Urban Growth via Chicago and Los Angeles
Another Almandsmith
The Industrial Revolution spawned cities of manufacturing all over the world. The first wave of large American cities were built during the industrial period in North America, becoming many of the USA’s major metropolises of the early twentieth century. The Chicago School of urban sociology, as proposed by Park, Burgess, and Wirth, rose to dominance in the field with their theories and models as to the shape and growth of these metropolises. Although their concentric zones model was one of several important urban templates, it proved extremely influential and enduring. The rise of globalization after the Second World War, however, moved manufacturing jobs out of ‘the western world’ and irrevocably changed the shape and function of cities globally. These changes, and the rise of the postmodern metropolis, have necessitated a new school of urban sociological thought – the Los Angeles School – which emphasizes the vast, chaotic, and socially fragmented nature of today’s cities.
Cities, especially large cities, do not stop at their political borders; they collect suburbs and edge cities along their fringes, and maintain ties with their surrounding rural areas, or hinterlands. A city and its associated/offshoot development is collectively called a metropolis, or metropolitan area. The difference between a city and a metropolis is a matter of scale. While a city is a single (albeit very large) settlement, a metropolitan area can consist of any number of cities and related towns and suburbs (Chen, Orum, and Paulson, 2013, p. 101). San Francisco, for example, is a single city, but the San Francisco Bay Area is a large metropolis incorporating interconnected settlements of all sizes; from large cities (San Jose has over a million people), all the way down to the small suburban communities that eventually give way to the rapidly developing hinterlands of the Central Valley.
Although different metropolitan areas have their own unique aspects and can appear completely different, there are patterns of layout and habitation that persistently reoccur. A general rule of the metropolis is that population density is highest in the city center, and decreases moving outward from there (Chen et al., 2013, p. 104). Beyond that, however, there have been multiple models to describe the shape and expansion of the metropolis.
Ernest Burgess, who founded the “Chicago School” of urban sociology along with colleagues Robert Park and Louis Wirth, originally published the concentric zones theory of sociospacial construction. Arguably the Chicago School’s most enduring legacy, Burgess’ model describes cities as composed of circular concentric zones radiating out from the city center, where each zone is a different metropolitan and/or social area. The city center is the site of industrial and business activity, with immigrants and the working class living closer to the center, and affluent commuter zones farther out (Chen et al., 2013, p. 39, 105-7).
In response to the concentric zones model, economist Homer Hoyt developed the sector model of urban growth in 1939. Hoyt describes cities’ zones as extending in wedges from the city center, based on transportation routes (such as railways or highways) into and out of the city. In this model, business districts and industrial activity are clustered along the routes, and then zones of affluence radiate in a circular fashion around the city center, with the least affluent closest to the routes and most affluent farthest away (Chen et al., 2013, p. 110). This growth pattern results in star-shaped cities with axes along highways and/or rail lines (Dear, 2002, p. 130-1)
Burgess and Hoyt’s models were very successful in describing certain kinds of cities, mostly older East Coast and Midwestern industrial cities. In an attempt to model a greater range of cities, Harris and Ullman developed the multiple nuclei model in 1945. A city following this model does not have a central business district (though it may have had one in the past); instead there are many different urban centers for various land uses around the city, with their own industries, services, and related segments of the population. These form the patchwork of urban zones that makes up the city environment (Chen et al., 2013, p. 111).
Each of these urban models describe different layouts of zones in a city, but how are these zones formed? The Chicago School explained urban zone formation with the now-defunct idea of “natural space”, that people and institutions with certain qualities would naturally end up in the certain areas of the city (Chen et al., 2013, p. 107). Natural areas are urban places with distinctive groups, organizations, institutions, or industries, such as the wholesale district, Chinatown, or Little Italy. They were natural, according to Burgess et al, in that there was a certain amount of inevitability in who ended up where, and the places where people end up were ecologically logical places for them to be (Chen et al., 2013, p. 107). Decades later, the Marx-inspired sociologists Logan and Molotch refuted the idea of natural spaces, contending that real estate developers and other members of a city’s growth coalition are able to set land values and control where development occurs, and thus have a significant influence over where various groups settle, and ultimately, the shape of the city (Chen et al., 2013, p. 105).
While the geographic models put forth by Burgess, Hoyt, Harris and Ullman all provide contrasting views on the shape and growth patterns of the city, it would be a mistake to discuss which is most accurate, or convincing. Each is a functional and informative model that describes a certain subset of urban spaces, and all offer insights on the nature of cities in general, but no one model could effectively describe all (or even most) cities. As geographer Michael Dear writes, “one can no longer make an unchallenged appeal to a single model for the myriad global and local trends that surround us” (2002, p. 129). Instead, each model provides a rough template for a certain type of city, with different models for different city patterns.
Cities and metropolitan areas, however, have undergone significant changes in form and function since WWII. At the end of the 1960s, American manufacturers began moving overseas, where it remains cheaper to mass-produce goods than in the United States. As more manufacturing jobs moved to other parts of the world, the country’s economic base began to transform from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. Cataclysmic impacts on the average American worker aside, as more industries left US cities, these cities progressively lost more and more of their dominant income. Without money or job opportunities, older industrial cities began cutting local services and losing population – especially young people moving away to find work (Chen et al., 2013, p. 162-4).
The decline and fall of the industrial city, however, was mirrored by the growth of the Sunbelt, cities in the southern and western areas of the United States that experienced an influx of people and growth of new industries after WWII (Chen et al., 2013, p. 163). Jobs in the aerospace industry and the burgeoning software and technology field brought people to cities such as Pasadena and San Jose, in California, and Seattle, Washington. The post-war period also saw growth in and around cities with universities or military bases, such as Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and Berkeley and San Diego, California (Chen et al., 2013, p. 164). The flourishing of the Sunbelt was made possible both by post-war transportation projects (especially the interstate system), and the post-war affordability of cars. Easy transportation affected the growth patterns of these cities, however, spawning ever-increasing numbers of suburbs and fringe cities (Chen et al., 2013, p. 164).
These post-war metropolises lack a number of qualities of the industrial-age American city. The cities of the Chicago School’s models had visible demarcations of social spaces, and tangible boundaries between their urban centers, fringe suburbs, and trade-linked hinterlands (Chen et al., 2013, p. 157). Many of them followed the concentric zones model, or Hoyt’s variation, the sector model. Chicago was the prototype of the previous age of American city, and the type of city that has suffered many of globalization’s ill effects. Los Angeles has been proposed as the prototype of today’s postmodern metropolis, as according to Joel Garreau, “every American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles” (Dear, 2002, p. 129).
Today’s growing cities follow the multiple nuclei model, though the postmodern metropolis has a number of specific characteristics to itself. Besides having no obvious urban center, social demarcations, or obvious divisions between the urban/suburban/hinterlands, these cities have very large, diverse, and socially fragmented populations, and experience severe economic and social inequalities. Unlike the modern-era industrial city, the postmodern metropolis has no dominant industry (Chen et al., 2013, p. 160); additionally, transportation and decentralization remain major shaping factors, leading to sprawl.
With such stark differences between the Chicago School’s vision of the city and today’s postmodern metropolis, a number of urban researchers have assembled the Los Angeles School, as “the city is now commonly represented as indicative of a new form of urbanism supplanting the older forms against which Los Angeles was once judged deviant” (2002, p. 135), as Michael Dear writes, “the region has become not the exception to but rather a prototype of our urban future” (2002, p. 128). The main tenets of the Los Angeles School respond to both the theories and the modernist presuppositions of the Chicago School; specifically, the modernist ideas of a city as a unified whole, urban conditions as a function of individuals’ choices, and a linear trajectory from past to progress, as well as Wirth’s discussion of the urban hinterlands.
Wirth wrote that outside and surrounding the city lies its symbiotic hinterlands, which the city organizes through trade. Dear argues that an important update of the Chicago School’s theories is the reversal of that scenario, “for it is no longer the center that organizes the urban hinterlands, but the hinterlands that determine what remains of the center” (2002, p. 131). He also updates the modernist framework the Chicago School was built on, outlining the postmodern base of the Los Angeles School. The postmodern metropolis is a fractured society, not a unified city; global corporations balance out or offset individual-centered agency; and the city is shaped by chaotic and non-linear processes, no smooth progression into the future (Dear, 2002, p. 134).
The Los Angeles School and the fragmented multiple nuclei model has come to replace the Chicago School and the concentric zone theory as the premier way of modeling the growth of the post-war, postindustrial, postmodern city – the city of today. One can look back over the changes in cities and the study of them, but it begs the question: what comes next? As metropolitan areas continue to grow and accumulate sprawl, they can start merging at the edges with other metropolitan areas nearby. This process heralds the formation of a megalopolis, or a vast and dense urban agglomeration stretching across tens and hundreds of square miles and consisting of multiple metropolises (Chen et al., 2013, p. 160-1). As a metropolis is a step up, in scale, from a city, a megalopolis is the step above that. Geographer Jean Gottman identifies the stretch of urbanity from Washington, D.C. to Boston as a megalopolis, and many more, existing and emergent, can be found across the planet – evidence of our increasingly urban future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chen, X., Orum, A. M., & Paulson, K. E. (2013). Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience. Various: Wiley-Blackwell.
Dear, M. (2002). “Los Angeles and the Chicago School: Invitation to a Debate”. In J. Lin & C. Mele (Eds.), The Urban Sociology Reader (127-137). London & New York: Routledge.
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