Urbanization involves an ongoing process of social and economic transformation resulting in and maintaining highdensity population concentrations. The U.S. Bureau of the
Census defines an area with a population concentration of
2,500 as urban land. Early urban areas (predating 1850) were
associated with centers of finance and modes of transportation such as ships and railroads. In the midwestern and
northeastern United States, many urban centers expanded at
the turn of the twentieth century when immigrant populations from Europe and migrant populations from more
rural areas moved into the factory cities of the Northeast for
economic opportunities in mass industry and commercial
districts.
At first, the urban expansion of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries occurred in an unplanned manner. The
industrialized American city of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries prompted economic growth, and the
forces of trade and commerce created both advantages and
disadvantages for the urban dwellers. Prior to mass industry
and modern transportation systems, the maximum expansion of an urban population remained relatively small,
around 30,000—enough to maintain a social cohesion within
the urban geography. With the advent of industrialization, as
cities expanded beyond former proportions with populations
of various cultural and ethnic characteristics, component
neighborhoods developed according to the social and economic attributes of the resident population. As a result, social
cohesion became more characteristic within neighborhood
boundaries, and neighborhood locations took on patterns
that distinguished the wealthy from the poor. Wealthier
neighborhoods were located near commercial districts or in
suburban locations, whereas low-income neighborhoods
often developed near the factories where residents worked.
The three essential components of the city were the factory, the railroad, and the slum. According to the Tenement
House Commission of 1894, around the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, three out five residents lived in
slum neighborhoods. Experts define the term slums as urban
developments and poor neighborhoods; more typically, they
are described as working-class neighborhoods characterized
by deteriorating and overcrowded housing. However, new
tenement apartments, built by investors to maximize the
number of people per square foot with minimal ventilation,
also made up part of the slum landscape. In the beginning of
the twentieth century, some Americans responded to slum
development by attempting to alter the behaviors of workers
through such measures as closing down saloons, teaching
immigrants to behave like Americans, increasing police
forces to maintain order, and providing health services to
prevent contagious diseases from spreading into more affluent neighborhoods. Therefore, this period of urbanization
became characterized by urban administration and charitable organizations that treated poverty-ridden slum neighborhoods as elements of diseases, something to be controlled, contained, and reformed (hence the term blight for
working-class sections of the urban environment). By the
1920s housing investigations and urban zoning were incorporated in the functions of many local urban administrations. But investigations often were limited to reporting on
the immoral and unsanitary behaviors of individuals rather
than criticizing the owners of slum housing who profited
from the rental properties.
Urban studies in the 1930s relied on the ideology and
methods of analysis that developed in an age of emergent sociological studies; these studies were dominated by the work
of Charles Darwin in the field of biology and then Herbert
Spencer and Social Darwinism. Spencer’s basic Darwinian
premise held that everything in the universe starts out incoherently and gradually becomes coherent. Therefore, it was argued, human society and the urban hierarchy, from rich to
poor, developed as part of a natural order of things. Those
who were most successful had superior skills in the division of
labor and subsequently reaped rewards through differences in
the wage structure and in the quality of urban housing. Experts described the emergence of a variety of urban neighborhoods, from the slums to the mansions of the rich, as functional in natural Darwinistic models of the human evolution
of inferior and superior social groups, often identified by race
or cultural attributes. Establishing the classical tradition in
urban studies based on Darwinian ideology, Robert E. Park
and E. W. Burgess provided a seminal work, The City, on
urban development theory in the field of human ecology.
There, the relationship between social changes, group mobility, and housing quality became established. In an article titled
“Succession: An Ecological Concept,” Park explained his notion of cities and growth as the movement of populations to
natural areas. Cities were locations that grew like rings on a
tree, with the growth based on the social characteristics of
populations. In fact, the analogy of tree rings is a biological
reference that presumed human society had two levels of natural organization that determined growth—the biotic (natural) and the cultural. The biotic occurred in the unthinking
realm of human existence that was analogous to plants, where
plants have natural areas of development based on unthinking natural competition. For Park, all else with regard to humans and the social order remained cultural.
Park and Burgess based their work on economic ideas of
evolutionary change as the product of competition resulting
in the survival of the fittest, another Darwinian concept.
Processes of neighborhood development began, they contended, with the commercial development of the city. Component neighborhoods surrounding the commerce of the
city competed for space. The relationship between unique
resident groups and their status in the division of labor, so
necessary to the economy and efficiency of the city, determined the relative status for each neighborhood. The less
necessary or redundant the labor was, the lower the quality
and value of the neighborhood. However, they noted that
these changes had dimensions limited by preexisting structural or cultural formations that created the larger collective
civilization. Park found that society, in its biotic and cultural
forms, took on territorial dimensions, whereby some cultures
lived in poorer inner-city areas near industrial sites and other
cultures lived in more desirable urban and suburban areas.
He likened this phenomenon to Darwin’s web of life, which,
in human dimensions, took on the particularly human characteristics of survival of the fittest within the framework of
laws and customs. In the human ecology model for urban development, there was a parallel theory fundamental to economics at that time. In Introduction to Economic History
(1922), Norman Scott Brien Gras outlined the entire story of
economic history as evolutionary stages manifested in metropolitan society, the economy, and the natural laws of
human nature and competition.
Based on the work of Burgess and Park, economists often
describe the ideas of social mobility, housing, and labor as
the natural order of human activity, tied to the characteristics and behaviors of social groups. Such arguments underpinned public and private policies that guided institutions to
discriminate against minority communities. In the 1940s
Amos Hawley took the focus of analysis away from the “natural” abilities of particular social groups and instead examined human ecology as it adapted to the demands of a capitalist system. Although Hawley discussed the urban model of
community development as clusters or neighborhoods identified by residents characterized by divisions of labor, his
theory defined community as part of a social system that was
primarily economic in its dimensions. Similar to Park and
Burgess, Hawley observed that a community functions as a
society that takes shape around the local economy, similar to
an organism that takes shape around its particular function.
But Hawley regarded the economic system, not culture or
human nature, as the ultimate determinant of the internal
development of the community. In spite of his differences
with the Park and Burgess work, Hawley described the community’s development in urban society using evolutionary
references to the natural world, much as succession theory
did. His term system development was analogous to the development of a biological system. Hawley regarded a society
as a formation interdependent between a population and the
capitalist environment—similar to the system of an organism in formation in a particular environment. The circulation of the system remained dependent on the way that capital maximized the operation of the system toward profit. In
Hawley’s view, capital interacted with people in the system,
just like the rest of the environment, and it was responsible
for the characteristics of community development. He prioritized the capitalist economy as an external environmental
factor and a source of contention to assimilate within the
system in order to take on particular and useful dimensions.
Hawley proposed that the development of the urban system
should be scientifically examined as a way of understanding
a capitalist society and its methods of circulation and evolution as it entered the system and reformed the community.
He regarded the capitalist economy as invasive and sometimes counterproductive in social formation and advocated
for an ecological approach to class analysis. The environment did not exist as a deterministic evolutionary process in
this case, he said, but was part of an interactive and interdependent economic process.
Hawley explicitly stated the economic dynamics in a
human ecology of change. In fact, any theory of the communities formed as people come together in a particular place
cannot dismiss the economically interdependent relationship. In this sense, households, neighborhoods, and communities operate as interdependent economic units, and within
the community, each household creates a value. Economists
describe households and the places within which they live as
subunits of neighborhoods within a larger community and
the sustaining economic system. The logic seems clear in
terms of the literature on slums in the twentieth century. People with poor wages lived in poor dwellings. Therefore, society and the various neighborhoods in the community environment of the urban work world will change as work
opportunities change. In terms of the industrial economy, the
booming demand for workers during both world wars and
the populations that migrated into the urban areas for jobs
where opportunities and the demand for labor opened up
caused the urban character to expand and change. In periods
of depression, the reverse process would occur. As work opportunities decreased, some neighborhoods would become
more vulnerable than others to adverse effects. In many cases,
low-skilled labor in the manufacturing sector realized the
changing tide of the economy first.
Changes in the urban economy and society appeared before World War II. Without effective housing programs for
inner-city neighborhoods, many buildings continued to deteriorate. The U.S. Housing Act of 1937, defined the term
slum as “any area where dwellings predominate, which, by
reason of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or
design, lack of ventilation, light or sanitation facilities, or any
combination of these factors are detrimental to safety, health,
or morals.” In the 1930s the federal legislation designed to address urban slums came under the short-lived Public Works
Administration and public housing programs. Subsidized
public housing developed as a new legislative concept that
was never popular with strong lobbies such as the National
Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). In the 1950s
public housing programs came under heavy attack in the
hearings led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, where they were depicted as part of a socialist or communist policy agenda.
Slum neighborhoods in cities throughout the nation remained neglected because of opposition to government
housing programs for the poor. But there was no similar opposition to other federal housing programs aimed at private
home ownership. Subsidized loans for homes helped to bail
out failing banks at a time when many Americans attributed
economic depression and previous economic hardships to
the devastating effects of business cycles in the capitalist system—a situation that led many to question the viability of
such a system. So the government gave the economy a source
of growth by subsidizing the private home market. Specifically, in the 1930s the federal government provided incentives
for home ownership in the form of subsidies, including support for contractors who built large suburban communities.
Subsidized home ownership also shifted economic growth
and employment from the city to the suburbs, leaving innercity residents with limited opportunities for jobs or affordable, quality housing. By the time the Great Depression
ended, some major precedents had been set that would create
the basis for all future developments in housing legislation.
The housing legislation of the 1930s bailed out banks, provided opportunities for home ownership, and quieted much
of the social unrest of the times. But the critical response to
the challenges of the day provided a form of long-term legislation for home ownership and housing that led to “suburbanization,” at a time when transportation made it feasible to
establish residential neighborhoods farther from factories.
These compound developments led to a population decline
in the major cities of the Midwest and Northeast. Subsidized
housing loans helped to create massive suburbs in the periphery of urban centers, and new transportation infrastructures redeveloped cities in response to the demand for automobile travel in an era marked by the commuter relationship
between suburbia and the city financial center. Eventually, as
critical masses located outside city boundaries, the financial
industry and economic growth followed as nodes of suburban financial centers, as opposed to the former model of central finance in inner-city commercial and financial districts.
But subsidized home ownership remained exclusively for
white city dwellers. Many people of color found their communities were left behind; they clustered in poor neighborhoods and found their job opportunities had decreased.
Urbanization in the 1950s occurred as a result of public
and private policies for investment and the perception of the
characteristics of poverty associated with the inner-city minorities and a variety of problems that existed only in certain
urban neighborhoods—the other America. In the classical
tradition, the other America included a population that existed outside the economic and social mainstream of the rest
of the nation. The classical theory of urban development
lacked a critical perspective discussed in the work of David
Harvey (1973), a prominent author on city planning and social justice issues. Urban planning and zoning had a history
of maintaining the “city beautiful” with parks and eliminating or degrading poor neighborhoods in the interest of new
transportation systems to convey suburban populations to
jobs and shopping in the core city. The poor and minorities
were restricted to certain zones and kept out of wealthier
neighborhoods to preserve property values. Raymond Mohl
noted that American planning focused on the needs of city
officials and businesspeople instead of the lower classes—the
opposite of European planning, which incorporated all aspects of the city. Social concerns continued to drive urban
planning in Europe, whereas in the United States, the movement focused on real estate values and re-creating the aristocratic city.
Harvey’s work on the topic of urban development contributed greatly to changing ideas about the natural processes
of housing deterioration and real estate investments in rental
properties. Harvey described urbanization as a development
in modern history within the context of an environment of
local power and business interests. He coined the term redlining in describing discrimination and the banking system and
the related aspects of rental property and landlord disinvestments that existed both in urban planning and in federal and
local guidelines for lending. In Harvey’s analysis, nothing
natural or evolutionary brought about urban decay. Rather,
these developments occurred as the result of human decisions made within institutions that condoned racism by singling out communities of color as high-risk neighborhoods
that could not qualify for the loans necessary to their development.
In the 1950s a neoclassical analysis of urban neighborhoods and slums ignored the social justice issues Harvey
raised. Milton Friedman provided the theoretical basis for
eminent domain in his classic work Democracy and Freedom
(1963), in which he described the forced removal of particular urban neighborhoods and their populations as a necessary plan for the improvement of the entire city. According to
Friedman, as local governments selected neighborhoods for
purposes of redevelopment, a decrease in low-income housing led to the displacement of poor populations. But the social consequences for slum residents translated into gains for
the greater community as luxury apartments and commercial buildings replaced dilapidated buildings surrounded by
business districts. City planners typically referred to slum residents as part of a cost-benefit equation, whereby the slum
dweller as a social deviant required scarce municipal resources in the form of services. As Friedman saw it, the result
increased taxes and neighborhood effects that compromised
property values and caused the flight of the middle class. In
addition to the consumption of scarce services, the slum
dweller existed outside the social and economic norms of the
larger community and was thus responsible for the physical
condition of the slum neighborhood. Friedman noted that
slums fulfilled their requirements by providing basic housing
to unproductive or underproductive members of society.
The Friedman analysis failed to provide a historical context for the accumulated problems of segregated zoning, preferences in home loans, community disinvestments, or the
real estate interests of absentee landlords. The fact was that
poor communities and largely communities of color found
themselves permanently displaced as city officials destroyed
entire neighborhoods for the purposes of slum clearance
when investors found that new commercial buildings for
banks, offices, and luxury apartments could increase the
value of inner-city property and bring a better return on their
real estate investments.
In the works of both Hawley and Harvey, the lack of a critical perspective led to viable alternatives to the classical economics of evolutionary urban development. Hawley addressed the factors of capital accumulation in a capitalist
society, and Friedman acknowledged important factors regarding urban economies, unemployment, and the slums.
For his part, Harvey brought to the fore the fact that communities of color were excluded from housing opportunities
during the period of suburbanization and that many urban
communities became zoned or redlined into areas that were
denied access to loans; further, he argued that these developments occurred as the result of a public policy calculated in a
racist institutional environment and were lobbied for by
powerful interests. However, in their differing versions of urbanization, all three authors discussed the logic of natural
competition and the inability of certain groups to adapt. It
should be noted that Harvey’s and Friedman’s arguments
were advanced in a time when federal programs set the stage
for urban riots—violent uprisings that occurred throughout
major cities. The chaos of urban riots led to a more organized
community activism that was an outgrowth of city development issues and public policy. Activist planners—students of
the social justice argument who were concerned with issues
of equity and social justice in the city—took up the cause of
urban activism.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the social justice approach to urbanization failed to account for the reality that an economic
shift had limited job opportunities in the city. Suburbanization, transportation, and technological changes created new
locations for economic development outside the city. Urbanization under inner-city activism contributed to an inner-city
population that was dependent on increases in public welfare
and bereft of opportunities for social mobility. The failure of
social programs, the findings of the McGone Commission on
the Watts riots (in 1965), and President Lyndon Johnson’s
Kerner Commission’s investigations into the large number of
people of color acting against local symbols of white American society in 1967 challenged the limitations of the social
justice model. In the 1970s these findings led to theories of
“spatial mismatch”—theories that examined inner-city population locations and economic growth as two distinct and
separate developments that led to a mismatch of jobs and
people seeking jobs. Both commission reports discussed the
problems of residential segregation that contributed to a lack
of access to the economic growth that shifted from the city to
the suburbs. A contributing work on this issue, written by
John F. Kain and titled “The Effect of the Ghetto on the Distribution and Level of Nonwhite Employment in Urban
Areas,” acknowledged that as certain groups received access
and opportunity to move to the suburbs, so did the economy.
Cities that were formerly the centers of industrial production
moved to the periphery of postindustrial developments
around employment associated with jobs such as those in
services and high technology. By the 1970s and 1980s, theories of spatial mismatch became tangible explanations for increases in urban decay and urban poverty. The central business districts of urban areas saw retail increasingly move to
megamalls in suburban areas, and inner-city core businesses
and employment continued to decline. The inner-city
poverty rate, which had been decreasing, began to rise. Large
portions of the population in cities were simply left behind,
and inner-city people of color who never escaped poverty
found their opportunities were even more limited.
In “The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Three Decades
Later,” Kain discussed the historical and statistical warfare between proponents and opponents of the spatial mismatch
theory. The basis for the theory was that housing discrimination led to the residential isolation of minority populations,
which denied them access to employment opportunities.
William Julius Wilson revived the theory in his book The
Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Wilson’s work revisited the idea that inner-city
poverty was the result of a racial group being isolated from
opportunity because of a disparity between the locations of
residences and job opportunities. Bennett Harrison discounted this argument by using empirical evidence to
demonstrate the prevalence of the “dual labor market” in the
postindustrial era. In his analysis, Harrison concluded that
lack of skills, not spatial dislocation, created the problem.
Inner-city minority populations did not possess the skills to
adapt to the new technological industries that were replacing
older, less-skilled industrial production lines. Therefore, in a
dual labor market—one for the less skilled and one for those
with higher-level technological skills—the compensation for
the skilled workers proved adequate, whereas that for individuals without skills remained less secure and certainly less
rewarding; in turn, this situation reduced the unskilled
worker’s capacity to find and keep a job.
Spatial mismatch provides an analysis of the factors of unemployment and wages based on the history of housing discrimination. Harrison argued that changes in the require-
ments for skilled labor had put inner-city minorities in
poverty. But in both cases, the opportunity structure of employment for communities of color remained limited, either
by a lack of educational opportunities or a lack of economic
opportunities. And in any case, housing and investment opportunities were limited, putting inner-city communities at
risk for high unemployment and poor housing conditions.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a radical departure
from the notion of institutional discrimination. The Moynihan argument concluded that the problems could be traced
to the dysfunctional and pathological culture of the minority
population typically found in African American, inner-city
neighborhoods. The aberrant urban culture was primarily
distinguished by the prevalence of female-headed households, crime, and out-of-wedlock births, all of which caused
the deterioration of inner-city neighborhoods. Whereas spatial mismatch acknowledged the compounded problems of
institutionalized and historical racism, Moynihan’s arguments established a basis for social welfare reforms designed
to encourage responsible behaviors (marriage and employment), rather than institutional reforms and civil rights.
David Bartlet, David Elesh, Ira Goldstein, George Leon,
and William Yancey, in their work “Islands in the Stream:
Neighborhoods and the Political Economy of the City,” examined the political economy of urbanization in a work on
the postindustrial city. The authors outlined the history of
redlining and disinvestments for urban communities of color
throughout the period of industrial flight in the 1970s and
1980s to dispel evolutionary notions concerning urban populations. They provided the basis for a continued discussion
of urbanization as located in a period of deurbanization in
the absence of institutional reforms. Their argument held
that the continued discriminatory practices of financial institutions and government policies accelerated the decline of
specific neighborhoods in the period of transition that occurred as industries moved from urban centers to other regions or nations. At that time, the phrase postindustrial economy was often used to describe a major trend in evolutionary
urban changes in the Western world. In the literature, postindustrialism meant the process whereby losses in massmanufacturing jobs were replaced with jobs in high-technology or service industries. The postindustrial age was
incorporated into postmodern theories of a society that
moved in social stages through major changes in production.
Modern societies invested in the technology for mass production, and postmodern societies moved out of mass production and into the information age with more advanced
computer technology. In this developmental model, service
industries were seen to operate as the predominant sources
for employment in the postindustrial/modern age. In
“Neighborhoods and the Political Economy,” the authors described the city as various neighborhoods, not in the biotic
system of the evolutionary economics of natural development but as a composite of neighborhoods within an urban
environment, where officials and investors continued to target certain neighborhoods for redevelopment. Neighborhoods became islands in the stream, a phrase used to describe
areas within a city context as changing and interrelated entities. These neighborhoods were part of the circulation of
labor, investments, and disinvestments that was organized by
the various levels of governance in relationship to the larger
context of the economy affecting the city. The discussion was
posed as an alternative to a more simplistic and classical version of a monocentric city, or the city that grows “naturally”
from the central business district to surrounding areas, like
the rings in a tree. The deindustrialization and urbanization
processes of the postindustrial cities coincide with the reindustrialization and urbanization of other areas, generally
from the northeastern and midwestern industrial cities of the
United States to the southern and the Sun Belt states. By the
1970s the movement and transformation of industry required changes in local government initiatives and practical
and theoretical changes in planning that left some neighborhoods in economic and social disintegration.
The theories of postmodern industrial societies influenced the planning principles of urban development. The
success of urban land-use strategies became measured by
their capacity to prepare cities for future development in
order to conform to the needs of service industries in the information age. Downtowns in large cities built new businesses and offices for corporate headquarters and financial
services with computerized and centralized operations. Such
plans have led to residential development for the modern
aristocrat, the cosmopolitan urbanite, in a period when cities
seek to revitalize and to increase populations with gentrified
neighborhoods. In this case, the political economy of the city,
rather than the science of nature and evolution, shapes urbanization. Even more classical authors of urban theory acknowledge that, as economic growth creates obsolescent
spaces in postindustrial cities, revitalization plans displace
poor populations considered obsolescent in the new industrial technologies. By contrast, spatial mismatch theories also
describe the obsolescence of low-skilled populations. Therefore, urbanization would appear to be a natural and functional operation of society and the economy, combined with
the more political dimensions of urban management on the
part of government administration.
Even if the economic principles of the free market are the
only standard by which to examine urbanization and its development, the contradictions are still remarkable because
government policy and administration have directed urbanization. Government interventions, such as those in the Great
Depression, have compensated for financial and social failures in the free market. Public subsidies for home ownership
and transportation infrastructure have determined urban development. And planning and targeted public investments
continue to influence the demographics of urban centers.
The continued presence of poor neighborhoods, characterized by low-income groups and decreasing property values,
serves as an impetus for urban redevelopment and the fluctuation of populations, moving back and forth from the suburban to the urban and from one region to another as the
economy and jobs shift and as housing locations become targeted for change. This is an evolutionary model, but the
stages function as part of a decision-making process that has
equated human development with profits in industry and
housing and provided few opportunities for social mobility
for those left behind in poor urban neighborhoods.
—Eileen Robertson-Rehberg
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