Urban Theory

Ely Chinoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351300506
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the future of the American city? What are the relevant contexts for the analysis of urban problems? Should attention be focused on the metropolitan area, the region, or the megalopolis? Does the changing shape and structure of urban America require new ways of thinking about the urban community? How do national trends and policies affect the future of city life? Until now few sociologists have tried to see what urban America may become. This failure limits their ability to serve the function they claim for themselves, asserts Ely Chinoy, enabling men and women to help shape their own future.Urban Theory examines trends, including social, cultural, and national variables that could affect them; offers explanations of urban problems; and presents a careful review of solutions that have been offered - proposals of planners, politicians, cynics, and even visionaries for remaking our cities and for controlling and directing growth or deterioration. It is a valuable assessment of the state of thinking about urban life during the post-World War II period, with interesting projections of trends and analyses. It includes a comprehensive discussion of many of the more academic questions dealt with in courses in urban sociology and urban planning, as well as a treatment of problems within a larger and more meaningful context.Chinoy states that unless people anticipate alternatives open to them, they will remain captive to forces that they do not understand or have no control over. By examining what the future may hold, we can more readily understand the present, cope with its problems, and deliberately contribute to the shape of the future. This perspective is as appropriate today as it was when the book was originally published in 1973. Included here are pieces by York Willbern, Catherine Bauer Wurster, John Friedman, John Miller, Jean Gottman, Paul N. Ylvisaker, Nathan Glazer, Morton Grodzins, and Russell Baker. This material will continue to be of interest in all sociology, political science, and urban studies courses that deal with crucial problems of the city, as well as to all planners and urban specialists.

1	The Transformation of the Urban Community
	YORK WILLBERN

In this largely historical account, York Willbern, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, describes the double revolution in urban society. First came the dense concentration of people in cities, then their dispersal, with their urban way of life, across the countryside. By identifying some of the forces that operate in both revolutions he clarifies the alternatives that are open, though he concludes that the future may find urban America resembling “a thin layer of scrambled eggs spread over much of the platter.”

The linguistic and historical relationships between the words “city” and “civilization” have often been noted. The present state of American cities and that great part of the civilization of this country which revolves around their functioning and well-being, have provoked a rapidly growing volume of interest and concern.

Most literate people are reasonably familiar with the gross outlines of urban population movements. They know that urban areas have increased in population much more rapidly than rural areas, that the great bulk of this growth has been in areas of metropolitan character, and that suburban areas have been growing much more rapidly than have central cities. None of us, however, yet understands adequately the implications and consequences of these massive redistributions of the population.

We are participating, in my opinion, in two revolutions, one imposed upon the other, and the meaning of the second is partially obscured by the fact that the first, much older, revolution is continuing even as the second develops.

The first of these revolutions, of course, is the rise of an urban way of life. The second is its diffusion and dispersal over the countryside. The first has been in the making in Europe and in this country for several hundred years. It was in nearly full flower when Johnson and Boswell were enjoying the fleshpots of eighteenth century London. This revolution was based on the rise of trade and on the growth of industry. The new technologies which promoted specialization, manufacturing, and great increases in the interchange of goods and services have continued and been accelerated in the last two generations. They are now world-wide in their impact; the non-Western world as well as the West is struggling today with the gains and costs of these changes. Those who are staggered by the problems of urbanization in this country are really shaken when they see Tokyo or Calcutta. Tokyo, the world’s most populous city, has no sewerage for eighty per cent of the metropolitan area. In Calcutta two-thirds of a million people have no home but the public streets and alleys.¹

These urbanizing forces continue unabated in this country. The proportion of the national population living in areas defined by the Census Bureau as “metropolitan” increased from 58 per cent in 1950 to 63 per cent in 1960. The proportions continue to grow and will probably reach 70 to 75 per cent before the Census Bureau decides that it is unable any longer to fabricate definitions to demarcate a population which is almost universally metropolitanized.

The second revolution is much newer and has been much more strongly felt in this country than anywhere else. This is the outward explosion of our urban centers. It has several causes, of course. One is the desire of families, particularly families with children, for detached dwellings on substantial plots of land. Sir Frederic J. Osborn, dean of British planners and editor of Town and Country Planning, emphasized this desire in a recent address to American planning officials, and in so doing raised a question of crucial importance to the continuation and welfare of large cities. He indicated that the most disastrous shortcoming associated with city size is “the lack of sufficient space inside cities for good family dwellings with private yards or gardens, for recreation, for industrial efficiency, and for the vegetative surroundings and the quiet and simple beauty man needs and desires for the fullness of life.”

Relative unconsciousness of this aspect of the urban problem surprises me in all countries, including my own, because the most conspicuous cause of the “metropolitan explosion” is the spontaneous quest by more and more urban families, as net incomes rise, for the family house standing in its own yard. The outward movement of the well-off is nothing new; what is new is the spread of wealth to far more numerous classes who can afford what Susannah’s husband provided for her in Babylon and great senators took for themselves in ancient Rome—a suburban home in a garden…. such environments reflect a universal natural desire that man indulges wherever and whenever he becomes prosperous and free.

Admittedly, there are some genuine addicts of high urban culture to whom space and green surroundings make little appeal—types who like to live in city centres with their rich assemblies of theatres, concert halls, art galleries, restaurants, night clubs, snack bars, and hamburger stands—and are reassured by the bustle of crowds, traffic noises, flashing signs, and the insistent impact on their senses of commercial vitality. I do not deplore the existence of these types, though I suspect that their contribution to our culture is over valued. But they are a tiny minority….²

This view is, of course, greatly at odds with that suggested by Mrs. Jane Jacobs in a book which is currently attracting a great deal of attention among students of urbanism.³ If the figures on population movement are an accurate indication of the desires of people for home environments, the evidence certainly supports Sir Frederic’s view much more strongly than that of Mrs. Jacob.

A good many technological developments have made this dispersion of urban housing relatively easy. Reliance upon electric power and the ease of power transmission, telephone lines, septic tanks and similar developments bring to widely scattered houses many of the conveniences and amenities once possible only in very closely settled cities.

A development of social technology—the long-term, monthly payment mortgage loan with low interest rates—has greatly facilitated the spread of American families into single-family detached dwellings. The growth of credit arrangements of this type has certainly been encouraged and fostered by national legislation. It can be argued that the nature of the urban residential patterns of this generation has been shaped very substantially by FHA and similar governmental programs. The overwhelming political support for these programs, however, and the existence of parallel nongovernmental developments indicate clearly that these credit socialization devices have probably been more the product than the cause of the social and economic forces at work.

If the basic desire for detached dwellings and space is one cause of the dispersion, another and very important cause is the appearance and practically universal use of the automobile in this country. We now have available, for most individuals, personalized rapid transit. The customary reaction to the automobile of Mrs. Jacobs and others who admire the congestion of dense urban settlement is to wish it would go away.

The impact of the automobile revolution is newer than many of us realize; its outlines are only now beginning to emerge. The last decade [1950–1960] was the first in which it was fully operative; the 1960 census returns gave figures which indicate some of the results on a nationwide basis. Automobiles began to be widespread in the 1920s, but too little time had as yet passed for really basic changes in ways of living and spatial relationships. In the 1930s the great economic depression overshadowed and hampered adjustments to the new technology; the 1940s brought another overpowering circumstance, the war and its aftermath, to mask and postpone the basic changes. They hit us full force in the 1950s, but a decade is a short time for a social revolution. The greatest public works enterprise in the history of mankind, our national system of expressways, which will probably give the automobile age its greatest boost since the Model T Ford, is just beginning. I am indebted to Harlan Cleveland for a statistic which he considered the most interesting of a recent year: we now have enough automotive vehicles in operation in this country for every man, woman, and child in the population to ride comfortably and simultaneously in the front seats.

It is difficult for us to realize that this new revolution may have a social impact comparable to that of the first. The basic purpose of a city is the facilitation of interchange—the interchange of goods through trade and merchandising, of labor and services in industrial and service enterprises, of messages and ideas in financial and political and cultural activities. When the means of interchange are drastically altered, the nature of the city must also be drastically altered.

In the large cities of a century ago, population was tightly concentrated. Concentration was necessary, in order for people to get from home to work and school and shop and engage in the other complex exchanges of a city. When each individual and most of the goods move from place to place within the urban environment in a vehicle weighing more than a ton and capable of moving economically at the rate of a mile a minute, the old patterns of settlement are technologically obsolete and will inevitably be changed. To achieve for a given population the same facility of circulation that the older concentrated cities had for pedestrian, horse-drawn, or even rail traffic, the modern city requires a land area many times greater. When movement and interchange were pedestrian and horse-drawn, an efficient area for a population of 200,000 might be about four square miles;⁴ for 200,000 people now, on a one or two persons per car basis (increasingly the normal pattern), the most efficient area might well be 100 square miles.

Many of the great cities of the world outside the United States are experiencing the integrating revolution, with relatively little evidence yet of the disintegrating one. Perhaps they may avoid the second. A Soviet economist, watching Americans coming to work one-in-a-car is supposed to have said “we’ll never make that mistake—that is, if we can help it.”⁵

In this country, however, disintegrating forces are moving at a rapid pace. The area north of the Ohio River and east from Chicago and St. Louis contains the urban heart of the United States. There were in this area in 1950 a dozen cities with more than half a million inhabitants each. What happened to the population of these cities in the decade of the 1950s, a decade in which urbanization continued apace? Every one of them lost, rather than gained, in population. While the urban area, the metropolitan area, in each case grew very substantially in population, not a single one of the large central cities in this area increased. If this is what is happening to the oldest, best established American cities, will Birmingham and Indianapolis, or even Houston and Los Angeles, be far behind?

The famous Regional Plan of 1929 for the New York metropolitan area projected a population by 1965 of 21 million people living in approximately 1,000 square miles of the region. In 1960, five years before the projected date, there were actually only 16 million people but the urbanized area constituted 2,000 square miles, twice the projected amount.⁶

The most recent major study of the New York metropolitan area, which Raymond Vernon and his associates made for the same Regional Plan Association, came to the following conclusion:

TABLE 1.1: Change in Population, 1950–1960, Major Cities in Northeast and Midwest

	1950	1960	Amount Change
Baltimore	949,708	939,024	— 10,684
Boston	801,444	697,197	—104,247
Buffalo	580,132	532,759	— 47,373
Chicago	3,620,962	3,550,404	— 70,558
Cincinnati	503,998	502,550	— 1,448
Cleveland	914,808	876,050	— 38,758
Detroit	1,849,568	1,670,144	—179,424
New York	7,891,957	7,781,984	—109,973
Philadelphia	2,071,605	2,002,512	— 69,093
Pittsburgh	676,806	604,332	— 72,474
St. Louis	856,796	750,026	—106,770
Washington, D.C.	802,178	763,956	— 38,222

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1962, pp. 22–23.

As one surveys the outward shift of the population in the New York Metropolitan Region and of the consumer activities tied to them, the forces behind the shift seem near-inexorable. Basic technological de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Trends and Prospects
• 1 : The Transformation of the Urban Community
• 2 : The Form and Structure of the Future Urban Complex
• 3 : The Urban Field
• 4 : The Rising Demand for Urban Amenities
• 5 : The Shape of the Future
• 6 : Notes on Southern California
• 7 : The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem
• 8 : The Apocalyptic Future
• For Further Reading
• Index