With the coming of relative affluence and abundant leisure to the population and a decrease of labour input in industrial processes, a new breed of cities has sprouted across the land: those that cater to the pleasure-seeker, vacationer, and the retired—for example, the young, flourishing cities of Florida or Nevada and many locations in California, Arizona, and Colorado.
The automobile as a means of personal transportation was developed about the time of World War I, and the American city was catapulted into a radically new period, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the further evolution of physical form and function. The size, density, and internal structure of the city were previously constrained by the limitations of the pedestrian and early mass-transit systems. Only the well-to-do could afford horse and carriage or a secluded villa in the countryside. Cities were relatively small and compact, with a single clearly defined centre, and they grew by accretion along their edges, without any significant spatial hiatuses except where commuter railroads linked outlying towns to the largest of metropolises. Workers living beyond the immediate vicinity of their work had to locate within reach of the few horse-drawn omnibuses or the later electric street railways.
The universality of the automobile, even among the less affluent, and the parallel proliferation of service facilities and highways greatly loosened and fragmented the American city, which spread over surrounding rural lands. Older, formerly autonomous towns grew swiftly. Many towns became satellites of the larger city or were absorbed. Many suburbs and subdivisions arose with single-family homes on lots larger than had been possible for the ordinary householder in the city. These communities were almost totally dependent on the highway for the flow of commuters, goods, and services, and many were located in splendid isolation, separated by tracts of farmland, brush, or forest from other such developments. At the major interchanges of the limited-access highways, a new form of agglomerated settlement sprang up. In a further elaboration of this trend, many larger cities have been girdled by a set of mushrooming complexes. These creations of private enterprise embody a novel concept of urban existence: a metropolitan module no longer reliant on the central city or its downtown. Usually anchored on a cluster of shopping malls and office parks, these “hypersuburbs,” whose residents and employees circulate freely within the outer metropolitan ring, offer virtually all of the social and economic facilities needed for the modern life-style.
The new look of the metropolitan area
The outcome has been a broad, ragged, semiurbanized belt of land surrounding each city, large or small, and quite often blending imperceptibly into the suburban-exurban halo encircling a neighbouring metropolitan centre. There is a great similarity in the makeup and general appearance of all such tracts: the planless intermixture of scraps of the rural landscape with the fragments of the scattered metropolis; the randomly distributed subdivisions or single homes; the vast shopping centres, the large commercial cemeteries, drive-in theatres, junkyards, and golf courses and other recreational enterprises; and the regional or metropolitan airport, often with its own cluster of factories, warehouses, or travel-oriented businesses. The traditional city—unitary, concentric in form, with a single well-defined middle—has been replaced by a relatively amorphous, polycentric metropolitan sprawl.
The inner city of a large U.S. metropolitan area displays some traits that are common to the larger centres of all advanced nations. A central business district, almost always the oldest section of the city, is surrounded by a succession of roughly circular zones, each distinctive in economic and social-ethnic character. The symmetry of this scheme is distorted by the irregularities of surface and drainage or the effects of radial highways and railroads. Land is most costly, and hence land use is most intensive, toward the centre. Major business, financial and governmental offices, department stores, and specialty shops dominate the downtown, which is usually fringed by a band of factories and warehouses. The outer parts of the city, like the suburbs, are mainly residential.
With some exceptions—e.g., large apartment complexes in downtown Chicago—people do not reside in the downtown areas, and there is a steady downward gradient in population density per unit area (and more open land and single-family residences) as one moves from the inner city toward the open country. Conversely, there is a general rise in income and social status with increasing distance from the core. The sharply defined immigrant neighbourhoods of the 19th century generally persist in a somewhat diluted form, though specific ethnic groups may have shifted their location. Later migrant groups, notably Southern blacks and Latin Americans, generally dominate the more run-down neighbourhoods of the inner cities.
Individual and collective character of cities
American cities, more so than the small-town or agrarian landscape, tend to be the product of a particular period rather than of location. The relatively venerable centres of the Eastern Seaboard—Boston; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Albany, New York; Chester, Pennsylvania; Alexandria, Virginia; or Georgetown (a district of Washington, D.C.), for example—are virtual replicas of the fashionable European models of their early period rather than the fruition of a regional culture, unlike New Orleans and Santa Fe, New Mexico, which reflect other times and regions. The townscapes of Pittsburgh; Detroit, Michigan; Chicago; and Denver, depict national modes of thought and the technological development of their formative years, just as Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; San Diego; Tucson, Arizona; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, proclaim contemporary values and gadgetry more than any local distinctiveness. When strong-minded city founders instituted a highly individual plan and their successors managed to preserve it—as, for example, in Savannah, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; and Salt Lake City, Utah—or when there is a happy combination of a spectacular site and appreciative residents—as in San Francisco or Seattle—a genuine individuality does seem to emerge. Such an identity also may develop where immigration has been highly selective, as in such places as Miami, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; and Los Angeles.
BostonFaneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts.Geoff Tompkinson/GTImage.com (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
As a group, U.S. cities differ from cities in other countries in both type and degree. The national political structure, the social inclinations of the people, and the strong outward surge of urban development have led to the political fragmentation of metropolises that socially and economically are relatively cohesive units. The fact that a single metropolitan area may sprawl across numerous incorporated towns and cities, several townships, and two or more counties and states has a major impact upon both its appearance and the way it functions. Not the least of these effects is a dearth of overall physical and social planning (or its ineffectuality when attempted), and the rather chaotic, inharmonious appearance of both inner-city and peripheral zones painfully reflects the absence of any effective collective action concerning such matters.