New World Urban Patterns

Colonial cities did exhibit a systematic pattern of dispersal, of spatial arrangement with respect to one another, but they showed no signs of the remarkable urban transformation that would take place west of the Mississippi in the nineteenth century. In the colonial period there were small but functionally important cities with a scattering of smaller places: an unpredictable array of settlements preceded the predictable hierarchical ordering of village, town, city, and metropolis that would come to characterize the nineteenth century.

Five important urban centers existed in the colonies by the early eighteenth century, each dominating its coastal region. These cities supported no carefully articulated network of smaller places: they tended to engross all possible urban activities. Until about 1820, for instance, Philadelphia's "preponderance hindered the growth of other towns." Only those backcountry areas separated by land (rather than by navigable waterways) escaped the pull of the big city and developed urban functions.^[15] On or near the coast, Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston often had closer ties to London than to one another. Each linked their agricultural hinterland with London merchants and markets rather than forming a single American network. During the colonial period, each city's commercial and transshipping facilities reflected the individual character of the people and agriculture it served. From Puritan Boston to the somewhat more tolerant Newport, from Dutch New York to Quaker Philadelphia and Anglican Charleston, each city served as an undifferentiated service center, concentrating legal, mercantile, and shipping services and colonial wealth in a seaport entrepôt.

These colonial cities did not form a coherent hierarchy. As the geographer Walter Christaller proposes, one expects a mature urban network to form a set of interlocked hexagons, where urban centers of diminishing size, complexity and hinterland array themselves like a honeycomb around one another.^[16] In such a system one would expect to find differentiated services at each level of urban settlement, with the urban network itself promoting opportunities

for singular economic specialization. In the colonies, the economic specialization of nineteenth-century factory towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, for instance, was nowhere to be seen, with the exception, perhaps, of a fishing port like Nantucket. Nor, while there were some smaller cities, like Nantucket or Salem, did the colonial cities conform to the spatial and power relationships that would order nineteenth-century urban geography.

Modern geographers conceptualize cities as being systematically related to one another within a spatial network of social and economic ties. Cities, in this view, exist in mutual interdependence, exerting as much, or more, influence on one another as they do on the surrounding hinterlands. This systematic perspective of regional geographers apprehends whole regions of cities and towns as aggregates of actors, radically dissociated from the immediate countryside. "The most immediate part of the environment of any city is other cities," Brian Berry asserted in the early 1960s. The questions such geographers address, not surprisingly, have been mainly oriented toward nonhistorical problems and explanations, testing, for instance, various hypotheses explaining urban hinterland formation or relating central communications dominance to the advantages of central urban locations.^[17] In some ways this approach resembles the urban biographies writ large, for the notion of a city as one actor in a regular system of actors is indeed anthropomorphic. By looking at cities as aggregates of actors we can build a systematic, descriptive account of the development and change in the larger urban system, though it should be clear that such a historical description makes no claims to scientific status, unlike regional science, which studies the economic geography of cities and regional city systems.

Within this systematic geographical framework the two basic modes of urban history may be incorporated: the new urban history, with more comparative and structural concepts, and urban biography, with its greater emphasis on unique locales and site characteristics. For instance, contemporaries made much of the rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago in the 1850s and 1860s. The major western city of the 1840s and 1850s, St. Louis nonetheless lost in the growth contest to what at first seemed like an upstart, Chicago. Both grew astonishingly. The population of St. Louis leapt from 16,469 in 1840 to 310,864 in 1870; that of Chicago exploded from 4,470 to 298,977 in the same decades. St. Louisans correctly

read the growth rates as portents of Chicago's bigger, hence brighter, future. By the turn of the century, Chicago had expanded almost six times, to 1.7 million people. St. Louis had not quite doubled, to somewhat under 600,000, and it was already lamenting its failure to become the population center it had aspired to be. This decline continued and by 1980, the city's population had actually decreased to 453,000, though its metropolitan area was home to 2.3 million. But although they competed for railroads, immigrants, and business, Chicago and St. Louis also needed one another. In the long run, Chicago's port and market benefited St. Louis, even though St. Louis no longer occupied its preeminent frontier position. Both cities grew together, mutually benefiting each other through the flourishing network of smaller cities and farms, tied by equally thriving water and rail transport, which grew between them. Both needed smaller cities, towns, villages. And even the most rural dwellers and farmers needed the cities. One study, for instance, has shown how the farmers surrounding mid-nineteenth century Madison, Wisconsin, choose to settle nearer rather than farther from town.^[18]

Schematized by German geographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the notion of urban networks has considerable relevance in helping us explore the dynamics of American urban expansion. Yet some of the more rigid theorizing of these geographers and location theorists lacks any historical sense and displays little relationship to reality.^[19] Sometimes the models seem more prescriptive than descriptive, but they can nonetheless aid in historical understanding. A model that stipulates how cities should have been located, what size they should have attained given their location, and what their economic functions should have been, gives us some context in which to place the cityscapes that actually unfolded. The concept of networks does not so much attempt to explain, but rather to highlight and describe critical shifts in the structure of the city world, especially the kaleidoscopic urban changes of the nineteenth century.

There are two basic kinds of urban network. The first is not so much a network as a one-city system, with a primate city that dominates a region usurping all major urban activities and leaving an atrophied network of villages. Nineteenth-century Paris, for instance, contained the major financial, commercial, cultural, and political enterprises in France, and was the largest single place of

manufacture. It had a population of over a million people in 1850, five times greater than that of Marseilles, the next largest city. London, ever an anomaly, dominated Britain and indeed much of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although it never contained the heavy industrial and factory enterprises that we associate with many cities in the United States, its financial and mercantile services made it the center of the Western economic sphere. Primacy is not just characteristic of London and Paris: certain third-world cities today loom in disproportionate size and importance over all other cities. Mexico City, for example, had a population in 1980 of almost 15 million, six times greater than that of Mexico's second largest city, Guadalajara. In contrast, New York in 1983 was only slightly more than twice as large as Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States. And none of the three largest U.S. cities—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—is a predominant political center, as true primate cities are. While Americans are often aware of the dominance of big cities, they have not experienced the almost complete dominion of a true primate center, which draws politics, economics, culture, and population disproportionately to one place.^[20]