Metropolitan area

“ Figure 4.—The recommended interregional system in relation to the location of principal metropolitan areas, as defined by the Bureau of the Census. groups, the cities directly connected are the largest of their respective population groups. ”

“ It is thus used now for the capital of a country, which contains the various official buildings of the administrative departments, the Houses of Parliament, &c. In the case of London, the term “metropolitan” is sometimes applied to the whole area including the “City of London,” e.g. ”

“ Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas Subareas may be defined within an area that meets the requirements to qualify as an MSA and also has a population of one million or more. The definition of these subareas, called PMSAs, requires meeting specified statistical criteria and having the support of local opinion. A PMSA consists of a large urbanized county or a cluster of counties (cities and towns in New England) that demonstrate strong internal economic and social links in addition to close ties with the central core of the larger area. ”

“ Counties containing the principal concentration of population—the largest city and surrounding densely settled area—are components of the MSA. Additional counties qualify to be included by meeting a specified level of commuting to the counties containing the population concentration and by meeting certain other requirements of metropolitan character, such as a specified minimum population density or percentage of the population that is urban. MSAs in New England are defined in terms of cities and towns, following rules concerning commuting and population density. ”

“ When [Pg 301] any city, borough, or township is partly within and partly without the twenty-five mile limit, the whole of such city, borough, or township shall be regarded as within the Suburban Metropolitan District.
Section 2. There shall be an executive department created for every Suburban Metropolitan District, to be known as the Department of Suburban Metropolitan Planning, which shall be in charge of a Suburban Metropolitan Planning Commission. ”

“ Some of the first things we want to know about the city, therefore, are: sources of population; immigration and natural growth; distribution of population within the city as affected by (a) economic, i.e., land, values, (b) sentimental interests, race, vocation, etc.; comparative growths of the population within different portions of the city area, as affected by birth- and death-rates, marriage and divorce, etc. The neighborhood.—Proximity and neighborly contact are the basis for the simplest and most elementary form of association with which we have to do in the organization of city life. ”

“ Another matter that has engaged public attention is the apparent difference of opinion between the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District Companies, as to the control of the Inner Circle. Nature has designed them to be one, and but for vested and promoters’ interests, they probably would have been one from the first. ”

“ Nearness to a large city has relation to the problem of the Administrator in making his definition. For the proximity of the plant to a metropolitan center, like the size of the town where the plant is located, may make the decisive difference between an agricultural and an urban environment. ”

“ We are—as the Census Returns for 1901 quite clearly show—in the early phase of a great development of centrifugal possibilities. And since it has been shown that a city of pedestrians is inexorably limited by a radius of about four miles, and that a horse-using city may grow out to seven or eight, it follows that the available area of a city which can offer a cheap suburban journey of thirty miles an hour is a circle with a radius of thirty miles. ”

“ Think of it, ye metropolitan dwellers in your two-hundred-year-old cities, who after a day down-town sink into your cushioned-seats for an hour's ride to the suburbs with a sigh of contentment that your lot is cast in the midst of civilization,—think how close upon your heels come some of these Western cities which have not yet seen their second decade! ”

“ A metropolitan city, however, requires for its own local purposes municipal institutions not less than other towns. Their utility is indeed greater, and their want more felt, in a large, populous, opulent, and crowded metropolis, than in a country town of less size, population, and wealth. Each of the seven parliamentary boroughs contains a larger number of inhabited houses and a larger population than the City ”

“ But we must not therefore assume that the metropolitan populations consume the metropolitan matches. Taking the population at upward of two millions, and the inhabited houses at about three hundred thousand, let us endeavor to estimate the distribution of these little articles of domestic comfort. ”

“ The most advanced type of the city-county problem involves the adjustment of the political to the physical and social unity of a great urban area, regardless of established boundaries of either cities or counties. ”

“ The city plan, for example, establishes metes and bounds, fixes in a general way the location and character of the city's constructions, and imposes an orderly arrangement, within the city area, upon the buildings which are erected by private initiative as well as by public authority. ”

“ Too often the American that himself makes his fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most metropolitan street of the most metropolitan town. Whereas a European of the same sort would thereupon migrate into the country. ”

“ It is the product of limited means of communication and constitutes a more or less self-sustaining economic unit. The city is a more highly specialized unit and, as a result, is a part of a wider interrelated area, while the metropolis tends to become a cosmopolitan unit based upon a relatively high degree of development of the means of communication. The differences between these three urban types is not only expressed in terms of number of inhabitants and area of occupation, but also in social organization and in attitudes. ”

“ They include modern and internationalized metropolises, grandiose ancient capital cities, glamorous cultural destinations, and towns with unique features. As urbanization accelerates, tightly-knit city clusters have formed, each covering a large area and inhabited by a large population. ”

“ In a very large town it is of course important to secure a certain possibility of progressing diagonally, otherwise the journey from place to place may unduly resemble a knight's move on the chess-board, but if I were planning anew a town of fair size, I would certainly retain a strict parallelogram formation for its central area and start the radiation at a quarter of a mile or half a mile from the focus. ”

“ These water ways of the metropolis extend for several hundred miles through and about the City and its suburbs, and connect and bring into communication other great cities of the country. They are traversed continually by barges, which besides much merchandise contain a large floating population. ”

“ And taking this assumption as sound, we can state precisely the maximum area of various types of town. A pedestrian agglomeration such as we find in China, and such as most of the European towns probably were before the nineteenth century, would be swept entirely by a radius of four miles about the business quarter and industrial centre; and, under these circumstances, where the area of the feeding regions has been very large the massing of human beings has probably reached its extreme limit. ”

“ If then, there are twenty such avenues to the metropolis, it appears that the total of the regular ingress and egress will be 16,000 persons, of whom perhaps 8,000 walk, 2,000 arrive in public conveyances, and 6,000 ride on horseback, or in open or close carriages. Such a phenomenon is presented no-where else in the world; and it never can exist except in a city which unites the same combined features of population, wealth, commerce, and the varied employments which belong to our own vast metropolis. ”

“ It was a very pleasant moment in the growth of the metropolis which had become, in a quiet, provincial way, a town in the special sense in which that word connotes a group of people numerous enough to constitute a society, fond of the same pleasures, interested in local incidents and amusements, sufficiently intimate to have formed a code of social standards and manners. ”

“ The district I have in mind is a very common type of district: a healthy, open suburb on the fringe of London, tainted by one of those older villages in which the poorest workers are apt to congregate. ”

“ To-day it is a truly characteristic, large, provincial town of little or no importance to the outside world. Self-sufficient as to its own importance, and the events around which its local life circles, it gives little indication of ever becoming more of a metropolis than it now is; indeed the census figures would indicate that the department, of which it is the capital, has remained stationary as to the numbers of its population, since the Revolution. ”

“ Only twelve miles from the metropolis, and in reality one of its many suburbs, it nestles among the hills, and looks off upon a broad expanse of field and meadow and forest, as though there were no such place as London in existence. ”

“ Second city in population in the world.
Divided into five sections, called boroughs.
Carries on more than half the foreign trade of the United States.
Leads all American cities in the value of its manufactures. ”

“ Every large city has its occupational suburbs like the Stockyards in Chicago, and its residence suburbs like Brookline in Boston, each of which has the size and the character of a complete separate town, village, or city, except that its population is a selected one. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of these cities within cities, of which the most interesting characteristic is that they are composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races but of the same social class, is East London, with a population of 2,000,000 laborers. ”

“ The main direction of city growth is usually controlled by topography. For example, the cities at the west end of harbors or on the west side of rivers grow west, as Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis, Omaha, Minneapolis; cities on the east side of harbors or rivers grow east, as Columbus, St. Joseph, Memphis, Grand Rapids, Seattle, and similarly New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Indianapolis grow north; and Louisville, Kansas City, Savannah, Houston grow south. ”

“ The traveller who has asked at the bookshop of a provincial town for a local history or even for a local guide is as well able to realize the distance which parts us from France, Italy, or Germany, as is the student who inquires for a detailed account of how civic life or any one of its characteristic institutions grew up among us. A certain number of town histories do indeed exist, but they by no means always deal necessarily or even mainly with the life of the borough itself. ”

“ It has been pointed out that the enormous urban region of the future may present an extraordinary variety of districts, suburbs, and subordinate centres within its limiting boundaries, and here we have a very definite enforcement of that probability. ”

“ It to-day is a modern city in every sense of the word; the political, social, industrial and financial center of the republic, and with its suburbs has a population of 500,000. The principal streets are broad and well-paved; the city is electrically lighted and is served by an electrical car-system which extends to suburban towns. ”

“ These districts are within easy distance of the capital by train or electric tramway, and residence within them is rendered more pleasant by the exquisite gardens which surround their villas, many of which are of some antiquity, are spacious and dignified, and possess none of the freakishness which too often disfigures English suburban localities. ”

“ This tendency of cities to reach out and include their present suburbs, and even the territory where their future suburbs are to be,—a tendency which a few years ago was mocked at,—is in these days seen to be normal and wise. ”

“ It is many a long year since I first began to find delight in wandering through the least-known districts of the capital, in visiting strange quarters inhabited by strange people, in penetrating dim, mysterious regions where thousands of our fellow-citizens live, cut off from the rest of the populace by a network of streets and slums into which it is nobody's business but the inhabitants' to enter, and where a visitor from beyond is rarely seen. ”

“ Throughout a vast district around the city, the one great feature of the landscape is the mighty minster, which, almost like that of Laon, crowns the edge of the ridge, rising, with a steepness well-nigh unknown in the streets of English towns, above the lower city and the plain at its feet. ”

“ A third area (III) is inhabited by the workers in industries who have escaped from the area of deterioration (II) but who desire to live within easy access of their work. Beyond this zone is the “residential area” (IV) of high-class apartment buildings or of exclusive “restricted” districts of single family dwellings. Still farther, out beyond the city limits, is the commuters’ zone (V) —suburban areas, or satellite cities—within a thirty- to sixty-minute ride of the central business district. ”

“ Each province shall have a metropolis, which shall be so placed as a centre almost in a circumference, and the rest at equal distances, some 12 Italian miles asunder, or thereabout, and in them shall be sold all things necessary for the use of man; statis horis et diebus, no market towns, markets or fairs, for they do but beggar cities (no village shall stand above 6, 7, or 8 miles from a city) except those emporiums which are by the sea side, general staples, marts, as Antwerp, Venice, Bergen of old, London, &c. ”