Unit 20 Urbanisation and its influence

1. How did industrialisation affect urbanisation?

The effects of industrialisation on urbanisation can be discerned from a " before-and-after" com­parison: the sociological contrasts between preindustrial fifteenth-century Venice and the newly industrialised Boston of the late nineteenth century are striking. In Venice's Golden Age, about 190, 000 residents were packed into a very small space. The simple but slow means of transporta­tion-foot, boat, or horse-drawn wagon-limited the range in which people and goods could move. Venice's population did not rise much above this number because of technological limitations on moving food from the countryside to the city, and on preventing spoilage once it arrived. Further­more, Venice was dirty and plagued by disease; periodic epidemics took the lives of many people. Crime was also a persistent threat. The population was divided sharply by differences in wealth, although even the poor in Venice were better off than their economic counterparts in the country. Class conflict never erupted in Venice, in part because of the absolute power of the ruling class. The cultural achievements of Venice in its Golden Age-in architecture, art, handicrafts, and sci­ence-were profound.

Boston in the late nineteenth century was a city built during the early years of the industrial

revolution in America. Interestingly, industrialisation of agriculture was a key factor in the urban explosion of places like Boston. New farm implements (such as tractors and harvesters), mass-produced and increasingly efficient pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers, and feeds, and improved means for transporting and storing food all led to dramatic increases in the number of city dwellers each farmer could feed. Fewer workers were needed on the farms; at the same time, more hands were needed in the new mills and factories of the early industrial city.

Industrialisation also had direct effects on the growth of Boston. Improvements in the metropoli­tan railroad system meant that people and goods could move over longer distances and still be part of " the city." New engineering technologies enabled the construction of taller buildings and in­creased the population density of core neighbourhoods. Deadly epidemics were virtually eliminated by improvements in public hygiene; indoor plumbing and municipal sewer systems became common at this time.

Boston covered a larger geographical territory than fifteenth-century Venice. Residential suburbs expanded along trolley lines, a sign that people now could live at considerable distances from where they worked. Manufacturing plants also began to move out from the hub along the railroad spokes. These developments contributed to a residential segregation of aristocrats and wealthy people from factory workers and the poor (in pre-industrial Venice, the poor and the rich lived on the same street). Still, in 1900 it was only six miles from the Boston City Hall to the most distant suburb, a tiny distance when compared with the sprawl of Los Angeles or Calcutta today.

2. How does the modern metropolis in the United States differ from its equivalent in the Third World?

A metropolis is a major city with surrounding municipalities caught up in its economic and social orbit; there is no better example than Los Angeles today. The Los Angeles metropolitan area is 14 times larger than Boston at the turn of the twentieth century; its 12 million residents are dis­tributed relatively sparsely in low-density neighbourhoods of single-family units. According to the Census Bureau, Los Angeles constitutes a Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA), which is an interlinked cluster of one or more cities and their surrounding suburbs that together have a population of over one million people. The open land that once separated Los Angeles from San Diego has all but disappeared in urban sprawl. Sociologists use the term megalopolis to refer to two or more neighbouring metropolises whose geographical areas have sprawled so far that their outermost edges merge with one another.

Increased use of private automobiles is partly responsible for the sprawl of Los Angeles: houses, factories, and offices no longer need to be built along public transportation lines (land between the spokes was built up rapidly). From the air, Los Angeles appears as a grid of freeways carrying some 5.8 million automobile trips per day. The availability of this extensive network of freeways means that residents of Los Angeles sometimes must commute 50 or even 100 miles to and from work (nineteenth-century Bostonians would not have been able to commute more than 10 miles round trip). Most automobile trips do not go to or from " downtown"; offices, factories, shopping malls, and recreational facilities are scattered throughout the metropolitan region, often at the intersections of major freeways. One pattern established in nineteenth-century Boston persists in modern Los Angeles: residential segregation by race and income is a predominant feature of most American metropolises today.

The metropolis also can be found in the Third World today, but contrasts to Los Angeles are striking and depressing. For example, Third World cities like Calcutta are growing at an explosive rate because of high birth rates and continued streams of immigrants from rural areas; by contrast,

populations in many American cities have levelled off. The fastest growing neighbourhoods in Third World cities are slums for the poor, where overcrowded conditions and frequent outbreaks contagious and infectious diseases make life miserable. Calcutta is among the poorest cities of the world, and the huge number of people living in poverty is not likely to decrease as long as the city is plagued by economic stagnation; the port is dying and commerce is drying up. Although the; centre of Calcutta gives the appearance of prosperity, it is surrounded by at least a half-million people who live and die without homes.

3. How do urban ecologists explain patterns of urban land use?

Sociologists have developed two perspectives to explain why cities take certain " shapes, " that is, why the use of urban land (for residences, offices, or industry) follows recognisable patterns. One perspective is called urban ecology, which examines how the social uses of land are the result of an interaction between various groups of people and their physical/geographical environment. Urban ecologists have produced three models describing the development of urban spaces.

First, the concentric zone model suggests that the centre of cities is a business of offices and shops; it is surrounded by a transition area characterised by residential instability, low rentsm, and high crime rates. Beyond this transitional ring are residential neighbourhoods, with the poorest groups living closer to the city centre than wealthier groups. Second, the sector model also suggests that the business district is located at the centre of a city, but different land-use development tends to occur in specialised sectors along major transportation routes that radiate out from the centre. Heavy industry may settle along railroads; residential neighbourhoods may grow along free­ways. Third, the multiple nuclei model suggests that a city has not one centre (or nucleus) but a series of nuclei, each with a specialised function.

Urban ecologists have also studied processes of change in urban land use. The invasion/succes­sion model describes changes in urban neighbourhoods in terms of invasions by a new kind of resident, followed by competition for available land and ultimately by the emergence of a new use for the area. The history of Harlem illustrates the invasion/succession model. In the late nineteenth century, Harlem was among the most fashionable residential neighbourhoods of New York. Develop­ers hoped to maximise profits by rushing to build luxury apartment buildings. Soon, however, the supply of housing vastly exceeded demand, and developers were forced to lower rents in order to attract occupants. Many blacks, desperate for new housing, took advantage of the low rents and moved into Harlem. This racial transition did not immediately create the slum that people now often associate with Harlem. As the black residents found it increasingly difficult to meet rising rents, however, they took in boarders. Many luxury apartment buildings became transient rooming houses, and as population density swelled, the neighbourhood declined economically and socially.

The neighbourhood life cycle model is an extension of the invasion/succession model, in which neighbourhood change is seen as an extended series of invasion/succession episodes. Neighbourhoods move through the following cycle of stages: development (new apartment buildings were built in Harlem), transition (overbuilding took place in Harlem and property values fell)), downgrading (developers allowed buildings to deteriorate and many eventually abandoned them), thinning out (white residents of Harlem moved out), and renewal (housing in parts of Harlem has been upgrad­ed).

Contemporary urban ecologists see cities as integrated wholes, in which each part contributes some specialised function to the integration of the whole. As change occurs in one area (e.g., blacks moving into Harlem), other areas respond and adapt (perhaps new luxury housing was built in the Bronx to house affluent whites fleeing Harlem). Cities adapt in ways that improve their chances of survival in ever-changing physical and social environments. In the view of urban ecologists, the shape of cities arises from the process of functional adaptation to changing environments.