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Western Municipal Transition to the Post War World
Popular and professional consensus in the postwar pre-1960 world saw western cities as either “the forerunner of the urban world of tomorrow”—or “God’s own junkyard”, the “non-city”. In 1958 the editors of Fortune published a series on “the Exploding Metropolis lead off by William H. Whyte’s “Are Cities Un-American”.[1] Abbott’s perception of western cities was that it was profoundly affected by one’s reaction to the car and the highway, by preference for density or decentralization. Two introductory observations relevant to our first discussion of western suburbs are that whatever the variant of western suburb/central city evolution, western cities (1) shared the four dynamics mentioned in the first two paragraphs, and (2) these four dynamics usually played out to permit a decentralization of the metropolis [into] multiple independent centers—a multi-centered or multi-nuclear metropolitan area[2]. Western central cities and their suburbs have moved along a different path than their Eastern and Midwestern forbearers. We can observe from western cities from Lubbock Texas, to Las Vegas, to Los Angeles that these cities are built around the automobile which, at root, provides individual control over personal travel. Such cities are linear (sprawled if one must), dominated by commercial strips and a network of shopping centers—each an island in a sea of parking lots.
Taken together, Lubbock, Las Vegas and Los Angeles offer consistent lessons about the form and visual character of most Western cities. They are vernacular environments that have responded to the tastes and demands of middle Americans, with only sporadic and often post facto attention to comprehensive planning and urban design. These ordinary cities are linear rather than centered and hierarchical. The ideal model has no privileged locations comparable to the downtowns of turn-of-the-century American cities or the public centers of historic cities. With the automobile reducing the time and inconvenience of distance, each district has approximate equality of position along the axis or within the grid …. ‘the freeway is totally egalitarian’.[3]
[1] The Exploding Metropolis: a Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How our Cities Can Resist It (Doubleday Anchor, 1958).
[2] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 126-127. Abbott correctly advises us that, however, separate the path, western and eastern cities do share many commonalities—that they “converge on the national average”. While this may suggest I speaketh from both sides of my mouth, it is more that western and eastern cities are not night and day, rather more or less. The key take away is the metropolitan hinterland of the two is different, less so the internal landscape and demographics of each suburb and central city. Architectural design and housing style, however can be quite different, of course.
[3] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 129.
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As the reader may remember from past sections in this chapter, most western central cities turned primarily to annexation. Friendly state legislatures, such as in Oklahoma, produced annexation legislation which facilitated easy and generally successful employment of this tool during the late forties and fifties. Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Albuquerque are each examples of intensive use of annexation to solve the immediate postwar urban fringe crisis. The huge expansion of central city boundaries in this period have become the principal factor that 1970’s and 1980’s economists would attribute to the decline of Eastern/Midwestern cities and the rise of the Sunbelt cities. Statistically, the two dynamics may well be highly correlated, but western postwar annexation was both more complex in its policy motivations, and, despite favorable state legislation constituted a “once in a lifetime” opportunity for western central cities.
The problem was that western population growth did not stop at the end of World War II. For better or worse, a good deal of people continued to move into unincorporated areas or suburban communities. Also, western cities were not invulnerable to losing residents to suburbs. As expansive as these annexations were, they could not keep up with periphery development. “If the 1950’s were years of successful expansion for many sunbelt cities, they were also the era when the balance between city and suburb began to tilt …. By the end of the 1950’s, or the beginning of the 1960’s, it was clear that the attractions of reform [central city] governments to hold residents in older neighborhoods, that the process of annexation had failed to keep pace with peripheral growth, and that decisions on regional service distribution had been inadequate to subordinate metropolitan growth patterns to central city needs”[1]. Say it another way, the suburbs attracted population that was increasingly resistant to attempts of central cities to annex them!
Uneven development, into which I include the now-forgotten Kondratieff cycle[2], will be borrowed, lock, stock and barrel, from the version presented by Perry and Watkins in their “Rise of the Sunbelt Cities”[3]. The authors present a framework opposed to the more conventional “convergence model” which was especially prominent during the period under discussion. The regional convergence model[4] rests upon the tenet that regions, based on factor costs of production, investment and wealth, will tend to regress to the mean over time. Regions over time will arrive at equilibrium. Uneven development like Gunnar Myrdal[5], however, question, if not reject the notion of eventual regional equilibrium by asserting that change can be permanent, does not necessarily generate counter-balancing forces and in fact can create a “vicious cycle” (or amplifying feedback loops) in which economic factors simply get worse—and worse. The policy response gap between convergence and uneven development models is huge—but not our concern at this point. One does not have to accept either model totally; the process by which uneven development starts does not require a commitment to its eventual outcome. I believe Perry and Watkin’s framework lends insight into how industrial decentralization and military investment altered the West’s (and New South’s) urban economic bases , while weakening the economic bases of the Northern and Midwestern hegemony. In short, I argue industrial decentralization did play a significant role in triggering the so-called rise of the Sunbelt.
[1] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 175-176.
[2] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper, 1942); Walt W. Rostow, “Regional Change in the Fifth Kondratieff Upswing”, in David C. Perry and Alfred Watkins (Eds), the Rise of the Sunbelt Cities (Beverly Hills, SAGE Publicaions,1977)
[3]David C. Perry and Alfred Watkins, “Regional Change and the Impact of Uneven Urban Development”, in David C. Perry and Alfred Watkins (Eds), the Rise of the Sunbelt Cities (Beverly Hills, SAGE Publicaions,1977)
[4] Simon Kuznets, Capital in the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 1961)
[5] Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (Harper and Row, 1944)
Ron W. Coan 