John S. Adams

METROPOLITAN AREA DEFINITION IN THE UNITED STATES

Since 1905 the Bureau of the Census has devised and applied concepts and criteria for delineating metropolitan areas and has published statistics describing them. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and its predecessor, the Bureau of the Budget, have defined metropolitan areas for use by federal agencies since introducing standard metropolitan areas (SMAs) for the 1950 census. In the late 20th century, new national United States settlement forms emerged, and distinctions between urban and rural areas or between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas lost both their theoretical and practical significance. A proposed system of national settlement areas, applied experimentally to eight diverse states, uses counties (towns and cities in New England) as basic statistical units, with each categorized by its population density as ranked within both its state and the nation. Relative population density alone is an adequate and appropriate surrogate for activity patterns and interaction among geographic unit...

Monumentality in Urban Design: The Case of Russia

A prominent American urban geographer and observer of the Russian urban scene provides an overview of grand planning and monumental urban design in Russia and the former Soviet Union through the lens of four themes outlined in a previous paper by Larry Ford (2008). In the process, he adds two more themes relevant to Russia and the former USSR: town building and architecture intended to define and legitimize state power, and the shaping or remodeling of society to reflect a regimes ideology. Noting the obstacles in the West to getting large urban projects planned, accepted, and completed, he argues that monumental urban landscapes appear to demand some degree of sustained, centralized, authoritarian leadership. The latter has been present in Russia and the USSR during much of the past millennium, including the present, but the emergence of new commercial/corporate forces in urban land development also bears scrutiny in studies of the processes promoting urban monumentality. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, R14, R52. 10 figures, 44 references.

Reconsidering faculty roles and rewards in geography

Abstract In the USA there has been a reassessment of public and faculty attitudes to higher education and its practices. One concern has been the priority faculty and administrators in different disciplines attach to the roles and rewards accorded to teaching, research and public service. The Association of American Geographers (AAG) set up a task force to examine these issues with respect to geography. The proposals of that task force are presented here together with an introduction by Ron Abler, the AAGs Executive Director. These proposals have now been sent to all US geography departments for consideration. They should interest geography associations and departments in other countries, where the tension between faculty roles and rewards are issues for staff and/or public concern.

Editorial-Understanding Competition Among Metropolitan Economies: Response to Richard Shearmur

Congratulations to Richard Shearmur (2008) for addressing a question that has puzzled me for 50 years, namely, “How do urban/metropolitan regions support themselves while competing with one another?”—a question that mainstream economists and other social scientists consider to be a trivial question, or perhaps they view it as too difficult. To make matters worse, public rhetoric about regional economic vitality and competitiveness is misleading. When governors talk about “their states’ economies,” they are misinformed. State governments have budgets, to be sure, but they do not have economies. Regional economies do not coincide with political jurisdictions. Moreover, a lack of understanding of how regional economies function narrows political debate to a focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs” (i.e., “votes, votes, votes”). So my first response to Shearmur is, yes, the theoretical basis for answering this question remains underdeveloped, but I will go further and assert that the answers we usually hear are incomplete, misleading, or just plain wrong. Shearmur asks: “Why are cities competing?” The short answer is that cities (i.e., citycentered metropolitan areas) compete to survive and prosper. How they do so is not well understood, although it is not for lack of trying. Each metropolitan economy is a complex system of interests, agendas, assets, flows, and activities that Wassily Leontief and Walter Isard devoted much of their careers modeling (Leontief et al., 1953; Isard, 1951, 1960). Leontief’s work at the University of Leningrad became the framework for regional economic planning after 1928 in the former Soviet Union. Isard’s work in regional science built on Leontief’s and extended it to the measurement of direct (within the region) and indirect (in linked regions) environmental impacts. A highly original treatment of the question was supplied by Jane Jacobs (bless her memory!). She essentially argued that the United States can usefully and accurately be thought of as a mosaic of urban-centered regions, with the national economy understood as an aggregation of urban-centered regional economies competing with one another as they develop and attract resources (e.g., labor, capital, entrepreneurship, ideas) while putting local resources to productive uses (Jacobs, 1984). She advanced a coherent argument about what it takes for a metropolitan economy to flourish (compete successfully with other metro economies of equal size and strength). She showed how “transactions of decline” are a weak foundation for metropolitan economies, listing examples such as the

John Robert Borchert, 1918–2001

D uring a Geography Department faculty meeting in the 1980s, we were discussing the perennial question of whether a course on the development of geographic thought and practice should be required of our graduate students. After all, the department enjoyed a long-standing reputation for methodological inquiry and it had served us well. John Borchert listened to the debate for about 20 minutes, then volunteered that such a requirement would be a waste of time, that students should concentrate on their courses, seminars, field work, and research. John’s comment reflected his sleeves-rolled-up, mud-on-boots approach to geography’s scholarly task: observe the landscape, ask questions, gather relevant data, plot them on a map or a series of maps for different time periods, do follow-up field work, revise the maps, suggest what is revealed by spatial analysis, especially as it might inform public policy, listen to feedback, and present interpretation and conclusions. Over a four-decade career, John’s work in and outside the classroom, his keen observations, brilliant insights, and plain language inspired students, colleagues, planning professionals, and public officials in ways that garnered for him some of the highest honors ever awarded to a professional geographer in the United States. John was a practical scholar of exceptional intellect and charismatic demeanor who made original and important contributions to climatology, natural resource assessment, regional economic analysis of the United States, American metropolitan evolution, urban and regional planning, geographic information science, and geographic education (Adams 2001a, 2001b; Adams and Ruttan 2002). As a Regents’ Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota, John inspired generations of students to abandon their armchairs, visit the map library, get into the field, explore the territory, ask questions, produce dynamic map series, generalize from them to figure out what is occurring on the land, and participate in public policy debate and land use planning.

Highway improvements and land development in Minnesota's Greater Twin Cities Area, 1970-1997

As increased traffic congestion becomes an issue in more and more cities across the country and especially in rapidly growing suburban areas, the following questions are often asked. How are improvements in highway transportation and patterns of land development in suburban and exurban areas related? Do road improvements encourage land development, or vice versa? The key question of leads and lags between transportation and development within cities and townships of the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area was investigated for five time intervals between 1970 and 1997. Correlation and regression analyses were used to measure the strength and causality of relationships between highway improvements and the timing and levels of residential, industrial, commercial, and office development. Although statistical relationships describing correlations of leads, lags, and contemporaneous change were found to be highly significant, the measures of those relationships were seldom constant. They differed from one time period to the next, from one location to another within specific time periods, and from one type of development to another. The weakest relationships occurred in the most recent era (1990s) for all development types. Generally, industrial development seemed to be most influenced by transportation and location over the eras, followed by office and commercial construction. New housing seemed to be least affected by transportation and location; this finding may have major implications for addressing issues of traffic congestion.

Census Atlas of the United States. Trudy A. Suchan, Marc J. Perry, James D. Fitzsimmons, Anika E. Juhn, Alexander M. Tait, and Cynthia A. Brewer.

When I was in college, my adviser, who had come of age on a North Dakota farm during the Dust Bowl, began a lecture on social statistics by stating, “On average, John D. Rockefeller and I are wealthy—but that doesn’t say much about me.” To hammer home the point, he reminded us about the fellow who drowned in a river that was only 6 inches deep—on average. Today when media report national unemployment rates, average household incomes, mortgage foreclosure rates, or myriad statistics on one or another feature of American life, the numbers usually come across as disembodied facts—in one ear and out the other. To be sure, national averages are useful for many purposes, but as a summary statement describing the vast United States, they are not intended to convey helpful information about important variations from the average (i.e., about places as different as Phoenix, or Buffalo, NY, or Shannon County, South Dakota). In certain respects, the significant story about America today is more about trends in the differences and disparities than about the means, medians, and modes. Fortunately, to shed light on what we need to know about the trends, differences, and disparities, the splendid new Census Atlas of the United States comes to the rescue. This volume, say the authors, is the first comprehensive atlas produced by the Census Bureau since the early 20th century. It illustrates the range of data collected by decennial censuses from 1790 to Census 2000, and uses those data to paint a demographic and socioeconomic portrait of the country’s settlement patterns, and to show how selected features vary from place to place and how patterns changed over time. For example, a county-level “Year of Maximum Population” map provides a succinct history of the United States in a single illustration. Expertly executed maps in vivid color capture migration flows and growth of the nation’s population and its history, including westward expansion, sectional crisis, and the Civil War, the end of the frontier, the industrial revolution, and the rise of the post–World War II suburban culture. Most of the 750-plus maps on oversize (12 in. × 15 in.) pages present county-level detail for the United States and Puerto Rico, while state-level maps portray time series. When neighborhood scale is needed, tract-level detail is provided for selected cities (population over 1 million in 2000) and metropolitan areas (over 4 million). The atlas is organized in topical chapters around three themes: “who we are” (Chapters 2–5), “where we come from” (Chapters 6–9), and “what we do” (Chapters 10–14). Chapters begin with a national map of a primary feature of the main topic, accompanied by discussion of census concepts and statistical trends, county-level and state-level maps, and first-rate interpretive text. For example, Chapter 2 (Population Distribution) [Meghan: Are “Population Distribution” and the other parenthetical descriptions after the chapter numbers titles of the chapters? If so, they should be in quotes. If not, they should be lowercase.] begins by discussing historical changes in population distribution at several spatial scales, population growth by region through time, increased urbanization, metropolitan expansion, recent population change in states and counties. This overview discussion is illustrated by a map of movement of the national center of population since 1790, a dot map of current U.S. population distribution, and a county-level map of population density. Detailed maps and discussion follow, concluding with state-level maps portraying shifts in the distribution of congressional seats since 1789. Chapter 3 (Race and Hispanic Origin) discusses the difficult process of classifying race and ethnicity for census purposes in the face of shifting concepts and debate over what the terms mean and imply, as well as the reality of fast-growing population subgroups that continue to redistribute across the nation and within metropolitan