John R. Borchert

American Metropolitan Evolution

TH E landscapes of any American city reflect countless decisions and actions from the time of settlement to the present. The results are apparent not only in differences in land use but in the kaleidoscopic variety of building facades, street patterns, and lot sizes. Early actions precluded or frustrated many later locational decisions. The metropolitan physical plant has accumulated through various historical epochs, and clearly those epochs were distinguished from one another by different ideas and technologies. Increasingly, in proportion to its size and age, the metropolis is becoming a complicated puzzle of heterogeneous and anachronistic features.

The Surface Water Supply of American Municipalities

T MHE water which United States municipalities take from lakes, streams, and reservoirs in an average year constitutes about six per cent of the total withdrawal use of water in the nation for all purposes. It is approximately eleven per cent of the total withdrawal for public and private-industrial water systems in the nations urban areas.1 Surface-supplied municipal systems serve nearly two thousand communities with approximately one-half the population of the United States.2 And these surface supplies are highly susceptible to problems created by pollution, sedimentation, and seasonal fluctuations of climate. Thus the following analysis deals with an important aspect of the United States water supply, although it is only one of several major interrelated parts of the total problem. It is hoped that this study will help to define the geographical limits of some of the generalizations which have been made from isolated water supply problems in various parts of the country.