William B. Meyer

The Poor on the Hilltops? The Vertical Fringe of a Late Nineteenth-Century American City

Abstract Features of the physical urban site merit more attention than they have traditionally received in models of city form, but in bestowing it the interrelation of social and natural features must be recognized and a neoenvironmental determinism avoided that would see the roles played by site features as always and everywhere the same. In American cities today, the affluence of residents, as a rule, increases with elevation. Yet in the “walking city” of the nineteenth century and earlier, high lands difficulty of access might have outweighed its attractions and made it the home of the poor and not the rich. The possibility is investigated through a study of upland residential patterns in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1891, just before the citys first electric trolley line was installed. Though a simple inversion of todays pattern did not appear, working-class residents indeed predominated on the highest land. They shared it with pockets of upper-class estates and with other land uses—such as parks, large residential institutions, and extractive and nuisance industries—typically associated with the premodern horizontal urban fringe and apparently drawn to the vertical fringe as well by the cheapness of land.

THE OTHER BURGESS MODEL

In addition to his famous concentric-zone model of urban form, Ernest W. Burgess in 1929 outlined an altitudinal-zone model. It proposed a positive relationship in “hills cities” between the socioeconomic status of residents and the elevations at which they live. This article suggests a theoretical rationale for this “other Burgess model” based on the role of amenities in contemporary residential choice. Its performance compares favorably to that of competing models in an empirical test in cities selected to approximate as closely as possible the conditions that it assumes. [Key words: amenities, E. W. Burgess, urban form.]

HILLS AS RESOURCES AND RESISTANCES IN SYRACUSE, NEW YORK*

Abstract. In an example of what William Freudenburg and his colleagues called the “conjoint construction” of nature and society, hills may represent either assets or liabilities for urban settlement, depending on the period and the activities involved. The relationships between terrain and land use in Syracuse, New York, since the late eighteenth century fall into three major eras. The initial phase, in which settlement largely shunned the lowlands, gave way in the 1820s to one in which canals and railroads stimulated development of the lowlands and in which most land uses, save those of the classic urban fringe, avoided the uplands. A new pattern appeared in the late nineteenth century with the arrival of the electric trolley and the automobile and with provision of a municipal water supply able to reach the citys high ground. Development since then has been consistent with Ernest Burgesss 1929 model of “the poor in the valleys, the well‐to‐do on the hillslopes, and the rich on the hilltops.”

Burgess and Hoyt in Los Angeles: testing the Chicago models in an automotive-age American city

For much of the twentieth century, the “Chicago models” proposed by E. W. Burgess in the 1920s, Homer Hoyt in the 1930s, and Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman in 1945 dominated discussions of the spatial form of cities in the United States. The changes that have subsequently occurred in American urban geography naturally raise questions about the continuing relevance of the models. In recent years, a “Los Angeles School” in geography and urban studies has dismissed the Chicago models as outdated. But the critics have provided little empirical evidence in support of their claims. Identifying exogenous amenities—those of distance from the city center, terrain, and waterfronts—as central elements in the Chicago models, we analyzed the relation of these factors to the patterns of income in Los Angeles and Chicago using spatial statistical regression. The newer, automobile-age city closely follows, while the older city of Chicago deviates substantially from, the patterns predicted in the classical Chicago models. These models may best describe the most recently built American cities and may be more relevant than ever today in explaining the dynamics of urban form.

EDWARD BELLAMY AND THE WEATHER OF UTOPIA

Utopian thinkers have often assumed that radical geoengineering is necessary for the creation of a perfect world. This assumption necessarily puts them at odds with environmentalism, but the conflict is not inescapable. Human difficulties with the biophysical world can instead be interpreted as arising from the interaction of environment with society and thus as capable of being eradicated simply by reforming the latter. One notable early exponent of this kind of social constructionism was the American utopian novelist and publicist Edward Bellamy (1850–1898). His fictional and nonfictional writings analyzed the ways in which the troubles that Americans of his time had with weather and climate grew out of their ways of life and political‐economic institutions and would disappear if these were reformed. This line of thought allowed Bellamy to portray a utopia where human beings had ceased to suffer serious harm and inconvenience from the weather yet had not tampered with the atmospheric environment itself.

The suburban bias of American society

ABSTRACT Past research has characterized countries as displaying the traits of urban or rural bias. Neither concept fits the United States well. We propose, as a hypothesis for research, that it may better be understood as displaying a suburban bias vis-à-vis both urban and rural populations. Drawing on the urban and rural bias literatures, we discuss two forms that suburban bias might take, allocational and dispositional, and the ways in which they might be identified. We offer initial evidence of a prevailing suburban bias in the United States in two spheres, those of judicial interpretation and American planning history, and conclude with suggestions for further research on the hypothesis.

Residential Patterns in the Pre-Automotive American City

The classic geographic distinction between situation and site factors suggests that the former will have declined and the latter increased since the late 19th century in their importance as determinants of American urban residential patterns. We test the prediction by examining the relation of socioeconomic status to horizontal and vertical distance from the city center in the largest American cities in 1880. A comparison of the results with the patterns prevalent in the twentieth century largely, though not entirely, supports the prediction, as do changes in the status of main streets and harbor islands.

Urban Primacy before Mark Jefferson

The phenomenon of urban primacy has been much studied in the social sciences since Mark Jefferson introduced the term in 1939. It is less well recognized that many European and American writers of stature from the late seventeenth century onward had discussed the same phenomenon under other names, often that of a “capital” or its cognates in other languages. Their work attests to the wide currency that the concept enjoyed and offered many important suggestions regarding urban primacys causes and consequences. Jefferson nonetheless remains a central figure in the history of the idea for having inaugurated the coordinated academic study of the topic.

Response to comment on “The suburban bias of American society?”

We thank Thomas and Fulkerson for their comments and for the opportunity to explore further some of the issues we raised in our paper, “The suburban bias of American society?”. In our response, we confine ourselves to the statements in their commentary, doing the authors the possible injustice – for which we apologize in advance – of oversimplifying matters that they may have discussed in more detail elsewhere. Thomas and Fulkerson find our model of suburban bias “too particularistic,” writing that “by focusing on American society and, as the article continues, specifically the time period since the late nineteenth century, the ability to intuit deeper structures in the organization of populations across space and time is lost.” However, we offered the concept of suburban bias as a hypothesized local model. We suggested at the end of our article that it may perhaps have some wider applicability, but we focused on the time and region to which it seems most relevant. We did not propose to replace all existing or possible models with it, merely to supplement them with one that illuminates the experience – not a trivial one – of the United States since the late nineteenth century. Doing so ought not in any way to deter others from seeking to identify alternative urban structures and processes operating at other scales of time and space, and we welcome Thomas and Fulkerson’s efforts to do just that. The structures that they emphasize involve the political economy of relations between a powerful and hegemonic yet resource-dependent urban sector and a dominated hinterland, relations maintained by the mechanisms of colonialist coercion and what they refer to as “urbanormative idealizations”. They offer this framework as an alternative to prior concepts of urban and rural – and especially of an urban–rural continuum of settlement patterns – that were standard in mid-twentieth century social science, and remain embedded in US Department of Agriculture coding practices, but that, they write, “have by-and-large not held up to empirical scrutiny.” Much of what they say, as they observe, does not conflict with what we said in our paper. We described a rural disadvantage vis-à-vis suburbs in the United States as in large part resulting from the kinds of processes they detail. It is a limitation of their framework, though, that it makes no room for the concept of the suburban as a distinct and important category. If suburbs did not in fact form such a category that would be no problem. But inasmuch as increasing numbers of

Neo-Environmental Determinism

“Neo-environmental determinism” has appeared in a number of forms and areas: in the spatial regionalization of human life and activity, in the interpretation of prehistory, in the study of contemporary world patterns of human well-being and economic development, and in the projection of the future consequences of human-induced climate change. Most neo-determinism has developed outside of geography, and critiques of such reasoning by geographers offer valuable caveats and correctives to it.