Urban System in Transition

In these lectures

• Focus on three post-WWII periods in US urban development

– Postwar Economic Recovery and Growth (1946-1972) with sprawl and suburbanization

– Economic Crisis and Reorganization (1972-1983) due to deindustrialization

– Technology and Communications Revolutions (1983-today)

• Also examine the impact of these epochs on urban theory

Post-War Economic Recovery

• Interstate Highways – This changed the organization of the US profoundly, from a society that used rail to travel anything but a short distance to one that lived in automobiles

– The other major change of this era was the coming of regional and sub-regional airports that could accommodate passenger jets.

• In terms of the urban system, what grows (and continues to until very recently) is the Sunbelt (the US South and West)

– Factors include cheaper land, lower taxes, lower energy costs, and cheaper/less militant labor, all promoted by local boosters

• Electronics, aerospace and petrochemicals were particularly attracted to these locations because they could create the infrastructure they needed without legacy costs

– Also, in Manufacturing Belt, machines were aging, costs were getting higher and agglomeration diseconomies were outweighing cumulative causation

• Thus decentralization

Post-War Recovery (cont.)

• However, the largest urban centers, New York and Chicago (along with newcomers Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and LA) begin picking up more and more corporate headquarters

– In these cities, the cumulative causation of entrepreneurial talent and support services remained strong, so that when a wave of mergers and consolidations came, they ended up with the new merged HQ’s

• Another trend emerges around Research and Development (which becomes increasingly important to find new profits), where, along with big cities, three sites with a combination of strong university research facilities, strong federal science presence, and a range of cultural and recreational amenities emerges

– Silicon Valley, CA; Route 128 near Boston, MA; and the Research Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill), NC

Freeways and Metropolitan Sprawl

• Cars grow again in number (from 26 million in ’45, to 52 million in ’55, to 97 million in ’72)

– Number of people per car fell from 5 to 2

– Even low price cars could now go 80

• Suburbs added 19 million in the 1950’s (45% growth)

– Surrounding counties grew very fast; and in fact, a lot of growth of central cities came from western cities like Dallas and San Diego annexing surrounding communities

Freeways and Sprawl

• Peter Hall noted 4 preconditions for this sprawl

• Zoning, as affirmed in Euclid v Ambler

• Pent up demand from Depression and WWII

• Cheap, long term home financing from FHA and the GI Bill

• Highways

• The change came with the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act

– Planned 41,000 miles of interstate, linking every major city

– Change the internal form of cities by creating a ringroad/beltway with spoke highways going into the CBD

• Once you had ring roads and highway intersections, suburban malls, then residential, then light industry, offices and warehousing all head to the burbs

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• Fordist Suburb

– Beginning in 1950, housing starts were at 2 million a year, and have averaged 1.5 million or more almost every year since

• FHA assisted 11 million buyers during 50’s and homeownership rate went from 45 to 65%

– This happened with little planning or oversight

• Developers wanted profit, so they made standardized products and introduced more prefabricated elements

– Most important was the balloon frame, using many many 2 x 4s, it was cheaper (by 40%) and needed less skilled labor to build than the old corner pillar/support beam homes

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• The predominate house styles were the Ranch and Bungalow (single story, big windows, low slung roof, carport or garage and lawn)

– Bungalow was so named because it was designed by the British to be a well ventilated house for use in Bengal

• Whole big developments of these emerged, like the 100,000 person Lakewood Park complex near LA and Levittown, NY, with its standardized designs and innovative materials and low costs of $100 and $57 a month

• This meant that while in the past, the urban fabric was developed more carefully with thought (in general), but now, it growing by big wide swatches was the future

• Geographer Donald Meinig said the California suburb was now one of the iconic landscapes of America; Historian Lizabeth Cohen notes the emergence of a “consumer’s republic”

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• People were in love with driving, so you get drive thru and drive in food, drive thru windows and banks and dry cleaners, drive in movie theaters, etc…

– This meant that more and more land dedicated to parking, which caused buildings to be put back further from the street, which made signs bigger and suburbs uniformly parking lot covored

• Some exceptions to Fordist burbs

– Oak Brook and Park Forest near Chicago had extra green

– Columbia and Reston near DC brought back the greenbelt concept with separate transport type corridors, green space, and self-sustaining village centers with rec and retail

– California begin to get the all-inclusive auto subdivision, with the club house, golf course, riding trails, ball fields, lakes, pools to make a recreation oriented environment

• Examples include Irvine, Valencia and Mission Viejo

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• Except for the heaviest industry like steel tied to older plants and locations, most industry could now locate anywhere

• Areas they got zoning for industry included:

– Along highways (where residential did not want to be)

– At interstate junctions (for transport advantages)

– In developer built industrial parks

– The area around airports (again for transport)

• Began to get even more industrially/commercial agglomeration, with nearby businesses becoming interconnecting

– Like aerospace and electronics in Orange County, CA

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• But more importantly, the key to the liveliness of the central city, retail, begin to leave for the regional shopping mall

– These were anchored by branches of the department store, filled out mostly with national/regional specialty chains and a few local retailers

– Would be at key freeway junctions with acres of parking

– The first designer of the mall was Victor Gruen

• An Austrian immigrant

• His earliest mall was the open air Northland Mall near Detroit

• First full enclosed, climate controlled mall was Southdale Mall, Edina, MN, near Minneapolis

– Minnesota receives many early malls, and eventually the Mall of America (need heat)

– Southdale was to have apartments, offices, parks and lake and be a true community center; only the retail was built

• By 1957, there were 2000 shopping centers of all types; 8200 by 1965; 12,000 by 1970 and 22,000 by 1980.

Central City Land Use

• Between 1953-70, NYC lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs; loses of similar per capita rate felt elsewhere

– There was a lot of white collar growth to offset this, but white collar did not live in the city during this era

• Because of the moving out factories, slums and railroads were demolished

– But this land was not the land white collar wanted (they wanted the old core of the CBD in skyscrapers), so it was just cleared or left to decay leaving big empty swatches of city.

• These are called brownfield sites

• Highways needed 200-300 ft rights of way – these were carved out of low income neighborhoods, parks and river fronts, making neighborhoods unwalkable and everything ugly

– Furthermore, the 1960’s saw riots in many minority neighborhoods that made people talk of American cities as doughnuts, that were empty in the center with a suburban ring

• European cities get fewer skyscrapers and because of land shortages, less room to sprawl and thus a lesser extent of changes

– Middle income retail kept fleeing CBD, replaced by pawn shops, military surplus, wig stores

US Demographic Change

• Baby Boom:

– Started post WWII in an era of prosperity, high marriage rates and large young families

• The baby boom children begin entering college in the mid-1960’s, during an era of emerging pop music, civil rights, Vietnam war and birth control

– Leave college in the 1970’s during the first bad times since the Depression; more singles, single parent households, small families and divorces

» Interestingly, this hurts home affordability (average mortgage from 21% to 36% of income in 5 years) by the 1980’s since there were so many more households than past generations

– By the 1980’s, the 60’s were gone and a highly individualistic, materialistic and much more conservative culture predominated

» A big move towards the Sun Belt amongst this generation especially Atlanta, Orlando and the Texas Cities (and Seattle, which is really the Rain Belt)

• This generation has entered its prime earning years (leaving its nesting years), and until the recent crash in stock market, was heading towards retirement

US Demographic Change (cont.)

• Post-Boom/Gen X

– Born between 1966 and 80, includes many of the new immigrants to the U.S. over the last few decades

• Brought us the personal computer and the internet

– Also Sun Belt, but different locations

• Smaller cities many with universities like Austin, Raleigh-Durham, Lexington, Madison, Columbus, Lansing

• Immigrant gateways like Salinas, San Diego

• Plus Dallas, Atlanta and Phoenix (yuck)

• Most of these tend to be cheaper with better job prospects than the boomer nests

Elderly

• A fast growing group that by 2000 was 12.4% of the population

• Because of social security and strong pension funds developed in the 1960’s, was the world’s wealthiest ever elderly generation

– Also took advantage of huge home price increases in their old homes to sell high

• While some have followed patterns of other groups to university towns and sun belt cities, they have singled out a few small Sun Belt cities in particular where they make up 25% of the population and up (many of them in Florida, since it had no income tax)

– Naples, Myrtle Beach, Las Cruces, Flagstaff, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Scottsdale, Miami, Hollywood all big in 2000 census

• Expect more places in North Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee to make that list (Asheville, Boone)

– Interestingly, many of the Great Plains states are disproportionately elderly because all the young people leave

New Immigrants

• Much more on immigration in Part 3 of the course, but for now

– Most immigrants post-1970 have been from Latin America and Asia, not Europe as previous waves (in fact, Europe only got its own first wave of immigrants since WWII)

– Each sending country has a distinct pattern of concentration (meaning that certain cities are favored over others)

– New York was and remains a major gateway, but LA is now #1 drawing from both East Asia and Latin America

• Miami is number one in the whole world in terms of % of foreign born citizens

– Among smaller large cities, DC, Boston, San Jose, OC, and San Diego also have a disproportionately large %

Economic Crisis and Reorganization

• In the 1970’s, the US entered a previously unthinkable period of stagflation (where there was weak demand for good combined with rising prices)

– During this time, productivity barely rose, unemployment increased and incomes actually fell for many

• The tipping point was the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and OPEC price raise (which caused a 4x increase in oil prices), but other issues had already been at work which set the stage:

– Big ones were increasing competition from well-managed Japanese and European corporations; also emerging were the Newly Industrialized Countries (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea (along with Mexico), which could manufacture at much cheaper labor costs

– Combine this with an emerging preference for the Sunbelt and a big technology revolution on the horizon, things looked bleak for the manufacturing core

• Up until this point, the Keynesian welfare system had been expanding; but under strained budgets and a “tax-payer revolt” against providing government services at all (viewed by many as a blowback from the civil rights movement), services begin disappearing

– With the election of Reagan, the federal government began a period of deregulation (thus pushing issues onto states), while at the same time cutting their spending on urban areas

Cycle of Deindustrialization

• Detroit and Youngstown and other older manufacturing belt cities begin to suffer as deindustrialization happens

– It is like cumulative causation in reverse

• Initial plant closings see the ancillary plants and services also close.

• Then goes spending on retail and services; which leads to more poverty and outmigration

• Government has a shrinking tax base, just as more need for basic services

– Thus less spent on quality of life issues, which again makes the location less desirable

– While cities everywhere in the US were not doing great (including Atlanta, Oakland, New Orleans), the concentration of problems in the Northeast and Great Lakes

• It is an overaccumulation crisis, where there is idle labor, idle productive capacity, and idle capital

– So a lot of money goes out to loans to poor countries, which they end up not being able to service, and a soon to be glut in commercial real estate

– There is also a lot of investment in R&D, and a lot of money given to universities, which will help pave the way to the next technological epoch for the US.

New Urban Hierarchy?

• With the growing importance of services in general, and producer services in particular, researchers proposed that a new global urban hierarchy has emerged consisting of four types of cities

• World Cities

• Regional Control Centers

• Specialized Producer Service Centers

• Dependent Centers

• Again, this is just a model, a sketch from available (and not always perfect data) about how the world economy functions

– This says nothing about how much a city is growing, how nice of place it is to live, how equal/unequal various groups are treated, etc.

– It also tends to underestimate the importance of cities with well defined cultural roles (Las Vegas and Orlando in pleasure; Dubai as a business and leisure capital; Mumbai as a glamour and business capital)

World Cities

• Originally coined by the urban planner Geddes in 1915, to highlight that there were a small number of cities in which most of the world’s business is conducted (especially in terms of marketing, production and international finance), while also having political and cultural influence as well

– In fact, there is a study group that uses quantitative data to rank and track world cities

– The world cities are not the world’s largest cities; some of the largest cities do not even make the secondary list

– These cities also tend to have a disproportionate amount of the world’s elite, while attracting large numbers of international immigrants of all stripes (Tokyo being an exception) and setting many urban development trends followed elsewhere

• There are three dominant world cities that control North America, Europe and Asia respectively: New York, London, and Tokyo

• The next tier consists of full-fledged world cities with smaller numbers of headquarters: Chicago, LA, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Zurich, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Hong Kong

• The third tier of secondary world cities “complete the international space of flows between governments, major corporations, stock exchanges, futures exchanges, securities markets, commodity markets, major banks and international organizations

– Houston, Miami, San Fran and DC are in that category

Below World Cities

• Regional Control Centers (aka Regional Nodal Centers)– Instead of global headquarters, they have national and regional headquarters, along with strong banking and some producer services and important public sector institutions

– In the US, a handy way to remember is if the city has a franchise in more than one major professional sport, it is likely a regional control center (see list on pg. 94 of these and sub-regional control centers)

• Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Tampa and Detroit are counter-examples

• Specialized Producer Service Centers

– Type 1: Highly specialized producer services (management or technical): office equipment in Rochester, semi-conductors in San Jose, cars in Detroit

• Have some special service HQs and lots of R&D

• Depend on other places for high order marketing, finance, etc.

– Type 2: Government/Education Centers, where there are state capitals plus universities (Albany, Austin, Madison, Raleigh-Durham, Tallahassee)

• Also have lots of R&D because of the universities

Below World Cities (cont.)

• Dependent Centers

– They are often smaller cities (though not always) that specialize and depend on decisions made in higher-order control centers

• Type 1: Traditional manufacturing centers (Buffalo, Erie, Chattanooga)

• Type 2: Industrial military centers (Huntsville, San Diego – mostly in South and West)

• Type 3: Mining/Industrial centeres (Duluth, MN; Charleston, WV)

• Type 4: Resort/Retirement/Residential (Albuquerque, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Las Vegas – mostly again in South and West)

Technology and Communications Revolutions

• There have been three types of technologies that the book lists that have enabled the restructuring of the economy

– Production Process Technologies (essentially automated manufacturing)

– Transaction Technologies (just-in-time inventory control, meaning that components can be purchased as needed and not have to be stockpiled)

– Circulation Technologies (those technologies form email to cargo containers that have cut the costs of communication and of distribution of goods)

• To this, which the book doesn’t mention here, I would add

– Financial Technologies (short term loans, insurances, securities and other innovations which made getting cash infinitely easier, allowing various waves of acquisitions and market expansions)

Tech and Com Revolutions (cont.)

• If the last slide was the enabling technologies, these are three central processes of the restructuring

– Transformation of the relationship between capital and labor

• Now capital has the edge in setting wages. Partly due to automation, partly due to circulation tech that allows production to move, partly due to newly emerged industries that have not unionized, partly due to more women and immigrants in the workforce (who had not been previously unionized)

– Emergence of new roles for the state and public sector

• Less “collective consumption” (schools, hospitals, community service), more public/private partnership, deregulation, supporting R & D, and defense/public order spending

– Development of New International and Inter-metropolitan Divisions of Labor

• All these technologies that allow time-space compression and locational choice means geography matters more, since small differences between places (in terms of cost or amenities) can cause a movement of capital and jobs.

– Furthermore, the pace of movement has greatly increased, meaning stability for urban societies is likely a thing of the past

Tech and Com Revolution (cont)

• The growth and location of professional and business services has been the huge story of this era

– In 1976, 2.6 million of these jobs; 1986, 5.2 million; 1993, 11.5 million; 2002, 16.0 million

– Include jobs in R&D, engineering, data processing, programming, personnel, consulting, law, accounting, finance

• The big cities have the lion’s share overall, but proportionally, biggest growth in medium-sized cities like Boston, D.C., San Jose, Raleigh-Durham, Austin, Orlando, Huntsville, Colorado Springs, Seattle

Tech and Com Rev (cont.)

• Cities play a special role in “globalization” of the economy economically, politically and culturally

• According to UN Habitat, information and communication technologies are intensifying global urbanization by

– Allowing specialist urban centers with high value manufacturing and services to extend their powers, market and control to ever more distant areas

– Growing speed, complexity and riskiness of innovation needs a concentration of tech infrastructure and knowledgeable people in order to sustain competitiveness

– Demand for tech is driven overwhelmingly by urban markets, especially “world cities” with their concentrations of capital and corporations and large affluent consumer markets.

Globalization and Urban Change

• The automobile and jet were already active in earlier eras, so the big driver of change in this era are communication technologies, which allows for economic globalization/decentralization

– Parts of some cities (enclaves) became super-connected

• These become centers of innovation, while intensifying social and economic inequality within and between cities

• Splintering Urbanism

– Concept developed in book of the same name by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin

• This is the hot book among planners for the last 5 or so years

Global Change (cont.)

– 6 Settings made by splintering urbanism

• Enclaves of international banking, finance and business services in world and regional cities

– Lower Manhattan, City of London, Bahnofstrasse Zurich, Hong Kong Financial District

• Enclaves of internet and multimedia, in world cities

– Multimedia Gulch (San Fran), Silicon Alley (NYC

• Technopoles and clusters of high-tech industry in suburban campuses near world cities and universities, plus in a select few Newly Industrialized Countries (NIC’s – or countries that have had a big upturn in growth since late 1980’s)

– Lyon, Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Multimedia Supercorridor (Malaysia)

Global Change (cont.)

• 6 Settings made by splintering urbanism (cont.)

• Foreign Direct Investment manufacturing zones with custom infrastrucuture, expedited approval process, tax concessions and labor/environmental regulation waivers. Near developing world cities,

– Porto Alegre and Parana Brazil got these zones thanks to Import Substitution policies

• Back office enclaves with data processing, routine accounting, e-commerce and call centers (usually English language ability is key) – some declining cities like Roanoke or Omaha, Sunderland (UK), plus many cities in India and English speaking Caribbean, and Manila

• Logistics zones including ports and export processing zones, require strong information and transport networks to coordinate with headquarters, near developing cities in E and SE Asia, plus Mexico/Caribbean cities to serve US market, and North Africa for Europe

Global Change (cont.)

• Polycentric Metropolis

– Cities in North America were first to disperse

– One of the key features is what are called “Edge Cities” with concentrations of offices, residential and retail in the burbs that outshine the old CBD’s, usually near interstate exchanges

– Peter Hall’s six nodes within the polycentric metropolis

• Traditional downtown defined by walking distances and radial transport, home to oldest information services like banking, insurance and government (the City, London; Maronouchi/Otemachi, Tokyo)

• Newer business centers in prestigious residential quarter, with corporate HQ’s and media/ad/design services (London West End; 16^th arrondissment Paris; Midtown Manhattan; Akasaki/Roppongi, Tokyo)

• Internal edge cities developed on old industrial land because of crowding in other office districts (La Defense, Paris; Docklands, London; and Shinjuku Tokyo)

Global Change (cont.)

• Hall nodes (cont)

– External edge cities that grew quickly and may not even be incorporated (usually near airport, sometimes on train line, always near freeway, includes Dulles corridor DC, London’s Heathrow, Schiphol (Amsterdam), O'Hare Chicago)

• Doral would be the closest Miami has to one of these (freeways, airport, business parks, subdivisions)

• Sometimes called stealth cities, because they often do not have a name, chamber of commerce, library, public square

– Outermost edge city for back office and R&D, usually on rail lines near major cities: Reading (London), St. Quentin-en-Yvelines (Paris), Greenwich, CN (NYC), Shin-Yokohama (Tokyo)

– Specialized sub-centers for education, sports, entertainment, convention centers

• Some on reclaimed land close to core, some started as independent and the city grew around them

Global Change (cont.)

• The largest of these polycentric metropolises are 100 miles across, made of a loose collection of urban realms (economic sub-regions) bound together by freeways

– These urban realms often function independently, between 175,000 and 250,000 people

• Each realm has retail/commercial/ residential, each has either a commercial or retail high order central place of there own (even if it is a mall or airport)

• Thus they function independently of old CBD, except perhaps for sporting events or other big deal happenings

• Many look similar world wide with freeways, condo/apartment complexes, strip malls, office parks and single family subdivisions

Global Change (cont.)

• End of Suburbia?

– Things are so dispersed, they are no longer traditional “suburbs” because they no longer serve a traditional “core”

– Also, since the 1980’s, there has been a small but noticeable countermovement of select functions back to parts central cities, involving mixed-use residential development, advanced business services, historic preservation and gentrification

– Furthermore, under the auspices of civic entrepreneurialism in the 1990’s and 2000’s, many cities tried to do large scale “set piece” developments centered on waterfront/downtown retail or arena districts to try to get some weekend dollars from outlying areas and give a perception of dynamism from investors

• Bayside in Miami is a big example; also Gateway in Cleveland, Harbor Place Baltimore, South Street Seaport, NYC

• Many of these did not succeed financially because of intra-urban retail competition and the fact they were replicated in too many cities to make them unique

Boomburgs and “Generica”

• Boomburgs is another name for the edge cities, in general distinct not in function from old cores but in their low density and loosely configured spatial structure

– Specifically, they have 100,000 plus people, are not the largest cities in the metropolitan area, and had double digit growth in recent decades

– Development is done by large swatches of single-family home subdivisions (including the famous McMansions) with little or no internal retail or office structure, surrounded by strip malls, parking lots, office parks, big-box stores

• Has been dubbed “Generica” because developers mostly focused on profit and quick turnaround, not quality or uniqueness of any type (since those cost money)

– Most of them are in the Southwest, with half in California

• Biggest is Mesa, AZ, followed by Arlington, TX, Chandler, AZ and Henderson, NV (other big ones are Naperville, IL; Bellevue, WA; Irvine CA; Fremont, CA)

– The book lists Hialeah as one, but while the stats fit, its does not seem to meet the qualitative description (it is an older, more established place, kind of like Salem, OR), where as Pembroke Pines and Coral Springs do because of their spread out nature and recent emergence

– These saw the biggest de-valuing during the 2008 real-estate crisis

European Urbanization Notes

• Europe is the most heavily urbanized continent (though this varies by country from 97% in Belgium to 40% in Albania)

– Also has some of the slowest growing cities, partly because internal migration has run its course, partly due to low birth rate

• Germany, Belgium, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland follow rank-size rule; France, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ireland, and Iceland are primate city dominated

• London and Paris are the two largest cities, legacies of their days as old imperial capitals

– London-Birmingham-Liverpool-Newcastle have become a megalopolis like DC-NYC; also Rhine/Ruhr in Germany and Randstad in Holland

• Old core started in English Midlands to Bavaria and Paris

– Like in the US, 1970’s saw the deindustrialization of the old core

• Liverpool and Rotterdam were especially hurt by labor reductions following the containerization of shipping

• Core has shifted South and East, especially since end of cold war

– Now along with London and Paris, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Zurich, Geneva, Milan, Turin and Lyon (probably also Barcelona)

• Also, as EU expands Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest will continue to grow in importance (and potentially Istanbul as well)

Counterurbanization, Deurbanization, Reurbanization

• In the 1970’s, the growth rate of large cities dropped rapidly (and actually declined in places like Cleveland and Buffalo) and non-metropolitan areas in the South and West, as well as small cities there, grew rapidly

– This was called counterurbanization

• It was helped by improved rural electricity and water, TV reception (and eventually satellite), plus low costs, some counter-cultural folks and retirees

– So in these places (as well as overseas), you get branch plants that do routinized work on established products

• This fits with the product lifecycles, where establish products have mature markets and production techniques, and need to compete on price

Counter, de, re (continued)

• In the 1980’s, cities grew again as well as the counties surrounding them

– Los Angeles added three million; Dallas and San Fran each added around 1 million; Orlando grew by 53%

– Coasts grew rapidly during the 1980’s

– Also some formerly unincorporated exurban communities (residential communities not contiguous with existing city and its suburbs) become metropolitan areas like Santa Clarita and Moreno Valley

• In the 1990’s, people living in metropolitan areas grew by 14% (putting 80% of US in cities or burbs; 50% in metro areas of 1 million+)

– LA, NYC, Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix all add 1 million +; Denver, Miami and others add 500,000

– Las Vegas grew 83% during the 1990’s and perhaps faster in the early 2000’s! Phoenix by 43%

– During late 1990’s and into the 2000’s, the non coastal West begins to grow as people actually leave California for cheaper areas

• New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee will be the story of 2000’s (although Florida may have reached its high water mark because of increasing cost)

• This meant that the deurbanization of the 1970’s was a blip

– The percent of Americans living in cities not suburbs has remained a steady 30% since 1930’s – it is surburbs that have grown rapidly

• This has come at the expense of Midwestern non-metropolitan places

Quantifying Quality of Life

• Just like comparing colleges, comparing and ranking quality of life in cities is not straightforward

– What data to include, can data capture everything, and that different groups want different things from a city

• For example, young singles want rec and jobs; young families want schools, retirees want mild climate, health care, low cost of living

• Many studies (including the Places Rated Almanac) use the following criteria

– Cost of Living (taxes, home prices, utilities, health care costs)

– Transportation (commute time, public transport, external links)

– Job Growth

– Education (K-12, libraries, colleges and universities)

– Climate (summer mildness, winter mildness, seasonal variability, hazards)

– Crime (violent crime rate, property crime rate)

– The arts (museums, museum attendance, ballet, opera, symphony, theater)

– Health care (gp’s, specialists, hospital beds, teaching hospitals)

– Recreation (theme parks, aquariums, auto racing, gambling, golf courses, restaurants, movie screens, pro sports, protecting recreation areas, water recreation, zoos)

Japanese Cities

• Japan had huge urban growth post-WWII

– From 33% of pop in 1950 in cities of 50,000 + to 64% by 1970; overall urban percentage = 72%

• In Japan, the big cities take the biggest chunks of population

– The Tokaido Megalopolis has 44% of Japan’s population (meaning 66 million people)

• Includes Tokyo-Yokohama (which has 30 million on its own); Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto; and Nagoya

– This makes Japan a very core-periphery country, where rural to urban migration centered mostly on that one city

Japanese Cities (cont.)

• Tokyo had a plan for urban growth post WWII, that was not implemented fully and allowed haphazard growth, which led to congestion and a polycentric city layout

– Growth around key subcenters: Shibuya (fashion, media, corporate HQ), Shinjuku (government functions), rail lines out from Chiyoda (old imperial district)

– Unlike many cities though, corporate functions remained in the CBD, with millions of people commuting via the super-crowded but efficient mass transit system

– Also, Japanese cities have fewer neighborhood divisions among socioeconomic or racial lines (along with Japanese soceity, in which there is a strong and deep middle class)

Australian Cities

• Most people live within 125 miles of the coast in Australia, most of them within the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide

• While there are upscale communities and office/research parks at city edges, not the same extent as US or UK edge cities (mainly because of strong planning controls and a lack of urban highways and ring roads)

– Also CBD’s remain strong, as does inner-city residential for multiple classes (with very strong gentrification programs)

– However, programs like Better Cities (which are public private partnerships to get more Pacific Rim control functions to Australia) have built lots of high rent luxury housing and very little affordable housing

• In fact, Sydney while very livable is also hugely expensive

• Its most depressed areas tend to be post-WWII industrial suburbs, where industry has left but housing estates (public housing) remain and where SE Asians and refugees cluster