Urbanization

Urbanization. Over four centuries, the United States gradually emerged as a predominantly urban nation. Since 1920, a majority of Americans have lived in urban places. The process of urbanization—the growth and settlement of cities—has been the result of interactions among technological and economic change and such social processes as population growth, immigration, and internal migration. Public policy has also played a decisive role in the transformation of urban areas. The physical form and social structure of cities have reflected conscious choices by political officials, planners, and ordinary citizens.

Until the mid–eighteenth century, not many settlements in North America could properly be called cities. Prior to contact with European colonists, few Native Americans lived in urban settlements. With a small number of noteworthy exceptions, such as pueblo villages of the Anasazi people of the Southwest and the thirteenth‐century city of Cahokia, near the Mississipi River in what is now East St. Louis, Illinois, most American Indians lived in traveling bands or in small, often seasonal villages.

The Colonial Era.

Early European settlers imposed European models of urbanism on the North American landscape. Spanish colonists along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic imported traditional Roman designs for their settlements, although most of their North American settlements were small fortifications. English‐born city‐builders often imitated the commercial and residential layouts of their native towns and cities. Some farsighted planners, such as William Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania and founder of Philadelphia, attempted to build utopian cities. Penn hoped that Philadelphia, with its grid of streets, public squares, and large lots, would offer an alternative to the crowded, disorderly streets that characterized many British and colonial towns. Although Penn's vision of a “Greene Countrie Town” remained unfulfilled, his grid plan became a nearly universal feature of later North American city‐building. The easily replicated grid promoted real‐estate development and the flow of people and traffic.

Urbanization proceeded at different paces, but followed a distinct pattern. Primarily commercial in origin, most colonial cities functioned as local and regional marketplaces. The four largest cities in British North America (Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston, South Carolina) had deepwater ports that allowed them to serve as entrepôts for intercolonial and international trade. These commercial cities had sizable populations of merchants, artisans, and other craftspeople. But even these colonial cities were small by later standards. In 1775, Philadelphia had about 25,000 residents; New York, 18,000; Boston, 16,000; and Charleston, 12,000. Commercial cities tended to be undifferentiated spatially by economic status, race, or ethnicity. Wealthy urban residents usually lived in close proximity to artisans, laborers, and poor people. In addition, working people usually lived near their places of employment; many artisans and shopkeepers lived above their shops.

Urbanization in the Industrial Age.

With the rise of industrialization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cities expanded and took on new forms. Early manufacturing cities, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, emerged in places with waterpower, abundant cheap labor, and well‐heeled investors. The expansion of canals such as New York's Erie Canal and the introduction of steam power propelled urban growth inland. By the mid–nineteenth century, railroads also spurred urbanization, bringing industry, migrants and immigrants, and commercial goods to places as diverse as Wheeling, in present‐day in West Virginia; Chicago; Omaha, Nebraska; and Butte, Montana. These cities grew in tandem with the commercial expansion of their hinterlands. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Wheeling; and Butte rose because of their proximity to rich mineral and ore deposits; Chicago depended on the lumber and agricultural goods from its hinterland; Omaha on its access to the cattle and grain produced on the Great Plains.

Industrial cities attracted newcomers from declining agricultural regions who sought employment in factories and other commercial enterprises. Port cities and places easily accessible by rail attracted the lion's share of immigrants from abroad. Immigration and rural‐to‐urban migration significantly increased the proportion of Americans living in cities, from 5.1 percent in 1790 to 25.7 percent in 1870.

In contrast to Colonial Era “walking cities,” industrial cities were more diverse but more segregated by social class. Workers clustered in neighborhoods abutting industrial districts while well‐to‐do urbanites began to settle in more homogeneous neighborhoods distant from immigrants and industry. Innovations in urban transportation, particularly commuter railways and streetcars, facilitated an upper‐ and middle‐class exodus from center cities and encouraged early suburbanization.

From the 1870s through the 1920s, American cities underwent dramatic growth and change. The advent of affordable public transportation and the coming of the automobile drew urban populations outward. The process of residential segregation by class accelerated. At the same time, cities reached their industrial and commercial zenith. By the early twentieth century, downtowns hummed with corporate and retail activity and new forms of mass entertainment, including vaudeville, movie theaters, and sports stadiums. The period also witnessed the construction of a remarkable variety of centralized urban institutions, including museums, municipal parks, and department stores.

Post‐1920 Developments.

From the 1920s through the late twentieth century, urban growth and development followed a new course. Most older industrial cities in the Northeast and Middle West lost population while new cities, largely in the South and West (the Sun Belt), grew rapidly. The nonwhite populations of cities also expanded rapidly during the two great migrations of African Americans from the rural South (1914–1929 and 1941–1968). The urbanization of black Americans was extraordinarily rapid: in 1920, more than 90 percent lived in rural areas; by 1990, more than 90 percent lived in cities. The ethnic composition of many cities also changed with the migration of Caribbean, Latin American, and Asians, particularly after the 1965 immigration reforms. As the central cities became more heterogeneous, Americans of European descent migrated en masse from cities to suburbs. By 1980, a plurality of Americans, most of them white, lived in suburban areas.

Government policies played a crucial role in shaping the twentieth‐century metropolis. In the New Deal Era, the federal government funneled massive economic assistance to the South. World War II and Cold War military spending fueled the rise of Sun Belt cities. At the same time, government subsidies for road construction, especially the interstate highway system, spurred metropolitan decentralization and encouraged the flight of population and jobs to suburban and rural areas. Persistent racial segregation, coupled with the high‐rise housing projects associated with postwar urban‐renewal programs, also shattered many older inner‐city neighborhoods and contributed to the isolation and marginalization of the urban poor and the concentration of crime and other social problems in the inner city.

The federal government also underwrote suburbanization through generous mortgage programs and loan guarantees by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration. Federal housing subsidies exacerbated class and racial segregation by requiring that new developments be economically and racially homogeneous. With federally backed loans and mortgages seldom available to racial minorities, most suburbs remained overwhelmingly white. State laws also encouraged the proliferation of separate municipalities in metropolitan areas, most with their own tax bases, social services, and school districts.

By the end of the twentieth century, America had become a metropolitan nation. Whereas the nineteenth‐century central cities witnessed rapid population growth and economic development, the highest rates of population and economic growth in the late twentieth century occurred in suburban areas. By 1980, a plurality of the nation's population lived in suburbs, not in central cities. Central‐city downtowns no longer held a monopoly over business and commercial activity. Suburban office and industrial parks and shopping centers competed successfully with central business districts, dispersing economic activity over wide areas. Metropolitan areas remained deeply segregated by race, despite an increase in minority suburbanization and a reverse flow of affluent whites back to the inner cities, sometimes called gentrification. Fragmentation and multiplication of local governmental jurisdictions characterized the late twentieth‐century metropolis. At century's end, some cities, notably Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, experimented with new forms of metropolitan government and enacted policies to discourage suburban sprawl. But these initiatives remained exceptions to the prevailing pattern of demographic and economic decentralization.
See also Agriculture: Since 1920; Architecture: Public Architecture; Asian Americans; Automotive Industry; Canals and Waterways; Detroit; Factory System; Hispanic Americans; Immigrant Labor; Immigration Law; Los Angeles; Lowell Mills; Mobility; Motor Vehicles; Muckrakers; Municipal and County Government; New Orleans; Parks, Urban; Popular Culture; Poverty; Race and Ethnicity; San Francisco; Spanish Settlements in North American; Steffens, Lincoln; Tweed, William Magear; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

Gary Nash , The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1979.
Kenneth T. Jackson , Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, 1985.
Carl Abbott , The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, 1987.
Sam Bass Warner , The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, 2d ed., 1987.
Eric Monkkonen , America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1790–1980, 1988.
William Cronon , Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1991.
Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, 1993.
Howard Chudacoff, with and Judith E. Smith , The Evolution of American Urban Society, 1994.
Thomas J. Sugrue , The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, 1996.

Thomas J. Sugrue