Urban growth

“ While more of a general survey than a special study of the influence of the city plan upon the actual growth of the city, it does show some disharmonies arising out of the attempt to control a planned urban project in the face of growth and unexpected complications. ”

“ For in part the way they are is what determines the pattern of urban growth and much of the restless shifting and wandering that makes the city's people a strong influence to the limits of the Basin and beyond. In part also, however, the pattern of urban growth makes the people the way they are—it has been observed, for instance, that if suburban Americans were better satisfied with their manner of life, they probably would not spend so much of their time in automobiles getting away from it. ”

“ THE GROWTH OF THE CITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO A RESEARCH PROJECT The outstanding fact of modern society is the growth of great cities. Nowhere else have the enormous changes which the machine industry has made in our social life registered themselves with such obviousness as in the cities. In the United States the transition from a rural to an urban civilization, though beginning later than in Europe, has taken place, if not more rapidly and completely, at any rate more logically in its most characteristic forms. ”

“ Factories, railroads, and steamships have been the great factors in this urban expansion.
Some features of city life: Effects of City Growth upon the National Life.—The growth of large cities has had profound effects upon American life and temperament. It has changed the whole character of the country, its problems and its habits of mind. A century ago the United States was predominantly an agricultural land; the great majority of the people were engaged in earning their living from the soil. They had the same occupation and common interests. ”

“ Their arqument is that many of the most powerful stimuli to rapid urbanization in the past have less influence today, and that changing government policies could reduce the comparative attractiveness of cities, especially the largest cities, and slow rate of urbanization.
7. The urban population growth rate in developing countries as a whole has been slowing down from 5.2 per cent per r annum in the late 195Os to 3.4 per cent in the 1980s. [5] It is expected to decline even further in the coming decades. ”

“ With an explicit strategy, nations can begin to reorient those central economic and major sectoral policies that will reinforce megacity growth, urban decline. and poverty. They can likewise promote more effectively the development of small and intermadiate urban centres. the strengthening of their local governments. and the establishment of services and facilities needed to attract development initiatives and investment. ”

“ Rural and urban development strategies and approaches should be complementary rather than contradictory: The development of secondary centres is to the direct economic benefit of the resource areas they serve. 30, The job opportunities and housing provided by cities are essential to absorb the population growth that the countryside cannot cope with; as long as price controls and subsidies do not interfere, the urban market should offer advantages to rural producers. But there are obviously conflicts of interest between developing country city-dwellers and farmers. ”

“ Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city—its charters, formal organization, buildings, street railways, and so forth—is, or seems to be, mere artifact. However, it is only when and in so far as these things, through use and wont, connect themselves, like a tool in the hand of a man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in the community that they assume the institutional form. As the whole the city is a growth. It is the undesigned product of the labors of successive generations of men. ”

“ In this way the city acquires an organization which is neither designed nor controlled.
Physical geography, natural advantages, and the means of transportation determine in advance the general outlines of the urban plan. As the city increases in population, the subtler influences of sympathy, rivalry, and economic necessity tend to control the distribution of population. Business and manufacturing seek advantageous locations and draw around them a certain portion of the population. ”

“ To be reckoned with under the head of future prospects are not only local changes of utility, but the rate of growth of the city as a whole, the prosperity or depression of the surrounding section and the success or failure of the industries directly supporting it. ”

“ In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, high-ways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. ”

“ Growth in cities consists of movement away from the point of origin in all directions, except as topographically hindered, this movement being due both to aggregation at the edges and pressure from the centre. Central growth takes place both from the heart of the city and from each subcentre of attraction, and axial growth pushes into the outlying territory by means of rail-roads, turnpikes and street railroads. ”

“ Part 3 Turning to the main central growth of cities, a successful business at or near the city centre which requires more space can secure it either by acquiring adjoining ground, by building higher in the air, or by moving away from the centre. To build higher in the air solves the problem in a banking and office district, but not in a retail shopping district, where ground floor frontage on traffic streets is required. ”

“ Water surfaces, whether within or without a city, if navigable, facilitate the movement of population, and if non-navigable prevent it. The law of continuity is the same, every city being a link in the chain stretching from the first settlements in a country to the last, and every growth within a city a part of the chain of development which first reaches the city from the outside and continues its life within. Manufacturing has the same centralizing effect, whether on a large scale it creates a city or on a small scale it builds up a district within a city. ”

“ We have laid down now the broad lines of road, railway, and sea transit in the coming century, and we have got this general prophecy of "urban regions" established, and for the present that much must suffice.
And as for the world beyond our urban regions? The same line of reasoning that leads to the expectation that the city will diffuse itself until it has taken up considerable areas and many of the characteristics, the greenness, the fresh air, of what is now country, leads us to suppose also that the country will take to itself many of the qualities of the city. ”

“ Complicating this broad outward movement of zones, axes of traffic project shops through residence areas, create business subcen-tres, where they intersect, and change circular cities into star-shaped cities. Central growth, due to proximity, and axial growth, due to accessibility, are summed up in the static power of established sections and the dynamic power of their chief lines of intercommunication. ”

“ Our investigations so far seem to indicate that variations in land values, especially where correlated with differences in rents, offer perhaps the best single measure of mobility, and so of all the changes taking place in the expansion and growth of the city. ”

“ The city, from this standpoint, may be regarded as typical of a certain stage in economic development. The rise of the city is intimately associated with the transition from handicraft to machine industry, the division of labor, the market, and exchange. Besides the great number of economic histories which trace the general movement toward urban economy there are many monographs of special cities whose economic history has been studied, and some instances of present-day developments in metropolitan economy. ”

“ But though our cities are still as a whole planless, their growth as yet little better than a mere casual accretion and agglomeration, if not a spreading blight, American and German cities are now increasingly affording examples of comprehensive design of extension and of internal improvement. ”

“ Is not the improvement of our towns and cities, as such, a field which capital might well enter? Recent investigations by Captain Francis V. Greene, of New York, and other experts, demonstrate that, were the city's pavements as good as they should be, horses could draw threefold greater loads over them, with an immense abatement of both noise and filth. While the improvement of the metropolis due to individual enterprise and taste has been marvelous of late years, its mansions and business structures vying with the finest in the world, the city as a city is little changed. ”

“ In each city the sections built up by the different factors may be clearly distinguished, these flourishing or decaying according to the prosperity or decline of their special factors. Thus the railroads, docks and warehouses evidence the city's commerce; the factories its industrial energies; the retail shops the consuming power of the population; the residence sections the wealth, social grades and numbers of the citizens; and the buildings of public and semi-public utility the standard of civilization and civic pride of the city. ”

“ In some cities central growth occurs first and in others axial growth, but all cities illustrate both forms of growth and in all cases central growth includes some axial growth, and axial growth some central growth. Central growth consists of the clustering of utilities around any point of attraction and is based on proximity, while axial growth is the result of transportation facilities and is based on accessibility. A continual contest exists between axial growth pushing out from the. ”

“ All cities are built up from these two influences, which vary in quantity, intensity and quality, the resulting districts overlapping, interpenetrating, neutralizing and harmonizing as the pressure of the city's growth bring them in contact with each other. ”

“ When nearly one-third of all the people of the nation live in communities of such size, the large city becomes a type of social centre of great significance. At the prevailing rate of growth a majority of the American people will soon be dwelling in cities, and there seems to be no reason to expect a reversal of tendency because modern invention is making it possible for fewer persons on the farm to supply the agricultural products that city people need. ”

“ By systematically neglecting the simplest elements of city planning, we have provided a large and profitable field for all the palliative devices of engineering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce electric light; where we congest business, we build skyscrapers; where we overcrowd the thoroughfares with traffic we burrow subways; where we permit the city to become congested with a population whose density would not be tolerated in a well-designed community, we conduct water hundreds of miles by aqueducts to bathe them and slake their thirst ”

“ A progressive and dynamic civilization implies the good and bad alike. The cities, as the foci of progress, inevitably contain both." The development of suburban life, stimulated by the railroad and the trolley, and the transference of manufacturing industries to the suburbs, are regarded as factors of great promise for the amelioration of the recognized evils of city life and for the solution of some of the difficulties it offers and the promotion of its best results. ”

“ You would have what has become, or is becoming very rapidly, a new urban region, a complete community of the new type, rich and poor and all sorts and aspects of economic life together. I would suggest that watersheds make excellent boundaries. Let me remind you that railways, tramways, drain-pipes, water-pipes, and high-roads have this in common—they will not climb over a watershed if they can possibly avoid doing so, and that population and schools and poor tend always to distribute themselves in accordance with these other things. ”

“ Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most effective field of operation. ”

“ And this principle of growth—this principle of always preserving a belt of country round our cities would be ever kept in mind till, in course of time, we should have a cluster of cities, not of course arranged in the precise geometrical form of my diagram, but so grouped around a Central City that each inhabitant of the whole group, though in one sense living in a town of small size, would be in reality living in, and would enjoy all the advantages of, a great and most beautiful city ”

“ It is not the growth of the cities that we want to check, but the needless want and misery in the cities, and this can be done by restoring the natural condition of living, and among other things, by showing that it is easier and making it more attractive to live in comfort on the outskirts of the city as producers, than in the slums as paupers. ”

“ Transportation and communication, tramways and telephones, newspapers and advertising, steel construction and elevators—all things, in fact, which tend to bring about at once a greater mobility and a greater concentration of the urban populations—are primary factors in the ecological organization of the city. ”