Metropolis and Region

Otis Dudley Duncan, William Richard Scott, Stanley Lieberson, Beverly Davis Duncan, Hal H. Winsborough

• Publisher: RFF Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134001491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is Volume II of a series of six on Urban and Regional Economics originally published in 1960. This study discusses the future of urban developments in America. Has they already have megapolitan belts, sprawling regions of quasi-urban settlement stretching along coast lines or major transportation routes, current concepts of the community stand to be challenged. What will remain of local government and institutions if locality ceases to have any historically recognizable form? The situations described in this book pertain to the mid-century United States of some 150 million people. What serviceable image of metropolis and region can we fashion for a country of 300 million? The prospect for such a population size by the end of the twentieth century is implicit in current growth rates, as is the channeling of much of the growth into areas now called metropolitan or in process of transfer to that class.

Chapter 1
Metropolis and Region: A Mid-Century Bench Mark

At a time when journalists are making the "exploding metropolis" virtually a household word there is no need to plead the timeliness of an essay on metropolitanism. But though our topic is timely we are not primarily concerned to diagnose a social problem or to suggest remedies for the manifold ills of metropolitan areas. The maladies on this familiar roster—traffic congestion, housing obsolescence, frictions among shifting population groups, financial quandaries, governmental fragmentation, and the like—are most likely not fundamental problems in themselves. Rather, they symptomatically reflect an accumulation of lags in the mutual adjustment of units and functions of the metropolitan community—lags which are perhaps inevitable in a period of sporadic and unco-ordinated, though not unrelated, changes in community structure. Our large cities have grown rapidly. A century ago, on the eve of the Civil War, only New York (the present five boroughs) was passing the million mark; Philadelphia had somewhat more than a half million inhabitants, Baltimore just over 200,000, and five other cities between 100,000 and 200,000. By 1950, when population figures based on corporate boundaries had ceased to be meaningful, the country contained no less than 14 standard metropolitan areas of more than 1,000,000 inhabitants, another 19 with populations over a half million, and, altogether, 151 with populations of 100,000 or more. Such growth reflected the expansion of population and the peopling of the full continental area, the economic development of the country which brought about an astounding rise in productivity and levels of living, and—most important for our study—a concomitant reorganization of the economy. This reorganization entailed a progressively heightening interdependence among territorial units of the economy with the emergence of increasingly prominent focal points at which the patterns of interdependence were administered and mediated: in a word, "metropolises."

The history of metropolitan growth in the United States has been ably analyzed by a succession of investigators; the exposition of metropolitan organization as a late phase of economic development has been provided by pioneer thinkers; and some of the major concepts, including that of the metropolitan community itself, have been applied to demographic and economic data with illuminating results in previous studies. (Our review of this literature appears in chapter 4.) What then is the distinctive task we have set for ourselves? The answer is three-fold.

First, we seek to bring into juxtaposition some of the leading ideas which have been propounded on the nature of the metropolis, its role in the national economy, and its relation to the regional differentiation of the economy. The thesis we hope to establish is that a rich variety of conceptual tools is at hand for the analysis of such problems and that these concepts—oftentimes emanating from diverse and independent sources—have unsuspected ramifications and interconnections. We cannot pretend to have achieved a thoroughgoing articulation of these concepts or the perhaps drastic reformulation that the present profusion of ideas invites. But we may tentatively claim to provide a more comprehensive summary of pertinent theoretical insights than is readily available elsewhere.

Second, to test the cogency of ideas and formulations distilled from the literature, we attempt a comprehensive outline of the major structural characteristics of the United States metropolitan economy as of about 1950. Our work here goes beyond the existing excellent studies of functional types of cities and metropolitan dominance in regard to both detail of analysis and explicit orientation to the problem of the metropolis in relation to the regional differentiation of the economy.

Third, and incidental to the second objective, we provide a systematic survey of the industrial composition and regional relationships of the larger cities of the United States—those most likely to manifest distinctively metropolitan characteristics. The materials of this survey afford an account of where the evolution of the metropolitan economy had arrived by about 1950 and a bench mark for measuring the changes we can anticipate full well in the second half of the century. Although our survey is essentially cross-sectional, it provides the requisite starting point for dynamic investigations. Moreover, we feel that it may serve as an informative context for case studies of particular metropolises and particular regions which may be carried out by investigators working intensively with small segments of the economy.

We identify our approach as "ecological." It embodies what we regard as the soundest elements in the tradition of the discipline which has been most competently expounded in Hawley's Human Ecology (1950). Readers who are interested in the perspective taken by human ecology, as compared with alternative approaches to the study of human collective existence, may consult two other recent statements (Duncan, 1959a; Duncan and Schnore, 1959),^* for we do not intend to press the issue of disciplinary labels here. Suffice it to say that as far as we are concerned the salient characteristic—if not a unique one—of an ecological approach is its proclivity for analyzing human communities and economic systems in terms of their place in a total ecosystem, the major facets of which are populations adjusting to their environments by means of their technological equipment and patterns of social organization. But if the ecologist's orientation gives him an advantage in "seeing things whole," it also requires that he be willing to exploit the methods and discoveries of related disciplines—demography, economics, geography, and sociology—putting them not always to their original uses but rather to those suggested by his own conceptual framework.

One item remains for prefatory discussion before coming to the main business of this chapter, which is to provide the reader with a convenient summary and guide to the volume as a whole. It will doubtless appear from time to time that what we are up to is the presentation of invidious distinctions between cities that qualify as "metropolises" and those that do not. This is not our intention. Indeed, we have deliberately equivocated at several points on the question of formal criteria of metropolitan status. Such caution is well advised, for cities nowadays vie with one another for recognition as metropolises. One of the unanticipated by-products of the system of "standard metropolitan areas" established by federal statistical agencies a decade or so ago was the scramble of communities for recognition in that system. "There is, unfortunately, a tendency for local areas to view the establishment of an S.M.A. as a sort of gold star awarded by the federal government," stated one of the responsible officials (Shryock, 1957, p. 170). We can sympathize with anyone whose task is to attach labels and apply standard classifications, for it is the collective variety and individual uniqueness of human communities that impress most investigators.

Of one thing we can be sure: the metropolis is not a creation of the federal (or any other) government, nor is it an artifact of bureaucratic statistical procedures. The scientists of politics, in proof of the contrary, spend much time worrying about how to fit governments to the realities of metropolitan community structure. Actually, the metropolis was not "created" at all. It just grew—or, rather, it evolved over a period of several generations. The mechanisms of its evolution are imperfectly understood, but we have reason to think they are closely connected with the basic conditions of economic development. If this is true, then to understand the structure of a highly developed economy we must investigate the structure of its metropolitan communities; and to understand metropolitan communities we must examine them in the context of a more inclusive system. It also follows that such, investigation can never be finished, for the object of study changes its nature and functions continually in response to changes in the conditions that brought it into being.

Moreover, like any complex and polymorphic entity, the metropolis is subject to differing interpretations according to the perspective from which it is viewed. Some of the several ways in which previous investigators have examined metropolitanism are indicated in subsequent chapters. Our own perspective puts heavy emphasis on location and function—where metropolises are and what they do. No great originality is claimed for this approach to metropolitan study, but the particular combination of devices used in portraying the metropolitan organization of the United States economy as of about 1950 is perhaps somewhat distinctive.

Because our account of mid-century metropolitan structure is rather lengthy and involves a heterogeneous collection of analytical approaches, the reader wishing to avail himself of our materials may find use for a synoptic preview of concepts and findings. Accordingly, this chapter presents a summary of the volume as a whole along with comments that may be useful in deciding whether particular parts or chapters of the book warrant special attention for the reader's purposes.

Whatever meaning of "metropolis" is accepted, it is generally agreed that metropolises are a special kind or class of cities. In embarking on a study of metropolitan structure, therefore, we are well advised to take advantage of previous thinking and research on the general problem of urban location and functions (see chapter 2). In what may well be regarded as a classical statement on this problem, Harris and Ullman (1945, pp. 7-9) propose the following categories:

1. Cities as central places performing comprehensive services for a surrounding area....

2. Transport cities performing break-of£-bulk and allied services along transport routes, supported by areas which may be remote in distance but close in connection because of the city's strategic location on transport channels. . . .

3. Specialized-function cities performing one service such as mining, manufacturing, or recreation for large areas, including the general tributary areas of hosts of other cities.

Examination of the assumptions underlying this scheme and study of its implications will reveal that analysis of both functions and locations is facilitated by considering relationships between cities and regions— viewing cities as "punctiform agglomerations" (Lösch, 1954, p. 68) of activities and regions as extended areas wherein are carried out activities complementary to those of cities. Some implicit notions of city region relationships appear to underlie two types of research that have been pursued energetically during the last couple of decades or so: analysis of the urban "economic base" and classification of cities according to type of "functional specialization." It appears to be a workable hypothesis that nearly every city has a more or less standard repertoire of functions performed for its own inhabitants and for its immediate continuous "hinterland"—comprising the area which it serves and upon which it depends most closely, in conformity with the central-place scheme. But many cities have highly distinctive functions that make up important parts of their economic base and that involve them in ramified relationships with a variety of types of "regions," of which those specializing in resource-extracting activities are an important category, though one somewhat neglected in formulations dealing with the economic base and functional specialization. The kind of conceptual flexibility that the actual variety of city-region relationships requires is perhaps most nearly attained in the "interregional input-output" model of Isard (1951). Although, owing to limitations of data and the like, this model is not now directly applicable in its complete mathematical form, it provides a general framework for a "regional interpretation of the functions of the city" (Dickinson, 1947, p. 165). In the present study, we have made more direct use of the "input-output access" approach developed by Perloff et al. (1960, Part I).

Before narrowing our focus to the metropolis as a particular kind or class of city, it seems well to explore the implications of some ideas concerning the "urban hierarchy" (see chapter 3). Not a few writers have, implicitly or explicitly, regarded metropolises as the class of cities occupying the uppermost level in some kind of hierarchic arrangement. The hierarchy concept is significant for us in still another respect: it assumes or implies that a collection of cities, if properly delimited, may be regarded as a system. The investigator undertaking comparative urban research with the concept of a system of cities in mind will be interested in properties of the system as such, rather than merely the varying traits of individual cities.

The hierarchy notion has been developed deductively by elaborating the implications of the concept of central place, referred to above. On the empirical side, evidence for the heuristic value of the hierarchy concept has been adduced in three different, but convergent, ways. Some writers have attributed much importance to the "rank-size rule" —the finding that many national systems of cities have a distribution of city sizes that can be described rather well by a Pareto curve. Second, geographers in particular have plunged directly into the problem of identifying levels in the urban hierarchy on the basis of data indicating the kinds of services rendered by and facilities found in cities. It is perhaps their cartographic interest that has motivated such attempts to classify cities into a small number of typological groupings on the assumption that a hierarchy exists. Finally, evidence for a hierarchic pattern has been forthcoming in a number of studies designed to reveal empirical correlates of community size. Our own empirical materials in chapter 3 derive from this last approach, being concerned with patterns of variation in industrial composition of cities in relation to their size.

Much of the tendency to hierarchic pattern observed in industry statistics arrayed by city size apparently is due to variation in the proportions employed in certain broad industry categories rather than the proportions in individual industries within these categories. Categories manifesting a tendency to decrease in relative importance with increasing city size include local services (those assumed to have a service area largely circumscribed by the boundaries of the urban center itself), extractive activities, and processing industries (manufacturing industries, a sizable proportion of whose inputs are raw materials). By contrast, non-local services (those with more or less extensive service areas beyond the city boundaries) and fabricating industries (whose inputs are primarily already processed or partially fabricated materials) tend to increase in relative importance with increasing city size. Individual industries within these broad categories exhibit differences in degree of urbanization which, for the most part, are consistent with this summary of the facts.

Intensive study of the industry distributions leads to certain findings which are consistent with the notion that the urban hierarchy in the United States, as far as manufacturing is concerned, is a truly national one. In regard to services, however, it may be meaningful to think of broad regions as having more or less self-contained hierarchies of cities, although some kinds of service industries clearly are organized on a national basis. These conclusions are phrased cautiously, since other interpretations of the evidence are possible.

Although many of the findings are not inconsistent with deductions from the central-place scheme, it would be going too far to claim that they validate central-place theory in any strict sense. Moreover, it is possible to identify certain aspects of the variation of industry composition with city size that call for explanatory principles other than those supplied by the centrality principle. Apparently, large cities generate certain distinctive types of needs or demands, which are then satisfied locally by specialized economic units. The size of the local market in big cities is sufficient to permit both a finer division of labor than is possible in small cities and the realization of numerous "external economies of scale," quite apart from the size of the outlying areas served by those cities (the factor emphasized in central-place formulations). In any case, we may conclude that the evidence supporting the notion of urban hierarchy is strong, and that the factors producing the hierarchic tendency must somehow be closely related to size of community. This evidence justifies the emphasis placed on size as an indicator of metropolitan status in later chapters. At the same time, one must recognize the strong possibility that no single dimension of variation should be overemphasized if a realistic description of a hierarchic system is to be secured.

Further development of the urban hierarchy notion may some day produce a definitive concept of metropolitanism. In the meantime, it is possible to consider the nature of the metropolis without resolving all the issues associated with the hierarchy concept. Chapter 4 reviews some outstanding statements on criteria of metropolitanism and some schemes for delimiting metropolitan community areas. Emphasis is placed on the classic formulation of Gras (1922a, b). Gras thought of the metropolis as an industrially developed city strategically located at a focus of a transportation network—a major city which organizes the hinterland market and mediates inter-regional exchanges and which, finally and quite symptomatically, provides the requisite financial facilities for its own commercial and industrial activities and those of its hinterland. Less relevant here is the complementary idea of the metropolis (developed especially by McKenzie, 1933, and Bogue, 1949) as a type of settlement pattern. Gras recognized that his formulation lacked refinement and specificity, for he urged that detailed statistical investigations be conducted to validate his criteria of metropolitanism. In response to this need, the suggestive study by Vance and Smith (1954) made ingenious use of six indicators—wholesale and retail sales, business services receipts, bank clearings, number of manufacturing branch offices, and value added by manufacture—to identify the metropolitan centers of the South and to indicate how these fit into the national pattern of intermetropolitan relationships.

The problem of delimiting "metropolitan regions" or "metropolitan community areas," unfortunately, has seldom been tackled in connection with a comprehensive study of city-region relationships. For this reason, although several of the published schemes of metropolitan regions reviewed in chapter 4 have considerable value and merit careful study, they often give the appearance of excessive artificiality. Moreover, reasons may be given for supposing that the conventional distinction between "uniform regions" and "nodal regions" (of which metropolitan regions are one species) has defects from a heuristic standpoint. While some types of relative "uniformity" are rather direct reflections of environmental factors, others clearly have a functional basis and thus are by no means unrelated to "nodal" structure. It is often pointed out that "nodal regions" may be heterogeneous owing to inclusion of segments of two or more "uniform regions," but it is also true that some types of metropolis may carve out their hinterlands within an area of relative uniformity. Indeed, this is the assumption behind the whole idea of central-place functions. But apart from this kind of conceptual objection to previous formulations on metropolitan regions, it is important to observe that each kind of metropolitan function may entail a distinctive type of regional relationship. In many instances it is quite clear that some of the more important of these relationships have little connection with the "hinterland" of the metropolis as recognized in schemes of metropolitan regions. In short, we contend that if the problem of metropolis-region relationships is attacked with the aid of the best current theory concerning location and functions of cities, the received image of metropolitan regions will have to be modified considerably.

Some implications of the verbal statement of metropolitan characteristics and functions are put to the test with statistical data in chapter 5. In line with the emphasis of Gras on financial functions, attention is first given to the specialization of cities in lending and the spatial patterns of bank loans—taking such loans as a significant and accessible aspect of the total financial complex. The well-known preeminence of New York Ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Metropolis and Region: A Mid-Century Bench Mark
• Part I. The Metropolis and Its Functions
• Part II. Metropolitan Dominance: Hinterland Activities
• Part III. Industry Structure and Regional Relationships
• Part IV. Fifty Major Cities and Their Regional Relationships
• Appendix: Sources and Adjustment of Data
• Bibliography
• Index