urbanization definition us history

urbanization definition us history

The Impact of Urbanization on American Society: A Historical Perspective

1. Introduction to Urbanization in U.S. History

Urbanization – the growth of towns and cities relative to the population – has been a feature of U.S. history for hundreds of years. In its first century, the United States was a nation of people who lived primarily in rural areas, and these rural residents made up the bulk of the nation’s inhabitants. They worked at a variety of agriculture-related jobs, turning largely to each other and to local towns for their social, economic, and political lives. Over time, the number of commercial and industrial jobs has risen while the number of agriculture-related jobs has declined. As a result, the nation’s urban population – that is, people living in towns and cities – has increased from less than 5 percent of U.S. residents at the time of the Revolution to nearly 75 percent by the end of the 20th century. Though most Americans no longer live on farms, agriculture in the United States is a major world force, and food production and the business of agriculture affect us all, regardless of whether we live in rural or urban areas. Indeed, we are now an urban nation in which city living and city problems powerfully influence the daily lives and futures of rural as well as urban residents.

2. Economic and Social Drivers of Urbanization

Concentration of commerce, transportation, and manufacturing establishments in larger urban places had been a consumer of people from rural and smaller town living areas from the beginning of economic history. The city provided more opportunities to enlarge social contacts and economic stature. Individual material advancement stimulated by cities jumps out from the pages of American history, shaping expectations of what lay ahead. The emerging case for and against specific elements of urbanism well before the Civil War invites us to look anew at the “first new nation”, extending our understanding of the rapidly urbanizing society beyond the institutions and local affairs of the potentially larger number of people discussed politically by the local town of the General Court (Massachusetts), House of Burgesses (Virginia), or the recruit able by public officers. At the turn of the century urban and rural people, fearing year-end dependence through lack of opportunity or resources, formed the social welfare system (workhouses, poor relief, and almshouses) in response to urban growth; rural living for length of days was a liability in the early 1800s while during the sunset of the 19th urban living under conditions of reformed health standards and organized personal movement and recreation, advantageously shaped by public policy, invested the filial guarantees ingrained in American settlement and unparalleled economic progress with timely consequences.

America’s economic and social transformation before the Civil War created the conditions that led to rapid urbanization. As the new nation struggled with the problems of developing efficient systems of transportation, communication, and energy generation, and with the relentless movement of Americans to the cities, an increasingly urban and increasingly industrial culture was taking shape. The mid-nineteenth century market revolution was built upon the essential changes that have defined America as an urban-industrial society: specialization, interchangeable parts, mechanization, standardization, and new opportunities for obtaining capital to invest in increasingly large and complex enterprises. Enabled by technological and capital-intensive changes in the basic sectors of the economy – agriculture, natural resource exploitation, transportation, and manufacturing – accelerating urbanization touched the lives of all Americans; whether they were farmers, artisans, or vagabonds.

3. Challenges and Opportunities of Urban Living

The previous section argued that the urbanization of American society is a significant and irreversible social change. With its substantially adverse effects on the natural environment, inherent tendencies to increase sociocultural conflict and unmanaged social disorganization, and tendency to aggravate disparities in income and political power, urbanization will indeed seriously challenge American society. The question of how to respond to this heady challenge invites attention to the extensive literature on the sociology of complex organizations. Urbanization creates irresistible opportunities for growth, enrichment, and advancement that attract people to new and existing cities. That is, subpopulations which stand to gain more than others from the process of urban growth are drawn to cities by the prospect of realizing economic and social objectives that would be more difficult to achieve in the countryside.

4. Cultural Shifts and Urban Identity Formation

The historical relationships within the rapidly reconstructive American urban landscape have formed an extensive and complex dialogue regarding population, taxonomies and urban development and have suggested several resolution models in the search for how an interactive duality of urbanity and environment may be reasonably redirected into a system, the sum of whose standard parameters can also be handled reciprocally for stability. Key to these are the archaeological, documentary and cartographic techniques that make it possible to elucidate at greater levels of comprehensive meaning the tissue of social discourses. In other words, direct, purposeful and cognitive approaches towards meeting the broader social concerns, including quality of life issues, also exist. However, such approaches can only form a new urban identity upon critically revised and updated conclusions regarding the proper urban role and the attendant authority criteria within the urban fabric.

Cultural changes, associatively, have accompanied a general shift of focus from the individual rural to the collective urban rationale through which pluralistic if not dichotomous societal attributes as growth versus atrophy, demarcated differences between civilization and savagery or the accents of morality, social responsibility, unity, identity and anomie have been defined and debated. Thus, the external manifestations of the historical process of transformation itself have been updated, interpreted and stressed in all the cultural components and urban semantics inherent in or impinging on the five successive stages of urban development which gave rise to the successive stages of multiplex urban identity formation in the American colonies.

5. Conclusion: Urbanization’s Legacy in American Society

Cities are not only a problem but also a continued necessity, and despite depictions of cities as crosses of steel and stone or hellholes filled with an inferno of suffering, they are, in fact, places where people work, play, and live. There are many reasons for the creation of cities. They are, as Edith T. Clark noted when looking at ancient civilization, “market towns, towns of process, towns of worship, towns of education, towns of defense, and diligent and vigorous carrying out.” Cities, including many in urban America, are keys to the rich and varied achievements of people who live in them and to the visions and dreams of all who pass through them, if only for a moment.

The problems themselves and the efforts to alleviate or eliminate them have commanded the attention of many other disciplines besides history, including law, political science, economics, and literature. The study of city government reaches some of its deepest insights when it focuses on the structure and dynamics of American urban society. The story of African-American migration to the cities and the hope for a better life that brought Southerners to Detroit, the Italians to New York, the Poles to Chicago, and countless other waves and ethnic groups to urban America elicit admiration and sadness for the working conditions and attitudes early urban dwellers encountered. The role of the city in creating and sustaining elite groups in American society suggests important insights into the social structure and cultural patterns of the larger society.

A historical perspective on the impact of urbanization in America makes the rapid growth of its twentieth-century metropolitan areas particularly significant. It demonstrates that American cities have deep historical roots and that they are not unique in their wide range of pathological characteristics. For more than one hundred years, observers and reformers have sought to mitigate these problems of city life. In the process, America has developed an impressive urban tradition, manifested through the efforts of countless individuals, through the work of numerous organizations, and through the actions of every level of government. In particular, reformers have made important headway where problems like death and ill health from fire, crime, and disease, infant mortality, and municipal corruption were of grave national importance.