THE GROWTH OF THE CITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO A RESEARCH PROJECT
The outstanding fact of modern society is the growth of great cities.
Nowhere else have the enormous changes which the machine industry has
made in our social life registered themselves with such obviousness as
in the cities. In the United States the transition from a rural to an
urban civilization, though beginning later than in Europe, has taken
place, if not more rapidly and completely, at any rate more logically in
its most characteristic forms.
All the manifestations of modern life which are peculiarly urban—the
skyscraper, the subway, the department store, the daily newspaper, and
social work—are characteristically American. The more subtle changes in
our social life, which in their cruder manifestations are termed “social
problems,” problems that alarm and bewilder us, as divorce, delinquency,
and social unrest, are to be found in their most acute forms in our
largest American cities. The profound and “subversive” forces which have
wrought these changes are measured in the physical growth and expansion
of cities. That is the significance of the comparative statistics of
Weber, Bücher, and other students.
These statistical studies, although dealing mainly with the effects of
urban growth, brought out into clear relief certain distinctive
characteristics of urban as compared with rural populations. The larger
proportion of women to men in the cities than in the open country, the
greater percentage of youth and middle-aged, the higher ratio of the
foreign-born, the increased heterogeneity of occupation increase with
the growth of the city and profoundly alter its social structure. These
variations in the composition of population are indicative of all the
changes going on in the social organization of the community. In fact,
these changes are a part of the growth of the city and suggest the
nature of the processes of growth.
The only aspect of growth adequately described by Bücher and Weber was
the rather obvious process of the _aggregation_ of urban population.
Almost as overt a process, that of _expansion_, has been investigated
from a different and very practical point of view by groups interested
in city planning, zoning, and regional surveys. Even more significant
than the increasing density of urban population is its correlative
tendency to overflow, and so to extend over wider areas, and to
incorporate these areas into a larger communal life. This paper,
therefore, will treat first of the expansion of the city, and then of
the less-known processes of urban metabolism and mobility which are
closely related to expansion.
EXPANSION AS PHYSICAL GROWTH
The expansion of the city from the standpoint of the city plan, zoning,
and regional surveys is thought of almost wholly in terms of its
physical growth. Traction studies have dealt with the development of
transportation in its relation to the distribution of population
throughout the city. The surveys made by the Bell Telephone Company and
other public utilities have attempted to forecast the direction and the
rate of growth of the city in order to anticipate the future demands for
the extension of their services. In the city plan the location of parks
and boulevards, the widening of traffic streets, the provision for a
civic center, are all in the interest of the future control of the
physical development of the city.
This expansion in area of our largest cities is now being brought
forcibly to our attention by the Plan for the Study of New York and Its
Environs, and by the formation of the Chicago Regional Planning
Association, which extends the metropolitan district of the city to a
radius of 50 miles, embracing 4,000 square miles of territory. Both are
attempting to measure expansion in order to deal with the changes that
accompany city growth. In England, where more than one-half of the
inhabitants live in cities having a population of 100,000 and over, the
lively appreciation of the bearing of urban expansion on social
organization is thus expressed by C. B. Fawcett:
One of the most important and striking developments in the growth of
the urban populations of the more advanced peoples of the world during
the last few decades has been the appearance of a number of vast urban
aggregates, or conurbations, far larger and more numerous than the
great cities of any preceding age. These have usually been formed by
the simultaneous expansion of a number of neighboring towns, which
have grown out toward each other until they have reached a practical
coalescence in one continuous urban area. Each such conurbation still
has within it many nuclei of denser town growth, most of which
represent the central areas of the various towns from which it has
grown, and these nuclear patches are connected by the less densely
urbanized areas which began as suburbs of these towns. The latter are
still usually rather less continuously occupied by buildings, and
often have many open spaces.
These great aggregates of town dwellers are a new feature in the
distribution of man over the earth. At the present day there are from
thirty to forty of them, each containing more than a million people,
whereas only a hundred years ago there were, outside the great centers
of population on the waterways of China, not more than two or three.
Such aggregations of people are phenomena of great geographical and
social importance; they give rise to new problems in the organization
of the life and well-being of their inhabitants and in their varied
activities. Few of them have yet developed a social consciousness at
all proportionate to their magnitude, or fully realized themselves as
definite groupings of people with many common interests, emotions and
thoughts.[19]
In Europe and America the tendency of the great city to expand has been
recognized in the term “the metropolitan area of the city,” which far
overruns its political limits, and in the case of New York and Chicago,
even state lines. The metropolitan area may be taken to include urban
territory that is physically contiguous, but it is coming to be defined
by that facility of transportation that enables a business man to live
in a suburb of Chicago and to work in the loop, and his wife to shop at
Marshall Field’s and attend grand opera in the Auditorium.
EXPANSION AS A PROCESS
No study of expansion as a process has yet been made, although the
materials for such a study and intimations of different aspects of the
process are contained in city planning, zoning, and regional surveys.
The typical processes of the expansion of the city can best be
illustrated, perhaps, by a series of concentric circles, which may be
numbered to designate both the successive zones of urban extension and
the types of areas differentiated in the process of expansion.
This chart represents an ideal construction of the tendencies of any
town or city to expand radially from its central business district—on
the map “The Loop” (I). Encircling the downtown area there is normally
an area in transition, which is being invaded by business and light
manufacture (II). A third area (III) is inhabited by the workers in
industries who have escaped from the area of deterioration (II) but who
desire to live within easy access of their work. Beyond this zone is the
“residential area” (IV) of high-class apartment buildings or of
exclusive “restricted” districts of single family dwellings. Still
farther, out beyond the city limits, is the commuters’ zone (V)—suburban
areas, or satellite cities—within a thirty- to sixty-minute ride of the
central business district.
This chart brings out clearly the main fact of expansion, namely, the
tendency of each inner zone to extend its area by the invasion of the
next outer zone. This aspect of expansion may be called _succession_, a
process which has been studied in detail in plant ecology. If this chart
is applied to Chicago, all four of these zones were in its early history
included in the circumference of the inner zone, the present business
district. The present boundaries of the area of deterioration were not
many years ago those of the zone now inhabited by independent
wage-earners, and within the memories of thousands of Chicagoans
contained the residences of the “best families.” It hardly needs to be
added that neither Chicago nor any other city fits perfectly into this
ideal scheme. Complications are introduced by the lake front, the
Chicago River, railroad lines, historical factors in the location of
industry, the relative degree of the resistance of communities to
invasion, etc.
[Illustration:
CHART I
The GROWTH OF THE CITY
]
Besides extension and succession, the general process of expansion in
urban growth involves the antagonistic and yet complementary processes
of concentration and decentralization. In all cities there is the
natural tendency for local and outside transportation to converge in the
central business district. In the downtown section of every large city
we expect to find the department stores, the skyscraper office
buildings, the railroad stations, the great hotels, the theaters, the
art museum, and the city hall. Quite naturally, almost inevitably, the
economic, cultural, and political life centers here. The relation of
centralization to the other processes of city life may be roughly gauged
by the fact that over half a million people daily enter and leave
Chicago’s “loop.” More recently sub-business centers have grown up in
outlying zones. These “satellite loops” do not, it seems, represent the
“hoped for” revival of the neighborhood, but rather a telescoping of
several local communities into a larger economic unity. The Chicago of
yesterday, an agglomeration of country towns and immigrant colonies, is
undergoing a process of reorganization into a centralized decentralized
system of local communities coalescing into sub-business areas visibly
or invisibly dominated by the central business district. The actual
processes of what may be called centralized decentralization are now
being studied in the development of the chain store, which is only one
illustration of the change in the basis of the urban organization.[20]
Expansion, as we have seen, deals with the physical growth of the city,
and with the extension of the technical services that have made city
life not only livable, but comfortable, even luxurious. Certain of these
basic necessities of urban life are possible only through a tremendous
development of communal existence. Three millions of people in Chicago
are dependent upon one unified water system, one giant gas company, and
one huge electric light plant. Yet, like most of the other aspects of
our communal urban life, this economic co-operation is an example of
co-operation without a shred of what the “spirit of co-operation” is
commonly thought to signify. The great public utilities are a part of
the mechanization of life in great cities, and have little or no other
meaning for social organization.
Yet the processes of expansion, and especially the rate of expansion,
may be studied not only in the physical growth and business development,
but also in the consequent changes in the social organization and in
personality types. How far is the growth of the city, in its physical
and technical aspects, matched by a natural but adequate readjustment in
the social organization? What, for a city, is a normal rate of
expansion, a rate of expansion with which controlled changes in the
social organization might successfully keep pace?
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND DISORGANIZATION AS PROCESSES OF METABOLISM
These questions may best be answered, perhaps, by thinking of urban
growth as a resultant of organization and disorganization analogous to
the anabolic and katabolic processes of metabolism in the body. In what
way are individuals incorporated into the life of a city? By what
process does a person become an organic part of his society? The natural
process of acquiring culture is by birth. A person is born into a family
already adjusted to a social environment—in this case the modern city.
The natural rate of increase of population most favorable for
assimilation may then be taken as the excess of the birth-rate over the
death-rate, but is this the normal rate of city growth? Certainly,
modern cities have increased and are increasing in population at a far
higher rate. However, the natural rate of growth may be used to measure
the disturbances of metabolism caused by any excessive increase, as
those which followed the great influx of southern Negroes into northern
cities since the war. In a similar way all cities show deviations in
composition by age and sex from a standard population such as that of
Sweden, unaffected in recent years by any great emigration or
immigration. Here again, marked variations, as any great excess of males
over females, or of females over males, or in the proportion of
children, or of grown men or women, are symptomatic of abnormalities in
social metabolism.
Normally the processes of disorganization and organization may be
thought of as in reciprocal relationship to each other, and as
co-operating in a moving equilibrium of social order toward an end
vaguely or definitely regarded as progressive. So far as disorganization
points to reorganization and makes for more efficient adjustment,
disorganization must be conceived not as pathological, but as normal.
Disorganization as preliminary to reorganization of attitudes and
conduct is almost invariably the lot of the newcomer to the city, and
the discarding of the habitual, and often of what has been to him the
moral, is not infrequently accompanied by sharp mental conflict and
sense of personal loss. Oftener, perhaps, the change gives sooner or
later a feeling of emancipation and an urge toward new goals.
[Illustration:
CHART II
URBAN AREAS
]
In the expansion of the city a process of distribution takes place which
sifts and sorts and relocates individuals and groups by residence and
occupation. The resulting differentiation of the cosmopolitan American
city into areas is typically all from one pattern, with only interesting
minor modifications. Within the central business district or on an
adjoining street is the “main stem” of “hobohemia,” the teeming Rialto
of the homeless migratory man of the Middle West.[21] In the zone of
deterioration encircling the central business section are always to be
found the so-called “slums” and “bad lands,” with their submerged
regions of poverty, degradation, and disease, and their underworlds of
crime and vice. Within a deteriorating area are rooming-house districts,
the purgatory of “lost souls.” Near by is the Latin Quarter, where
creative and rebellious spirits resort. The slums are also crowded to
overflowing with immigrant colonies—the Ghetto, Little Sicily,
Greektown, Chinatown—fascinatingly combining old world heritages and
American adaptations. Wedging out from here is the Black Belt, with its
free and disorderly life. The area of deterioration, while essentially
one of decay, of stationary or declining population, is also one of
regeneration, as witness the mission, the settlement, the artists’
colony, radical centers—all obsessed with the vision of a new and better
world.
The next zone is also inhabited predominatingly by factory and shop
workers, but skilled and thrifty. This is an area of second immigrant
settlement, generally of the second generation. It is the region of
escape from the slum, the _Deutschland_ of the aspiring Ghetto family.
For _Deutschland_ (literally “Germany”) is the name given, half in envy,
half in derision, to that region beyond the Ghetto where successful
neighbors appear to be imitating German Jewish standards of living. But
the inhabitant of this area in turn looks to the “Promised Land” beyond,
to its residential hotels, its apartment-house region, its “satellite
loops,” and its “bright light” areas.
This differentiation into natural economic and cultural groupings gives
form and character to the city. For segregation offers the group, and
thereby the individuals who compose the group, a place and a rôle in the
total organization of city life. Segregation limits development in
certain directions, but releases it in others. These areas tend to
accentuate certain traits, to attract and develop their kind of
individuals, and so to become further differentiated.
The division of labor in the city likewise illustrates disorganization,
reorganization, and increasing differentiation. The immigrant from rural
communities in Europe and America seldom brings with him economic skill
of any great value in our industrial, commercial, or professional life.
Yet interesting occupational selection has taken place by nationality,
explainable more by racial temperament or circumstance than by old-world
economic background, as Irish policemen, Greek ice-cream parlors,
Chinese laundries, Negro porters, Belgian janitors, etc.
The facts that in Chicago one million (996,589) individuals gainfully
employed reported 509 occupations, and that over 1,000 men and women in
_Who’s Who_ gave 116 different vocations, give some notion of how in the
city the minute differentiation of occupation “analyzes and sifts the
population, separating and classifying the diverse elements.”[22] These
figures also afford some intimation of the complexity and complication
of the modern industrial mechanism and the intricate segregation and
isolation of divergent economic groups. Interrelated with this economic
division of labor is a corresponding division into social classes and
into cultural and recreational groups. From this multiplicity of groups,
with their different patterns of life, the person finds his congenial
social world and—what is not feasible in the narrow confines of a
village—may move and live in widely separated, and perchance
conflicting, worlds. Personal disorganization may be but the failure to
harmonize the canons of conduct of two divergent groups.
If the phenomena of expansion and metabolism indicate that a moderate
degree of disorganization may and does facilitate social organization,
they indicate as well that rapid urban expansion is accompanied by
excessive increases in disease, crime, disorder, vice, insanity, and
suicide, rough indexes of social disorganization. But what are the
indexes of the causes, rather than of the effects, of the disordered
social metabolism of the city? The excess of the actual over the natural
increase of population has already been suggested as a criterion. The
significance of this increase consists in the immigration into a
metropolitan city like New York and Chicago of tens of thousands of
persons annually. Their invasion of the city has the effect of a tidal
wave inundating first the immigrant colonies, the ports of first entry,
dislodging thousands of inhabitants who overflow into the next zone, and
so on and on until the momentum of the wave has spent its force on the
last urban zone. The whole effect is to speed up expansion, to speed up
industry, to speed up the “junking” process in the area of deterioration
(II). These internal movements of the population become the more
significant for study. What movement is going on in the city, and how
may this movement be measured? It is easier, of course, to classify
movement within the city than to measure it. There is the movement from
residence to residence, change of occupation, labor turnover, movement
to and from work, movement for recreation and adventure. This leads to
the question: What is the significant aspect of movement for the study
of the changes in city life? The answer to this question leads directly
to the important distinction between movement and mobility.
MOBILITY AS THE PULSE OF THE COMMUNITY
Movement, per se, is not an evidence of change or of growth. In fact,
movement may be a fixed and unchanging order of motion, designed to
control a constant situation, as in routine movement. Movement that is
significant for growth implies a change of movement in response to a new
stimulus or situation. Change of movement of this type is called
_mobility_. Movement of the nature of routine finds its typical
expression in work. Change of movement, or mobility, is
characteristically expressed in adventure. The great city, with its
“bright lights,” its emporiums of novelties and bargains, its palaces of
amusement, its underworld of vice and crime, its risks of life and
property from accident, robbery, and homicide, has become the region of
the most intense degree of adventure and danger, excitement and thrill.
Mobility, it is evident, involves change, new experience, stimulation.
Stimulation induces a response of the person to those objects in his
environment which afford expression for his wishes. For the person, as
for the physical organism, stimulation is essential to growth. Response
to stimulation is wholesome so long as it is a correlated _integral_
reaction of the entire personality. When the reaction is _segmental_,
that is, detached from, and uncontrolled by, the organization of
personality, it tends to become disorganizing or pathological. That is
why stimulation for the sake of stimulation, as in the restless pursuit
of pleasure, partakes of the nature of vice.
The mobility of city life, with its increase in the number and intensity
of stimulations, tends inevitably to confuse and to demoralize the
person. For an essential element in the mores and in personal morality
is consistency, consistency of the type that is natural in the social
control of the primary group. Where mobility is the greatest, and where
in consequence primary controls break down completely, as in the zone of
deterioration in the modern city, there develop areas of demoralization,
of promiscuity, and of vice.
In our studies of the city it is found that areas of mobility are also
the regions in which are found juvenile delinquency, boys’ gangs, crime,
poverty, wife desertion, divorce, abandoned infants, vice.
These concrete situations show why mobility is perhaps the best index of
the state of metabolism of the city. Mobility may be thought of in more
than a fanciful sense, as the “pulse of the community.” Like the pulse
of the human body, it is a process which reflects and is indicative of
all the changes that are taking place in the community, and which is
susceptible of analysis into elements which may be stated numerically.
The elements entering into mobility may be classified under two main
heads: (1) the state of mutability of the person, and (2) the number and
kind of contacts or stimulations in his environment. The mutability of
city populations varies with sex and age composition, the degree of
detachment of the person from the family and from other groups. All
these factors may be expressed numerically. The new stimulations to
which a population responds can be measured in terms of change of
movement or of increasing contacts. Statistics on the movement of urban
population may only measure routine, but an increase at a higher ratio
than the increase of population measures mobility. In 1860 the horse-car
lines of New York City carried about 50,000,000 passengers; in 1890 the
trolley-cars (and a few surviving horse-cars) transported about
500,000,000; in 1921, the elevated, subway, surface, and electric and
steam suburban lines carried a total of more than 2,500,000,000
passengers.[23] In Chicago the total annual rides per capita on the
surface and elevated lines were 164 in 1890; 215 in 1900; 320 in 1910;
and 338 in 1921. In addition, the rides per capita on steam and electric
suburban lines almost doubled between 1916 (23) and 1921 (41), and the
increasing use of the automobile must not be overlooked.[24] For
example, the number of automobiles in Illinois increased from 131,140 in
1915 to 833,920 in 1923.[25]
Mobility may be measured not only by these changes of movement, but also
by increase of contacts. While the increase of population of Chicago in
1912–22 was less than 25 per cent (23.6 per cent), the increase of
letters delivered to Chicagoans was double that (49.6 per cent)—(from
693,084,196 to 1,038,007,854).[26] In 1912 New York had 8.8 telephones;
in 1922, 16.9 per 100 inhabitants. Boston had, in 1912, 10.1 telephones;
ten years later, 19.5 telephones per 100 inhabitants. In the same decade
the figures for Chicago increased from 12.3 to 21.6 per 100
population.[27] But increase of the use of the telephone is probably
more significant than increase in the number of telephones. The number
of telephone calls in Chicago increased from 606,131,928 in 1914 to
944,010,586 in 1922,[28] an increase of 55.7 per cent, while the
population increased only 13.4 per cent.
Land values, since they reflect movement, afford one of the most
sensitive indexes of mobility. The highest land values in Chicago are at
the point of greatest mobility in the city, at the corner of State and
Madison streets, in the Loop. A traffic count showed that at the rush
period 31,000 people an hour, or 210,000 men and women in sixteen and
one-half hours, passed the southwest corner. For over ten years land
values in the Loop have been stationary, but in the same time they have
doubled, quadrupled, and even sextupled in the strategic corners of the
“satellite loops,”[29] an accurate index of the changes which have
occurred. Our investigations so far seem to indicate that variations in
land values, especially where correlated with differences in rents,
offer perhaps the best single measure of mobility, and so of all the
changes taking place in the expansion and growth of the city.
In general outline, I have attempted to present the point of view and
methods of investigation which the department of sociology is employing
in its studies in the growth of the city, namely, to describe urban
expansion in terms of extension, succession, and concentration; to
determine how expansion disturbs metabolism when disorganization is in
excess of organization; and, finally, to define mobility and to propose
it as a measure both of expansion and metabolism, susceptible to precise
quantitative formulation, so that it may be regarded almost literally as
the pulse of the community. In a way, this statement might serve as an
introduction to any one of five or six research projects under way in
the department.[30] The project, however, in which I am directly engaged
is an attempt to apply these methods of investigation to a cross-section
of the city—to put this area, as it were, under the microscope, and so
to study in more detail and with greater control and precision the
processes which have been described here in the large. For this purpose
the West Side Jewish community has been selected. This community
includes the so-called “Ghetto,” or area of first settlement, and
Lawndale, the so-called “Deutschland,” or area of second settlement.
This area has certain obvious advantages for this study, from the
standpoint of expansion, metabolism, and mobility. It exemplifies the
tendency to expansion radially from the business center of the city. It
is now relatively a homogeneous cultural group. Lawndale is itself an
area in flux, with the tide of migrants still flowing in from the Ghetto
and a constant egress to more desirable regions of the residential zone.
In this area, too, it is also possible to study how the expected outcome
of this high rate of mobility in social and personal disorganization is
counteracted in large measure by the efficient communal organization of
the Jewish community.
ERNEST W. BURGESS