Urban Environment, Travel Behavior, Health, and Resident Satisfaction

Anzhelika Antipova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319741987
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the intersections of urban development, travel patterns, and health. Currently, there is a lack of research concerning the subjective dimensions of accessibility in urban environments and travel behavior, as well as travel-related outcomes. Antipova fills this gap in the scholarship by developing an analysis of satisfaction and perception-related indicators at an intraurban level. Specifically, she investigates various aspects of urban environment from the perspective of resident perception and satisfaction, as well as the relationship between urban environment, travel behavior, activity patterns, and traveler health.

© The Author(s) 2018

Anzhelika AntipovaUrban Environment, Travel Behavior, Health, and Resident Satisfactionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74198-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anzhelika Antipova¹

(1)

The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

End Abstract

1.1 Urban Growth

Prior to the 1820s, only a small percentage of the population lived in cities, which were restricted in physical area and mainly served as maritime trade centers for overseas shipping. In 1790, the first federal census showed that only 5.1% of the total population lived in cities (Miller 1973). In port cities, the occupations of merchants and skilled artisans and mechanics sustaining a shipping-based economy were important with most businesses and activities located close to the waterfront during the pre-1820s era. However, most people were primarily engaged in agriculture-related economic activities and lived outside the major cities (95%). Cities were growing very slowly at that time. New York City grew incrementally as the needs of the growing Atlantic economy and trade boom required construction of new docks, wharves, and piers and consequently a larger port. Starting in 1807, it finally experienced population growth so high that a layout was devised by a special commission authorized by the state of New York covering almost the entire area of Manhattan Island consisting of farms, villages, and open country terrain (Peterson 2003). In 1820, New York City’s population reached 100,000 and became the first “great city.” By 1840, two more cities acquired “great city” status—Baltimore and New Orleans (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Major city growth in the US in 1790–1990

Since the 1820s, urban growth notably exceeded population growth. As a national market economy developed, cities served as commercial, manufacturing, and financial centers. As inland markets opened up, port cities expanded their businesses giving rise to many new occupations including bankers, brokers, insurers, retailers, and so on. The urbanization of America has increased with the industrialization. From the 1840s onward, a new type of production emerged. Factories replaced old cottage industries (small shops producing cloth, garments, shoes, and other consumer goods). As the national market evolved and mechanization increased, factories achieved ever larger scale. Large-scale factory production required mass labor, which in turn required mass nearby housing. Mass production created a growing consumer goods market. Great urban centers emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the United States, the rate of population increase during the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries was mostly determined by rapid natural increase (more births than deaths) and population migration (more immigration than emigration) increasing the labor force and the size and diversity of urban population. Immigrants, many of them of European descent, supplied the labor demand in manufacturing and construction. The Lower East Side of New York and the West Side of Chicago once provided the cheapest rent quarters for the newly arrived European immigrants, while later the worst buildings were removed by demolition. The populations of New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia each surpassed the one million mark by 1890.

As cities grew, their physical form changed. All American cities, large and small, had a well-defined central core district. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the core business districts of the cities concentrated most commercial, financial, and retail uses including offices, banks, hotels, theaters, restaurants, department and specialty stores, and the like. Other functions of the downtown area included governmental and wholesale. All these downtown functions drew employees, clients, and visitors, with the city population relying upon the central core district for jobs, consumer goods, and services. The central core district kept its centrality advantage until the 1920s. Light industry and manufacturing was abundant near the central district and was also located along the freight railroads or major waterways or both. Industries included lumberyards, grain elevators, and bulk storage facilities (Peterson 2003).

Residencies also developed, and became diversified by class. Immigrants and common workers walked to the shops and factories and needed housing nearby. Crowded working-class neighborhoods consisting of cheap rental barracks, tenements, and wood-frame houses are seen in the photographs of the time blackened with coal smoke coming from adjacent industrial sites. Better apartments of the emerging lower middle class lined streetcar routes on both sides so that dwellers of these newer neighborhoods could ride the streetcar to work. Best lands near the central core and the edge of the city were occupied by single-family housing of upper-income class. The expensive inland enclaves and suburbs were often located along the streetcar lines or commuter railroads offering fast transportation.

1.2 Urbanization and Problems

Urbanization has brought with it many problems. With great city growth beginning since the 1820s, unregulated, unplanned growth soon produced unforeseen environmental stresses including dirty streets, poor air, recurrent fires, congested working and living conditions, and, at the worst, slums. Tenement houses promoted transmission of dangerous communicable diseases such as tuberculosis due to their crowded, congested conditions. Workers in large industrial cities in the mid-nineteenth century occupied the “railroad flats,” with limited sunlight and fresh air, with no water supply or sanitary facilities provided.

From the 1840s onward, cities turned into big congested places characterized by concentration and density. In health this manifested in frequent epidemics such as cholera and high mortality and morbidity. High rates of infant mortality and low life expectancy impacted population in a devastating way. Levy (2013) blames congestion for the natural decrease experienced for much of the nineteenth century by most large American cities: there were more deaths than births, but in fact, many cities increased due to in-migration. Cities of the nineteenth century had no water treatment facilities or sewage disposal.

Although the early twentieth century saw abatement of the worst overcrowding in urban slum neighborhoods compared with the nineteenth century, a substantial amount of substandard dwellings were still found in many large American cities. For example, St. Louis, where many structures erected in the previous century had inadequate facilities (e.g., no indoor toilets were installed but merely outhouses, plus only cold water or no running water was provided) (Hoffman 2012). In the early twentieth century, the coming of the automobile made roads dangerous to pedestrians and exposed people to noise and gasoline fumes.

Implementation of urban housing programs (described later in the chapter), especially the creation of the public housing program in 1937 and the enactment of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 , resulted in renovation and repair of existing structures so that the share of residential buildings in need of substantial physical repair greatly declined, while living conditions greatly improved. To compare, in 1940, 45% of American homes had inadequate facilities (that is, no running water, a flush toilet, or a private bath); the percentage of homes lacking these indoor facilities was just under 3% in 1980.

The level of crowding has declined steeply over the years 1940 to 2000. According to the US Historical Census of Housing (2011), the overall share of crowded households (occupied housing units are considered crowded if there is more than one person per room) declined over time: the percentage of crowding decreased from 20% in 1940 to 4.5% in 1980; however, it rose to 5.7% in 2000. The level of severely crowded homes (homes are considered severely crowded if there is more than 1.5 persons per room) changed in a similar way: in 1940, 9% of all homes were severely crowded, while only 1.4% of occupied housing units in 1980 were considered as such. This percentage rose again in 2000 to 2.7% (2.9 million were considered severely crowded).

Geographically, in 1940, states with high crowding rates were largely concentrated in the South. New Mexico had a crowding rate more than twice the national rate: 48% versus 20% national rate, followed by Alabama (41%), Mississippi (40%), Arizona (39%), Arkansas (37.8%), and Georgia (36.5%). The states in the Northeast and Midwest had lower than the national average crowding rate: Vermont had the lowest rate of about 10%, while New Hampshire, Delaware, Iowa, and Massachusetts each had a rate around 11%. The rates and geographical pattern have changed over time, for example, in 2000, the states with the highest crowding rates were Hawaii and California, each at about 15%, followed by Texas (9.4%), Washington , DC (8.9%), and Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, each with 8.6% compared with the national average crowding rate of 5.7% in the same year. The Northeastern states such as Maine (1.3%), West Virginia (1.3%), Vermont (1.4%), and New Hampshire (1.6%) each had low crowding rates (US Census 2011). Similarly, the number of people living in severely crowded conditions decreased from 9% in 1940 to less than 1.5% in 1980 (US Census 2011) (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

Housing crowding rates, 1940 and 2000

Recent rapid urbanization triggered many new environmental and socioeconomic problems. These include urban heat islands, energy consumption, air pollution, public health problems, deforestation, biodiversity, and the loss of high-quality agricultural lands (Clinton and Gong 2013; Zhang et al. 2013; DeFries et al. 2010). To lessen the impact of these and other problems cities are facing, understanding of urban growth is of critical importance to urban planners.

1.3 Urban Policy

While there is no simple definition, urban policy can be summarized as a

1. (1)
   Design and implementation of a set of complex activities in response to pressures of urban growth including the provision of essential public services and municipal infrastructure,
2. (2)
   Development of means to control and coordinate urban growth ,
3. (3)
   Creation of social and environmental programs designed to improve the effects of decline and poverty.

Contemporary urban policy emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as rapidly growing cities were industrializing. Within a single country, urban policy changes over time reflecting different goals and objectives (UN-Habitat 2014). Additionally, there is no agreement about what constitutes the most appropriate tools and techniques of urban policy.

The mid-twentieth century urban planners were seeking to develop a universal, rational, scientific research-based method to decision-making whereby different scenarios of the interactions between land use, transport, and housing within cities could be analyzed (a section on urban models is provided later in the chapter). Urban planners believed a scientific method should be employed for selecting the optimum solution for specified goals as well as predicting outcomes. On the one hand, research is determined by policy goals.

On ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Urban Environment: The Differences between the City in Europe and the United States
• 3. Local Amenities and Neighborhood Perception
• 4. City Structure and Spatial Patterns
• 5. The Relationship Between Urban Environment and Travel Behavior
• 6. The Relationship Between Urban Environment and Health
• 7. Conclusions
• Back Matter