and ownership led to greater horizontal integration of business activities and changes in the spatial relations among community, work, and region. That is, prior to the Depression, most companies had all their functions located together and generally in the same city. These firms were replaced by companies with divisions in any number of locations, and they used dispersal in space to their advantage to cut costs, especially labor costs. For example, a large company that was part of an oligopoly in one industry might have its headquarters in a center such as New York, where it would be close to the headquarters of the other oligopolists in the same industry. It would also be close to banking and related services necessary to the command-and-control function of business administration. Its specialized needs would stimulate the local community to supply laborers with adequate training for the jobs that were created. This same firm might have a branch plant for production located in Newark, New Jersey, a central distribution facility in Philadelphia, and so on, each with its own impact on the local community and labor force. Such a pattern of related functional differentiation and spatial or horizontal integration was replicated in many industries.
As a consequence, after 1930, a new, functionally differentiated system of urban places had emerged in the United States; that is, different cities were the homes of different aspects of industry or commerce. Instead of competing with one another, as was the case during the previous period of competitive capitalism discussed in Chapter 3, local capital was now organized and integrated by a national system of concentrated wealth. This pattern was not a product of the city itself but was attributable to the powers of institutions and social actors whose activities were deployed within the cities that were linked to the national corporations producing most of the country’s wealth. Thus, horizontal integration and functional differentiation were two related outcomes in the restructuring of social organization after the 1930s. We call this interlinked complex of functionally differentiated activities located within urban places a system of cities (McKenzie, 1933; Berry, 1972; Bourne and Simmons, 1978). In studying this system, it is always important to keep in mind that functional differentiation is a feature of the particular complex of economic activities that are located within a city rather than a characteristic of the city itself. Furthermore, the diverse activities across the nation are horizontally integrated by large corporations that possess “command-and-control” headquarters.
By the 1960s the US urban system consisted of a select group of large cities with populations ranging from several hundred thousand to over 7 million. This pattern represents balanced urbanization that is characteristic of the older industrialized countries such as England (see Chapter 11 for a contrast with less developed countries). Several studies have documented the structure of the urban system in the United States (Pred, 1973; Chase-Dunn, 1985). It is arranged across two different dimensions. On the one hand, cities seem to be distinguished by concentration of business in either manufacturing or services, with the larger cities less specialized. On the other hand, there is specialization in finances or commerce. Furthermore, from 1950 to 1970, the functional specialization of the cities in the US system remained relatively stable (South and Poston, 1982). Cities such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Atlanta, for example, were diverse areas, while cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, and Los Angeles were more concentrated in manufacturing, and Portland, Oregon, Kansas City, and Minneapolis specialized in financial activities and commerce. These specializations and rankings are somewhat different today, as we will see in the next chapter. However, until at least the 1970s they characterized an urban system that reflected the increasing functional integration of the emergent national economy. Until the 1970s they also showed that important business activity remained concentrated within central cities. That is no longer as true today.
The immense economic changes bringing about the concentration of capital in large cities were only one aspect of the metropolitan era. As central cities prospered, they attracted talented people from all over the nation. Metropolises became centers of culture and political power as well. They were the sites of important museums, universities, and symphony orchestras. They housed art movements and literary revivals. With their immense populations, they also wielded great political power. In many cases, such as Chicago and New York City, carrying the state in a presidential election depended, in effect, on carrying the city. Much of this confluence of economic, political, and cultural centrality was to change rapidly beginning with the 1960s (see next chapter). But perhaps the best example of the world-class metropolis during the period prior to this is New York City (see Box 5.3).
Between 1930 and 1960, the complexion of metropolitan demographics changed. As the metropolitan corporate economy kicked in following the Depression and large cities fought for their functional niche in the world, corporations hired a
Box 5.3 New York City in the Metropolitan Period
By the time of the Civil War, New York City was already the country’s most populous city and its banking capital. By the 1920s, New York had replaced London as the financial center of the globe. Its great skyscrapers, such as the Empire State and Chrysler buildings; its museums and cultural institutions, including Tin Pan Alley (Twenty-eighth Street) and Broadway theaters; and its universities, made New York the cultural and intellectual center of the United States as well. At this time, the New York Yankees were the best team in baseball and arguably the best team ever. Their home run hitter, Babe Ruth, was so popular that the owner, “Beer Baron” Jacob Rupert, decided to build a large stadium to showcase the team (Allen, 1990). Yankee Stadium, or “the house that Ruth built,” with over a 60,000 seating capacity, was constructed in the Bronx and instantly sold out for many of its games.
By 1930 New York already had over 7 million people, a figure that is slightly less than the population today. The Depression hit the city especially hard. Although many people suffered and manufacturing began its unimpeded decline, the city enjoyed a renaissance under the mayorship of Fiorello La Guardia. An outstanding progressive leader, La Guardia used government to get things done. Parks were cleaned up and renovated, new highways were constructed, the subway system was consolidated and improved, and new housing and commercial construction were promoted. La Guardia built the first international airport for New York (now named after him). His administration peaked with the spectacular New York World’s Fair from 1939 to 1940, which was visited by almost 45 million people (Allen, 1990:280).
During the 1950s, New York City became the center for corporate headquarters, if not the monopoly capital center for the globe. Beginning in 1952 with the construction of Lever House on Park Avenue, the new, international-style office building took over the skyline with its glass facades and square, flat roof. Midtown became a mass of high-rise corporate towers. At this time the New York School of Art, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, assumed the global standard for modern art, and the city became the culture capital of the world (Walloch, 1988). Arturo Toscanini, one of the greatest orchestra conductors, came to live in the city. The NBC Symphony Orchestra was created just for him, and he appeared on television. The new invention, by the way, had its programming centered in New York City, where all the network headquarters resided. By 1960, when the metropolitan period began its decline, there was still no more dynamic, exciting, culturally stimulating, and prosperous place in the United States.
growing number of white-collar professionals. Many more trained workers found employment in the sophisticated service industries that aided the activities of business headquarters. A growing number of these new urbanites were highly educated and well paid relative to the times. In the 1950s and 1960s, many of these corporate employees preferred to live in the city. A study by Leo F. Schnore (1963) in 1960 revealed that metropolitan regions with comparatively newer core cities (those reaching a population of 50,000 after 1920) had higher family incomes, levels of education, and percentages of white-collar employees in the central city than in the suburban ring. This breakdown is no longer the rule today, as we will see in Chapter 6 when we consider the contemporary changes.
In other respects, central cities began to assume the dimensions of ethnic and racial concentration that we find at present; that is, beginning with the 1950s, demographic differentiation of the metropolitan population began to take on the sharp racial distinctions that are characteristic today. Writing in the 1960s, Bollens and Schmandt remark:
Within the metropolitan area itself, the ethnic colonies are concentrated largely in the central city. . . . Chicago, an urban complex of many nationality groups, furnishes a typical example. The latest census shows that of the approximately 600,000 foreign born living in the SMSA, 73 percent reside in the central city. (1965:96)
Bollens and Schmandt add about black Americans at the time that:
The geographical segregation or distribution of ethnic settlements is even more pronounced when the non-white migrants, predominantly Negroes, are considered. . . . As the non-whites have migrated to urban places, they have tended to gravitate into the central cities of metropolitan areas. By 1960 over one-half of the non-white population lived in such communities, a gain of 63 percent over 1950. Among the whites, on the other hand, there has been a continual shift from the central cities to suburbs with the result that in 1960, 52 percent of the whites in the 212 SMSAs lived outside the central cities compared to 22 percent of the non-white. (1965:97)
The migration of blacks from the South involved a mass exodus. Millions left in the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the 1960 census, only half the black population still resided in the South. Several factors were responsible, including the extensive use of the mechanical cotton picker by the 1940s and the phasing out of the sharecropper system in the Deep South. Many black Americans went north, west, and east, attracted by the possibility of jobs in the newly booming military industries. Most of these migrants settled in the central cities. Returning to the example of Chicago, Nicholas Lemann notes:
During the 1940s, the black population of Chicago increased by 77 percent, from 278,000 to 492,000. In the 1950s, it grew by another 65 percent, to 813,000; at one point 2,200 black people were moving to Chicago every week. By 1960, Chicago had more than half a million more black residents than it had had twenty years earlier, and black migrants from the South were still coming in tremendous numbers. (1991b:70)
The extensive changes in urban form brought about during the metropolitan period led the way to the end of this era as well. By the early 1960s the movement of white families from the central city to the suburbs was well under way, and investment in areas outside of the central city paved the way for the creation of the multicentered urban region. Although the central cities would remain the focus of economic and manufacturing activity for another decade or two, their populations were already undergoing a remarkable transformation. Many central cities developed extensive ethnic and minority communities and by the end of the century would be more diverse than they had been a hundred years earlier. Increasingly the cities would become the home of ethnic communities and the white working class, while the white middle class would dominate the suburban areas. The crucial factor in all of this is the process of suburbanization, which is also responsible for the creation of the multicentered urban region.
In this chapter we have traced the development of settlement forms from the colonial period to the industrial period to the metropolitan period by linking these forms to changes in the political economy of the United States.
The legacy of the mercantile era was fourfold: (1) the absence of autonomous government and the ideology of privatism; (2) the absence of city economic rights; (3) the absence of city walls; (4) the role played by landed wealth as a singular source of wealth in the economy.
The legacy of the industrial era was also fourfold: (1) the development of the hinterland through the interaction of politicians, capitalists, land developers, and new transportation technologies; (2) the Industrial Revolution with its factories and factory towns; (3) immigration and population churning that provided factories with wage laborers and consumers and tenants for landlords; (4) new technologies that changed the construction of factories, offices, and residential structures, that lit up the cities with electrical lighting and provided mass transportation for commuters.
mercantile capitalism / industrial capitalism
monopoly capitalism / global capitalism
colonial cities / colonial dependency
mercantile cities
population churning
immigration
economic organization
spatial differentiation
functional specialization
1. How does urbanization in the United States differ from that of other countries discussed in Chapter 2? Identify three specific differences and explain their significance for urban development in the United States.
2. The legacies of colonialism were important for later urban development in the United States. What are the legacies of colonialism, and how have these influenced the development of American cities?
3. Industrial development led to the rapid growth of cities at the end of the nineteenth century. What are some of the social problems that resulted from this rapid growth? How were these problems dealt with by local governments?
4. What are some of the technological developments that influenced the physical structure of the industrial city at the end of the nineteenth century? How did these technological developments alter the spatial structure of the industrial city?
5. How was metropolitan growth from 1920 to 1960 linked to changes in the nature of US capitalism? How did the urban system in the United States change during this period? Why did metropolitan growth in this period result in increased functional differentiation of cities in the US urban system?