Urbanization

“ Before leaving the statistics of the growth of cities, it is worth our while to note that certain great urban centers are developing in this country which promise to show, even in the near future, the most extensive urbanization of population known to the world ”

“ The plight of the cities is due to the most rapid urbanization ever known, without sufficient plan or control. The result is square mile after square mile of developed city that is functionally and structurally obsolete both as to buildings and neighborhood arrangements. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As long as you exploit the farmers, and live in the city with the intention of continuing your easy, gluttonous lifestyle without dirtying your own hands, it is only natural that you must be satisfied with very little space and with an anti-Nature environment. That is urbanization. If the population did not abandon the country, gather together in one place, and destroy the natural environment, urbanization would be impossible. ”

“ Thus the secondary and tertiary industries, in manufacturing and supplying us with festivals and entertainment and trinkets and gewgaws, are able to scale the heights of prosperity, and the cities thereby continue their boundless expansion.
Reason Three
There is one other abettor of urbanization that we must not overlook: the bewitching power of the money economy. In order to make more money, the city manufactures more merchandise than necessary, and forces services down our throats. ”

“ We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards and avenues, all sluiced down with an air that forbade any thought of fatigue, and talked of city government and municipal taxation, till, in a certain silence, we were shown a suburb of uncared-for houses, shops, and banks, whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the shoulders of loafers. Dirt and tin cans lay about the street. ”

“ Land at greater distances from urban centres, and hitherto devoted only to agriculture or market gardens, is being utilised more and more for building purposes; the increasing values of land within the radius of these outer suburbs improves the position on urban markets of producers in rural centres whose lower rents may more than compensate for their slightly heavier cost of transport as compared with the suburban growers; the health of town workers taking to what are not merely suburban but country homes should improve. ”

“ The streets of the great towns of antiquity, the streets of the great towns of the East, the streets of all the mediæval towns, were not intended for any sort of wheeled traffic at all—were designed primarily and chiefly for pedestrians. So it would be, I suppose, in any one's ideal city. Surely Town, in theory at least, is a place one walks about as one walks about a house and garden, dressed with a certain ceremonious elaboration, safe from mud and the hardship and defilement of foul weather, buying, meeting, dining, studying, carousing, seeing the play. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Studies of urban growth reveal that the city grows outward from its central business district (1) in a series of expanding zones. [73] There is a “zone of transition” (2) encircling the downtown area. This is the area of deterioration, the so-called “slum”, created in large part by the invasion of business and light manufacture. A third area (3) is inhabited by workers in industry who have escaped from the area of deterioration (2) and who desire to live within easy access of their work. ”

“ In a region where freshly-built suburbs lie ending
'Mid plots of the glum market-gardener's ground,—
Its bare, tenantless frontages gloomily blending
With grime and neglect that are rampant all round,
Runs the street, so forlorn it could not be forlorner,
Where, looking straight down a "no thoroughfare" road,
With the blaze of a new public-house at the corner,
The sad "One-horse" Householder finds his abode! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 to 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A large proportion of the old buildings and all the unsightly, lofty, and inartistic ones were cleared away and replaced with structures of the low, broad, roomy style adapted to the new ways of living. Parks, gardens, and roomy spaces were multiplied on every hand and the system of transit so modified as to get rid of the noise and dust, and finally, in a word, the city of your day was changed into the modern city. Having thus been made as pleasant places to live in as was the country itself, the outflow of population from the cities ceased and an equilibrium became established. ”

“ And from this standpoint the holy city was a happy city; it had no suburbs. That is to say, there are all sorts of buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall. Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but it is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great industrial towns that they grow, as it were, unconsciously and blindly, like grass that covers up a boundary line traced on the earth. ”

“ Controlling Suburbs Where civic pride and organization promote intelligent efforts in a city to control real estate speculation, unregulated building and congestion, it often happens that the area just outside the city accepts all the evils cast forth by the city. A factory or plant, pushed to the outskirts where a suburb is quickly developed by land speculators to meet the new housing situation, may easily, and does often, become the center of a community totally without plan and where the evils of congestion appear in their most exaggerated form. ”

“ Nearer to the centre of the city also, and in the great mill and factory districts, one finds still the individual home, but here the houses are older, the rows seem longer and more unbroken in their monotony and in innumerable courts and alleys there is surface drainage. Here, also, we find the various features of the problem which grows more difficult in the older parts of the city and as the social scale is lowered. In prosperous times, each small house holds one family. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The GROWTH OF THE CITY
52Besides extension and succession, the general process of expansion in urban growth involves the antagonistic and yet complementary processes of concentration and decentralization. In all cities there is the natural tendency for local and outside transportation to converge in the central business district. In the downtown section of every large city we expect to find the department stores, the skyscraper office buildings, the railroad stations, the great hotels, the theaters, the art museum, and the city hall. ”

“ How many people own their own homes? What proportion of the population consists of nomads, hobos, gypsies? On the other hand, certain urban neighborhoods suffer from isolation. Efforts have been made at different times to reconstruct and quicken the life of city neighborhoods and to bring it in touch with the larger interests of the community. Such is in part the purpose of the social settlements. These organizations and others which are attempting to reconstruct city life have developed certain methods and a technique for stimulating and controlling local communities. ”

“ The unexpected was everywhere, green closes in the heart of commerce, quiet quadrangles in the byways of Fleet Street, quaint old churches by the river-side, bawling market-places behind stately mansions, great parks set in deserts of arid poverty, bustling docks hidden away in back streets, and elegant villas at the end of drab, dismal, long-trailing East-end thoroughfares, redolent of slush and cabbage-leaves and public-houses and fried fish. ”

“ If King Street, for example, were to end abruptly in the kind of landscape in which people hunt foxes and shoot partridges, both elements, the rural and the urban, would suffer from the contact simply because the town folk wouldn't and couldn't put up with the country roads, and the green fields and hedges wouldn't survive the friction, if I may so put it, of the citizens. In other words, a town of a certain density of population necessarily defies and defiles the immediate proximity of the country. ”

“ The character of the meshes in that wider network of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from the urban district, will vary with the soil, the climate and the tenure of the land—will vary, too, with the racial and national differences. But throughout all that follows, this mere relativity of the new sort of town to the new sort of country over which the new sorts of people we are immediately to consider will be scattered, must be borne in mind. ”

“ Isn’t the centre of a city for business? What right has a park there?
Or perhaps it is a great lake front as at Buffalo or Cleveland, which could or should be made into something splendid—the municipal centre, for instance, or the site of a great park. No. Instead the city will bend all its energies to growing away from it and leave it to shabby factories and warehouses and tumble-down houses, while it constructs immense parks in some region where a park could never possibly have as much charm as on the water front. ”

“ Value by proximity responds to central growth, diminishing in proportion to distance from various centres, while value from accessibility responds to axial growth, diminishing in proportion to absence of transportation facilities. Change occurs not only at the circumference but throughout the whole area of a city, outward growth being due both to pressure from the centre and to aggregation at the edges. All buildings within a city react upon each other, superior and inferior utilities displacing each other in turn. ”

“ These are the chief social causes of the growth of cities, and, as we have seen, they are wholly industrial in their nature. Undoubtedly the modern city is a product of modern industry. Certain non-economic factors may also enter into the growth of cities, but these are of but slight importance; such are the greater intellectual and educational advantages which the city offers, the great opportunities for pleasure and amusement in the city and the like. Such minor and individual causes have had but little part in the growth of the great cities of the present. ”

“ Then there grow up slums which are inhabited by great numbers of the poorer classes who are unable to defend themselves from association with the derelict and vicious. In the course of time every section and quarter of the city takes on something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants. Each separate part of the city is inevitably stained with the peculiar sentiments of its population. The effect of this is to convert what was at first a mere geographical expression into a neighborhood, that is to say, a locality with sentiments, traditions, and a history of its own. ”

“ To English eyes accustomed to dingy brick houses in the suburbs of big cities, to the dreary squalor of some new [Pg 71] little town which straggles around a filthy railway station, with refuse-heaps in undeveloped fields, and a half-finished "High Street," where a sweetstuff-shop, a stationer, and an estate agent establish themselves in the gloomy hope of business, these American villages look wonderfully clean, bright, and pleasant! ”