Urbanization in the U.S.A.

During the history, as the United States extended its reach across much of North America, the nation also became increasingly urbanized. Cities became places of manufacturing and consumption, points of transportation for raw materials and finished goods, and social spaces both joined and fragmented by class, race, ethnicity, gender, and generation. For many historians the rapidity and scale of these changes was the most significant aspect of the nineteenth century, with the period from 1840 to 1900, in the words of David Schuyler, “arguably the most crucial” in producing a “new urban landscape.” Yet the intense urbanization of the nineteenth century was more than simply a story of shifting land-use practices and territorial growth. It was also the story of millions of ordinary people who became enmeshed in a global industrial economy influencing all facets of urban life. Currently many urban planners and researchers believe that the urbanization has also brought some disadvantages for the United States.

Urbanization in the U.S.A. has brought many challenges to the USA and to the world as well. Climate change generated by greenhouse gas emissions adds yet another layer of special urgency to these pressing social problems. It is the very concentrated nature of cities—their population densities and their centrality in social functioning—that makes them and their residents so vulnerable to the hazards and stresses that climate change is inducing. Rising sea levels and warming water make serious climatic assaults on cities more frequent. Devastating storms and floods that hit once in a century now occur in far shorter cycles. The impacts are not equitably distributed. The poorest urban residents tend to live in the riskiest portions of the urban environments—flood plains, unstable slopes, river basins, and coastal areas. (habitat.aq.upm.es)

The widening metropolises are not uniform in terms of their residential population densities. Hence density measurements alone tell us little about the quality of urban life. This quality can vary widely within the comparatively small confines of any metropolitan area. It is especially important to understand that high density per se is not an indicator of compromised living conditions. Metropolitan New York, which includes both the central city and the surrounding suburbs, has an average population density of over 5,300 people per square mile (ppm2), but the wealthiest part of the region, Manhattan Island, has a density that exceeds 66,000 ppm2. (www.globalchange.umich.edu)

The major urban challenge of the twenty-first century concerns the ability of US government to effectively provide adequate shelter and to plan and deliver services for metropolitan-wide areas in developing countries. The difficulty in meeting the challenge is rooted in part in the fact that the historical political boundaries of the central city and suburban (i.e., satellite city) subunits of government typically derive from an earlier century, before contemporary transport and communications technology redefined effective spatial relationships. The urban economies of modern metropolises now run beyond the legal jurisdictions of the subunits of government responsible for infrastructure and public services. The insistence of international financial agencies and donors on governmental decentralization ...