The divided city and the patchwork metropolis

Abstract

Urbanists and geographers have long been concerned with the factors that shape and structure our cities and metro areas. Our basic understanding of the structure of cities comes from the Chicago School of urbanism. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Park, Burgess, and their associates at the University of Chicago developed a series of basic models of urban and metropolitan form based initially on “concentric zones” (Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1925). They later advanced two additional models, a “sector model” and a “multiple nuclei” model (Harris & Ullman, 1945; Hoyt, 1939). In their most basic and simplified form, those models portray an urban core occupied by commerce, industry, and the residential locations of the disadvantaged and the working classes surrounded by more affluent middle and upper class suburbs. For more than a century then, the geographic division between city and suburb was also America’s overarching class divide. The upper and middle classes lived in the suburbs; the poor lived in less advantaged cities or in undeveloped rural places. This outward-oriented suburban pattern reached its pinnacle in the 1980s, captured by the so-called “edge city model,” where suburban office parks and malls outside the city center replicated the functions of the old central business district (Garreau, 1992).