URBANIZATION

URBANIZATION. Cities have been the pioneers of American growth. From the beginnings of European exploration and conquest, towns and cities were the staging points for the settlement of successive resource frontiers. Boston and Santa Fe in the seventeenth century, Philadelphia and San Antonio in the eighteenth century, Cincinnati and Denver in the nineteenth century, and Anchorage and Miami in the twentieth century all played similar roles in organizing and supporting the production of raw materials for national and world markets. It has been city-based bankers, merchants, and journalists who have linked individual resource hinterlands into a single national economy.

The reality of the "urban frontier" clashes with the ingrained American frontier myth. In his famous essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), Frederick Jackson Turner asked his readers to take an imaginative stance over the Cumberland Gap to watch the "procession of civilization … the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer." City makers, by implication, trailed far to the rear. From James Fenimore Cooper's novels and Theodore Roosevelt's Winning of the West (4 vols., 1889–1896) to Paul Bunyan stories and John Wayne movies, there is little place for the bustling levees of New Orleans, the surging crowds of Broadway, or the smoky cacophony of Pittsburgh steel mills.

A comparison of urbanization in the United States to the rest of the world contradicts the national self-image. Americans have prided themselves on their youth as a nation, which consequently was late to urbanize. In sober fact, however, the United States was a pioneer among urbanizing nations. Along with Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, it was among the very first to feel the effects of the urban-industrial revolution. The history of American cities is substantially a story of the invention of new institutions and technologies to cope with two centuries of massive urbanization.

Stages of Urbanization

American urbanization has followed the same demographic pattern found in every urbanizing society for the last two centuries. The word "urbanization" itself refers to an increase in the proportion of national or regional population living in cities. For the first six thousand years of urban life, no society was long able to maintain an urban percentage greater than from 5 to 10 percent. Starting in late eighteenth-century England, however, one nation after another experienced an accelerating shift from rural to urban population. After several generations of rapid urbanization, the process leveled off toward a new equilibrium in which about three-quarters of the population lived in cities and many of the rest pursued city-related activities in smaller towns. The result, when the urban proportion of a population is graphed against time is an s-shaped curve that turns up sharply for perhaps a century and then tapers off.

Urban growth in the United States has clearly followed these three stages of gradual growth, explosive take off, and maturity. First, the era of colonial or pre-modern cities stretched from the seventeenth century to the 1810s. Second, the rise of the industrial city dominated a century of rapid urbanization from 1820 to 1920. Finally, the third era of the modern city has run from 1920 onward. At each stage, the available technologies of communication and transportation shaped the internal patterns of cities and their distribution across the continent.

The first century of British and Dutch colonization along the Atlantic seaboard depended directly on the founding of new cities, from New Amsterdam (1625) and Boston (1630) to Providence (1638), Charleston (1672), Norfolk (1680), Philadelphia (1682), and Savannah (1733). These colonial towns resembled the provincial market centers in the British Isles. Compact in size and small in population, they linked the farms, fisheries, and forests of the Atlantic colonies to markets in Europe and the Caribbean. With populations that ranged from 15,000 to 30,000 at the time of the American Revolution, the four largest cities dominated the commerce of regional hinterlands. Portsmouth, Salem, Springfield, and Providence looked to Boston; Albany traded via New York; Philadelphia took its profits from the rich farms of the Delaware and Susquehanna Valleys; Charleston centralized the trade of Savannah, Wilmington, and New Bern.

Colonial capitals looked to the sea. William Penn's Philadelphia was designed to march inland from the Delaware River, but the economic life of the port drew settlement north and south along the river. Charleston faced the Cooper River and the Atlantic beyond its barrier islands. New York City similarly faced its harbor on the East River. Taverns and warehouses lined the wharves. Merchants crowded the coffeehouses to share the latest shipping news and arrange for their next cargoes. The elite built near the governor's residence on lower Broadway to enjoy the fresh air off the Hudson River and a relaxing view of the green New Jersey shore.

Taken together, the twenty-four recognized cities with 2,500 people or more at the first census of 1790 accounted for only 5 percent of the national population. A generation later, after the disruptions of the War of 1812, with its British attacks on Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans, and the panic of 1819, the 1820 census still counted only 700,000 urban Americans—a scant 7 percent of the national total. A century later, the 1920 census found a nation that was 51 percent urban, giving 1920 as much symbolic meaning for American history as the supposed closing of the frontier in 1890.

Nineteenth-century urbanization meant more cities and bigger cities. From 1820 to 1920, the New York metropolitan area expanded from 124,000 people on the lower end of Manhattan Island to 7,910,000 spread across fourteen counties. Philadelphia's metropolitan region grew from 64,000 to 2,407,000. Over the same period, the number of cities from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean increased from a handful of settlements to 864 cities, topped by San Francisco and Los Angeles.

New city people came from farms and small towns on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether it involved a transatlantic voyage from Liverpool or Hamburg or a fifty-mile train ride into Indianapolis, migration from farm to city was the other great population movement in nineteenth-century America. It simultaneously balanced and was part of the westward movement across the continent. The physical construction of cities—houses, bridges, sewers, streets, offices, factories—was a complementary process of capital formation that, likewise, balanced the development of farms and their supporting railroads.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American cities fell into two categories. The nation's industrial core stretched from Boston and Baltimore westward to St. Louis and St. Paul, accounting for the overwhelming majority of manufacturing production and wealth. Many of these cities were specialized as textile towns, steel towns, shoemaking towns, pottery towns, and the like. Their industrial labor force drew from the millions of European immigrants and their children who made up more than two-thirds of the population of cities like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and New York City. Cities in the South, the Great Plains, and the Far West were the suppliers and customers. They funneled raw materials to the industrial belt: cotton from Mobile, lumber from Norfolk, metals from Denver, cattle from Kansas City. In

return, they distributed the manufactured goods of the Northeast.

Chicago was the great exemplar of the growing industrial city. Between 1880 and 1920, 605,000 immigrants and 790,000 Americans moved into the city. Chicagoans lifted their entire city ten feet to improve its drainage. They built the world's first skyscrapers and some of its first grain elevators. They remade American taste with the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. They competed with Odessa as a grain port, Pittsburgh as a steel city, Cincinnati as a meatpacker, and London and Paris as a national railroad center. Looking at Chicago and other mid-continent cities, Charles Francis Adams commented that "the young city of the West has instinctively … flung herself, heart, soul, and body, into the movement of her time. She has realized the great fact that steam has revolutionized the world, and she has bound her whole existence up in the great power of modern times" (North American Review, pp. 6–14).

Urban growth after 1900 revolved around the adaptation of American cities to twentieth-century technologies of personalized transportation and rapid communication. The 1910s and 1920s brought full electric wiring and self-starting automobiles to middle-class homes. George F. Babbitt, the eponymous hero of Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel, lived in a thoroughly modern Dutch colonial house in the bright new subdivision of Floral Heights in the up-to-date city of Zenith. He awakened each morning to "the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments." His bathroom was glazed tile and silvered metal. His business was real estate and his god was Modern Appliances.

The metropolis that Babbitt and millions of real automobile owners began to shape in the 1920s broke the physical bounds of the nineteenth century industrial city. In 1910 the Census Bureau devised the "metropolitan district" to capture information about the suburban communities that had begun to ring the central city. The definition has been repeatedly modified to match the realities of urban-regional geography. In 2000, the federal government recognized 280 metropolitan regions with a total population of 276 million. The metro areas of middle-sized cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Houston stretched for from seventy-five to one hundred miles from one suburban margin to the other.

The cities of post–World War II America have had the greatest ethnic variety in national history. They have been destinations for a massive northward movement. Rural southerners, both black and white, moved north (and west) to cities and jobs. Starting with the Great Migration of 1917 and 1918, the African American experience became an urban experience, creating centers of black culture like Harlem in the 1920s and feeling the bitter effects of ghettoization by the 1930s and 1940s. During the Great Depression and World War II, Appalachian whites joined black workers in middle western cities like Cincinnati and Detroit. Okies and Arkies left their depressed cotton farms in Oklahoma and Arkansas for new lives in Bakersfield and Los Angeles.

The northward movement also crossed oceans and borders. Puerto Rican immigrants after World War II remade the social fabric of New York City and adjacent cities. Half a million Cubans made an obvious impact on Miami after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The Puerto Ricans and Cubans were followed to eastern cities by Haitians, Jamaicans, Colombians, Hondurans, and others from the countries surrounding the Caribbean. Mexicans constitute the largest immigrant group in cities in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and California. Temporary workers, shoppers, visitors, legal migrants, and illegal migrants fill neighborhood after neighborhood in El Paso, San Antonio, San Diego, and Los Angeles, creating bilingual labor markets and downtowns.

From the 1970s, Asia matched Latin America, with each accounting for 40 percent of documented immigrants. Asians have concentrated in the cities of the Pacific Coast and in New York City. Los Angeles counts new ethnic neighborhoods for Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Samoans. Honolulu looks to Asia as well as the continental United States for business and tourism. A new generation of migrants has revitalized fading Chinatowns in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

The rise of Latin American and Asian immigration is part of a rebalancing of the American urban system. What journalists in the 1970s identified as the rise of the Sun Belt is part of a long-term shift of urban growth from the industrial Northeast toward the regional centers of the South and West—from Detroit, Buffalo, and Chicago to Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta. The causes include the concentration of defense spending and the aerospace industry between 1940 and 1990, the growth of a leisure economy, the expansion of domestic energy production, and the dominance of information technology industries. The result has been booming cities along the South Atlantic coast from Washington to Miami, through the greater Southwest from Houston to Denver, and along the Pacific Coast from San Diego to Seattle.

At the start of the twenty-first century, nine metropolitan areas had populations of five million or more: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington Baltimore, San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, and Dallas–Fort Worth. Their eighty-four-million residents accounted for 30 percent of all Americans. The fastest-growing metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2000 were all found in the South or West. In total, metropolitan areas contained 80 percent of the American population.

Cities and American Values

Urbanization has been a cultural as well as demographic process. The United States lagged behind Great Britain and a handful of nations in northwestern Europe in urbanization, but led the rest of the world. One result has been ambivalent Americans who have praised cities with one voice and shunned them with another. Public opinion polls repeatedly show that most Americans would prefer to live in a small town. A few extra questions have revealed that they also want easy access to the medical specialists, cultural facilities, and business opportunities that are found only in cities. Indeed, there was scarcely any place in late-twentieth-century America not thoroughly penetrated by urban values and tied into urban networks.

Thomas Jefferson set the tone for American anti-urbanism with the strident warning that cities were dangerous to democracy. At the time of Philadelphia's deadly yellow fever epidemic of 1800, Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush that "when great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations. … The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man." Jefferson feared that American cities would become facsimiles of eighteenth-century London and Paris as areas of poverty and breeders of riotous mobs. He also feared that because city dwellers were dependent on others for their livelihoods, their votes were at the disposal of the rich. Should Americans become "piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe," he wrote to James Madison, they would become "corrupt as in Europe."

If Jefferson feared foremost for the health of the republic, many of the antiurban writers who followed feared instead for the morals of the individual. George Foster drew stark contrasts between rich and poor in New York in Slices, by an Experienced Carver (1849) and New York by Gaslight (1850). Others indicted city life as a corrupter of both rich and poor. For example, in The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), Charles Loring Brace warned of the threat posed by the abjectly poor and the homeless. With no stake in society, they were a riot waiting to happen and a responsibility for more comfortable citizens. Jacob Riis used words and photographs to tell the middle class about the poor of New York City in How the Other Half Lives (1890). A few years later, W. T. Stead wrote If Christ Came to Chicago! (1894) to show the big city as un-Christian because it destroyed the lives of its inhabitants.

The first generation of urban sociologists wrote in the same vein during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Robert E. Park worked out a theory of urban life that blamed cities for substituting impersonal connections for close personal ties. As summarized by Louis Wirth in "Urbanism as a Way of Life" (1938), the indictment dressed up Thomas Jefferson in the language of social science. Wirth's city is the scene of transitory and superficial relationships, frantic status seeking, impersonal laws, and cultural institutions pandering to the lowest common denominator of a heterogeneous society.

The attack on city living was counterbalanced by sheer excitement about the pace of growth. By the 1830s large numbers of Americans had come to look on cities as tokens of American progress. The pages of booster pamphlets and histories of instant cities were drenched in statistics of growth. Pittsburgh as It Is (1857) offered statistics on coal mining, railroads, real estate values, population, employment, boat building, banks and a "progressional ratio" comparing the growth of Pittsburgh to the rest of the nation. Boosters counted churches, schools, newspapers, charities, and fraternal organizations as further evidence of economic and social progress. Before the Civil War, one Chicago editor wrote that "facts and figures …if carefully pondered, become more interesting and astonishing than the wildest vision of the most vagrant imagination." His words echoed seventy years later as George Babbitt sang the praises of "the famous Zenith spirit … that has made the little old Zip City celebrated in every land and clime, wherever condensed milk and pasteboard cartons are known." Urban advocates in the twentieth century extended the economic argument to point out the value of concentrating a variety of businesses in one location. The key is external economies: the ability of individual firms to buy and sell to each other and to share the services of bankers, insurance specialists, accountants, advertising agencies, mass media, and other specialists.

American writers and critics as disparate as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson have also acknowledged cities as sources of creativity. "We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities," Emerson wrote in his essay "The Young American" in 1844. Nathaniel Hawthorne allowed his protagonist in The Blithedale Romance (1852) to take time off from the rigors of a country commune for the intellectual refreshment of Boston. George Tucker, professor of moral philosophy and political economy at Jefferson's University of Virginia, analyzed urban trends in 1843. He stated: "The growth of cities commonly marks the progress of intelligence and the arts, measures the sum of social enjoyment, and always implies increased mental activity. … Whatever may be the good or evil tendencies of populous cities, they are the result to which all countries, that are at once fertile, free, and intelligent tend" (Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth, p. 127).

Livable Cities

Americans had to learn not only to plan their cities but also to live comfortably in the fast-growing communities that they erected. They needed to adapt their lives to the urban pace and to develop institutions to bring order out of the seeming chaos. In a city like Philadelphia, rates of accidental deaths and homicides began to drop after 1870 as city dwellers learned to control reckless behavior and pay attention on the streets. The end of the century also brought a decline of spontaneous mobs and endemic drunkenness at the same time that the saloon developed as a stable social institution in immigrant neighborhoods.

Cities developed community institutions that linked people in new ways. Apartment buildings offered a new environment for the middle class. Novelist William Dean Howells reflected contemporary concerns by devoting the first hundred pages of A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) to Basil March's search for an apartment appropriate for a newly appointed New York City magazine editor. Department stores, penny newspapers, vaudeville theaters, and baseball provided common meeting grounds and interests for heterogeneous populations. Department stores such as A. T. Stewart's, John Wanamaker's, Marshall Field's, and others of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s made emerging central business districts acceptable places for women as consumers and helped to introduce women into the clerical labor force. Ballparks and theaters were shared spaces where allegiances and jokes crossed ethnic lines. Ethnic banks, newspapers, and mutual insurance societies offered training in American ways at the same time that they preserved group identity.

The openness of the American city to continued growth brought the need for professionalism in public services. At the start of the nineteenth century, private companies or amateurs provided everything from drinking water to police protection. In the flammable wooden cities of colonial times, householders were expected to keep buckets and respond to calls for help. By the 1820s and 1830s, more cities had added groups of citizens who drilled together as volunteer fire companies, answered alarms, and fought fires as teams. Problems of timely response and the development of expensive steam-powered pumpers, however, required a switch to paid fire companies in the 1850s and 1860s. Firemen who were city employees could justify expensive training and be held accountable for effective performance. By 1900 most observers agreed that fire protection in the United States matched that anywhere in Europe.

Effective fire protection required a pressurized water supply. Residents of colonial cities had taken their water directly from streams and wells or bought it from entrepreneurs who carted barrels through the streets. Philadelphia installed the first large-scale water system in 1801. Boston reached twenty miles into the countryside with an aqueduct in the 1840s. From 1837 to 1842, New York City built the Croton Reservoir and an aqueduct that brought fresh water forty miles from Westchester County to a receiving reservoir in what is now Central Park. Changing theories of disease and the availability of abundant water for municipal cleaning helped to cut New York City's death toll in the 1866 cholera epidemic by 90 percent from the 1849 epidemic.

The public responsibilities of nineteenth-century cities generally fell into the three categories of public health and safety (police, sewers, parks), economic development

(street drainage and pavement), and public education. Such expanding responsibilities fueled the municipal progressivism of the early twentieth century. Led by local business interests, cities implemented civil service employment systems that based hiring and promotion on supposedly objective measures. The city manager system placed the daily operations of government under a professional administrator. As the system spread after the 1910s, city government became more and more the realm of engineers, planners, budget analysts, and other trained professionals.

Public intervention came later in other areas like low-income housing. Cities long preferred to regulate the private market rather than to intervene directly. New York City pioneered efforts to legislate minimum housing standards with tenement house codes in 1867, 1882, and 1901. However, providing the housing remained a private responsibility until the federal government began to finance public housing during the 1930s. Even the massive investments in public housing spurred by federal legislation in 1937 and 1949, however, failed to meet the need for affordable living places.

A full social agenda for local government awaited the 1960s. Assistance to the poor was the realm of private philanthropy in the nineteenth century, often coordinated through private charity organization societies. The crisis of the 1930s legitimized federal assistance for economically distressed individuals, but city government remained oriented to public safety and economic development. By the start of the 1960s, however, criticisms that the urban renewal programs of the 1950s had benefited real estate developers at the expense of citizens added to an increasing sense that America's multiracial cities were in a state of crisis. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson declared a nationwide "war on poverty." On the front lines was the Office of Economic Opportunity with its Neighborhood Youth Corps for unemployed teenagers, its Head Start and Upward Bound programs to bolster public schools, and its Community Action Agencies to mobilize the poor to work for their own interests. Two years later the Model Cities program sought to demonstrate that problems of education, child care, health care, housing, and employment could be attacked most effectively by coordinated efforts.

The last quarter of the century left American cities with comprehensive social commitments but limited resources. Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan redirected federal resources to meet the development needs of politically powerful suburbs. Cities and city people absorbed roughly two-thirds of the budget cuts in the first Reagan budget, leaving them without the resources to fund many needed social programs.

Cities and American Society

"I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." These opening lines from The Adventures of Augie March (1953) capture one of the essential features of the American city. The hero of Saul Bellow's novel about growing up during the 1920s and 1930s knew that cities are the place where things happen. They are centers of opportunity that bring people together to exchange goods, services, ideas, and human company.

At their best, American cities are among the most livable environments in the world. Americans have solved—or know how to solve—many of the physical problems of traffic, pollution, and deteriorated housing. Failures have come from lack of commitment and political will, not from the inherent nature of cities. The poor are often expected to tax themselves for public services that they cannot afford as private citizens. As in the nineteenth century, the centers of our cities display the polarization of society between the very rich and the very poor.

What cities will continue to do best is to protect diversity. The key to urban vitality is variety in economic activities, people, and neighborhoods. This understanding implies that the multicentered metropolitan area built around automobiles and freeways is a logical expression of American urbanism. In the words of historian Sam Bass Warner Jr., the contemporary city offers "the potential of a range of personal choices and social freedoms for city dwellers if we would only extend the paths of freedom that our urban system has been creating" (The Urban Wilderness, p. 113).

The political expression of the urban mosaic is metropolitan pluralism, facilitated by the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, and the war on poverty. Diverse groups defined by ethnicity, social class, or residential location have developed the capacity to pursue their goals through neighborhood organizations, suburban governments, and interest groups. Pluralistic politics has given previously ignored groups and communities entry to public and private decisions about metropolitan growth and services, particularly Hispanics and African Americans. However, cities still need strong area-wide institutions to facilitate the equitable sharing of problems and resources as well as opportunities. Most promising are regional agencies like the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council in Minnesota and Metro in Portland, Oregon, that have assumed responsibility for planning and delivering specific regional services such as parks or public transportation.

Toward the close of the New Deal, a number of the nation's leading specialists on urban growth summed up the promise of urban America in a report called Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy (1937). "The city has seemed at times the despair of America," it said, "but at others to be the Nation's hope, the battleground of democracy. … The faults of our cities are not those of decadence and impending decline, but of exuberant vitality crowding its way forward under tremendous pressure—the flood rather than the drought."

URBANIZATION

Stages of Urbanization

Cities and American Values

Livable Cities

Cities and American Society

BIBLIOGRAPHY