The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America / Edition 1

by Jon Teaford

Overview

In this absorbing history, Jon C. Teaford traces the dramatic evolution of American metropolitan life. At the end of World War II, the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest were bustling, racially and economically integrated areas frequented by suburban and urban dwellers alike. Yet since 1945, these cities have become peripheral to the lives of most Americans. "Edge cities" are now the dominant centers of production and consumption in post-suburban America. Characterized by sprawling freeways, corporate parks, and homogeneous malls and shopping centers, edge cities have transformed the urban landscape of the United States.

Teaford surveys metropolitan areas from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt and the way in which postwar social, racial, and cultural shifts contributed to the decline of the central city as a hub of work, shopping, transportation, and entertainment. He analyzes the effects of urban flight in the 1950s and 1960s, the subsequent growth of the suburbs, and the impact of financial crises and racial tensions. He then brings the discussion into the present by showing how the recent wave of immigration from Latin America and Asia has further altered metropolitan life and complicated the black-white divide. Engaging in original research and interpretation, Teaford tells the story of this fascinating metamorphosis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231133739
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/16/2006
Series:	Columbia History of Urban Life
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jon C. Teaford is professor of history at Purdue University, and author of, among others, The Twentieth Century American City (Johns Hopkins, 2nd ed., 1993) and The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Johns Hopkins, 1990).

Read an Excerpt

The Metropolitan Revolution

The Rise of Post-Urban America

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By Jon C. Teaford

Columbia University Press

Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-231-13372-3

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Chapter One

The Edgeless City

In 2003 urban scholar Robert Lang issued a new communiqué from the nation's little-understood metropolitan expanse. Challenging Joel Garreau's decade-old prediction that edge cities were reestablishing dense, mixed-use, identifiable centers in the metropolitan mass, Lang claimed that instead the prevailing pattern was the edgeless city, "a form of sprawling office development that does not have the density or cohesiveness of edge cities" but accounted "for the bulk of the office space found outside downtowns." According to Lang, "Sprawl is back-or, more accurately, it never went away." "Isolated office buildings or small clusters of buildings" were spread over "vast swaths of metropolitan space," and as a prime example Lang offered Edison's central New Jersey, where "edgeless cities stretch over a thousand square miles of metropolitan area." In other words, the multicentered metropolis was seemingly as passé as its single-centered ancestor. Metropolitan American was continuing its relentless advance across the countryside, eschewing concentration for sprawl.

Anyone driving the highways of New Jersey, Georgia, Florida,Illinois, Texas, or California would have strongly seconded Lang's findings. Commercial outlets spread in all directions and small office buildings with large parking lots proliferated at a faster pace than suburban high-rises served by multilevel garages. Strip centers skirting highways and giant discount stores convenient to motorists proved more attractive to time-conscious shoppers than many of the older malls that had dominated retailing for the past four decades. For the many customers who did not want to linger or stroll, a dense concentration of businesses had little appeal. If commerce was spread out along the highways, motorists could move as rapidly as possible along these asphalt conveyor belts, collecting goods and services as they passed. After all, one did not go to the dentist, grocery, or video store to experience some city planner's notion of diverse urbanity or to partake of some uplifting ambience. The idea was to get in, do one's business, and get out as quickly and conveniently as possible. Taking advantage of drive-through windows at drugstores, banks, and fast-food restaurants, customers might not even need to leave the comfort of their cars but instead could experience to the fullest the automobility of the edgeless city.

Meanwhile, housing subdivisions sprouted in barren fields, and the rate of residential sprawl seemed to accelerate. Once quiet suburbs emerged among the ranks of the nation's most populous cities, leading urban commentators to dub them boomburbs. By 2000, Virginia Beach could boast of 425,000 residents, up from 5,000 in 1950 and almost twice the population of Norfolk, the historic hub of tidewater Virginia. The Phoenix area included seven "suburban" cities with populations over 100,000, led by Mesa, with almost 400,000 inhabitants. Moreover, the growth of the Arizona boomburbs was not abating; in the mid-1990s, houses were reportedly consuming the Arizona desert at the rate of an acre per hour. Both Virginia Beach and Mesa were already more populous than such traditional hubs as Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, and Cincinnati. In California, there were twenty-five boomburbs with populations of more than 100,000, and the Denver metropolitan area was the site of three of these outlying giants, the largest being Aurora, with 276,000 people. Dallas was ringed by seven boomburbs that topped the 100,000 mark, headed by Arlington, whose population grew from 8,000 in 1950 to 333,000 in 2000. In these cities, growth was a way of life during the late twentieth century. Between 1986 and 1989, a breakneck annexation campaign more than doubled Aurora's area to 140 square miles. A Denver newspaper accused Aurora of being "bent on annexing Kansas and beyond." "Arlington is a pro-growth town," observed a former planning official of the Texas city at the close of the 1980s. "Always has been, always will be." Many observers felt that the physical evidence of unthinking, sprawling growth was all too obvious in many of the boomtowns. An early-twenty-first-century visitor to Aurora wrote of the Colorado giant: "It has no discernible downtown, no town center, just mile after mile of strip malls, small mom-and-pops, ethnic restaurants, and ranch-style housing developments."

The boomburbs were not only large, and growing larger, but most were becoming more diverse, defying long-standing notions of ethnic and lifestyle homogeneity in suburbia. A University of Michigan study completed in 1999 judged Aurora "the most integrated city in the United States," and Aurora's school system claimed that sixty-eight languages were spoken in the city's households. In 2000, 20 percent of the population was Hispanic, and 12 percent was African American. The Aurora community services directory was printed in English, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian. "Everywhere you go, it's like you're in a different country, with all the cultures and people," observed an enthusiastic Aurora resident. "I feel sorry for people who live in all-black or all-white neighborhoods because they don't know what they're missing."

Not only were there booming young cities welcoming people from around the world, but small towns and unincorporated areas in outlying counties were exploding with newcomers who had few or no ties to the region's historic hub city. By 2000, three suburban counties in the Atlanta area had over 500,000 residents, with Gwinnett County's population having soared from 32,000 in 1950 to 588,000 fifty years later. In 2004 Gwinnett County's school system was the largest in Georgia, with a more diverse student population than that of the predominantly black city of Atlanta. Twenty-three percent of the students were African American, 17 percent were Hispanic, and 10 percent were Asian American. Moreover, at the turn of the century, there seemed no prospect that Gwinnett's growth or that of surrounding counties would soon cease. In 1999 Time magazine ran a picture of new houses in Gwinnett County with the caption "Spread Alert" and questioned whether this was "part of the fastest widening human settlement ever."

Many residents of the ever more populous political units of the edgeless city maintained a carefully controlled lifestyle and a sense of grassroots rule by resorting to the private governments of homeowner associations. Large, diverse counties or boomburbs could not provide government tailored to a single subdivision, but the associations could, thus preserving the local control traditionally valued in suburbia even while populations soared. In the crime-ridden, threatening metropolitan world of the late twentieth century, the proliferating homeowner associations also offered the sense of security associated with small towns and traditional residential suburbs. This was especially evident in the growing number of gated communities, walled subdivisions that were off-limits to nonresidents. Homeowner associations maintained the surrounding walls as well as the community's private streets and the recreation areas open only to subdivision residents and their guests. Many such communities hired guards to staff gatehouses or imposed a system of key cards or entry codes that ensured only authorized persons could enter the subdivision. Originally popular among Sun Belt retirees, gated communities attracted a growing portion of the population during the 1990s, especially in the boomburb regions of California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. In 1994 approximately one-third of southern California's new communities were gated, and according to one estimate the nation's gated community population soared from 4 million in 1995 to 16 million in 1998. A study based on the 2001 American Housing Survey found that over 7 million American households were within walled communities.

Various factors encouraged this retreat behind walls and the resort to private homeowner governments. Fear of outsiders and the crimes they might commit motivated some to seek a life behind gates and security guards. A South Florida developer observed: "People are a little neurotic. [Those] who have suffered from crime or know someone who has are sitting there all day like Chicken Little waiting for the sky to fall in." A resident of a southern California subdivision that installed gates in the 1990s explained: "Before it was gated I had to keep everything locked. There were transients coming through, walking up and down the street." Yet prestige was an added advantage. "People like to live within walls because they give the illusion of security," remarked a Dallas security consultant. "And it has acquired a certain social connotation as well. It's become the thing to do, like having a doorman or a chauffeur." Moreover, many residents believed that the walls and subdivision associations created a more neighborly community, a small-town feeling. "In any homeowner association I think you'd have more community spirit than just on a block," commented a California resident. "I guess the gates make it a family." And a Dallas developer asserted: "The number one issue as I see it is that people want a sense of community. I think that is more what the gate is about, more so than security." He believed that "the main thing is 'I want a small town atmosphere in my big city. I want to be part of a community where I can be friends with all these people who are similar to my background.'"

In the seemingly limitless, centerless expanse of metropolitan America, walled subdivisions created identifiable, defined communities for their residents. For their residents, the walls provided needed edges in the edgeless city, boundaries that distinguished neighbors from intruders, the privileged from the poor, and the protected from the vulnerable. Implied in the concept of community was the notion that some belonged and some did not. In the amorphous sprawl of turn-of-the-century America, walled subdivisions made residents feel they were part of a community, fenced off from the dangerous and the undesirable. Many observers deplored the gated community phenomenon. A leading urban planner warned: "These walls and gates are leading to more segregation and more isolation, and the outcome is going to be tragic for all of us." But a resident of a gated community in the Dallas area boomburb of Irving thought otherwise: "It seems like a secure, established neighborhood where our kids can run around without having to worry about traffic." Claiming that in a city neighborhood "you never know what's going to happen," he concluded that "in a gated community you can control some of that."

Another emerging element of the landscape of the edgeless city was the giant windowless retail outlet known as the big-box store. By the close of the twentieth century, fewer large, enclosed malls were being built, and some were standing derelict as shoppers turned from the mall's department store anchors and headed instead for the big-box emporiums of discounters that lined suburban highways. With low prices and huge inventories, these discount chains lured millions of bargain-hungry shoppers. In 2000 Wal-Mart, with 4,190 stores, was the world's largest retailer, reaping four times the revenues of the nation's second-largest chain and ten times the sales of Federated Department Stores, the owner of Macy's. Number three in the United States and four in the world was the home improvement giant Home Depot, and the upscale discounter Target ranked number six in the nation (figure 7.1). Target was founded in 1962 as the discount outlet for Minneapolis's Dayton's Department Store. By the close of the century, Dayton's had purchased Detroit's premier department store, Hudson's, as well as Chicago's Marshall Field's. Yet in 2000, 83 percent of the company's pretax profits came from its discounter. Acknowledging the triumph of its big-box discount offspring over its aging department stores, the parent company changed its name from Dayton Hudson to Target.

The triumph of big-box retailers was yet another stage in the shift of shopping from a centripetal pursuit to a centrifugal one. For the largest selection of merchandise at the best prices, the shopper of the early twenty-first century headed not toward the city center but outward from the historic hub to suburban highways. At the beginning of the century, there was no Target store in Manhattan, but Manhattanites commuted outward to suburban outlets. "I'm beyond obsessed with Target," confessed one Manhattan business owner, who traveled to suburban New York or New Jersey each weekend to satisfy her obsession. Another well-heeled Manhattanite told of her discovery of Target in suburban Long Island: "I came out with two shopping carts full of stuff. They had to help me out the door. It's so cheap! It's amazing!"

Wal-Mart best exemplified this reversal of the traditional pattern prevailing before 1945. Founded by Arkansas's Sam Walton, it first thrived by catering to underserved small-town customers and then expanded into suburbia. Finally, by the turn of the twenty-first century, it was entering the central cities. In 2003 it had outlets in seven of the top ten urban markets; the exceptions were Chicago, Detroit, and New York City. A retail analyst observed: "Urban areas are the last frontier for Wal-Mart other than international markets." The same year, the giant discounter announced plans to open its first stores in the city of Chicago. Local labor unions responded with bitter attacks on the chain, which relied exclusively on nonunion labor. Yet many African Americans living near the proposed Wal-Mart sites favored the prospect of a big-box store in their neighborhood. A local pastor claimed that 99 percent of his congregants already shopped at suburban Wal-Marts, driving miles to satisfy their retailing needs. Expressing the opinion of many of her constituents, the city council representative for a black West Side neighborhood asserted: "If our money is good to spend in the suburbs, then it's good to spend here." "We need a Wal-Mart around here," remarked a West Side shopper. "I can't find any place in this neighborhood that sells decent clothes or furniture I can afford."

Both well-heeled Manhattanites and poor Chicagoans were headed outward from the underserved central city to the great edgeless-city emporiums of the twenty-first century. In 1945 Macy's, in the heart of Manhattan, was the world's biggest retailer; in 2000 Bentonville, Arkansas, was the headquarters of the world's preeminent retailer. In 1945 shoppers traveled downtown to find the most merchandise and seek the best prices; in 2000 the treasure troves of shoppers were along New Jersey interstates and on Illinois acreage that had produced corn only a few years earlier. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, New York City and Chicago were the last frontiers of the world's largest retailer, the last places it chose to locate. The metropolitan revolution had turned the retailing world inside out.

Although millions of Americans were flocking to big-box stores, gated communities, and boomburbs, a cadre of highly vocal critics was keeping alive the tradition of antisuburban diatribes. "The United States has become a predominantly suburban nation, but not a very happy one," pronounced critic Philip Langdon in 1994. According to him, suburbs were "fostering an unhealthy way of life," and, echoing the screeds of the 1950s, he believed that suburbanization had produced "a bitter harvest of individual trauma, family distress, and civic decay." Among the most vehement of the turn-of-the-century foes of suburban sprawl was James Howard Kunstler, who in a series of books leveled an unrelenting barrage of rhetoric on the edgeless city. It was "depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading," a landscape of "jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, ... Potemkin village shopping plazas with ... vast parking lagoons," and "Orwellian office parks featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards." It was "destructive, wasteful, toxic," a blight on the nation and a plague on its people. At the close of the century, Time magazine concluded with some exaggeration: "Everybody hates the drive time, the scuffed and dented banality, of overextended suburbs."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Metropolitan Revolution by Jon C. Teaford Copyright © 2006 by Columbia University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Introduction: The Metropolitan Revolution1. 1945
2. Reinforcing the status quo
3. Coming apart
4. The debacle
5. The new Metropolitan World
6. Beyond the black-white city
7. After the Revolution

What People are Saying About This

Roger Lotchin

This book is a major achievement by an outstanding historian of American cities. It is a truly unusual and compelling narrative of the new urban form that has developed since World War II. A must read for anyone interested in seeing how American cities have turned out.

— Roger Lotchin, professor of history, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of The Bad City in the Good War

Robert Fishman

Jon C. Teaford's knowledge of both cities and suburbs is unsurpassed among American historians. In this book, he brings both halves of the metropolitan equation together to achieve a rare balance and insight into the complex sixty-year history that has transformed both cities and suburbs and created a new American metropolis.

— Robert Fishman, professor of architecture and urban planning, University of Michigan

Editorial Reviews

A gripping voyage through the history of the revolution that changed America forever.

Journal of American Studies - Ganna Stembkovska

A useful and important work that moves beyond single-city studies to provide a broad national view of metropolitan development.

Enterprise & Society - Marilynn S. Johnson

An enjoyable, accessible, and comprehensive look at the post-Suburban era.

Kentucky Historical Society

A useful and important work that moves beyond single-city studies to provide a broad national view of metropolitan development.

— Marilynn S. Johnson

Enterprise & Society

This engaging study will provide the historical perspective we need.

— John D. Fairfield

The Journal of American History

A gripping voyage through the history of the revolution that changed America forever.

— Ganna Stembkovska

Journal of American Studies

This engaging study will provide the historical perspective we need.

The Journal of American History - John D. Fairfield

An enjoyable, accessible, and comprehensive look at the post-Suburban era.

Kentucky Historical Society