CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Reshaping the Metropolis
At Colorado Avenue she turned. It was the .first through boulevard she
had been on, and the traffic signals were off with yellow blinkers showing.
So she gave the car the gun, excitedly watching the needle swing past 30,
40, and 50 . … The car was pumping something into her veins, something of pride, of arrogance, of regained self respect.
-James Cain, Mildred Pierce (1945)
Now they lived in Mill Valley . … A tract house on the Sutton Manor
flatlands; it was big enough, comfortable, and just barely affordabk. .
Besides, the .first time they’d seen it, a racing green ’63 TR-4 was parked
in the driveway, a strong indication that the house’s owners were okay
people. If they could live in a tract house, so could Kate and Harvey . …
And it was still Mill Valley, though just barely; Kate still hated to tell
people, when she gave directions, to stay on East Blithedale all the way
out, as if they were headingfor 101, tum left at the Chevron station, go
past the Red Cart, and tum right at the carwash.
-Cyra McFadden,
The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County (1977)
Los Angeles is rather like a big earthworm that might be chopped into
twenty pieces and not killed . … You get the impression that a mediumsized urban centre has schizogenetically reproduced itself twenty times.
-Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955)
219
Seventy years after Emily French struggled to finish her small house near
the South Platte River, another Denver family moved into a new, almost finished house-but this time in the absolutely new neighborhood of Hoffman
Heights in the booming suburb of Aurora. Their experience-dad, mom,
Susan, Tom, Bobby, and Bud-mirrored that of millions of other families, but
we can revisit it through the memories and meditations of Robert Michael
Pyle. His memoir The Thunder Tree relives his childhood and youth in the
1950s and early 1960s. Summer days along the High Line Canal, explorations
of abandoned farmhouses, and trips to the public library (which kept getting a
bigger building and following population eastward) all fed his fascination with
wild nature in its losing contest with the suburban frontier. .
Aurora was booming in 1953, when the Pyles moved into their new fourbedroom home, yellow brick on a concrete slab. The kids woke to the “acrid
odor of roofer’s tar … field marks of a new suburb still under construction.”1 Their parents struggled to turn the bare dirt yard into lawn and garden with the help of the kids, who dug dandelions for a nickel a bucket.
Chinese elms were the tree of choice, brittle but fast growing; The Cold War
funded Aurora’s Fitzsimons Army Hospital, Lowry Field with its training
jets and Titan missile silos, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal to produce and
store chemical weapons. Aurora’s 3,000 residents in 1940 grew to 30,000 in
1953 when Bobby Pyle and his family moved out from the city, to 50,000 in
1960 when he entered high school, and to 276,000 by the end of the century.
In alliance with Colorado Springs, the city built its own transmountain water
system to pump snowrnelt across the Front Range independent of what suburban developers saw as the tyrannical Denver Water Board.2 Community
leaders annexed undeveloped tracts of prairie, marketed the city as an office
and industrial location, and envisioned Aurora as a new Minneapolis with
Denver relegated to the role of St. Paul without Prairie Home Companion.
Bobby Pyle fifty years later is a biologist and nature writer ofinternational
reputation. Then he roamed the edges of Aurora with the eye of a nascent
naturalist. He observed the transformation of the short-grass prairie, first by
invasive species like cheatgrass, then by the Kentucky bluegrass of domestic lawns and city parks, then by the asphalt of church and shopping center
parking lots. His family drove east into the prairie to see pronghorn antelope,
a trip that grew longer with each year. His naturalist’s eye also spotted the
changing species of housing: the old round barn, the rural house across from
the new mall, the abandoned farmhouse from a vanished farm, the two new
ranch-style houses built adjacent, “scouts for the suburb that was preparing
to pounce.” 3
Robert Pyle’s family were enlistees in the suburbanizing generation
that remade the nation after 1945. The immediate postwar decades brought
a perfect storm of housing demand: Couples who had deferred marriage
now walked down the aisle. Those who had deferred children rushed to
220 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
form families. The proportion of adults who were unmarried dropped to its
twentieth-century low in 1960, as young people married quickly and had an
average of three children spaced closely together. Meanwhile wartime savings
were available for down payments on mass-produced tract houses as families
longed to move out of cramped apartments or quit doubling up with relatives.
Builders pushed the number of new houses to a peak of nearly two million in
1950, industrializing production with standardized components and specialized crews. “On-site fabrication” was mass production without an assembly
line. In Robert Pyle’s suburban Denver, “growth advanced southeasterly from
Denver’s hinterland toward the Cherry Creek Reservoir, northeast along Sand
Creek, due east on Colfax. All obstacles fell, all proportion fell away. With the
advent of the town house and condominium, a powerful new tool came on
line. Colonies of cloned domiciles stormed the remaining countryside.” 4
By the time Robert Pyle had left for graduate school, photographer Robert
Adams was turning his eye to the same landscape. A highly admired landscape photographer, Adams often chooses to show the small works ofhumanity against the vast spaces of the world. His first book in 1970 was White
Churches of the Plains, a stunning series showing small-frame churches standing forty or eighty years old on the windswept land of eastern Colorado. For
his second book, in contrast, he photographed suburban Denver. The New
West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range (1974) hearkens back to the
Lakewood photos but takes the new suburbscapes on their own terms as
the epitome of the emerging West. The genre–the western suburb through
the camera-continues to flourish with books like Laurie Brown, Martha Ronk,
and Charles Little’s Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West (2000)
and Ann Wolfe’s Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl (2006).s
The surge of western population that began with World War II has yet to
crest, let alone recede. In 1940 the West was a region oflarge and small cities
speckling the plains, straddling small rivers where they escape the mountains, and dotting the coast. By 2000 it was home to vast metropolitan regions
that reached out to each other across deserts and prairies. The message of
the census has been consistent. To find nineteen of the nation’s twenty-fiv.e
fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the 1940s, Americans had to look west
across the Missouri and Sabine rivers. The same western states counted
as sixteen of the twenty-five fastest-growing metropolitan areas during the
1950s, slipped to twelve for the 1960s when Americans were discovering the
Sunbelt Southeast, and then recovered to sixteen for the 1970s, sixteen for
the 1980s, and fourteen for the 199os.G Between 1940 and 2000, Phoenix
moved from seventy-seventh place to fourteenth among American metropolitan areas; San Diego, from forty-seventh to seventeenth; Sacramento,
from eighty-second to twenty-fifth; and Austin, from 123rd to thirty-eighth.
The first suburban generation built cities with and for automobiles. Auto
dependence was not exclusive to western c.ommunities, but Denver was tops
RESHAPJNG THE METROPOLIS 221
FI c. u RE 50. War boom housing in Los Angeles. This Associated Press photo from
the early 1950s carried the following caption: “They met housing needs then. These
small unpretentious homes in a Los Angeles suburb were built just after the war
when thousands of home-hungry people needed places to live.” (Hearst Collection,
Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California Library.)
among major cities in the ratio of automobiles to population in both 1960
and 1970 (the result is the same counting all registered vehicles and passenger cars only). Los Angeles, Houston, and even San Francisco were also high
on the list. Phoenix, perhaps surprisingly, was a bit further down but still
ahead of Detroit, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
The increasingly elaborate youth culture of the postwar era depended
heavily on the rise of multicar families, and observers looked to western
cities to understand their implications. Drawing on his own teen years in
Los Angeles, Harvard professor James Q. Wilson tried to describe the cultural importance of automobile ownership for a skeptical East Coast intelligentsia.7 He drew on the same background that shaped Angeleno Charles
Bukowski’s memories in his poem “Waiting,” which recalls Los Angeles of
the 1930s as a land of freedom “if you had a car and the gas.”s
Arriving without preconceived ideas in the 1960s, British architecture
critic Rayner Banham saw the same landscape as “autopia” (and “surfurbia”)
in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). Automobiles in the
222 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FIGURE 51. Westchester, California. Along with nearby Lakewood,-the community of
Westchester, photographed in 1949, epitomized the national image of Los Angeles
as a place of endless horizontal sprawl in look-alike subdivisions. (Courtesy of the
California Historical Society/TicorTitle Insurance Los Angeles, Department of Special
Collections, University of Southern California Library.)
form of”kustomized kars” are the featured exhibit in pop trend spotter Tom
Wolfe’s 1965 essay “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”
They play the competing roles of anesthetic and redemption in Joan Didion’s
novel Play It as It Lays {1970).9 They are vital to the action in Rebel without a
Cause (1955), with its suburban Los Angeles setting, and they are the action in
American Graffiti (1973), which uses San Rafael and director George Lucas’s
hometown of Modesto to reproduce the feel of the early196os.
Life in a new, auto-oriented suburb like Lakewood, California, was not
quite the same as the notorious photographs suggest. Its 17,500 houses were
built on bean and sugar beet fields, and they were small (950 to 1,100 square
feet), but they were up to date (Lakewood was “garbage free” because each
house had an in-sink disposal), and they did not all look alike. Dozens of
parks and playgrounds helped to divide the development into distinct communities. Residents of each neighborhood staked a claim to “their” park,
and kids only ventured into other parks at the invitation of a friend. Most of
the residents would have agreed that it was “Tomorrow’s City Today,” with
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 223
its very large shopping center and big new high school that was the “jewel
of the town.”
Lakewood in the 1950s and 1960s was an optimistic and very homogeneous community. Its dads were veterans of World War II and Korea who
worked at the Douglas Aircraft plant or the Long Beach Naval Station. Moms
stayed home with the kids, by and large. Boys growing up in Lakewood had
a clear trajectory to success: high school sports, the military, and a job in the
defense industry. It was also very, very white, completing a monoculture in
terms of age, family patterns, economic class, and race. As one thoughtful
native has commented, it was ”the American Dream made affordable for a
generation of industrial workers …. They were oriented to aerospace ….
They worked at all the places that exemplified the bright future that California
was supposed to be.”10 The flip side of the successful 1950s and 1960s, however, would be an inability to adapt to racial integration and the disappearance
of industrial jobs in the 1980s and 1990s. With no layers of history, writes
another of Lakewood’s “original kids,” the community “has the feeling of a
club-the feeling that because everyone started out together, residents are
entitled to lifetime ‘charter membership.”’11
Milpitas, California, was another 1950s suburb built for and by the automobile. Located in the East Bay northeast of San Jose, Milpitas grew to serve
the new Ford assembly plant. Most of the new worker-residents moved out
from Oakland. They brought their union membership and working-class politics with them. They got a quieter community with a new and nicer house,
just as in Lakewood. They left behind marginal neighborhoods that suffered
from losing households with steady incomes. They also left behind African
American neighbors and coworkers who found it much more difficult than
whites to make the suburban trek from tenement to tract house.
The western cities that rushed to build freeways in the early decades of the
U.S. Interstate Highway program, initiated im956, began to choose different
transportation options in the second automobile generation that followed the
oil shocks of the mid-197os. In the camp of highway engineering were cities
like Denver, which began a controversial boundary-busting freeway loop in
the 1980s, and Phoenix, which scrambled to catch up with freeway mileage
after a slow start and was still building its valley loop into the new century. In
Texas, however, the Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth regions both planned in
the early twenty-first century to add 3,000 miles of freeway and tollway lanes,
and Austin projected another 1,000 lane miles.
The alternative to highway investment was to build new commuter rail
systems to preserve the centrality of historic downtowns and to concentrate
new development in corridors and nodes. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system
went into operation in the 1970s and grew over the next three decades, helping
to bring intense development to outlying centers like Walnut Creek. Portland
rejected a planned radial freeway in the mid-197os and has proceeded to
224 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
develop an extensive light-rail system. Seattle finished a second north-south
freeway in the 1980s and then paused for a seemingly interminable debate
about the right public transit investments (bus tunnel? more monorail? lightrail?). San Diego also took light-rail seriously as a system ofinterconnecting
lines. Sacramento, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix
undertook more limited rail systems after 19 90, although some of them continue to expand (as in Denver and Phoenix). One consequence is that four
cities of the western U.S. ranked in the nation’s top ten for percentage of
journey-to-work trips made by public transit, with San Francisco/Oakland
comparable to Washington, D.C., Honolulu comparable to Philadelphia, and
Seattle and Portland comparable to Pittsburgh.12
North of the border, Edmonton opened light-rail in the 1970s, followed
in the 1980s by Calgary and then by Vancouver’s SkyTrain (which runs both
above and below the surface). Without the temptation ofhuge chunks ofhighway money from their national government, Canadian cities were much more
reluctant to build extensive freeway systems. Instead, places like Edmonton
and Vancouver have opted to tie their growing regions together with rail
transit, improved bus service, and upgrades to existing highway systems-a
choice that is obvious to any American tourist who expects to cruise blithely
into the city center.
The second generation of suburban development also fostered supersuburb municipalities that began as suburbs or satellites of a larger city but
now have populations of 100,000 or more. In 1990, thirty-five of the forty-six
supersuburbs in the United States were located in the West. By 2000, the
western share was sixty-six of eighty-nine. At the even higher threshold of
200,000, the West in 2000 claimed twelve of fourteen, including giants like
Long Beach at 462,000, Mesa (Arizona) at 396,000, Santa Ana (California)
at 338,000, and Arlington (Texas) at 333,000. Specialists in urban government place the threshold population to support efficient full-service municipal government at between 50,000 and 100,000. A community of this size
can employ a diversified professional staff, maintain sophisticated support
services, and realize economies of scale in service delivery. To the U.S. examples we can add Burnaby, Surrey, Coquitlam, and Richmond in the Vancouver region.13
Two of the large suburbs are among the most successful of the comprehensively planned “New Towns” that developers promoted around the
United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The availability oflarge tracts of empty
land in single or limited ownership near western cities made New Towns
relatively easy to create as real estate deals. The Woodlands, on harvested
timberland fifteen miles north of Houston International Airport, was the
brainchild of George Mitchell, a futurist and energy mogul in the early 1970s.
Set among lakes and pine woods, the city sold a combination of small-town
nostalgia and high-tech communications infrastructure. Although hit by
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 225
ups and downs in the Texas real estate market, the Woodlands by 2000 had
56,000 residents. On a different coast, the roots of Irvine, California, date
to the 1860s and 1870s when James Irvine acquired title to several ranches
in what became Orange County. The Irvine Company moved from agriculture to land development in the 1950s, leasing lots in expensive coastal subdivisions around Newport Bay. Between 1959 and 1964, architect William
Pereira and Irvine Company employees developed plans for a 40,000-acre
tract between Newport Bay and the site of a new University of California
campus. They envisioned a set of semi-independent residential communities linked to two industrial sites, the university, and a Newport Center
“downtown.” Large builders erected the new housing on leased land, leaving
the company in long-term control. Covering only part of the Irvine Company
lands, the incorporated city oflrvine counted over 110,000 residents by 1990,
143,000 by 2000, and 194,000 by 2006_14
By the 1970s and 1980s, supersuburbs (or “outer cities”) were able to
push their own development agendas in direct competition with central cities. Their goal was to have the best ofboth worlds: industrial and commercial
real estate development to generate property taxes and sales taxes, coupled
with upscale residential development that would bring sober, taxpaying citizens who would want good schools, parks, and libraries but include few welfare cases and crime-prone families. This municipal agenda also suited new
suburban industries whose managers thought little about the needs of central
cities. Aerospace, defense, and electronics companies cared far more about
suburban highways and world markets than about fading downtowns and
neighborhoods. The Industrial League of Orange County, which represented
major defense and technology corporations, consistently overrode efforts to
slow the pace of growth or mitigate its effects on older communities.
San Jose has also battled through tensions between the center and periphery. During the 1950s aggressive annexation by the city of San Jose disrupted
efforts to plan for controlled growth in Santa Clara County. By the 1970s, in
contrast, the growth of Silicon Valley challenged the primacy of the central
city and its downtown business interests. Represented by the Santa Clara
Manufacturing Group, the newly rich diluted the remaining influence of
downtown, which was no longer a major concern for corporations that built
low-rise offices and factories in nearby cities like Mountain View, Sunnyvale,
Santa Clara, and Palo Alto, not to mention the occupants of more than
40 million square feet of office space within San Jose’s Golden Triangle at
the intersection of Routes 101 and 280. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a
new generation of city leaders (including mayors Tom McEnery and Susan
Hammer) pushed a downtown revival, with new hotels, office buildings, a
park, a convention center, two museums, a light-rail line, municipal buildings, and a public library (innovatively shared with San Jose State University).
The center of the new San Jose is Plaza de Cesar Chavez, bordered by a science
226 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
museum designed by a Mexican architect, reviving a new multiethnic downtown on the ashes of the dying white downtown.
Metropolitan Phoenix similarly developed multiple power centers. Phoenix, Tempe, and Scottsdale waged an annexation war through the 1960s as
each tried to snag developable land, battles that were revisited more recently
among Phoenix, Buckeye, and Peoria. The valley’s multiple growth nodes created new, localized sets of business and investment interests different from
those of the postwar civic leadership. New centers with their own groups
of economic and civic leaders included Scottsdale, Glendale, Mesa, Tempe,
Chandler, and the growing Camelback/Biltmore and northwest districts.
Mesa boosters, for example, pursued residential, commercial, and industrial
growth. The city bought up water rights, promoted its business district, and
sought new businesses. Glendale in 1984 offered a $20,000 bonus for the
first person to bring a 100,000-square-foot factory to town. Business and
civic groups such as the East Valley Partnership, the West Valley Partnership,
and Phoenix Together gave lip service to regional cooperation but “competed
for everything from sports facilities to educational institutions in order to
offer unique advantages to residents and businesses. For the most part, metropolitan pluralism prevailed in the Valley of the Sun. “1s
Center cities and supersuburbs remain in constant tension, something
immediately apparent to anyone who follows major league sports. In the Bay
Area, San Jose acquired the Sharks of the National Hockey League as part of
its downtown redevelopment and efforts to become a “big league city.” The
San Francisco Giants moved to a new downtown stadium for the twenty-first
century, but the Forty-Niners of the National Football League announced
plans in 2006 to build their new stadium in Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon
Valley. The Oakland Athletics planned to move twenty miles south from the
Oakland Coliseum to Fremont. In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Irving and
Arlington used liberal Texas annexation laws to expand aggressively in the
decades after World War II, taking in vast tracts of undeveloped prairie land
that lay in the path of metropolitan growth. Arlington, for one example, grew
from a few square miles in 1945 to nearly 100 square miles, giving it plenty of
land for a university campus and a Major League Baseball park, while Irving
got the NFL stadium. Chula Vista, California, grew to fifty square miles and
close to 200,000 people by 2007, enabling it to make a bid to lure the San
Diego Chargers from their old Mission Valley Stadium. And enough said
about the curiously named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
· Supersuburbs have their occasional downtowns and concentrations of
development around superregional malls and freeway interchanges, like
Las Colinas northwest of Dallas or the South Coast Plaza complex in Orange
County, places that fit journalist Joel Garreau’ s category ofEdge City. However,
such mid-rise islands and oases account for only a fraction of metro area
employment and retailing. Instead, other experts depict a fractal landscape
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 227
organized at a much finer grain. The edgeless city is the ordinary landscape
that we don’t really notice-small office parks, scattered factories and warehouses, and highway-side strips where insurance agents, CPAs, and yoga studios sit next to take-and-bake pizza places and car stereo stores. It is the place
where “office park dads” (a phrase coined by political consultants in 2002) are
busy at work while their spouses juggle the duties of “soccer moms.” These
findings support Anne Vernez Moudon’s argument that most clustering of
activity in suburban zones is at a much smaller scale than in Edge Cities. Her
research on Seattle has found what are, in effect, suburban neighborhoods of
3,000-4,000 residents in which a commercial strip or small shopping center
(perhaps with multiplex cinema) forms a core. Surrounding it are inwardturned sets oflow-rise apartments that have urban densities but nothing of
urban appearance and single-family houses. The Seattle region, for example,
has two or three Edge Cities such as Bellevue and the Kent Valley but roughly
100 suburban clusters.16
These suburban clusters are new melting pots where Asian and Latino
immigrants settle and acculturate to North American life. Some minority
suburbanization is overspill from established ethnic neighborhoods like East
Los Angeles. Much more, however, is the result of conscious initial choices
by new Americans and Canadians. Many immigrants prefer new houses that
don’t require Home Depot handyman skills. At the same time, the combination of new construction with home owner association restrictions promises to insulate property values against any feared effects of racial integration.
Minorities in 2000 accounted for more than half of suburban residents in
McAllen, El Paso, Honolulu, Albuquerque, Fresno, and Los Angeles and more
than 40 percent in San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, Stockton, San Antonio,
and San Diego. There were big gains in the minority share of suburbia in Las
Vegas, Houston, Dallas, and Bakersfield as well.
There were still Ozzie and Harriet families (two parents and children
in the same household) in western metropolitan areas, but they were most
likely to be living in the suburbs and to be named Nfu’i.ez or Nguyen rather
than Nelson. They might have picked a new planned community in Chula
Vista, outside of San Diego. The population of Eastlake Greens, for example,
consisted of 3,822 whites, 2,380 Hispanics, 2,383 Asians, and 465 African
Americans. The nearly identical new houses, the strict design controls, and
the curving streets and cul-de-sac layout offer the newly successful immigrant family economic security in a location without embedded ethnic tensions. The same pattern is true of El Paso, Denver, San Jose, Sacramento, and
the suburbs south and southeast ofVancouver.
The change can be traced in southern California’s Orange County-John
Wayne Airport country that was an early home base of Cold War conservatism. Orange County suburbs burgeoned in the 1950s and 1960s with defense
industry jobs and white families. This was receptive ground for the John
228 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Birch Society and its Communist conspiracy theories, for grassroots organizing for conservative causes, and for Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency.
The people whom Llsa McGirr has termed “suburban warriors” were easy
targets for satire by novelists like Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49,
but they acted from a combination of self-interest and political conviction.17
As the Cold War faded, however, voters continued to fight off higher taxes
but showed increasing interest in environmental and social issues. Local
residents, moreover, were increasingly Asian Americans and Latinos who
embraced “family values” but not the cultural biases that the phrase encoded.
By the 1990s there were two “Orange Counties,” multiethnic in the northern
half closer to Los Angeles and still white in the southern hal£ The 1998 congressional election marked the shift, when Chicana liberal Loretta Sanchez
defeated conservative cold warrior Robert Doman in a district including
Anaheim, Santa Ana, and Fullerton.
Absorbing all these forces of change-suburbanization ofhousing, transportation investment, immigration-western cities at the opening of the
twenty-first century had a distinctive imprint on the map. They were simultaneously centralized (although in a different way than Chicago or Detroit)
and multicentered, the locales alike for high-rise corridors, suburban cores,
and randomly scattered mini-malls.
At the center of the midsized western metropolis is not so much a traditional, tightly bounded downtown as an expansive but still dominant central district. Extending outward from the central core of banks, government
offices, and convention facilities in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it
embraced new condo clusters for empty nesters, secondary shopping nodes,
“old town” historic districts, and sports venues. Covering perhaps 3 or 4 percent of the entire developed area, it included most of the major public facilities and institutions. The “uptown” end might be anchored by a secondary
office concentration (a sort of “edge city” embedded in mid-metropolis), by a
major shopping node, or by a university campus such as the University of New
Mexico, University of Texas, University of Arizona, Boise State University, or
University of Washington.
In the space of eight square miles, about 2 percent of its whole region, a
visitor to Salt Lake City will find virtually every reason she has come to visit.
Temple Square and the key Mormon landmarks anchor the core. The secu•
lar state overlooks the city from a capitol building perched on a steep hill to
the north. Convention facilities and sports arenas are just west of the commercial district and its enormously wide streets. City hall, the public library,
and other parts of the local government are on the other side of the center,
a mile or so south of the capitol. A light-rail line runs three miles east to the
University of Utah.
Densities of western cities are surprisingly high. It remains surprising
to many people that Los Angeles is more densely populated than Detroit,
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 229
Cleveland, or Pittsburgh. There were forty-nine metro areas in the United
States with one million or more people in 2000. Ten of the twelve most densely
populated were western-Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco,
Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City.is The
statistics do not mean that western cities look like Manhattan or the Chicago
lakefront, with mile after mile of high-rising apartments. They do mean that
few western cities actually match up with the overworked term sprawl, with
its implications of scattershot housing tracts and isolated subdivisions tossed
randomly across the landscape. Instead, they have been growing low-rise but
compact, nudging out incrementally into their hinterlands rather than leapfrogging over the dales and hills.
Drive south from Sky Harbor Airport, grind up the high, massive ridge
of South Mountain, and look down on Phoenix. You see a big metropolis
for sure, with Phoenix, Tempe, a bit of Mesa, and a fringe of Scottsdale all
in view. You also see a large uninterrupted urban fabric, with little vacant
land except for the undevelopable slopes of Camelback Mountain and Squaw
Peak. Phoenix is a typical southwestern/far western metro area that has been
holding its density while gaining population. Adding population and urbanized land at roughly the same rates since the 1980s, it looks from on high
like a soft blanket of development draped over the Salt River Valley. Denver
has been described as folding over the Colorado plains and foothills like a
“lumpy pancake.” Los Angeles, agrees architecture critic Brendan Gill, has
“hugged the ground on which it was built.” Alison Lurie describes the same
low-rise intensity in her uncharitably titled novel The Nowhere City: “She
gestured at Mar Vista laid out below the freeway: a random grid of service
stations, two-story apartment buildings, drive-ins, palms, and factories, and
block after block of stucco cottages.”19
Contrast Atlanta or Indianapolis or Orlando. Here there are few environmental constraints of topography or water, allowing development to sprawl
endlessly into surrounding counties at very low densities. In Tom Wolfe’s
novel A Man in Full, 1990s Atlanta is erupting with real estate development
like a sea oflava. Far on the suburban fringe, Forsyth County is changing from
a “Redman Chewing Tobacco rural outback into Subdivision Heaven.” The
typical eastern or southeastern city intertwines into the surrounding region,
but as Wolf describes a flyover of Atlanta: “The trees stretched in every direction. They were Atlanta’s greatest natural resource, those trees were. People
loved to live beneath them … for the past thirty years all sorts of people …
had been moving beneath those trees, into all those delightful, leafy, rolling
rural communities that surrounded the city proper.”20
Indeed, the entire “dry Sunbelt” of California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado,
Utah, and New Mexico added new urbanized land and population in roughly
equal rates from 1982 to 1997 according to the National Resource Inventory, whereas the “wet Sunbelt” (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, the
230 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Carolinas) added developed land at twice the pace of population growth.
Between 1982 and 1997, again, the South averaged 1.4 new residents for
every newly urbanized acre, while the West averaged 3.6 residents. In the
1990s, Charlotte converted forty-nine acres of rural land to housing for every
100 new residents, and Nashville converted forty-two acres. In contrast, Las
Vegas converted fifteen, Phoenix converted sixteen, and Salt Lake City converted nine acres.
So, in fact, western cities lie relatively lightly on the land. “Urbanized area”
is the U.S. Census category that measures the extent of such lands. Unlike the
better-known metropolitan area (an economic concept), the urbanized area
is the land that is actually settled at urban densities-the aggregate urban
footprint, if you will. In Washington, for example, urbanized areas in 2000
ranged in size from twenty-seven square miles for Wenatchee to 954 square
miles for Seattle. In Oklahoma they ranged from thirty square miles for
Norman to 322 square miles for Oklahoma City. Urbanized areas claimed only
0.02 percent of Alaska (no surprise there), 0.2 percent of the northern plains
states, o.8 percent of the total expanse of the central Rocky Mountain states,
1.1 percent of the Northwest states, and just 1.7 percent of compact Hawaii.21
Only Texas at 2.0 percent and California at 4.1 percent were more extensively
built over. Canada does not publish data in a form precisely comparable to the
U.S. urbanized area, but use of the more expansive Census Metropolitan Area
( CMA) boundaries gives a comparable result: 0-4 percent ofBritish Columbia
within CMAs and 1.4 percent of the three Prairie Provinces.
There is another message to take away from South Mountain. Phoenix
and its sister cities form a “conurbanized” corridor. The term conurbation
comes from Scottish planner Patrick Geddes, who coined it early in the twentieth century to describe the way in which sets of originally independent cities were growing into each other to form a larger agglomeration, as with the
Randstadt cities of Holland, the Ruhr cities of Germany, or the industrial cities of the English Midlands. 22 In the twenty-first-century West, it is rival real
estate promotions and historically competitive commercial centers rather
than factory towns that have grown together into single metro-organisms.
There are some conurbations that include historically “twinned” cities like
Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston/Galveston, and Seattle/Tacoma and others in
which the one city such as Denver or Portland has always overshadowed the
secondary center(s).
The typical western conurbation stretches long and narrow, twice or
three times farther along one axis than the other. Environment may not be
destiny, but the topography of shorelines and mountains has again taken the
upper hand. The Phoenix conurbation runs seventy-five miles from Buckeye
to Apache Junction, constrained into a central corridor (and secondary parallel corridors) by the topography of east-west mountain ranges and contouring irrigation canals. Pugetopolis, centered nicely on Sea-Tac Airport, runs
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 231
r I cu RE 52. Lions’ Gate Bridge, Vancouver. Opened in 1938, the Lions’ Gate Bridge
(officially the First Narrows Bridge) connected Vancouver to the north shore of Burrard
Inlet. Arching over the entrance to Canada’s western port with a 5,890-foot suspension
span, it is a northern equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge that opened just a year
earlier, and it played a major role in the development of Vancouver’s northern suburbs.
(Courtesy of North Vancouver Museum.)
eighty miles from Olympia to Everett, squeezed between the water of Puget
Sound and the rain-soaked foothills of the Cascades. Utah’s conurbationninety miles from the south edge of Provo to the northern edge of Ogden-is
confined by a different sort of saltwater to the west and the high, dry Wasatch
Range to the east. It’s seventy miles from Oceanside to Tijuana, with San
Diego in the middle; eighty miles from Salem, Oregon, to Battleground,
Washington, with Portland in between; a hundred miles from Castle Rock to
Fort Collins, with Denver in between; and sixty miles from West Vancouver
to Chilliwack along the axis ofBurrard Inlet and the Fraser River. Mediumsized cities like Albuquerque and El Paso also stretch along a single axisin these cases constricted along the course of the Rio Grande by mountain
ranges and military bases. Seen from Tantalus Drive high behind the city
center, Honolulu is a narrow, twenty-mile arc of urban development that
wraps around the southwest side and base of the Koolau Range from Pearl
City to new communities around Koko Head.
The scale and visibility of western conurbations combined, in several
cases, with their relative economic and social homogeneity to support interest
2.32 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
. MANMADE
BOUNDARY
L
SERVICE AREA
FICURE 53. Phoenix urban village plan. In the 1990s 1 many western cities developed
regional plans that proposed to combat sprawl by focusing growth on regional and
neighborhood centers. The City of Phoenix Planning Department, for example, proposed
in 1993 that the city be planned as a set of neighborhood dusters of “urban villages”
that could provide a wide range of jobs and services within a relatively localized area.
in metropolitan growth management. Often spurred by the specter of suburban gridlock and other threats to the quality of daily life, the growth management impulse has drawn on neighborhood activists, quality-of-life liberals,
environmentalists, and open-space advocates.
One strategy by urban planners and public officials has been to bring
order out of the randomness of market by promoting development around
outlying centers or nodes. Phoenix talked about promoting “urban villages.”
Portland’s “Region 2040 Plan” (1994) designated a hierarchy of”regional centers” and “town centers.” The Puget Sound Regional Council in 1996 defined
nine established downtowns in the Seattle/Tacoma area and twelve suburban
locations as “urban centers” that are to absorb most new employment and
receive most transportation improvements. Salt Lake City residents in the
1990s undertook an elaborate Envision Utah program that built consensus
around the need to strengthen regional community centers and development
corridors. The legislature in 1999 established a Quality Growth Commission
ID help channel state infrastructure funding to communities that planned
their development according to the growth management goals.
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 233
Americans could look north for examples of innovative responses to metropolitan growth such as the Winnipeg Unicity. In 1960, the provincial government created the Metropolitan Corporation of Greater Winnipeg with an
elected council to serve as a second tier of government dealing with regional
issues while the old city and suburbs handled local concerns. Twelve years
later, the leftist New Democratic Party used its control of the province to create a single unified Unicitywith a fifty-one-member city council (now shrunk
by two-thirds). The price for a uniform tax rate and uniform services was a
government in which suburban areas outweighed the old core. According to
urban politics specialist Christopher Leo, the term Unicity was seldom used
by the twenty-first century-just Winnipeg.23
Advocates of regional planning often journeyed to Vancouver for inspiration. The Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD), created in 1967, has
responsibility for regional parks, transit, water, environmental services, and
planning. I ts Livable Region plan in 1976 proposed to focus future growth on
central Vancouver plus four outlying nodes in Burnaby, Surrey, Coquitlam,
and New Westminster. Although the plan made great sense in the physically
constrained setting of Vancouver, the provincial government of the 1980s
gutted the authority of the GVRD. With further swings in local politics, the
GVRD in 1990 updated and reissued the Livable Region plan with claims of
“moderate success” (although central Vancouver was still far ahead of outlying centers in its share of commercial and office space).24
Another option was to manage the entire footprint of a city by directing
growth onto certain lands and away from others. Here too, Canadian cities
took the lead. Having acquired large tracts of tax-forfeiture land during the
bad years after 1920, Saskatoon in 1945 found itself owning 8,500 building
lots. It acquired additional farmland in the 1950s and 1960s with the goals
of promoting compact development and moderating land costs. In 1953 it
adopted a policy of maintaining a fifteen- to twenty-year supply in public
ownership, selling to developers at a profit and simultaneously ensuring that
growth would be orderly and contiguous. Edmonton used both purchased
and tax-foreclosed land to influence the location and character of development, establishing a partial greenbelt and encouraging large, mixed-use
neighborhoods with town centers such as Mill Woods in the 1970s. British
Columbia’s parliament in 1973 passed Bill 42, which created an Agricultural
Land Reserve. The province has put the most productive farmland, much of it
in the Fraser Valley, off.limits to urbanization. The effect has been to limit the
eastward sprawl of Vancouver and to keep smaller, fast-growing Abbotsford
a true city in the country, where population and farm revenues both doubled
from the mid-1980s to 2006.
Hawaii set the pace in the United States with a 1961 law to protect pineapple and sugarcane plantations by dividing the areas into urban, rural, agricultural, and conservation areas (somewhat like the British Columbia program).
234 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
California created a commission to regulate filling and development around
all of San Francisco Bay in 1965. Oregon adopted a statewide land planning
system in 1973 to fend off what Governor Tom McCall called “the unfettered
despoiling of the land” through “sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania, and the ravenous rampage of suburbia in the Willamette Valley. “2s A key
tool was the establishment of Urban Growth Boundaries that protect productive farm- and forestland and keep metropolitan areas compact.26 The
Washington Growth Management Act in 1990 adopted a similar although
less stringent policy of Urban Growth Areas.
Las Vegas-the newest supercity-developed compactly even while growing a spectacular 83 percent in the 1990s. The opening ae1ials in television’s
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation show the surprising conservativeness of its
urban footprint. An intensely developed core area includes not only the Strip
but also hospitals, a university, banks, and business towers. Low-rise neighborhoods spread from Boulder City and Henderson to North Las Vegas, but
they are constrained by military land, by a basin and range landscape that
channels development into a corridor, and by the costs of supplying water
in a desert. This is a metropolis with good union jobs in the hotel and restaurant. industry and a service economy that is diversifying from gambling
and tourism.
For permanent residents, Las Vegas offers a new variation on the venerable idea of development around neighborhood units with what historian
Hal Rothman has called “post-urban pods.” Writing for the local newspaper,
he has commented that “each Station or Coast casino defines a new node,
a six-square-mile area in which people live and play.” Far from the Strip,
these “community casinos” include restaurants and hotels and attract adjacent mixed-use development with shopping and housing. As he wrote a few
months before his death, “Right by my house is a casino … that has next to
it a faux village with condos, restaurants, and high-end stores. That development has morphed across the street, giving me a Whole Foods within range
of my wheelchair. “21
Las Vegas, like most of the metropolitan West, is also part of an even larger
pattern. Somewhat in the way that astronomers see stars grouped into galaxies, galaxies into clusters, and clusters clumping unevenly at astonishing
scale, geographers see cities grouped into conurbations and conurbations
grouping into larger ribbons of urbanization. In 2005, the Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy revisited Jean Gottmann’s idea of the “megalopolis” as reshaped
by a half century of Interstate Highways. It defined ten Megalopolitan Areas
for the United States and adjacent border areas. Each has a distinct historical
and regional identity, is organized around high-volume transportation corridors, and is projected to have at least 10 million people by 2040. In the east
the list includes the Boston-to-Washington and Chicago-to-Toronto clusters
that were apparent as early as the 1960s. In the West, from larger to smaller
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 235
population , are the Santa Barbara-Los Angeles-Tijuana “Southlandn (which
extends a spur to Las Vegas); north-central California reaching from the San
Francisco Bay deep into the Central Valley; the Texas Triangle, with its comers
at Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio; Cascadia (Portland-S eattle- Vancouver};
and Phoenix-Tuc son. Some might add the Rocky Mountain Piedmont from
Pueblo to Cheyenne or, with a very big stretch and lots of open country,
Calgary-Edmonton.is To return to the astronomical metaphor, these are the
West’s night-view megacities, the bands and constellations ofbrightness that
show so sharply on nighttime satellite images and contrast so starkly with the
dimly lit mountain s, plateaus, prairies, and forests between.
236 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Reshaping the Metropolis
At Colorado Avenue she turned. It was the .first through boulevard she
had been on, and the traffic signals were off with yellow blinkers showing.
So she gave the car the gun, excitedly watching the needle swing past 30,
40, and 50 . … The car was pumping something into her veins, something of pride, of arrogance, of regained self respect.
-James Cain, Mildred Pierce (1945)
Now they lived in Mill Valley . … A tract house on the Sutton Manor
flatlands; it was big enough, comfortable, and just barely affordabk. .
Besides, the .first time they’d seen it, a racing green ’63 TR-4 was parked
in the driveway, a strong indication that the house’s owners were okay
people. If they could live in a tract house, so could Kate and Harvey . …
And it was still Mill Valley, though just barely; Kate still hated to tell
people, when she gave directions, to stay on East Blithedale all the way
out, as if they were headingfor 101, tum left at the Chevron station, go
past the Red Cart, and tum right at the carwash.
-Cyra McFadden,
The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County (1977)
Los Angeles is rather like a big earthworm that might be chopped into
twenty pieces and not killed . … You get the impression that a mediumsized urban centre has schizogenetically reproduced itself twenty times.
-Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955)
219
Seventy years after Emily French struggled to finish her small house near
the South Platte River, another Denver family moved into a new, almost finished house-but this time in the absolutely new neighborhood of Hoffman
Heights in the booming suburb of Aurora. Their experience-dad, mom,
Susan, Tom, Bobby, and Bud-mirrored that of millions of other families, but
we can revisit it through the memories and meditations of Robert Michael
Pyle. His memoir The Thunder Tree relives his childhood and youth in the
1950s and early 1960s. Summer days along the High Line Canal, explorations
of abandoned farmhouses, and trips to the public library (which kept getting a
bigger building and following population eastward) all fed his fascination with
wild nature in its losing contest with the suburban frontier. .
Aurora was booming in 1953, when the Pyles moved into their new fourbedroom home, yellow brick on a concrete slab. The kids woke to the “acrid
odor of roofer’s tar … field marks of a new suburb still under construction.”1 Their parents struggled to turn the bare dirt yard into lawn and garden with the help of the kids, who dug dandelions for a nickel a bucket.
Chinese elms were the tree of choice, brittle but fast growing; The Cold War
funded Aurora’s Fitzsimons Army Hospital, Lowry Field with its training
jets and Titan missile silos, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal to produce and
store chemical weapons. Aurora’s 3,000 residents in 1940 grew to 30,000 in
1953 when Bobby Pyle and his family moved out from the city, to 50,000 in
1960 when he entered high school, and to 276,000 by the end of the century.
In alliance with Colorado Springs, the city built its own transmountain water
system to pump snowrnelt across the Front Range independent of what suburban developers saw as the tyrannical Denver Water Board.2 Community
leaders annexed undeveloped tracts of prairie, marketed the city as an office
and industrial location, and envisioned Aurora as a new Minneapolis with
Denver relegated to the role of St. Paul without Prairie Home Companion.
Bobby Pyle fifty years later is a biologist and nature writer ofinternational
reputation. Then he roamed the edges of Aurora with the eye of a nascent
naturalist. He observed the transformation of the short-grass prairie, first by
invasive species like cheatgrass, then by the Kentucky bluegrass of domestic lawns and city parks, then by the asphalt of church and shopping center
parking lots. His family drove east into the prairie to see pronghorn antelope,
a trip that grew longer with each year. His naturalist’s eye also spotted the
changing species of housing: the old round barn, the rural house across from
the new mall, the abandoned farmhouse from a vanished farm, the two new
ranch-style houses built adjacent, “scouts for the suburb that was preparing
to pounce.” 3
Robert Pyle’s family were enlistees in the suburbanizing generation
that remade the nation after 1945. The immediate postwar decades brought
a perfect storm of housing demand: Couples who had deferred marriage
now walked down the aisle. Those who had deferred children rushed to
220 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
form families. The proportion of adults who were unmarried dropped to its
twentieth-century low in 1960, as young people married quickly and had an
average of three children spaced closely together. Meanwhile wartime savings
were available for down payments on mass-produced tract houses as families
longed to move out of cramped apartments or quit doubling up with relatives.
Builders pushed the number of new houses to a peak of nearly two million in
1950, industrializing production with standardized components and specialized crews. “On-site fabrication” was mass production without an assembly
line. In Robert Pyle’s suburban Denver, “growth advanced southeasterly from
Denver’s hinterland toward the Cherry Creek Reservoir, northeast along Sand
Creek, due east on Colfax. All obstacles fell, all proportion fell away. With the
advent of the town house and condominium, a powerful new tool came on
line. Colonies of cloned domiciles stormed the remaining countryside.” 4
By the time Robert Pyle had left for graduate school, photographer Robert
Adams was turning his eye to the same landscape. A highly admired landscape photographer, Adams often chooses to show the small works ofhumanity against the vast spaces of the world. His first book in 1970 was White
Churches of the Plains, a stunning series showing small-frame churches standing forty or eighty years old on the windswept land of eastern Colorado. For
his second book, in contrast, he photographed suburban Denver. The New
West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range (1974) hearkens back to the
Lakewood photos but takes the new suburbscapes on their own terms as
the epitome of the emerging West. The genre–the western suburb through
the camera-continues to flourish with books like Laurie Brown, Martha Ronk,
and Charles Little’s Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West (2000)
and Ann Wolfe’s Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl (2006).s
The surge of western population that began with World War II has yet to
crest, let alone recede. In 1940 the West was a region oflarge and small cities
speckling the plains, straddling small rivers where they escape the mountains, and dotting the coast. By 2000 it was home to vast metropolitan regions
that reached out to each other across deserts and prairies. The message of
the census has been consistent. To find nineteen of the nation’s twenty-fiv.e
fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the 1940s, Americans had to look west
across the Missouri and Sabine rivers. The same western states counted
as sixteen of the twenty-five fastest-growing metropolitan areas during the
1950s, slipped to twelve for the 1960s when Americans were discovering the
Sunbelt Southeast, and then recovered to sixteen for the 1970s, sixteen for
the 1980s, and fourteen for the 199os.G Between 1940 and 2000, Phoenix
moved from seventy-seventh place to fourteenth among American metropolitan areas; San Diego, from forty-seventh to seventeenth; Sacramento,
from eighty-second to twenty-fifth; and Austin, from 123rd to thirty-eighth.
The first suburban generation built cities with and for automobiles. Auto
dependence was not exclusive to western c.ommunities, but Denver was tops
RESHAPJNG THE METROPOLIS 221
FI c. u RE 50. War boom housing in Los Angeles. This Associated Press photo from
the early 1950s carried the following caption: “They met housing needs then. These
small unpretentious homes in a Los Angeles suburb were built just after the war
when thousands of home-hungry people needed places to live.” (Hearst Collection,
Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California Library.)
among major cities in the ratio of automobiles to population in both 1960
and 1970 (the result is the same counting all registered vehicles and passenger cars only). Los Angeles, Houston, and even San Francisco were also high
on the list. Phoenix, perhaps surprisingly, was a bit further down but still
ahead of Detroit, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
The increasingly elaborate youth culture of the postwar era depended
heavily on the rise of multicar families, and observers looked to western
cities to understand their implications. Drawing on his own teen years in
Los Angeles, Harvard professor James Q. Wilson tried to describe the cultural importance of automobile ownership for a skeptical East Coast intelligentsia.7 He drew on the same background that shaped Angeleno Charles
Bukowski’s memories in his poem “Waiting,” which recalls Los Angeles of
the 1930s as a land of freedom “if you had a car and the gas.”s
Arriving without preconceived ideas in the 1960s, British architecture
critic Rayner Banham saw the same landscape as “autopia” (and “surfurbia”)
in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). Automobiles in the
222 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FIGURE 51. Westchester, California. Along with nearby Lakewood,-the community of
Westchester, photographed in 1949, epitomized the national image of Los Angeles
as a place of endless horizontal sprawl in look-alike subdivisions. (Courtesy of the
California Historical Society/TicorTitle Insurance Los Angeles, Department of Special
Collections, University of Southern California Library.)
form of”kustomized kars” are the featured exhibit in pop trend spotter Tom
Wolfe’s 1965 essay “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”
They play the competing roles of anesthetic and redemption in Joan Didion’s
novel Play It as It Lays {1970).9 They are vital to the action in Rebel without a
Cause (1955), with its suburban Los Angeles setting, and they are the action in
American Graffiti (1973), which uses San Rafael and director George Lucas’s
hometown of Modesto to reproduce the feel of the early196os.
Life in a new, auto-oriented suburb like Lakewood, California, was not
quite the same as the notorious photographs suggest. Its 17,500 houses were
built on bean and sugar beet fields, and they were small (950 to 1,100 square
feet), but they were up to date (Lakewood was “garbage free” because each
house had an in-sink disposal), and they did not all look alike. Dozens of
parks and playgrounds helped to divide the development into distinct communities. Residents of each neighborhood staked a claim to “their” park,
and kids only ventured into other parks at the invitation of a friend. Most of
the residents would have agreed that it was “Tomorrow’s City Today,” with
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 223
its very large shopping center and big new high school that was the “jewel
of the town.”
Lakewood in the 1950s and 1960s was an optimistic and very homogeneous community. Its dads were veterans of World War II and Korea who
worked at the Douglas Aircraft plant or the Long Beach Naval Station. Moms
stayed home with the kids, by and large. Boys growing up in Lakewood had
a clear trajectory to success: high school sports, the military, and a job in the
defense industry. It was also very, very white, completing a monoculture in
terms of age, family patterns, economic class, and race. As one thoughtful
native has commented, it was ”the American Dream made affordable for a
generation of industrial workers …. They were oriented to aerospace ….
They worked at all the places that exemplified the bright future that California
was supposed to be.”10 The flip side of the successful 1950s and 1960s, however, would be an inability to adapt to racial integration and the disappearance
of industrial jobs in the 1980s and 1990s. With no layers of history, writes
another of Lakewood’s “original kids,” the community “has the feeling of a
club-the feeling that because everyone started out together, residents are
entitled to lifetime ‘charter membership.”’11
Milpitas, California, was another 1950s suburb built for and by the automobile. Located in the East Bay northeast of San Jose, Milpitas grew to serve
the new Ford assembly plant. Most of the new worker-residents moved out
from Oakland. They brought their union membership and working-class politics with them. They got a quieter community with a new and nicer house,
just as in Lakewood. They left behind marginal neighborhoods that suffered
from losing households with steady incomes. They also left behind African
American neighbors and coworkers who found it much more difficult than
whites to make the suburban trek from tenement to tract house.
The western cities that rushed to build freeways in the early decades of the
U.S. Interstate Highway program, initiated im956, began to choose different
transportation options in the second automobile generation that followed the
oil shocks of the mid-197os. In the camp of highway engineering were cities
like Denver, which began a controversial boundary-busting freeway loop in
the 1980s, and Phoenix, which scrambled to catch up with freeway mileage
after a slow start and was still building its valley loop into the new century. In
Texas, however, the Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth regions both planned in
the early twenty-first century to add 3,000 miles of freeway and tollway lanes,
and Austin projected another 1,000 lane miles.
The alternative to highway investment was to build new commuter rail
systems to preserve the centrality of historic downtowns and to concentrate
new development in corridors and nodes. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system
went into operation in the 1970s and grew over the next three decades, helping
to bring intense development to outlying centers like Walnut Creek. Portland
rejected a planned radial freeway in the mid-197os and has proceeded to
224 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
develop an extensive light-rail system. Seattle finished a second north-south
freeway in the 1980s and then paused for a seemingly interminable debate
about the right public transit investments (bus tunnel? more monorail? lightrail?). San Diego also took light-rail seriously as a system ofinterconnecting
lines. Sacramento, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix
undertook more limited rail systems after 19 90, although some of them continue to expand (as in Denver and Phoenix). One consequence is that four
cities of the western U.S. ranked in the nation’s top ten for percentage of
journey-to-work trips made by public transit, with San Francisco/Oakland
comparable to Washington, D.C., Honolulu comparable to Philadelphia, and
Seattle and Portland comparable to Pittsburgh.12
North of the border, Edmonton opened light-rail in the 1970s, followed
in the 1980s by Calgary and then by Vancouver’s SkyTrain (which runs both
above and below the surface). Without the temptation ofhuge chunks ofhighway money from their national government, Canadian cities were much more
reluctant to build extensive freeway systems. Instead, places like Edmonton
and Vancouver have opted to tie their growing regions together with rail
transit, improved bus service, and upgrades to existing highway systems-a
choice that is obvious to any American tourist who expects to cruise blithely
into the city center.
The second generation of suburban development also fostered supersuburb municipalities that began as suburbs or satellites of a larger city but
now have populations of 100,000 or more. In 1990, thirty-five of the forty-six
supersuburbs in the United States were located in the West. By 2000, the
western share was sixty-six of eighty-nine. At the even higher threshold of
200,000, the West in 2000 claimed twelve of fourteen, including giants like
Long Beach at 462,000, Mesa (Arizona) at 396,000, Santa Ana (California)
at 338,000, and Arlington (Texas) at 333,000. Specialists in urban government place the threshold population to support efficient full-service municipal government at between 50,000 and 100,000. A community of this size
can employ a diversified professional staff, maintain sophisticated support
services, and realize economies of scale in service delivery. To the U.S. examples we can add Burnaby, Surrey, Coquitlam, and Richmond in the Vancouver region.13
Two of the large suburbs are among the most successful of the comprehensively planned “New Towns” that developers promoted around the
United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The availability oflarge tracts of empty
land in single or limited ownership near western cities made New Towns
relatively easy to create as real estate deals. The Woodlands, on harvested
timberland fifteen miles north of Houston International Airport, was the
brainchild of George Mitchell, a futurist and energy mogul in the early 1970s.
Set among lakes and pine woods, the city sold a combination of small-town
nostalgia and high-tech communications infrastructure. Although hit by
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 225
ups and downs in the Texas real estate market, the Woodlands by 2000 had
56,000 residents. On a different coast, the roots of Irvine, California, date
to the 1860s and 1870s when James Irvine acquired title to several ranches
in what became Orange County. The Irvine Company moved from agriculture to land development in the 1950s, leasing lots in expensive coastal subdivisions around Newport Bay. Between 1959 and 1964, architect William
Pereira and Irvine Company employees developed plans for a 40,000-acre
tract between Newport Bay and the site of a new University of California
campus. They envisioned a set of semi-independent residential communities linked to two industrial sites, the university, and a Newport Center
“downtown.” Large builders erected the new housing on leased land, leaving
the company in long-term control. Covering only part of the Irvine Company
lands, the incorporated city oflrvine counted over 110,000 residents by 1990,
143,000 by 2000, and 194,000 by 2006_14
By the 1970s and 1980s, supersuburbs (or “outer cities”) were able to
push their own development agendas in direct competition with central cities. Their goal was to have the best ofboth worlds: industrial and commercial
real estate development to generate property taxes and sales taxes, coupled
with upscale residential development that would bring sober, taxpaying citizens who would want good schools, parks, and libraries but include few welfare cases and crime-prone families. This municipal agenda also suited new
suburban industries whose managers thought little about the needs of central
cities. Aerospace, defense, and electronics companies cared far more about
suburban highways and world markets than about fading downtowns and
neighborhoods. The Industrial League of Orange County, which represented
major defense and technology corporations, consistently overrode efforts to
slow the pace of growth or mitigate its effects on older communities.
San Jose has also battled through tensions between the center and periphery. During the 1950s aggressive annexation by the city of San Jose disrupted
efforts to plan for controlled growth in Santa Clara County. By the 1970s, in
contrast, the growth of Silicon Valley challenged the primacy of the central
city and its downtown business interests. Represented by the Santa Clara
Manufacturing Group, the newly rich diluted the remaining influence of
downtown, which was no longer a major concern for corporations that built
low-rise offices and factories in nearby cities like Mountain View, Sunnyvale,
Santa Clara, and Palo Alto, not to mention the occupants of more than
40 million square feet of office space within San Jose’s Golden Triangle at
the intersection of Routes 101 and 280. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a
new generation of city leaders (including mayors Tom McEnery and Susan
Hammer) pushed a downtown revival, with new hotels, office buildings, a
park, a convention center, two museums, a light-rail line, municipal buildings, and a public library (innovatively shared with San Jose State University).
The center of the new San Jose is Plaza de Cesar Chavez, bordered by a science
226 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
museum designed by a Mexican architect, reviving a new multiethnic downtown on the ashes of the dying white downtown.
Metropolitan Phoenix similarly developed multiple power centers. Phoenix, Tempe, and Scottsdale waged an annexation war through the 1960s as
each tried to snag developable land, battles that were revisited more recently
among Phoenix, Buckeye, and Peoria. The valley’s multiple growth nodes created new, localized sets of business and investment interests different from
those of the postwar civic leadership. New centers with their own groups
of economic and civic leaders included Scottsdale, Glendale, Mesa, Tempe,
Chandler, and the growing Camelback/Biltmore and northwest districts.
Mesa boosters, for example, pursued residential, commercial, and industrial
growth. The city bought up water rights, promoted its business district, and
sought new businesses. Glendale in 1984 offered a $20,000 bonus for the
first person to bring a 100,000-square-foot factory to town. Business and
civic groups such as the East Valley Partnership, the West Valley Partnership,
and Phoenix Together gave lip service to regional cooperation but “competed
for everything from sports facilities to educational institutions in order to
offer unique advantages to residents and businesses. For the most part, metropolitan pluralism prevailed in the Valley of the Sun. “1s
Center cities and supersuburbs remain in constant tension, something
immediately apparent to anyone who follows major league sports. In the Bay
Area, San Jose acquired the Sharks of the National Hockey League as part of
its downtown redevelopment and efforts to become a “big league city.” The
San Francisco Giants moved to a new downtown stadium for the twenty-first
century, but the Forty-Niners of the National Football League announced
plans in 2006 to build their new stadium in Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon
Valley. The Oakland Athletics planned to move twenty miles south from the
Oakland Coliseum to Fremont. In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Irving and
Arlington used liberal Texas annexation laws to expand aggressively in the
decades after World War II, taking in vast tracts of undeveloped prairie land
that lay in the path of metropolitan growth. Arlington, for one example, grew
from a few square miles in 1945 to nearly 100 square miles, giving it plenty of
land for a university campus and a Major League Baseball park, while Irving
got the NFL stadium. Chula Vista, California, grew to fifty square miles and
close to 200,000 people by 2007, enabling it to make a bid to lure the San
Diego Chargers from their old Mission Valley Stadium. And enough said
about the curiously named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
· Supersuburbs have their occasional downtowns and concentrations of
development around superregional malls and freeway interchanges, like
Las Colinas northwest of Dallas or the South Coast Plaza complex in Orange
County, places that fit journalist Joel Garreau’ s category ofEdge City. However,
such mid-rise islands and oases account for only a fraction of metro area
employment and retailing. Instead, other experts depict a fractal landscape
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 227
organized at a much finer grain. The edgeless city is the ordinary landscape
that we don’t really notice-small office parks, scattered factories and warehouses, and highway-side strips where insurance agents, CPAs, and yoga studios sit next to take-and-bake pizza places and car stereo stores. It is the place
where “office park dads” (a phrase coined by political consultants in 2002) are
busy at work while their spouses juggle the duties of “soccer moms.” These
findings support Anne Vernez Moudon’s argument that most clustering of
activity in suburban zones is at a much smaller scale than in Edge Cities. Her
research on Seattle has found what are, in effect, suburban neighborhoods of
3,000-4,000 residents in which a commercial strip or small shopping center
(perhaps with multiplex cinema) forms a core. Surrounding it are inwardturned sets oflow-rise apartments that have urban densities but nothing of
urban appearance and single-family houses. The Seattle region, for example,
has two or three Edge Cities such as Bellevue and the Kent Valley but roughly
100 suburban clusters.16
These suburban clusters are new melting pots where Asian and Latino
immigrants settle and acculturate to North American life. Some minority
suburbanization is overspill from established ethnic neighborhoods like East
Los Angeles. Much more, however, is the result of conscious initial choices
by new Americans and Canadians. Many immigrants prefer new houses that
don’t require Home Depot handyman skills. At the same time, the combination of new construction with home owner association restrictions promises to insulate property values against any feared effects of racial integration.
Minorities in 2000 accounted for more than half of suburban residents in
McAllen, El Paso, Honolulu, Albuquerque, Fresno, and Los Angeles and more
than 40 percent in San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, Stockton, San Antonio,
and San Diego. There were big gains in the minority share of suburbia in Las
Vegas, Houston, Dallas, and Bakersfield as well.
There were still Ozzie and Harriet families (two parents and children
in the same household) in western metropolitan areas, but they were most
likely to be living in the suburbs and to be named Nfu’i.ez or Nguyen rather
than Nelson. They might have picked a new planned community in Chula
Vista, outside of San Diego. The population of Eastlake Greens, for example,
consisted of 3,822 whites, 2,380 Hispanics, 2,383 Asians, and 465 African
Americans. The nearly identical new houses, the strict design controls, and
the curving streets and cul-de-sac layout offer the newly successful immigrant family economic security in a location without embedded ethnic tensions. The same pattern is true of El Paso, Denver, San Jose, Sacramento, and
the suburbs south and southeast ofVancouver.
The change can be traced in southern California’s Orange County-John
Wayne Airport country that was an early home base of Cold War conservatism. Orange County suburbs burgeoned in the 1950s and 1960s with defense
industry jobs and white families. This was receptive ground for the John
228 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Birch Society and its Communist conspiracy theories, for grassroots organizing for conservative causes, and for Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency.
The people whom Llsa McGirr has termed “suburban warriors” were easy
targets for satire by novelists like Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49,
but they acted from a combination of self-interest and political conviction.17
As the Cold War faded, however, voters continued to fight off higher taxes
but showed increasing interest in environmental and social issues. Local
residents, moreover, were increasingly Asian Americans and Latinos who
embraced “family values” but not the cultural biases that the phrase encoded.
By the 1990s there were two “Orange Counties,” multiethnic in the northern
half closer to Los Angeles and still white in the southern hal£ The 1998 congressional election marked the shift, when Chicana liberal Loretta Sanchez
defeated conservative cold warrior Robert Doman in a district including
Anaheim, Santa Ana, and Fullerton.
Absorbing all these forces of change-suburbanization ofhousing, transportation investment, immigration-western cities at the opening of the
twenty-first century had a distinctive imprint on the map. They were simultaneously centralized (although in a different way than Chicago or Detroit)
and multicentered, the locales alike for high-rise corridors, suburban cores,
and randomly scattered mini-malls.
At the center of the midsized western metropolis is not so much a traditional, tightly bounded downtown as an expansive but still dominant central district. Extending outward from the central core of banks, government
offices, and convention facilities in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it
embraced new condo clusters for empty nesters, secondary shopping nodes,
“old town” historic districts, and sports venues. Covering perhaps 3 or 4 percent of the entire developed area, it included most of the major public facilities and institutions. The “uptown” end might be anchored by a secondary
office concentration (a sort of “edge city” embedded in mid-metropolis), by a
major shopping node, or by a university campus such as the University of New
Mexico, University of Texas, University of Arizona, Boise State University, or
University of Washington.
In the space of eight square miles, about 2 percent of its whole region, a
visitor to Salt Lake City will find virtually every reason she has come to visit.
Temple Square and the key Mormon landmarks anchor the core. The secu•
lar state overlooks the city from a capitol building perched on a steep hill to
the north. Convention facilities and sports arenas are just west of the commercial district and its enormously wide streets. City hall, the public library,
and other parts of the local government are on the other side of the center,
a mile or so south of the capitol. A light-rail line runs three miles east to the
University of Utah.
Densities of western cities are surprisingly high. It remains surprising
to many people that Los Angeles is more densely populated than Detroit,
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 229
Cleveland, or Pittsburgh. There were forty-nine metro areas in the United
States with one million or more people in 2000. Ten of the twelve most densely
populated were western-Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco,
Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City.is The
statistics do not mean that western cities look like Manhattan or the Chicago
lakefront, with mile after mile of high-rising apartments. They do mean that
few western cities actually match up with the overworked term sprawl, with
its implications of scattershot housing tracts and isolated subdivisions tossed
randomly across the landscape. Instead, they have been growing low-rise but
compact, nudging out incrementally into their hinterlands rather than leapfrogging over the dales and hills.
Drive south from Sky Harbor Airport, grind up the high, massive ridge
of South Mountain, and look down on Phoenix. You see a big metropolis
for sure, with Phoenix, Tempe, a bit of Mesa, and a fringe of Scottsdale all
in view. You also see a large uninterrupted urban fabric, with little vacant
land except for the undevelopable slopes of Camelback Mountain and Squaw
Peak. Phoenix is a typical southwestern/far western metro area that has been
holding its density while gaining population. Adding population and urbanized land at roughly the same rates since the 1980s, it looks from on high
like a soft blanket of development draped over the Salt River Valley. Denver
has been described as folding over the Colorado plains and foothills like a
“lumpy pancake.” Los Angeles, agrees architecture critic Brendan Gill, has
“hugged the ground on which it was built.” Alison Lurie describes the same
low-rise intensity in her uncharitably titled novel The Nowhere City: “She
gestured at Mar Vista laid out below the freeway: a random grid of service
stations, two-story apartment buildings, drive-ins, palms, and factories, and
block after block of stucco cottages.”19
Contrast Atlanta or Indianapolis or Orlando. Here there are few environmental constraints of topography or water, allowing development to sprawl
endlessly into surrounding counties at very low densities. In Tom Wolfe’s
novel A Man in Full, 1990s Atlanta is erupting with real estate development
like a sea oflava. Far on the suburban fringe, Forsyth County is changing from
a “Redman Chewing Tobacco rural outback into Subdivision Heaven.” The
typical eastern or southeastern city intertwines into the surrounding region,
but as Wolf describes a flyover of Atlanta: “The trees stretched in every direction. They were Atlanta’s greatest natural resource, those trees were. People
loved to live beneath them … for the past thirty years all sorts of people …
had been moving beneath those trees, into all those delightful, leafy, rolling
rural communities that surrounded the city proper.”20
Indeed, the entire “dry Sunbelt” of California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado,
Utah, and New Mexico added new urbanized land and population in roughly
equal rates from 1982 to 1997 according to the National Resource Inventory, whereas the “wet Sunbelt” (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, the
230 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Carolinas) added developed land at twice the pace of population growth.
Between 1982 and 1997, again, the South averaged 1.4 new residents for
every newly urbanized acre, while the West averaged 3.6 residents. In the
1990s, Charlotte converted forty-nine acres of rural land to housing for every
100 new residents, and Nashville converted forty-two acres. In contrast, Las
Vegas converted fifteen, Phoenix converted sixteen, and Salt Lake City converted nine acres.
So, in fact, western cities lie relatively lightly on the land. “Urbanized area”
is the U.S. Census category that measures the extent of such lands. Unlike the
better-known metropolitan area (an economic concept), the urbanized area
is the land that is actually settled at urban densities-the aggregate urban
footprint, if you will. In Washington, for example, urbanized areas in 2000
ranged in size from twenty-seven square miles for Wenatchee to 954 square
miles for Seattle. In Oklahoma they ranged from thirty square miles for
Norman to 322 square miles for Oklahoma City. Urbanized areas claimed only
0.02 percent of Alaska (no surprise there), 0.2 percent of the northern plains
states, o.8 percent of the total expanse of the central Rocky Mountain states,
1.1 percent of the Northwest states, and just 1.7 percent of compact Hawaii.21
Only Texas at 2.0 percent and California at 4.1 percent were more extensively
built over. Canada does not publish data in a form precisely comparable to the
U.S. urbanized area, but use of the more expansive Census Metropolitan Area
( CMA) boundaries gives a comparable result: 0-4 percent ofBritish Columbia
within CMAs and 1.4 percent of the three Prairie Provinces.
There is another message to take away from South Mountain. Phoenix
and its sister cities form a “conurbanized” corridor. The term conurbation
comes from Scottish planner Patrick Geddes, who coined it early in the twentieth century to describe the way in which sets of originally independent cities were growing into each other to form a larger agglomeration, as with the
Randstadt cities of Holland, the Ruhr cities of Germany, or the industrial cities of the English Midlands. 22 In the twenty-first-century West, it is rival real
estate promotions and historically competitive commercial centers rather
than factory towns that have grown together into single metro-organisms.
There are some conurbations that include historically “twinned” cities like
Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston/Galveston, and Seattle/Tacoma and others in
which the one city such as Denver or Portland has always overshadowed the
secondary center(s).
The typical western conurbation stretches long and narrow, twice or
three times farther along one axis than the other. Environment may not be
destiny, but the topography of shorelines and mountains has again taken the
upper hand. The Phoenix conurbation runs seventy-five miles from Buckeye
to Apache Junction, constrained into a central corridor (and secondary parallel corridors) by the topography of east-west mountain ranges and contouring irrigation canals. Pugetopolis, centered nicely on Sea-Tac Airport, runs
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 231
r I cu RE 52. Lions’ Gate Bridge, Vancouver. Opened in 1938, the Lions’ Gate Bridge
(officially the First Narrows Bridge) connected Vancouver to the north shore of Burrard
Inlet. Arching over the entrance to Canada’s western port with a 5,890-foot suspension
span, it is a northern equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge that opened just a year
earlier, and it played a major role in the development of Vancouver’s northern suburbs.
(Courtesy of North Vancouver Museum.)
eighty miles from Olympia to Everett, squeezed between the water of Puget
Sound and the rain-soaked foothills of the Cascades. Utah’s conurbationninety miles from the south edge of Provo to the northern edge of Ogden-is
confined by a different sort of saltwater to the west and the high, dry Wasatch
Range to the east. It’s seventy miles from Oceanside to Tijuana, with San
Diego in the middle; eighty miles from Salem, Oregon, to Battleground,
Washington, with Portland in between; a hundred miles from Castle Rock to
Fort Collins, with Denver in between; and sixty miles from West Vancouver
to Chilliwack along the axis ofBurrard Inlet and the Fraser River. Mediumsized cities like Albuquerque and El Paso also stretch along a single axisin these cases constricted along the course of the Rio Grande by mountain
ranges and military bases. Seen from Tantalus Drive high behind the city
center, Honolulu is a narrow, twenty-mile arc of urban development that
wraps around the southwest side and base of the Koolau Range from Pearl
City to new communities around Koko Head.
The scale and visibility of western conurbations combined, in several
cases, with their relative economic and social homogeneity to support interest
2.32 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
. MANMADE
BOUNDARY
L
SERVICE AREA
FICURE 53. Phoenix urban village plan. In the 1990s 1 many western cities developed
regional plans that proposed to combat sprawl by focusing growth on regional and
neighborhood centers. The City of Phoenix Planning Department, for example, proposed
in 1993 that the city be planned as a set of neighborhood dusters of “urban villages”
that could provide a wide range of jobs and services within a relatively localized area.
in metropolitan growth management. Often spurred by the specter of suburban gridlock and other threats to the quality of daily life, the growth management impulse has drawn on neighborhood activists, quality-of-life liberals,
environmentalists, and open-space advocates.
One strategy by urban planners and public officials has been to bring
order out of the randomness of market by promoting development around
outlying centers or nodes. Phoenix talked about promoting “urban villages.”
Portland’s “Region 2040 Plan” (1994) designated a hierarchy of”regional centers” and “town centers.” The Puget Sound Regional Council in 1996 defined
nine established downtowns in the Seattle/Tacoma area and twelve suburban
locations as “urban centers” that are to absorb most new employment and
receive most transportation improvements. Salt Lake City residents in the
1990s undertook an elaborate Envision Utah program that built consensus
around the need to strengthen regional community centers and development
corridors. The legislature in 1999 established a Quality Growth Commission
ID help channel state infrastructure funding to communities that planned
their development according to the growth management goals.
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 233
Americans could look north for examples of innovative responses to metropolitan growth such as the Winnipeg Unicity. In 1960, the provincial government created the Metropolitan Corporation of Greater Winnipeg with an
elected council to serve as a second tier of government dealing with regional
issues while the old city and suburbs handled local concerns. Twelve years
later, the leftist New Democratic Party used its control of the province to create a single unified Unicitywith a fifty-one-member city council (now shrunk
by two-thirds). The price for a uniform tax rate and uniform services was a
government in which suburban areas outweighed the old core. According to
urban politics specialist Christopher Leo, the term Unicity was seldom used
by the twenty-first century-just Winnipeg.23
Advocates of regional planning often journeyed to Vancouver for inspiration. The Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD), created in 1967, has
responsibility for regional parks, transit, water, environmental services, and
planning. I ts Livable Region plan in 1976 proposed to focus future growth on
central Vancouver plus four outlying nodes in Burnaby, Surrey, Coquitlam,
and New Westminster. Although the plan made great sense in the physically
constrained setting of Vancouver, the provincial government of the 1980s
gutted the authority of the GVRD. With further swings in local politics, the
GVRD in 1990 updated and reissued the Livable Region plan with claims of
“moderate success” (although central Vancouver was still far ahead of outlying centers in its share of commercial and office space).24
Another option was to manage the entire footprint of a city by directing
growth onto certain lands and away from others. Here too, Canadian cities
took the lead. Having acquired large tracts of tax-forfeiture land during the
bad years after 1920, Saskatoon in 1945 found itself owning 8,500 building
lots. It acquired additional farmland in the 1950s and 1960s with the goals
of promoting compact development and moderating land costs. In 1953 it
adopted a policy of maintaining a fifteen- to twenty-year supply in public
ownership, selling to developers at a profit and simultaneously ensuring that
growth would be orderly and contiguous. Edmonton used both purchased
and tax-foreclosed land to influence the location and character of development, establishing a partial greenbelt and encouraging large, mixed-use
neighborhoods with town centers such as Mill Woods in the 1970s. British
Columbia’s parliament in 1973 passed Bill 42, which created an Agricultural
Land Reserve. The province has put the most productive farmland, much of it
in the Fraser Valley, off.limits to urbanization. The effect has been to limit the
eastward sprawl of Vancouver and to keep smaller, fast-growing Abbotsford
a true city in the country, where population and farm revenues both doubled
from the mid-1980s to 2006.
Hawaii set the pace in the United States with a 1961 law to protect pineapple and sugarcane plantations by dividing the areas into urban, rural, agricultural, and conservation areas (somewhat like the British Columbia program).
234 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
California created a commission to regulate filling and development around
all of San Francisco Bay in 1965. Oregon adopted a statewide land planning
system in 1973 to fend off what Governor Tom McCall called “the unfettered
despoiling of the land” through “sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania, and the ravenous rampage of suburbia in the Willamette Valley. “2s A key
tool was the establishment of Urban Growth Boundaries that protect productive farm- and forestland and keep metropolitan areas compact.26 The
Washington Growth Management Act in 1990 adopted a similar although
less stringent policy of Urban Growth Areas.
Las Vegas-the newest supercity-developed compactly even while growing a spectacular 83 percent in the 1990s. The opening ae1ials in television’s
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation show the surprising conservativeness of its
urban footprint. An intensely developed core area includes not only the Strip
but also hospitals, a university, banks, and business towers. Low-rise neighborhoods spread from Boulder City and Henderson to North Las Vegas, but
they are constrained by military land, by a basin and range landscape that
channels development into a corridor, and by the costs of supplying water
in a desert. This is a metropolis with good union jobs in the hotel and restaurant. industry and a service economy that is diversifying from gambling
and tourism.
For permanent residents, Las Vegas offers a new variation on the venerable idea of development around neighborhood units with what historian
Hal Rothman has called “post-urban pods.” Writing for the local newspaper,
he has commented that “each Station or Coast casino defines a new node,
a six-square-mile area in which people live and play.” Far from the Strip,
these “community casinos” include restaurants and hotels and attract adjacent mixed-use development with shopping and housing. As he wrote a few
months before his death, “Right by my house is a casino … that has next to
it a faux village with condos, restaurants, and high-end stores. That development has morphed across the street, giving me a Whole Foods within range
of my wheelchair. “21
Las Vegas, like most of the metropolitan West, is also part of an even larger
pattern. Somewhat in the way that astronomers see stars grouped into galaxies, galaxies into clusters, and clusters clumping unevenly at astonishing
scale, geographers see cities grouped into conurbations and conurbations
grouping into larger ribbons of urbanization. In 2005, the Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy revisited Jean Gottmann’s idea of the “megalopolis” as reshaped
by a half century of Interstate Highways. It defined ten Megalopolitan Areas
for the United States and adjacent border areas. Each has a distinct historical
and regional identity, is organized around high-volume transportation corridors, and is projected to have at least 10 million people by 2040. In the east
the list includes the Boston-to-Washington and Chicago-to-Toronto clusters
that were apparent as early as the 1960s. In the West, from larger to smaller
RESHAPING THE METROPOLIS 235
population , are the Santa Barbara-Los Angeles-Tijuana “Southlandn (which
extends a spur to Las Vegas); north-central California reaching from the San
Francisco Bay deep into the Central Valley; the Texas Triangle, with its comers
at Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio; Cascadia (Portland-S eattle- Vancouver};
and Phoenix-Tuc son. Some might add the Rocky Mountain Piedmont from
Pueblo to Cheyenne or, with a very big stretch and lots of open country,
Calgary-Edmonton.is To return to the astronomical metaphor, these are the
West’s night-view megacities, the bands and constellations ofbrightness that
show so sharply on nighttime satellite images and contrast so starkly with the
dimly lit mountain s, plateaus, prairies, and forests between.
236 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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You determine when you get the paper by setting the deadline when placing the order. All papers are delivered within the deadline. We are well aware that we operate in a time-sensitive industry. As such, we have laid out strategies to ensure that the client receives the paper on time and they never miss the deadline. We understand that papers that are submitted late have some points deducted. We do not want you to miss any points due to late submission. We work on beating deadlines by huge margins in order to ensure that you have ample time to review the paper before you submit it.
We have a privacy and confidentiality policy that guides our work. We NEVER share any customer information with third parties. Noone will ever know that you used our assignment help services. It’s only between you and us. We are bound by our policies to protect the customer’s identity and information. All your information, such as your names, phone number, email, order information, and so on, are protected. We have robust security systems that ensure that your data is protected. Hacking our systems is close to impossible, and it has never happened.
You fill all the paper instructions in the order form. Make sure you include all the helpful materials so that our academic writers can deliver the perfect paper. It will also help to eliminate unnecessary revisions.
Proceed to pay for the paper so that it can be assigned to one of our expert academic writers. The paper subject is matched with the writer’s area of specialization.
You communicate with the writer and know about the progress of the paper. The client can ask the writer for drafts of the paper. The client can upload extra material and include additional instructions from the lecturer. Receive a paper.
The paper is sent to your email and uploaded to your personal account. You also get a plagiarism report attached to your paper.
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Delivering a high-quality product at a reasonable price is not enough anymore.
That’s why we have developed 5 beneficial guarantees that will make your experience with our service enjoyable, easy, and safe.
You have to be 100% sure of the quality of your product to give a money-back guarantee. This describes us perfectly. Make sure that this guarantee is totally transparent.
Read moreEach paper is composed from scratch, according to your instructions. It is then checked by our plagiarism-detection software. There is no gap where plagiarism could squeeze in.
Read moreThanks to our free revisions, there is no way for you to be unsatisfied. We will work on your paper until you are completely happy with the result.
Read moreYour email is safe, as we store it according to international data protection rules. Your bank details are secure, as we use only reliable payment systems.
Read moreBy sending us your money, you buy the service we provide. Check out our terms and conditions if you prefer business talks to be laid out in official language.
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