Multi-Centered Metropolitan Region

The City

• The city is a form of development about 10,000 Years Old– High population density– Bounded– Surrounded by supportive agricultural

production

New Patterns of Urban Settlement

• Since the period of extensive industrialization in the 1800s there has been a trend towards the wealthy to move to the hinterland and have a place in the city too

• As transportation technologies have changed the boundaries of settlement have been pushed further and further away from the city center

• Yet the city remains as a central place with a full range of important employment, goods, and services

New Patterns of Urban Settlement

• Many simplistically claim that the mass-production of the automobile has changed settlement patterns and caused sprawl

• More accurately it was a series of forces after WWII– Economic prosperity and growing middle class– Government subsidies for mortgages– Zoning and utilities funding that favored new

construction– Creation of a modern highway system (for

defense)

New Patterns of Urban Settlement

• This new growth form has surrounded older existing cities in some cases and other cases new style cities have arisen

• But calling them cities in the strictest sense is inaccurate.

• This is because the central places of these “cities” have spun off many of its functions to other surrounding centers

New Patterns of Urban Settlement

• The traditional central city still exists and remains important but is a more specialized place business and consumption and its population is less representative of the society as a whole

• Nearby suburban malls are centers of shopping• Centers of Manufacturing and high-tech company

campuses are located in the suburbs in “industrial parks”

• Centers of residential developments and large tracts of housing become the bedroom communities of the region

• This is not a city but a “multi-centered metropolitan region”

Confusion Among Scholars

• This is not the settlement form we have referred to as a city

• “We no longer live in a spatial form of centrality, like an edge city, but a sprawling region of development with many separate centers with their own levels of functional specialization.”

• The government (US Bureau of the Census) does not recognize MMRs—too expensive to determine– Many scholars have not abandoned the central

city as the fundamental unit of urban study for this reason

– MSAs do not really convey this complexity

Population Movement

• De-centralization refers to the process of the city loosing population and functions that they traditionally held

• Re-centralization refers to the process where new centers are developed along with distinct forms of social organization

• York City and Baltimore are good examples of this