URBANIZATION

URBANIZATION. Cities have been the pioneers of American growth. From the beginnings of European exploration and conquest, towns and cities were the staging points for the settlement of successive resource frontiers. Boston and Santa Fe in the seventeenth century, Philadelphia and San Antonio in the eighteenth century, Cincinnati and Denver in the nineteenth century, and Anchorage and Miami in the twentieth century all played similar roles in organizing and supporting the production of raw materials for national and world markets. It has been city-based bankers, merchants, and journalists who have linked individual resource hinterlands into a single national economy.

The reality of the "urban frontier" clashes with the ingrained American frontier myth. In his famous essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), Frederick Jackson Turner asked his readers to take an imaginative stance over the Cumberland Gap to watch the "procession of civilization … the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer." City makers, by implication, trailed far to the rear. From James Fenimore Cooper's novels and Theodore Roosevelt's Winning of the West (4 vols., 1889–1896) to Paul Bunyan stories and John Wayne movies, there is little place for the bustling levees of New Orleans, the surging crowds of Broadway, or the smoky cacophony of Pittsburgh steel mills.

A comparison of urbanization in the United States to the rest of the world contradicts the national self-image. Americans have prided themselves on their youth as a nation, which consequently was late to urbanize. In sober fact, however, the United States was a pioneer among urbanizing nations. Along with Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, it was among the very first to feel the effects of the urban-industrial revolution. The history of American cities is substantially a story of the invention of new institutions and technologies to cope with two centuries of massive urbanization.

Stages of Urbanization

American urbanization has followed the same demographic pattern found in every urbanizing society for the last two centuries. The word "urbanization" itself refers to an increase in the proportion of national or regional population living in cities. For the first six thousand years of urban life, no society was long able to maintain an urban percentage greater than from 5 to 10 percent. Starting in late eighteenth-century England, however, one nation after another experienced an accelerating shift from rural to urban population. After several generations of rapid urbanization, the process leveled off toward a new equilibrium in which about three-quarters of the population lived in cities and many of the rest pursued city-related activities in smaller towns. The result, when the urban proportion of a population is graphed against time is an s-shaped curve that turns up sharply for perhaps a century and then tapers off.

Urban growth in the United States has clearly followed these three stages of gradual growth, explosive take off, and maturity. First, the era of colonial or pre-modern cities stretched from the seventeenth century to the 1810s. Second, the rise of the industrial city dominated a century of rapid urbanization from 1820 to 1920. Finally, the third era of the modern city has run from 1920 onward. At each stage, the available technologies of communication and transportation shaped the internal patterns of cities and their distribution across the continent.

The first century of British and Dutch colonization along the Atlantic seaboard depended directly on the founding of new cities, from New Amsterdam (1625) and Boston (1630) to Providence (1638), Charleston (1672), Norfolk (1680), Philadelphia (1682), and Savannah (1733). These colonial towns resembled the provincial market centers in the British Isles. Compact in size and small in population, they linked the farms, fisheries, and forests of the Atlantic colonies to markets in Europe and the Caribbean. With populations that ranged from 15,000 to 30,000 at the time of the American Revolution, the four largest cities dominated the commerce of regional hinterlands. Portsmouth, Salem, Springfield, and Providence looked to Boston; Albany traded via New York; Philadelphia took its profits from the rich farms of the Delaware and Susquehanna Valleys; Charleston centralized the trade of Savannah, Wilmington, and New Bern.

Colonial capitals looked to the sea. William Penn's Philadelphia was designed to march inland from the Delaware River, but the economic life of the port drew settlement north and south along the river. Charleston faced the Cooper River and the Atlantic beyond its barrier islands. New York City similarly faced its harbor on the East River. Taverns and warehouses lined the wharves. Merchants crowded the coffeehouses to share the latest shipping news and arrange for their next cargoes. The elite built near the governor's residence on lower Broadway to enjoy the fresh air off the Hudson River and a relaxing view of the green New Jersey shore.

Taken together, the twenty-four recognized cities with 2,500 people or more at the first census of 1790 accounted for only 5 percent of the national population. A generation later, after the disruptions of the War of 1812, with its British attacks on Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans, and the panic of 1819, the 1820 census still counted only 700,000 urban Americans—a scant 7 percent of the national total. A century later, the 1920 census found a nation that was 51 percent urban, giving 1920 as much symbolic meaning for American history as the supposed closing of the frontier in 1890.

Nineteenth-century urbanization meant more cities and bigger cities. From 1820 to 1920, the New York metropolitan area expanded from 124,000 people on the lower end of Manhattan Island to 7,910,000 spread across fourteen counties. Philadelphia's metropolitan region grew from 64,000 to 2,407,000. Over the same period, the number of cities from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean increased from a handful of settlements to 864 cities, topped by San Francisco and Los Angeles.

New city people came from farms and small towns on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether it involved a transatlantic voyage from Liverpool or Hamburg or a fifty-mile train ride into Indianapolis, migration from farm to city was the other great population movement in nineteenth-century America. It simultaneously balanced and was part of the westward movement across the continent. The physical construction of cities—houses, bridges, sewers, streets, offices, factories—was a complementary process of capital formation that, likewise, balanced the development of farms and their supporting railroads.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American cities fell into two categories. The nation's industrial core stretched from Boston and Baltimore westward to St. Louis and St. Paul, accounting for the overwhelming majority of manufacturing production and wealth. Many of these cities were specialized as textile towns, steel towns, shoemaking towns, pottery towns, and the like. Their industrial labor force drew from the millions of European immigrants and their children who made up more than two-thirds of the population of cities like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and New York City. Cities in the South, the Great Plains, and the Far West were the suppliers and customers. They funneled raw materials to the industrial belt: cotton from Mobile, lumber from Norfolk, metals from Denver, cattle from Kansas City. In

return, they distributed the manufactured goods of the Northeast.

Chicago was the great exemplar of the growing industrial city. Between 1880 and 1920, 605,000 immigrants and 790,000 Americans moved into the city. Chicagoans lifted their entire city ten feet to improve its drainage. They built the world's first skyscrapers and some of its first grain elevators. They remade American taste with the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. They competed with Odessa as a grain port, Pittsburgh as a steel city, Cincinnati as a meatpacker, and London and Paris as a national railroad center. Looking at Chicago and other mid-continent cities, Charles Francis Adams commented that "the young city of the West has instinctively … flung herself, heart, soul, and body, into the movement of her time. She has realized the great fact that steam has revolutionized the world, and she has bound her whole existence up in the great power of modern times" (North American Review, pp. 6–14).

Urban growth after 1900 revolved around the adaptation of American cities to twentieth-century technologies of personalized transportation and rapid communication. The 1910s and 1920s brought full electric wiring and self-starting automobiles to middle-class homes. George F. Babbitt, the eponymous hero of Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel, lived in a thoroughly modern Dutch colonial house in the bright new subdivision of Floral Heights in the up-to-date city of Zenith. He awakened each morning to "the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments." His bathroom was glazed tile and silvered metal. His business was real estate and his god was Modern Appliances.

The metropolis that Babbitt and millions of real automobile owners began to shape in the 1920s broke the physical bounds of the nineteenth century industrial city. In 1910 the Census Bureau devised the "metropolitan district" to capture information about the suburban communities that had begun to ring the central city. The definition has been repeatedly modified to match the realities of urban-regional geography. In 2000, the federal government recognized 280 metropolitan regions with a total population of 276 million. The metro areas of middle-sized cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Houston stretched for from seventy-five to one hundred miles from one suburban margin to the other.

The cities of post–World War II America have had the greatest ethnic variety in national history. They have been destinations for a massive northward movement. Rural southerners, both black and white, moved north (and west) to cities and jobs. Starting with the Great Migration of 1917 and 1918, the African American experience became an urban experience, creating centers of black culture like Harlem in the 1920s and feeling the bitter effects of ghettoization by the 1930s and 1940s. During the Great Depression and World War II, Appalachian whites joined black workers in middle western cities like Cincinnati and Detroit. Okies and Arkies left their depressed cotton farms in Oklahoma and Arkansas for new lives in Bakersfield and Los Angeles.

The northward movement also crossed oceans and borders. Puerto Rican immigrants after World War II remade the social fabric of New York City and adjacent cities. Half a million Cubans made an obvious impact on Miami after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The Puerto Ricans and Cubans were followed to eastern cities by Haitians, Jamaicans, Colombians, Hondurans, and others from the countries surrounding the Caribbean. Mexicans constitute the largest immigrant group in cities in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and California. Temporary workers, shoppers, visitors, legal migrants, and illegal migrants fill neighborhood after neighborhood in El Paso, San Antonio, San Diego, and Los Angeles, creating bilingual labor markets and downtowns.

From the 1970s, Asia matched Latin America, with each accounting for 40 percent of documented immigrants. Asians have concentrated in the cities of the Pacific Coast and in New York City. Los Angeles counts new ethnic neighborhoods for Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Samoans. Honolulu looks to Asia as well as the continental United States for business and tourism. A new generation of migrants has revitalized fading Chinatowns in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

The rise of Latin American and Asian immigration is part of a rebalancing of the American urban system. What journalists in the 1970s identified as the rise of the Sun Belt is part of a long-term shift of urban growth from the industrial Northeast toward the regional centers of the South and West—from Detroit, Buffalo, and Chicago to Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta. The causes include the concentration of defense spending and the aerospace industry between 1940 and 1990, the growth of a leisure economy, the expansion of domestic energy production, and the dominance of information technology industries. The result has been booming cities along the South Atlantic coast from Washington to Miami, through the greater Southwest from Houston to Denver, and along the Pacific Coast from San Diego to Seattle.

At the start of the twenty-first century, nine metropolitan areas had populations of five million or more: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington Baltimore, San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, and Dallas–Fort Worth. Their eighty-four-million residents accounted for 30 percent of all Americans. The fastest-growing metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2000 were all found in the South or West. In total, metropolitan areas contained 80 percent of the American population.

Cities and American Values

Urbanization has been a cultural as well as demographic process. The United States lagged behind Great Britain and a handful of nations in northwestern Europe in urbanization, but led the rest of the world. One result has been ambivalent Americans who have praised cities with one voice and shunned them with another. Public opinion polls repeatedly show that most Americans would prefer to live in a small town. A few extra questions have revealed that they also want easy access to the medical specialists, cultural facilities, and business opportunities that are found only in cities. Indeed, there was scarcely any place in late-twentieth-century America not thoroughly penetrated by urban values and tied into urban networks.

Thomas Jefferson set the tone for American anti-urbanism with the strident warning that cities were dangerous to democracy. At the time of Philadelphia's deadly yellow fever epidemic of 1800, Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush that "when great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations. … The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man." Jefferson feared that American cities would become facsimiles of eighteenth-century London and Paris as areas of poverty and breeders of riotous mobs. He also feared that because city dwellers were dependent on others for their livelihoods, their votes were at the disposal of the rich. Should Americans become "piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe," he wrote to James Madison, they would become "corrupt as in Europe."

If Jefferson feared foremost for the health of the republic, many of the antiurban writers who followed feared instead for the morals of the individual. George Foster drew stark contrasts between rich and poor in New York in Slices, by an Experienced Carver (1849) and New York by Gaslight (1850). Others indicted city life as a corrupter of both rich and poor. For example, in The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), Charles Loring Brace warned of the threat posed by the abjectly poor and the homeless. With no stake in society, they were a riot waiting to happen and a responsibility for more comfortable citizens. Jacob Riis used words and photographs to tell the middle class about the poor of New York City in How the Other Half Lives (1890). A few years later, W. T. Stead wrote If Christ Came to Chicago! (1894) to show the big city as un-Christian because it destroyed the lives of its inhabitants.

The first generation of urban sociologists wrote in the same vein during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Robert E. Park worked out a theory of urban life that blamed cities for substituting impersonal connections for close personal ties. As summarized by Louis Wirth in "Urbanism as a Way of Life" (1938), the indictment dressed up Thomas Jefferson in the language of social science. Wirth's city is the scene of transitory and superficial relationships, frantic status seeking, impersonal laws, and cultural institutions pandering to the lowest common denominator of a heterogeneous society.

The attack on city living was counterbalanced by sheer excitement about the pace of growth. By the 1830s large numbers of Americans had come to look on cities as tokens of American progress. The pages of booster pamphlets and histories of instant cities were drenched in statistics of growth. Pittsburgh as It Is (1857) offered statistics on coal mining, railroads, real estate values, population, employment, boat building, banks and a "progressional ratio" comparing the growth of Pittsburgh to the rest of the nation. Boosters counted churches, schools, newspapers, charities, and fraternal organizations as further evidence of economic and social progress. Before the Civil War, one Chicago editor wrote that "facts and figures …if carefully pondered, become more interesting and astonishing than the wildest vision of the most vagrant imagination." His words echoed seventy years later as George Babbitt sang the praises of "the famous Zenith spirit … that has made the little old Zip City celebrated in every land and clime, wherever condensed milk and pasteboard cartons are known." Urban advocates in the twentieth century extended the economic argument to point out the value of concentrating a variety of businesses in one location. The key is external economies: the ability of individual firms to buy and sell to each other and to share the services of bankers, insurance specialists, accountants, advertising agencies, mass media, and other specialists.

American writers and critics as disparate as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson have also acknowledged cities as sources of creativity. "We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities," Emerson wrote in his essay "The Young American" in 1844. Nathaniel Hawthorne allowed his protagonist in The Blithedale Romance (1852) to take time off from the rigors of a country commune for the intellectual refreshment of Boston. George Tucker, professor of moral philosophy and political economy at Jefferson's University of Virginia, analyzed urban trends in 1843. He stated: "The growth of cities commonly marks the progress of intelligence and the arts, measures the sum of social enjoyment, and always implies increased mental activity. … Whatever may be the good or evil tendencies of populous cities, they are the result to which all countries, that are at once fertile, free, and intelligent tend" (Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth, p. 127).

Livable Cities

Americans had to learn not only to plan their cities but also to live comfortably in the fast-growing communities that they erected. They needed to adapt their lives to the urban pace and to develop institutions to bring order out of the seeming chaos. In a city like Philadelphia, rates of accidental deaths and homicides began to drop after 1870 as city dwellers learned to control reckless behavior and pay attention on the streets. The end of the century also brought a decline of spontaneous mobs and endemic drunkenness at the same time that the saloon developed as a stable social institution in immigrant neighborhoods.

Cities developed community institutions that linked people in new ways. Apartment buildings offered a new environment for the middle class. Novelist William Dean Howells reflected contemporary concerns by devoting the first hundred pages of A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) to Basil March's search for an apartment appropriate for a newly appointed New York City magazine editor. Department stores, penny newspapers, vaudeville theaters, and baseball provided common meeting grounds and interests for heterogeneous populations. Department stores such as A. T. Stewart's, John Wanamaker's, Marshall Field's, and others of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s made emerging central business districts acceptable places for women as consumers and helped to introduce women into the clerical labor force. Ballparks and theaters were shared spaces where allegiances and jokes crossed ethnic lines. Ethnic banks, newspapers, and mutual insurance societies offered training in American ways at the same time that they preserved group identity.

The openness of the American city to continued growth brought the need for professionalism in public services. At the start of the nineteenth century, private companies or amateurs provided everything from drinking water to police protection. In the flammable wooden cities of colonial times, householders were expected to keep buckets and respond to calls for help. By the 1820s and 1830s, more cities had added groups of citizens who drilled together as volunteer fire companies, answered alarms, and fought fires as teams. Problems of timely response and the development of expensive steam-powered pumpers, however, required a switch to paid fire companies in the 1850s and 1860s. Firemen who were city employees could justify expensive training and be held accountable for effective performance. By 1900 most observers agreed that fire protection in the United States matched that anywhere in Europe.

Effective fire protection required a pressurized water supply. Residents of colonial cities had taken their water directly from streams and wells or bought it from entrepreneurs who carted barrels through the streets. Philadelphia installed the first large-scale water system in 1801. Boston reached twenty miles into the countryside with an aqueduct in the 1840s. From 1837 to 1842, New York City built the Croton Reservoir and an aqueduct that brought fresh water forty miles from Westchester County to a receiving reservoir in what is now Central Park. Changing theories of disease and the availability of abundant water for municipal cleaning helped to cut New York City's death toll in the 1866 cholera epidemic by 90 percent from the 1849 epidemic.

The public responsibilities of nineteenth-century cities generally fell into the three categories of public health and safety (police, sewers, parks), economic development

(street drainage and pavement), and public education. Such expanding responsibilities fueled the municipal progressivism of the early twentieth century. Led by local business interests, cities implemented civil service employment systems that based hiring and promotion on supposedly objective measures. The city manager system placed the daily operations of government under a professional administrator. As the system spread after the 1910s, city government became more and more the realm of engineers, planners, budget analysts, and other trained professionals.

Public intervention came later in other areas like low-income housing. Cities long preferred to regulate the private market rather than to intervene directly. New York City pioneered efforts to legislate minimum housing standards with tenement house codes in 1867, 1882, and 1901. However, providing the housing remained a private responsibility until the federal government began to finance public housing during the 1930s. Even the massive investments in public housing spurred by federal legislation in 1937 and 1949, however, failed to meet the need for affordable living places.

A full social agenda for local government awaited the 1960s. Assistance to the poor was the realm of private philanthropy in the nineteenth century, often coordinated through private charity organization societies. The crisis of the 1930s legitimized federal assistance for economically distressed individuals, but city government remained oriented to public safety and economic development. By the start of the 1960s, however, criticisms that the urban renewal programs of the 1950s had benefited real estate developers at the expense of citizens added to an increasing sense that America's multiracial cities were in a state of crisis. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson declared a nationwide "war on poverty." On the front lines was the Office of Economic Opportunity with its Neighborhood Youth Corps for unemployed teenagers, its Head Start and Upward Bound programs to bolster public schools, and its Community Action Agencies to mobilize the poor to work for their own interests. Two years later the Model Cities program sought to demonstrate that problems of education, child care, health care, housing, and employment could be attacked most effectively by coordinated efforts.

The last quarter of the century left American cities with comprehensive social commitments but limited resources. Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan redirected federal resources to meet the development needs of politically powerful suburbs. Cities and city people absorbed roughly two-thirds of the budget cuts in the first Reagan budget, leaving them without the resources to fund many needed social programs.

Cities and American Society

"I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." These opening lines from The Adventures of Augie March (1953) capture one of the essential features of the American city. The hero of Saul Bellow's novel about growing up during the 1920s and 1930s knew that cities are the place where things happen. They are centers of opportunity that bring people together to exchange goods, services, ideas, and human company.

At their best, American cities are among the most livable environments in the world. Americans have solved—or know how to solve—many of the physical problems of traffic, pollution, and deteriorated housing. Failures have come from lack of commitment and political will, not from the inherent nature of cities. The poor are often expected to tax themselves for public services that they cannot afford as private citizens. As in the nineteenth century, the centers of our cities display the polarization of society between the very rich and the very poor.

What cities will continue to do best is to protect diversity. The key to urban vitality is variety in economic activities, people, and neighborhoods. This understanding implies that the multicentered metropolitan area built around automobiles and freeways is a logical expression of American urbanism. In the words of historian Sam Bass Warner Jr., the contemporary city offers "the potential of a range of personal choices and social freedoms for city dwellers if we would only extend the paths of freedom that our urban system has been creating" (The Urban Wilderness, p. 113).

The political expression of the urban mosaic is metropolitan pluralism, facilitated by the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, and the war on poverty. Diverse groups defined by ethnicity, social class, or residential location have developed the capacity to pursue their goals through neighborhood organizations, suburban governments, and interest groups. Pluralistic politics has given previously ignored groups and communities entry to public and private decisions about metropolitan growth and services, particularly Hispanics and African Americans. However, cities still need strong area-wide institutions to facilitate the equitable sharing of problems and resources as well as opportunities. Most promising are regional agencies like the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council in Minnesota and Metro in Portland, Oregon, that have assumed responsibility for planning and delivering specific regional services such as parks or public transportation.

Toward the close of the New Deal, a number of the nation's leading specialists on urban growth summed up the promise of urban America in a report called Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy (1937). "The city has seemed at times the despair of America," it said, "but at others to be the Nation's hope, the battleground of democracy. … The faults of our cities are not those of decadence and impending decline, but of exuberant vitality crowding its way forward under tremendous pressure—the flood rather than the drought."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Goldfield, David R. Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607–1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Monkkonen, Eric H. America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780–1980. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Monti, Daniel J., Jr. The American City: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999.

Nash, Gary. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Tucker, George. Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years, As Exhibited by the Decennial Census. New York: Press of Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, 1843.

Wade, Richard C. The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959.

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CarlAbbott

See alsoCity Planning ; Housing ; Immigration ; a Migration, Internal ; Poverty ; Suburbanization ; Tenements ; Urban Redevelopment .

urbanization over the last millennium has been a distinctly weaker process in Ireland than in Great Britain or elsewhere in north‐western Europe. Irish towns before the 17th century were very small, and it is only since the 1960s that more than half the population on the island has lived in towns or cities. In the dominant narratives of Irish history, urban life and urban culture have played only a modest part. Towns and their creation have been characterized as alien, or at best as a conduit through which colonial and other unwelcome influences have entered.

More sympathetic studies of Irish towns and cities were for long restricted to single‐case studies and biased towards the architectural and monumental. Comparative studies of the history of Irish urbanization have been late in coming and have tended to be specific as to period. Medieval debates have centred on pre‐Norman urban origins; the nature and functions of the Anglo‐Norman boroughs; the character and fortunes of the trading cities; and the almost complete absence of urbanization in Gaelic and Gaelicized areas. Early modern studies have been concerned with the fate of the Old English urban communities; the role of towns in public and private policies of plantation, reformation, and improvement; and the rise of Dublin. More modern concerns include the evolution of the estate town; the rise and fall of municipal oligarchy (see urban government); the mushrooming of the 18th‐century port cities and the changing commercial hierarchy; the genesis of street architecture, planning, and property speculation; and the role of the towns in popular politicization. From the early 19th century both the quality and range of evidence of urbanization improves dramatically: thus there is abundant documentation on the final stages of a long growth phase which in the case of most towns and cities was halted at mid‐century, with urban expansion thereafter restricted to east and north Ulster and the greater Dublin conurbation. Little comparative work on this divergent experience has been done, although Belfast's golden age of growth has attracted a considerable literature. Ironically, the urbanization of the Irish emigrant in Great Britain and North America has been far more closely studied than the domestic urban experience in the era of mass emigration. The return of urban growth in the 1920s and its unbalanced character, the housing and transport revolutions in the following generation, and the impact of town and regional planning have been the subject of many micro‐studies, but the literature remains strangely silent on the general character of this process and on the degree to which the Irish path to mass urbanization has been either innovative or unique.

Prior to 1550 three major phases of town development may be recognized. The first stirrings of town life occurred at monasteries during the 7th century, and from c.900 one may talk about the existence of monastic towns. The second phase is represented by the Vikings, who established port towns in the 9th and 10th centuries. The third phase occurred during the late 12th and 13th centuries when about 50 new towns were established by the Anglo‐Normans.

Although founded primarily as hermitages, many monasteries had by the late 7th century attracted a dependent population of criminals, traders, and drifters. The description of Kildare, c.670, by Cogitosus emphasizes its populated nature. Ecclesiastical legislation permitted such people to live and work outside the holiest area of the monastery, i.e. outside the area which contained the church, shrines, and burial ground. Archaeological excavations at sites such as Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly, have located domestic occupation outside the centrally placed ecclesiastical zone; there the remains consist of round houses, boundary fences, a boat slip, and paved surfaces, as well as evidence for a range of craft working activities including bronze smithing, gold working, iron working, jet bracelet manufacturing, and comb making. Evidence for trade and exchange at monastic sites increases substantially after the year 900. Fairs and markets were held; kings began to build their palaces at or beside churches; and there is increasing documentary evidence for domestic structures, for residential precincts, and for the presence of streets.

The construction, in 841, of longphorts at Dublin and Annagassan, Co. Louth, marks the beginnings of Viking settlement. To date, nothing is known of the physical appearance of these centres but it has been speculated that they may have inspired the form and layout of the towns established in the following century. In 914 a great Scandinavian fleet landed at Waterford, initiating a major phase of urbanization. Cork was established c.915, while Dublin, abandoned in 902, was refounded in 917. Other fleets were responsible for the foundation of Wexford (c.921) and Limerick (922). Archaeological excavation in Dublin, notably at Wood Quay, has shed a great deal of light on the nature of these 10th‐century towns. They were characterized by having a series of long narrow properties with houses fronting onto the streets, and were enclosed by a defensive rampart. Virtually all of the buildings were of wood with post and wattle as the most common form of construction; all were of rectangular plan with typical measurements of 25 by 18 feet. The archaeological evidence so far uncovered from Waterford dates to the 11th and 12th centuries but it parallels the Dublin record in many ways. At Cork the Scandinavians established themselves on an island in the estuary of the river Lee, immediately below the monastery of St Finbarr; by the 12th century it was defended by a stone wall with gates. Excavations at Wexford and Limerick have also uncovered buildings of Viking age date. Although claims have been made that Arklow and Wicklow were towns at this time, hard evidence is lacking.

The initial urban activity of the Anglo‐Normans consisted of expanding pre‐existing towns such as Dublin and Kildare. New towns, like Drogheda, were founded before the end of the 12th century, however, and they were a common feature of 13th‐century expansion and settlement. The chronology of town foundation is relatively short with Roscommon, established in 1282, as the latest example. The distribution of towns is predominantly eastern with westward extensions to Dingle, Galway, and Sligo; this essentially reflects the areas colonized by the Anglo‐Normans. The street layout was predominantly linear although more complex plans, such as the chequer patterns of Drogheda, New Ross, and Galway, also occur. Colonists were attracted by the offer of a plot of land within the town on which to build a house and by the opportunity of becoming a burgess. The new towns normally possessed one parish church, in contrast with the older centres where many parishes are found, and all were walled towns. The general pattern of urban development in the 13th century is one of expansion, followed by contraction in the 14th century, renewal in the 15th century, and expansion again in the 16th century. If one may generalize from the evidence at Kilkenny, Galway, and Dublin then it would seem that by the late 15th century urban government was in the hands of a self‐interested local oligarchy. During the later Middle Ages a number of towns, such as Cavan, Granard, Co. Longford, and Sligo, were developed and patronized by Gaelic Irish lords.

The cycle of urban creation and large‐town consolidation that occurred in the late 12th and 13th centuries may usefully be compared with the next such cycle, extending from the late 16th to the early 18th century. In both cycles there was a convergence of interest, albeit temporary and wavering, between an expansionary royal authority that saw in town foundation a means of strategic military control, and the colonial grantees and venturers for whom the attraction of settlers could best be achieved by offering them physical security and legal privilege in an urban setting. In both phases of urban growth there were many false dawns: over 330 Anglo‐Norman boroughs were created by 1300 but more than two‐thirds of them failed to develop identifiable urban characteristics. In the first half of the 17th century over 500 grants for the holding of markets were made, with a further 130 later in the century, some of which in both cases were revived 13th‐century grants; again, a great many were stillborn. Indeed the obligation on late 16th‐ and early 17th‐century plantation grantees to build towns and introduce ‘civility’ was not continued in the huge land grants of the Cromwellian era.

At least ten of the larger medieval towns had ‘Irishtowns’, an indication that at critical moments in their history there had been some degree of ethnic exclusivity. By the late medieval period the provincial ports played up their allegiance to the English crown in formal contrast with the rebels at their gates, but in reality with depopulation and isolation their cultural make‐up had become fairly mixed. Something similar was to occur in the larger cities in the second cycle: in nearly every case their Catholic and predominantly Old English inhabitants were expelled beyond the walls, whether by military action between 1644 and 1655 or through the enforcement of anti‐Catholic legislation after 1692. Immigrants at first filled their shoes, and thus the chief ports of the south and east had a predominantly Protestant citizenry around 1700. But as these centres grew in size and complexity in the 18th century the migration field became more local and the migrants predominantly Catholic; formal blocks on trade and residence gradually broke down again.

Despite these parallels, the wave of urbanization during the ‘long’ 17th century also had its distinctive features. Urbanization in Ulster moved from being of marginal significance in the 13th century to centre stage, with many successful foundations, including the port town of Belfast; there were the first signs of town planning, notably in the greenfield sites at Derry and Bandon; and there was a sharp divergence of trend among the two dozen established trading centres: some of these marked time (for example, New Ross, the largest medieval walled town); others enjoyed a short‐lived greatness (notably 17th‐century Youghal); and a select few cornered the lion's share of overseas trade for a longer period and expanded beyond their old walled cores as a result (Limerick, Waterford, and Cork). Dublin was a special case: its capital status had meant relatively little before the 1590s, but the growth of the apparatus of the state and its increasing attractions as a social centre for the new gentry class propelled it far beyond the size of any Irish town. It undermined its rivals in Leinster and became the main port and market for food and fuel within the Irish Sea by 1700.

In the following century and a half the runaway growth of Dublin and Cork slackened somewhat, and many of the second‐line cities and market towns displayed greater demographic dynamism. There were several reasons for this: the gradual reorientation of Irish foreign trade towards short distance Anglo‐Irish exchanges gave the secondary ports a chance to compete on more equal terms; these centres developed complex service and industrial functions with the growing wealth of the consumers in their hinterlands; and with the general growth of Irish population in the later 18th century and beyond, many Irish towns developed labouring ghettos, at first on the approach roads and in the suburbs, later among the obsolescent housing stock within the urban core.

The cycle of urban creation during the ‘long’ 17th century also involved more modest initiatives: the establishment of estate villages with limited commercial functions and no corporate life. It has been estimated that landlords were involved in the development of around 750 such villages between 1600 and 1850. The successful ones were a means of introducing immigrant craftsmen and of providing a market for tenants' produce, and a minority (for example, Cookstown, Co. Londonderry, Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, and Mitchelstown, Co. Cork) developed into major wholesale centres, even challenging existing country towns (as in the case of Tullamore in King's Country and Westport, Co. Mayo). In such settlements the market place and the Church of Ireland church usually formed the key elements in the urban plan.

Most Irish urban places were in trouble by the second quarter of the 19th century: population had in many cases trebled in fifty years, and the infrastructure rarely managed to cope with the new urban poor. The startling decline of workshop industry coupled with rural economic distress was a poisonous mix. The problem was compounded by a growing hostility between those who controlled municipal government and the bulk of the governed; the constitution of Irish corporations, restricted in the 1670s (see new rules), seemed increasingly inappropriate with the slippage of Protestant numbers and the continuing denial of civic freedom to Catholics even after the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 had theoretically admitted them to participation in corporate political life. The politicization of municipally unenfranchised Catholic freeholders put town corporations on the defensive and delayed local ameliorative action.

Municipal reform when it finally came in 1840 changed the party colour of the aldermen (outside Ulster), but the social malaise of the towns was only very slowly addressed. Legislation reorganizing the poor law, public health, and urban infrastructure drew on British precedents but enforcement followed at an embarrassing distance. The problem in most towns was a declining tax base, the result of the general fall in urban population after 1850 (to urban worlds outside Ireland) and of the specific movement of middleclass residents to suburbs outside the municipal jurisdiction (Dublin was the most extreme case of this). By contrast the tightly conservative burghers of Belfast during its period of break‐neck growth were far more successful in providing an acceptable urban environment for its citizenry; but they had the financial resources so to do. A measure of their distinctive self‐belief is the construction of two town halls within 40 years, the second (1906) being the most elaborate piece of civil architecture ever erected in an Irish town.

Elsewhere the increasingly democratic municipal governments were presiding over what were statistically stagnant urban communities. But Irish town life by 1900 was being transformed in a number of ways: the railway, the omnibus, and then the tramway heightened social segregation, then allowed all the possibility of at least periodic escape to the new seaside towns; working‐class culture in city and town was being redefined by the availability of cheap newsprint, spectator sports, trade unions for the unskilled, and a very visible range of religious organizations seeking working‐class support.

The resurgence of large towns from the 1920s and their acceleration in the 1960s reflected first industrial growth, and then the late 20th‐century service revolution. However, in the case of Belfast, much of its metropolitan population moved to dormitory towns and secondary nodes in the region. In the case of Dublin, despite talk of green belts and decentralization, the conurbation doubled in population between the 1920s and the 1980s; the major population shift was first to a series of new working‐class suburbs, and from the 1950s to a series of satellite ‘towns’ around the western perimeter of the city‐region. Urban housing stock was transformed from the 1920s, first by local authority slum clearance programmes, and later by private speculative developers: in 1981 two‐thirds of the houses in the Dublin region were less than 40 years old. No Irish city encouraged either a high‐rise business district or (with the exception of the troubled Ballymun development north of Dublin in the 1960s) high‐density public housing. The low‐density character of the Irish urban environment at the end of the 20th century was a largely fortuitous bonus arising from the discontinuous pattern of Irish urbanization.

Bibliography

Bradley, John , Walled Towns in Ireland (1995)
Doherty, C. , ‘The Monastic Town in Early Medieval Ireland’, and Bradley, J. , ‘Planned Anglo‐Norman Towns in Ireland’, in H. B. Clarke and A. Simms (eds.), Comparative History of Urban Origins in Non‐Roman Europe (1985)
Graham, B. J., and Proudfoot, L. J. (eds.), An Historical Geography of Ireland (1993)
Harkness, David, and O'Dowd, Mary (eds.), The Town in Ireland (1981)
Wallace, P. F. , ‘The Archaeological Identity of the Hiberno‐Norse Town’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 122 (1992)

JBr/ and John Bradley

Urbanization

THE CONTEMPORARY SPREAD OF URBANIZATION

DENSITY, DIVERSITY, AND URBANIZATION

URBANISM AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Urbanization—the transformation of social life from rural to urban settings—is the seminal process in defining the course of civilization. Urban life evolved approximately ten thousand years ago as a result of sophisticated agricultural innovations that led to a food supply of sufficient magnitude to support both the cultivators and a new class of urban residents. These agricultural innovations, mainly irrigation-based public works, required a more complex social order than that of an agrarian village. Urbanization at its base is thus distinguished from the settled agrarian life that preceded it in two important respects: it embodies a multifaceted social hierarchy and relies on sophisticated technologies to support the activities of daily living (Childe 1936). These uniquely urban characteristics consistently define both urbanization and civilization from the past to the present.

Just as civilization emerged from urbanization in the past, so too does the future course of civilization hinge on our ability to incorporate the reality of contemporary urbanization into our responses to twenty-first-century challenges that include climate change, the elimination of severe poverty, ecological balance, the conquest of communicable diseases, and other pressing social and environmental problems. This is the case because since 2007 more than half of the world’s population resides in urban settings—a historic first.

Urban life can be defined, following Louis Wirth (1938), as life in permanent dense settlements with socially diverse populations. According to Lewis Mumford (1937), the city plays a critical role in the creation and maintenance of culture and civilization. Finally, following Henri Pirenne (1925), the crucial role of trade and production should be stressed. Thus urbanization involves an ongoing threefold process: (1) urbanization geographically and spatially spreads the number and density of permanent settlements; (2) settlements become comprised of populations that are socially and ethnically differentiated; and (3) these urban populations thrive through the production and exchange of a diverse array of manufactured and cultural products.

THE CONTEMPORARY SPREAD OF URBANIZATION

Although city life extends back at least ten millennia, the shape and size of modern urban settlements have roots that extend back only about 250 years to the Industrial Revolution, which marked a significant transformation in the role of cities as loci of critical productive activity and not just as cultural and political centers for a surrounding agrarian countryside. The present characterization of the world as predominantly urban is the cumulative result of this urbanization-industrialization trend. Industrial urbanization emerged first in the countries of the West, then in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and is now strongly evident in Asia and Africa (Garau et al. 2005).

According to United Nations projections, by 2030 the increase of 2.06 billion in net global population will occur in urban areas. Over 94 percent of that urban total (1.96 billion) will be in the world’s less-developed regions (UN Population Division 2004). This means that virtually all of the additional needs of the world’s future population will have to be addressed in the urban areas of the poorest countries.

UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency responsible for promoting sustainable urban development, estimates that roughly one-third of the current urban population of about three billion live in places that can be characterized as slums. The UN classification schema for slums is a fivefold measure: lack of access to safe drinking water, lack of access to sanitation, inadequate shelter, overcrowding, and lack of security of tenure. If a place of residence meets any one of these measures, it is classified as a slum. By the year 2030, if nothing is done, the proportion of the urban population living in slums will rise to 43 percent (1.7 billion in an urban population of 3.93 billion). All of these people will be living in the urban slums of countries in the developing world, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (UN-HABITAT and Global Urban Observatory 2003).

DENSITY, DIVERSITY, AND URBANIZATION

Urbanization is most powerfully observed through physical density (comparatively large numbers of people living in comparatively small areas). The ratio of population size to land area is the standard metric for evaluating density. It is a precise measurement that is not easily interpreted because neither the numerator (population size) nor the denominator (land area) is static. Political boundaries are only marginally helpful in defining the effective size of an urban settlement because at any moment changes in communications and transport technology alter the size of the relevant space over which urban residents live and work. Until the end of the eighteenth century, cities were spatially compact places with a radius of about one to two miles—the distance an individual could comfortably walk in carrying out daily activities. With the arrival of industrialization, effective urban size spread rapidly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary urban or, more properly, metropolitan settlements easily encompass radii of 50 miles or more. This is a result of the continual improvement in rapid overland and even air travel modes and digital and wireless communications technology. The exact spatial configuration of any metropolitan settlement is a compromise between activities that must remain within walking distance and those for which residents are willing to travel (Schaeffer and Sclar 1980).

These spatially widening metropolises are not uniform in terms of their residential population densities. Hence density measurements alone tell us little about the quality of urban life. This quality can vary widely within the comparatively small confines of any metropolitan area. It is especially important to understand that high density per se is not an indicator of compromised living conditions. Metropolitan New York, which includes both the central city and the surrounding suburbs, has an average population density of over 5,300 people per square mile (ppm²), but the wealthiest part of the region, Manhattan Island, has a density that exceeds 66,000 ppm². By way of comparison Nairobi, Kenya, has a city-wide density of over 1,400 ppm², but its centrally located slum, Kibera, considered the largest in Africa, has an estimated population density of at least 100,000 ppm². While Kibera’s density significantly exceeds Manhattan’s, the major determinant of the differences in quality of life relate to the quality of shelter and the ancillary urban services, such as water, sanitation, public safety, and most importantly transportation. Very poor urban residents must exchange life in high-density, poorly serviced places for the ability to walk to the places in the urban center where they earn a livelihood.

The major urban challenge of the twenty-first century concerns the ability of governments to effectively provide adequate shelter and to plan and deliver services for metropolitan-wide areas in developing countries. The difficulty in meeting the challenge is rooted in part in the fact that the historical political boundaries of the central city and suburban (i.e., satellite city) subunits of government typically derive from an earlier century, before contemporary transport and communications technology redefined effective spatial relationships. The urban economies of modern metropolises now run beyond the legal jurisdictions of the subunits of government responsible for infrastructure and public services. The insistence of international financial agencies and donors on governmental decentralization in developing countries has only served to exacerbate this problem because it has left these governmental subunits with the responsibility but without either the technical ability or revenue sources. The result is that necessary regional planning and infrastructure investment to address the challenges of urbanization are often stymied.

Urban population growth is largely migration driven. On one side there is the push of rural poverty and on the other the pull of urban opportunity. This migration-driven growth is further exacerbated by natural rates of urban population increase (birth rates that exceed death rates). Social life in urban settlements is thus more complex than its village counterpart. The transactions of daily living in villages are governed by a social economy where goods and services are exchanged on the basis of social roles and rules of reciprocity rooted in longstanding customs and religious observances. The transactions of urbanization that confront the new arrivals are, in whole or in part, defined by the impersonal exchange relationships typical of a market economy. This transition is never a simple one-for-one exchange.

Because urban populations are continually in flux and often simultaneously expanding, they are often characterized by a multiplicity of informal and formal social relationships and institutions in a similar state of flux. The variations among an informal social economy and a formal market economy in any city at any moment in time are highly reflective of the larger external forces, such as globalization and migration, that are continually redefining the roles of different cities in a world of complex trading and production relationships. In the slum of Kibera, many of the activities of daily life, including the provision of vital public services such as water, sanitation, and public safety, are governed by an informal local, but powerful, social economy (Lowenthal 1975). In contrast, life in the working-class neighborhoods of cities in developed countries is typically an amalgam of informal social institutions imbedded in formal mechanisms of municipal public-service delivery. For the wealthiest residents of these same cities, virtually all the services they consume are provided via the formal institutions of government or market exchanges.

URBANISM AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

Many of the patterns of contemporary urban development are extensions of those set in place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These patterns were based on three assumptions: (1) energy was relatively inexpensive; (2) safe drinking water was abundant; and (3) the environment could absorb all the waste products of urbanization. None of these assumptions is any longer valid. Consequently, urbanization in the twenty-first century will have to be reconceived in both social and environmental terms. The world cannot afford the political instability and social costs of massive pockets of urban slum dwellers, nor can it accommodate urban growth through a further spatial spread that relies on urban transport powered by carbon-based energy sources and the discharge of waste products into both the local and global atmosphere. A healthy and vibrant environment is now a scarce but vital good.

Environmental problems are principally generated by the disorderly sprawl of urban settlements into the surrounding countryside. In the developed world, metropolitan areas organized around private automobile travel among low-density suburbs and tied to a central business district generate high volumes of automobile travel in the absence of tight land-use regulation and good public transport. This development pattern has led to increased mobile source pollution within the metropolitan areas and significant greenhouse gas emissions that endanger the whole planet. Sprawl requires an ever-increasing spread of impermeable (i.e., paved) ground surfaces. This in turn leads to the runoff of polluted waters into the groundwater supplies. The paved surfaces absorb heat from the sun and create urban heat islands that require more energy consumption and the emission of pollution and greenhouse gases to cool homes and offices. In addition, there are inadequate landfills to collect all the refuse of these high-consumption urban centers.

In the developing world, the problems are similar but more acute in their direct manifestation. The high rates of population growth lead to a pattern in which urban settlement runs ahead of infrastructure improvement. This leads to the establishment of informal settlements (i.e., slums) characterized by an absolute lack of safe drinking water and sanitation. The lack of adequate public transport and public health protection systems leads to a congestion of private cars and informal transports in the center of cities, which exacerbates the air quality problems and greenhouse gas emissions. The social costs of the lack of these services fall disproportionately on the poorest residents of these burgeoning metropolitan areas. These costs take the form of excessive mortality and morbidity rates, low rates of labor productivity, and the reinforcement of an ongoing trap of urban poverty.

Climate change generated by greenhouse gas emissions adds yet another layer of special urgency to these pressing social problems. It is the very concentrated nature of cities—their population densities and their centrality in social functioning—that makes them and their residents so vulnerable to the hazards and stresses that climate change is inducing. Rising sea levels and warming water make serious climatic assaults on cities more frequent. Devastating storms and floods that hit once in a century now occur in far shorter cycles. The impacts are not equitably distributed. The poorest urban residents tend to live in the riskiest portions of the urban environments—flood plains, unstable slopes, river basins, and coastal areas.

Although the challenges of urbanization are formidable, the technical knowledge for their solutions exists. The question for the twenty-first century involves the ability of the international community, nations, and local governments to create institutions of urban planning and democratic governance that can effectively apply these solutions at a sufficiently broad scale that they can make a measurable difference.

SEE ALSO Cities

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Childe, V. Gordon. 1936. Man Makes Himself. London: Watts.

Garau, Pietro, Elliott Sclar, and Gabriella Carolini (lead authors). 2005. A Home in the City. UN Millennium Project: Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan.

Lowenthal, Martin. 1975. The Social Economy of the Urban Working Class. In The Social Economy of Cities, eds. Gary Gappert and Harold M. Rose, 447–469. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Mumford, Lewis. 1937. What Is a City? Architectural Record 82: 58–62.

Pirenne, Henri. [1925] 1948. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Trans. Frank D. Halsey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schaeffer, K. H., and Elliott Sclar. 1980. Access for All: Transportation and Urban Growth. New York: Columbia University Press.

UN-HABITAT and Global Urban Observatory. 2003. Guide to Monitoring Target 11: Improving the Lives of 100 Million Slum Dwellers. Nairobi, Kenya: Author.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Population Division. 2004. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision. New York: Author.

Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44: 1–24.

Elliott D. Sclar

Urbanization

Urbanization, in conventional terms, refers to the process through which society is transformed from one that is predominantly rural, in economy, culture and life style, to one that is predominantly urban. It is also a process of territorial reorganization in that it shifts the locations, as well as the characteristics, of population and production activities. Typically, urbanization is defined by the simple proportion of a nation's population residing in areas that are classified, by national census authorities, as urban places. Since definitions of what is or is not urban differ from one country to another, however, so do interpretations of what the designation urban implies (United Nations 1996).

Urbanization, however defined, is much more than a simple matter of population or production accounting (Knox 1994). It reflects, for a start, a complex set of processes involving a series of linked transformations, not only in where people live and what they produce, but in how they live; in terms of economic well-being, political organization and the distribution of power, demographic structure (e.g. fertility), and social (and family) relations.

The Urbanization Process

It can be argued that urbanization represents the single most fundamental transformation of the twentieth century. Almost all other societal changes, for example, in levels of economic development, industrialization, the character of the family and fertility rates—indeed civilization itself—are contingent on the urban factor (Hall 1998). Although urban settlements—defined here as dense clusters of nonagricultural populations—have existed for perhaps 7,000 years, they seldom exceeded a few thousand people and only accommodated a very small proportion of the population of the territories they controlled.

In fact, it was not until after 1900 that any nation could be said to have a majority of its citizens living in urban areas. The industrial revolution in Britain, driven by the demands for a skilled and geographically concentrated labor force, and attracted by the economic benefits of agglomerating production facilities in dense settlements, produced the first truly urban nation in 1910 when more than 50 percent of its population was resident in urban areas. Other European nations followed soon after. The United States became predominantly urban, by this same measure, in 1920, whereas most Asian countries did not reach this stage until after 1945.

Prior to World War II less than 25 percent of the world's population was living in urban areas. Since then the process of concentration has accelerated, especially in the developing countries. By the end of the twentieth century roughly 48 percent of the world's six billion people lived in urban areas (United Nations 1996). Thus, the opening of the twenty-first century signals the beginning of another crucial global watershed: over 50 percent of the world's population will become urban dwellers.

Generally, the proportion of a country's population that is urban (i.e. the level of urbanization) is closely associated with the level of economic development—particularly the degree of industrialization—and the standard of living. In the advanced industrial economies today the urban proportion varies between 75 and 90 percent, in middle-income countries from 50 to 75 percent, and in the developing world from 10 to 50 percent. Recently, however, the long-standing association between levels of economic development and income per capita on the one hand and increases in the level of urbanization on the other has been broken. In many developing countries, unlike the industrialized world in the nineteenth century, the rate of urbanization has tended to out-pace the rate of economic growth. This has lead to a situation of over-urbanization, and the appearance of large mega-cities, often with insufficient employment opportunities, inadequate services, and intense poverty (Gilbert and Gugler 1994; Lo and Yeung 1998).

The Social Impacts of Urbanization

It is now widely accepted that urbanization is as much a social process as it is an economic and territorial process. It transforms societal organizations, the role of the family, demographic structures, the nature of work, and the way we choose to live and with whom. It also modifies domestic roles and relations within the family, and redefines concepts of individual and social responsibility.

Fertility rates. Initially, the societal shift from rural to urban alters rates of natural population increase. There are no recorded examples of where this has not been true. Contrary to public perception, however, it first reduces the death rate, despite the often appalling living conditions in many cities, as in, for example, nineteenth-century Europe and North America and in present-day cities in the developing world (Smith 1996). Only later does urbanization reduce the birth rate (i.e. the fertility rate). The time lag between declining death and birth rates initially means rapid urban population growth; subsequently, fertility rates drop sharply and the rate of growth of urban populations declines.

As a result, families become smaller relatively quickly, not only because parents have fewer children on average, but also because the extended family typical of rural settings is much less common in urban areas. Children are clearly less useful in urban settlements, as units of labor and producers, than in rural settings, and are more expensive to house and feed. In fact, fertility levels in developed countries have dropped so low that cities are seldom capable of reproducing their own populations. They grow, if at all, largely through in-migration from other cities or from rural areas—the latter is now a largely depleted source of population in Western countries—and increasingly through immigration.

Ironically, overpopulation in the Third World and historically low fertility levels in developed countries have combined to produce a massive immigration into those cities in the latter countries that serve as contemporary immigrant gateways or world cities (Sassen 2001; Castles and Miller 1998). Those cities, in turn, have been transformed, in social and ethno-cultural terms, as a result of this immigration (Polese and Stren 2000).

Families and living arrangements. The evolution to an urban society is also frequently equated with a decline in the status of the family, and with a proliferation of nontraditional family forms and new types of households. By nontraditional we mean those families without two parents and/or without children. This trend is in part a reflection of an increasing diversity in "choices of living arrangements." This concept is used in the scholarly literature to refer to the myriad of ways in which individuals in an urban society combine to form collective units (i.e., households). Those combinations may follow from marriage, the traditional arrangement, or from any other association of individuals within the housing system whether those individuals are related by marriage or blood, or are unrelated.

Historically, of course, living arrangements in the past or in rural areas were never as homogeneous or traditional as the literature would have us believe. Nevertheless, the last half-century, notably in the Western countries, has witnessed an explosion in rates of household formation and a sharp increase in the diversity of household and family types. For most of the period since World War II, rates of household formation—that is, the propensity to establish a separate household—has been much higher (indeed 50% higher) than the rate of population growth, and the rate of nonfamily household formation (whose members are not related by blood or marriage) has been higher still. This proliferation has many causes, including rising incomes, higher divorce rates, lower marriage rates, and alternative life styles.

The highest propensities to form separate households, however, have been within two principal groups: the young and the elderly. The former includes single parents, the most rapidly growing household type in Western cities; the growth of the latter has been facilitated by increased longevity and improved health and social benefits. In previous generations, and in most rural societies, many of these individuals would have shared accommodation, often as part of extended family groupings. The result, again with respect to Western countries, is that average family size is now fewer than four persons, while average household size is fewer than three. In many older central cities, in fact, average household size is below two persons. This is in part a sign of success, reflecting improvements in housing and in our ability to afford to live alone, but it also reflects dramatic changes in how we choose to live and in our attitudes to marriage, family life, and social responsibility.

Links to labor markets. This diversity in living arrangements and family composition in urban societies is also closely linked to shifts in the world of work—in the urban economy and in occupations. Not only does urbanization involve obvious changes in employment and working life, it alters the relationships between households (the collective units of consumption) and labor markets (the production sector). Individuals work and earn wages, but it is households (and families) that spend those earnings. Thus, the composition of families and households influences the changing well-being of the individuals in those households as much as the occupational status of its members.

Two countervailing processes are at work here in reshaping the linkages between living arrangement and work. One is that over the last half century the proportion of the population in the labor force—that is, the participation rate—has increased, especially among married women. Historically, of course, women always had full-time jobs in pre-urban societies, but through the process of urbanization much of that work became marginalized as "domestic" (and unpaid) work. Second, the decline in average household size has tended to fragment the incomes of consuming units, usually meaning fewer wage earners per household. One rather obvious result of this intersection of changes in family composition and the labor market has been a deeper polarization in economic well-being among urban populations, which is especially marked between households with two or more workers and those with none.

Domestic relations. Such labor market changes are also interrelated, as cause and effect, with shifts in domestic relations inside the household and family. The impact of these changes have been most obvious for married women. Not only has their involvement in the formal (paid) labor market increased, but so too has their economic position within the family. This gives women more autonomy in decision making, but it has not been without drawbacks. For many women the challenge of balancing work, domestic responsibilities, and the imperatives of everyday urban life, have increased, not decreased. Smaller families, and the dispersion of extended families in contemporary urbanized societies, have in combination also reduced the level of kinship support systems available to these women.

The Urban Future

The level of urbanization, as measured by the proportion of the population living in urban areas, has largely stabilized in the highly developed countries. This does not mean, however, that the urbanization process writ large has ceased. Almost everyone now lives in or near a metropolitan region, and thus shares many of the same values, living arrangements, and life styles. Population growth rates are also declining; in many western countries there is little or no natural growth. At the same time, within the urban size hierarchy, urban populations have continued to concentrate in the larger metropolitan areas; indeed, more than half of all Americans now live in areas with populations over one million. The concept urban now means metropolitan, and it implies a way of life, as well as a place.

Moreover, the social transformations that flow from that process are continuing. Families will likely become even smaller as fertility rates decline still further and the pressures of urban living become more intense. The proportion of smaller, nontraditional households will also grow. Cities, as a consequence, will depend for their future growth even more on attracting in-migrants.

Cities in developing countries face a far more daunting challenge a result of the continuing urbanization process in an era of rapid global economic restructuring. Although fertility rates are expected to decline, death rates are likely to decline even faster. Thus, urban populations will continue to grow rapidly. The magnitude of anticipated social changes in families, households, and living arrangements is immense. Indeed, the twenty-first century will be defined by the ability of countries to cope with massive urban growth and the parallel transformations in urban economies and social conditions. Most, but not all, countries will follow the urban path defined earlier by countries in the developed world.

Approximately 38 percent of the developing world population is currently classified as urban, at least according to their place of residence. If U.N. estimates (2000) are correct, this will rise to 60 percent within twenty years. Even with recent declines in fertility levels and thus reductions in family sizes in those countries, this projection means that a total of over two billion people will be added to the urban population of Third World countries. How well they will live, in economic terms, and in what types of social settings and family relationships, remains to be seen.

See also:Immigration; Industrialization; Migration; Neighborhood; Poverty; Rural Families; Work and Family

Bibliography

castles, s., and miller, m. (1998). the age of migration: international population movements in the modern world. new york: guilford press.

gilbert, a., and gugler, j. (1994). cities, poverty anddevelopment: urbanization and the third world. new york: oxford university press.

hall, p. (1998). cities in civilization. london: weidenfeld and nicolson.

lo, fu-chen, and yeung, yue-man, eds. (1998). globalurbanization and the world of large cities. tokyo: united nations university press.

knox, p. (1994). urbanization. upper saddle river, nj:prentice hall.

polese, m., and stren, r., eds. (2000). the socialsustainability of cities. toronto: university of toronto press.

sassen, s. (2001). the global city: new york, london and tokyo. princeton, nj: princeton university press.

smith, d.a. (1996). third world cities in globalperspective. boulder, co: westview press.

united nations. (1996). an urbanizing world: globalreport on human settlements. new york: oxford university press.

united nations. (2000). world development report. newyork: oxford university press.

LARRY S. BOURNE

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

URBANIZATION AND THE BLACK CHURCH

Segregation

American churches in the 1940s were almost entirely segregated. A 1946 estimate suggested that no more than one-half of 1 percent of blacks attended church with whites. Instead, African Americans actively promoted and supported their own churches. There were thirty-four predominately black denominations, the largest of which, the National Baptist Convention of America, possessed 4.4 million members. The heart of black church strength was in the Baptist and Methodist churches of the South. Led by a segregated middle class of black professionals, they unified community life, mitigated the difficulties of poverty, and provided a distinct culture and identity for African Americans. Black congregations were far more engaged in services than their white counterparts, and black spirituals and gospel music bound the churches together. In the 1940s southern black churches remained important, but as more and more African Americans migrated from the rural South to the industrialized North to take jobs in defense industries, the character of black religion began to change.

Secularization and Differentiation

The new black churches of the urban North were different from those in the South, being more secularized and cosmopolitan. Northern black churches were divided according to social class in a way similar to the social divisions of white churches. Wealthy blacks formed Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Congregational churches; middle-class blacks formed African Methodist or Baptist congregations. Both groups were usually ministered to by well-educated, professionally trained clergy. New and poor black migrants to the city, however, congregated in small, intimate storefront churches of often diverse practices, usually ministered to by untrained but enthusiastic laity. Often connected to Pentecostal, Holiness, New Thought, and other evangelical churches, the storefronts specialized in the types of services typical among white and black evangelists and circuit riders in the rural South: enthusiastic, dramatic services designed to inspire sudden conversions. More than a few of these churches were dismissed by journalists and observers such as Ira Reid as cults and frauds, but they held an undeniable attraction to displaced, poor black migrants and were often successful in providing order and structure to disorganized lives.

Divine and Grace

The most popular of the storefront preachers in the 1940s was Father Divine. George Baker was a former Baptist minister who set up a "Peace Mission" in Harlem in 1931; by 1941, as "Father Divine," Baker was famous in New York and expanded his operations to Philadelphia. Divine claimed to be the incarnation of God and became known for his bountiful chicken dinners and his egalitarian church. The Peace Mission urged communicants to abstain from crime, liquor, gambling, and race hatred; exhorted them to "peace" in all things; and promised health and well-being if one lived exactly according to the teachings of Father Divine. Similar to Father Divine was "Sweet Daddy" Grace. An immigrant from Portugal or the Azores, Bishop Charles Emmanuel Grace also claimed the powers of God and toured from city to city demonstrating his gifts, including healings, blessings, ceremonial honors, and ecstasies of the spirit. Sweet Daddy Grace's Houses of Prayer of All Nations specialized in lively services featuring monarchical pomp, propulsive music, and frenzied dancing. Like Father Divine, Grace demanded absolute obedience, preached racial tolerance, and required his adherents to deposit their wages with him, since their spirits were so filled they did not need money.

Nation of Islam

In contrast to the black cults of Father Divine and Sweet Daddy Grace, the storefront ministry of the Nation of Islam (or Black Muslims, as they were commonly known) was far less individualistic and had a distinct social agenda. A powerful combination of Islam and militant black nationalism, in the 1940s the Nation of Islam was a small movement centered in Detroit and Chicago. Led by Elijah Muhammad—born Robert Poole, the son of a Baptist minister from Georgia—the Black Muslims reversed the reigning race stereotypes of the day, asserting that whites were an inferior, demonic race. The Nation of Islam claimed that white Christianity was on the verge of being overthrown by God; they advocated black separatism and a strict moral, ritual, and economic self-determination in anticipation of that event. Because Muhammad refused to kill on any order save that given by Allah, he was incarcerated for draft resistance during World War II, but he turned this to his advantage, and in the 1950s the Nation of Islam would become known for the prison recruitment methods he pioneered. One charismatic prison convert—Malcolm Little, who took the name Malcolm X—would garner worldwide attention to the movement in the early 1960s.

Catholic Recruitment

After World War II, as more and more white ethnic groups moved toward the suburbs, more and more blacks and Hispanics moved into the cities. This migration greatly challenged the Catholic Church, the traditional church of white ethnic city dwellers. Some Catholic churches picked up and moved to the suburbs, but the majority remained at the center of urban neighborhoods, even as the ethnic composition of those neighborhoods changed. Approximately 365,000 blacks belonged to the Catholic Church, occupying 408 local churches, 306 elementary schools, and 30 high schools. Adapting church attitudes and services for a radically different population proved difficult; nonetheless, by the end of the decade many urban dioceses had begun actively to solicit African American converts.

Churches and Civil Rights

In the South the postwar black church became a magnet for African American protest. African Americans had many grievances, including Jim Crow laws in the South that denied them fundamental rights, such as the vote; disrespect for and denigration of their war service; and an unequal wage structure that prevented blacks from enjoying many of the benefits of postwar prosperity. The black church, as the voice of the community, protested these conditions, in the 1940s for the most part in vain. There were religiously based civil rights organizations in the 1940s: the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), for example. Neither was distinctly southern or denominational. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., from his base in Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, also organized small-scale civil rights protests in New York City. The next generation of civil rights leaders spent the 1940s for the most part in integrated seminaries, where they gained invaluable training and experience. For the most part, however, civil rights activism had yet to begin. Instead, the southern black church nurtured the movement until the 1950s, when organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group of black ministers, would lead the first successful campaigns to abolish Jim Crow.

Sources:

Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1972);

Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE

The National Urban League, more commonly known as the Urban League, is a nonprofit, multiracial organization that is dedicated to the elimination of racial segregation and discrimination and to the enhancement of economic and educational opportunities for African Americans throughout the United States. The Urban League, which was founded in 1910 and is headquartered in New York City, has more than 100 affiliates in 34 states and the District of Columbia.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in plessy v. ferguson 163 U.S. 537, 16 S.Ct. 1138, 41 L.Ed. 256 (1896), which held that "separate but equal" accommodations for blacks and whites was constitutional, led to a severe system of segregation in the South in which so-called jim crow laws barred blacks from schools, jobs, and many public places including hotels, bars, and restaurants. The early 1900s saw the beginnings of a migration of blacks from the rural South moving North to find better jobs and economic stability for their families.

Upon arriving in the Northern states, however, many blacks found themselves still excluded from decent housing, jobs, and education. Mostly rural in background, many were bewildered by the customs and mores of urban living. Realizing that these newcomers desperately needed help, the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes was established in New York City on September 29, 1910.

In 1911, the committee merged with two other organizations to form the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes. The organization began by counseling black migrants and training black social workers but soon expanded its activities into such areas as housing, employment, education, recreation, and health and sanitation. By the end of world war i, the organization had 81 staff members working in New York and in affiliates that had been established in 30 other cities. In 1919 the organization became known as the National Urban League.

Throughout the Great Depression the Urban League crusaded for the integration of blacks into segregated labor unions and for inclusion in President franklin d. roosevelt's new deal programs that were aimed at fostering economic recovery. During world war ii, the League continued to fight for integration of the trade unions, particularly those involved in defense work and in the armed services. After the war, the league worked with businesses to train black workers for various trades and to encourage Fortune 500 companies to participate in job fairs held on black college campuses.

In 1942 Mrs. Mollie L. Moon started the first Urban League Guild in New York City. Guild members were volunteers who helped League efforts and its programs. The guild placed particular emphasis on information, fund-raising, and leadership development. The activities of the New York Guild were so productive that many others were started by Urban League affiliates. In 1952 the National Council of Guilds was established. In 2003 the National Council oversaw the work of guilds in more than 85 cities.

In 1961 Whitney M. Young Jr. became the league's executive director. Under his leadership the organization grew from 60 chapters to 98, and numerous large American corporations and foundations made contributions that supported job and housing programs as well as other social welfare programs. Young's ten-point program calling for federal funding to help reduce poverty among blacks became the basis for President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" that was aimed at reducing poverty for all Americans.

In 1972 Vernon E. Jordan Jr. became the league's fifth executive director. Jordan oversaw a number of new initiatives in the areas of business development, housing, and education. He established the league as a major channel for passing federal funds to urban community programs and services. He also emphasized voter registration, and programs dealing with energy conservation, protection of the environment, and new job roles for women.

John Jacob, who expanded the league's mission and established the Permanent Development Fund, succeeded Jordan in 1982. Jacob advocated for programs to fight crime in black neighborhoods, to reduce teenage pregnancies, and to help single parents. In 1994 Jacob was succeeded by Hugh B. Price, an attorney who emphasized affirmative action, economic empowerment, and the importance of diversity in an increasingly multi-ethnic society.

In 2000 the league recast its Washington Operations Office as the Institute for Opportunity and Equality. The Institute conducts research, analyzes policy, and advocates for significant issues including employment, criminal justice, community development, and economic policy.

In April 2003, the Urban League named Milton Little as interim president and CEO to replace Price who resigned in November 2002. The new president will oversee the operations of the league, which in 2003 had a budget of more than $40 million and was the oldest and largest community-based U.S. organization dedicated to helping blacks achieve racial and economic parity.

further readings

Moore, Jesse Thomas. 1981. A Search for Equality: The National Urban League, 1910–1961. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.

National Urban League. Available online at <www.nul.org> (accessed July 30, 2003).

cross-references

Civil Rights Acts; Civil Rights Movement; Discrimination; Equal Rights; NAACP.

NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE

NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE. Founded in New York in 1911 through the consolidation of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes in New York (1906), the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (1910), the National Urban League quickly established itself as the principal agency to serve as a resource for the black, urban population. An interracial organization committed to integration, it relied on tools of negotiation, persuasion, education, and investigation to accomplish its economic and social goals. The League was founded by Mrs. Ruth Standish Baldwin, the widow of a railroad magnate and philanthropist, and Dr. George Edmund Haynes, the first African American to receive a doctorate from Columbia University. The National Urban League was concerned chiefly with gaining jobs for blacks. It placed workers in the private sector, attacked the color line in organized labor, sponsored programs of vocational guidance and job training, and sought for the establishment of governmental policies of equal employment opportunity.

During the Great Depression, the National Urban League lobbied for the inclusion of African Americans in federal relief and recovery programs. It worked to improve urban conditions through boycotts against firms refusing to employ blacks, pressures on schools to expand vocational opportunities, and a drive to admit blacks into previously segregated labor unions. During the 1940s, the league pressed for an end to discrimination in defense industries and for the desegregation of the armed forces.

As much concerned with social welfare as with employment, the Urban League conducted scientific investigations of conditions among urban blacks as a basis for practical reform. It trained the first corps of professional black social workers and placed them in community service positions. It worked for decent housing, recreational facilities, and health and welfare services, and it counseled African Americans new to the cities on behavior, dress, sanitation, health, and homemaking.

In the 1960s the Urban League supplemented its traditional social service approach with a more activist commitment to civil rights. It embraced direct action and community organization and sponsored leadership training and voter-education projects. Though the League's tax-exempt status did not permit protest activities, activists such as A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. used the group's headquarters to help organize massive popular demonstrations in support of the enforcement of civil rights and economic justice, including the March on Washington of 1963 and the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. The League's executive director, Whitney M. Young Jr., called for a domestic Marshall Plan, a ten-point plan designed to close the economic gap between white and black Americans, which influenced the War on Poverty of the Johnson administration.

Since the 1960s the Urban League has continued working to improve urban life, expanding into community programs that provide services such as health care, housing and community development, job training and placement, and AIDS education. It remains involved in national politics and frequently reports on issues such as equal employment and welfare reform.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hamilton, Charles V. The Struggle for Political Equality. New York: National Urban League, 1976.

Moore, Jesse Thomas, Jr. A Search for Equality: The National Urban League, 1910–1961. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981.

Parris, Guichard, and Lester Brooks. Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Wiess, Nancy J. The National Urban League, 1910–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

———. Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Nancy J.Weiss/h. s.

See alsoAfrican Americans ; Civil Rights Movement ; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People .

URBANIZATION

The growth of cities and the social and physical transformations arising from this phenomenon.

The Middle East is home to the world's first cities as well as some of its most notable ones. The first cities, which developed in southern Mesopotamia (now in Iraq) about 3500 b.c.e., had small populations by modern standards—not exceeding about 20,000 inhabitants. By 3000 b.c.e. cities also grew along the Nile in Egypt. From these early centers, urban life spread throughout the world.

Until about 1800 most of the great cities such as Babylon, Alexandria, Ctesiphon, Constantinople (now Istanbul), Baghdad, and Cairo could grow large because they had access to water transport and income from an imperial tax base. Industry and trade were the main sources of income for smaller cities, including Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Carthage, Tabriz, Palmyra, and Mecca. The development of some cities was heavily influenced by their religious significance; these include Jerusalem, Karbala, Mash-had, Mecca, Medina, and Qom. The proportion of the total population living in cities in what became known as the Middle East seldom exceeded 15 percent before the nineteenth century.

New factors contributed to the growth of cities after 1800, including modern transportation, new trade patterns, and European penetration. Following World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, nationalist regimes were established, first in Iran and Turkey, later in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. These focused development inward. East of Libya, the capitals of the large countries are all inland (Ankara, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Riyadh, Sanʿa, Tehran) and since their development policies were statist, these cities expanded. After World War II, rail and road networks that centered on the capitals were extended, facilitating migration to them. At the same time, rapid rural population growth and the mechanization of agriculture, largely implemented after 1945, pushed farmers from the land. Millions of people in the region moved to cities in search of jobs, education, and other services.

Israel was established in 1948 after a period of conflict, and its urban growth—mainly Tel Aviv and Haifa—was fueled by an influx of Jewish immigrants. Palestinians left or were expelled by Israeli forces in 1948, swelling cities in neighboring countries including Lebanon (Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut), Jordan (Amman), and Kuwait, as well as the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Oil boomtowns (Abadan, Abu Dhabi, Dhahran, Kuwait City) grew rapidly for short periods, but they never became as large as the major political and commercial centers. In the larger countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Turkey) close to 50 percent of the population was urban by the mid-1990s. In some of the smaller countries (Israel, Lebanon, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates) the proportion is as high as 90 percent.

see also urban planning.

Bibliography

Blake, G. H., and Lawless, R. I., eds. The Changing Middle Eastern City. New York: Barnes & Noble; London: Croom Helm, 1980.

Bonine, Michael, ed. Population, Poverty, and Politics in Middle East Cities. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.

Brown, L. Carl, ed. From Madina to Metropolis: Heritage and Change in the Near Eastern City. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1973.

Saqqaf, Abdulaziz Y., ed. The Middle East City: Ancient Traditions Confront a Modern World. New York: Paragon House, 1987.

john r. clark
updated by anthony b. toth

urbanization Narrowly defined, urbanization refers to city formation. The earliest cities date from about the fourth millennium BCE. In the Middle Ages the expansion of long-distance trade and mercantile capitalism stimulated the growth of major European cities. There is significant controversy about the relationship between urbanization, feudal decline, and the growth of capitalism.

Most sociological attention has focused on the large-scale urbanization accompanying industrialization and the emergence of modern societies. Although there is no invariant relationship between levels of economic development and urbanization, the term ‘under-urbanization’ is often used to describe the situation in (former) state socialist countries, where the growth of industrial agglomerations is not matched by a sufficient expansion of housing and urban infrastructure for the workforce. Similarly, the term ‘over-urbanization’ is applied to Third World cities which have large populations that cannot be absorbed into the formal economy. As the social changes accompanying industrialization diffuse throughout national territories the sociological significance of urbanization diminishes. In such urbanized societies the term may carry a wider meaning, signifying possession of an advanced industrial economy, and modernized social structure. See also URBANISM.

urbanization The increase in the proportion of a population living in urban areas and the process by which an area loses its rural character and way of life. Urbanization is a consequence mainly of rural-urban migration. This process began in Europe in the 19th century. Although large cities existed before 1800, the vast majority of the world's population lived in small, often self-sufficient village communities. Industrialization and population growth in Europe in the 19th century resulted in radical change: sometimes the excess peasant population moved to towns to seek paid work, often having to live in unhygienic slums and dying of infectious diseases.

Urbanization in the 20th century has proceeded at an unprecedented rate. In 1900 the UK became the first country to be predominantly urban. In 1920 only about 14% of the world's population lived in urban areas but by 1950 the proportion had reached 25% and by 1990, 43%. The transport revolution has ensured that many villages near large cities in Western Europe or the USA have become little more than dormitories for urban workers, who commute daily to the city. If present trends continue, some 60% of the world's population could be living in towns and cities by 2025.