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Scott Greer
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The Metropolis

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The Metropolis
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Governing
The Metropolis
Scott Greer
A.
4
Associate Professor of
Political Science and Sociology
Director, Center for
Metropolitan Studies
Northwestern University
John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
New York • London
JS
331
GE 2
Copyright 1962 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
This book or any part thereof
must not be reproduced in any form
without the written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-18353
Printed in the United States of America
-
!
57-304183
Preface
In the past decade the American people have slowly be-
Come aware of a dramatic fact. We are an urban nation and
the metropolis is our native habitat. Though we still think
of a diffuse nation living in cities, small towns, and open-
country neighborhoods, most of us will live out our lives
within the compass of a few very large cities.
Little in our past has prepared us for this. Our political
thought was developed from a concern with the direct
democracy possible (at least in theory) within small govern-
mental units, "governing best when governing least." Today
our governments are, in sum, a vast network, corresponding
to giant business corporations and great metropolitan com-
plexes. Today we spend over sixty billion dollars a year for
state and local government. The reason is clear; government
grows precisely because the entire society is increasing in
scale.
Concern with the federal government has sometimes led
us to neglect the local community and its governance. And
to be sure, war and economic prosperity, two of the great
issues of the day, cannot be settled here. But other issues
can and will be, and at the local level the average citizen
has his major opportunity to control his collective fate.
Democracy is an experiment in education; that education
is most accessible in the local political community.
V
VI
PREFACE

But the local community has changed radically with the
growth of the metropolis. It cannot be understood without
attention_to_the transformation of our entire society_that
produces the metropolis. For these reasons I have written
this study of politics and government in our metropolitan
areas. I believe that knowledge precedes commitment, and
our ignorance of the political world of the metropolis ac-
counts for much of our apathy and cynicism. I believe
knowledge, even of failure, is more useful than ignorance.
• This book is an effort to summarize many studies of
politics and government in metropolitan areas. It rests
upon the work of scores of scholars, actors, and observers.
It is by no means complete. Metropolitanization has come
upon us so rapidly that we are still struggling to under-
stand it. Undoubtedly many complexities are omitted,
many generalizations are debatable. I have followed the
strategy of sacrificing detailed documentation to the de-
mands of intellectual order. Thus the book is more than
a photograph of big city government; it aims to be an
analysis.
My reasons for maintaining this emphasis are as follows.
First, I believe any student appreciates intellectual order
and develops more control through understanding a clearly
stated theory' than through exposure to a hundred case
studies. After all, his life is filled with case studies; he
comes to the college for a more general understanding and
the power that flows from it. Second, I believe that the
collective enterprise of understanding our political com-
munities is furthered by the presentation of clearly stated
and logical theory. Even when it is not valid in all respects,
it may still frame significance so that important questions
can be asked.
As a citizen, I believe that the questions that can be
asked of our local polities are among the most important
ones we must answer. The mass society and the administra-
tive state begin at home. They begin in the inability of
local governance to shoulder the burden of decision. They
PREFACE
VII
Otis, Oregon
May, 1962
are nourished through the ignorance of citizenry and local
leaders alike. They terminate in the death of significance.
It has been said that Americans hate politics. It has also
been said that one cannot love that which he does not
understand. If this book has any success, perhaps it will
help us to be more realistic, informed, and tough-minded
about our local polity. It is, after all, a major determinant
of our common fate.
SCOTT GREER
}
Contents
Part I The Creation of a Metropolitan World
1 The City in Time and Space
The City as a Center of Societal Order, 4
9
Urbanization in the Past: The City as an Island, 6
Increase in Scale and Societal Transformation
Energy, Transportation, and the City, 10
Some Consequences of Increase in Scale, 12
The Changing American Urban Community
3
15
Increase in Scale and the Development of the United
States, 16
The History of our Cities in the Light of Techno-
logical Change, 17
The Dispersion of the City, 20
2 The People of the Metropolis
23
Variation of Urban Lives: Ethnicity, Social Rank, and
Life Style, 23
Increasing Social Choice and Variation, 28
The Map of the Metropolis and the Division of Re-
wards, 31
The Inherited City and the Changing Neighbor-
hoods, 33
The Maintenance of Order in the Urban Community 35
The City as a Problem of Social Order, 36
Solutions to the Problem of Order, 37
The Basis of Urban Order: The Local Political Com-
munity, 39
IX
X
CONTENTS
L
Part II The Governmental Response to
Metropolitanization
45
3 The Governmental Mosaic of the Metropolis
The Norms of Local Government in the United
States, 46
How the Cities Grew Up, 49
Central City versus Suburbs
50
Difference in People and Difference in Government, 52
The Origins of Suburban Municipalities, 53
The Governmental Dichotomy and Some Consequences
“URG.
55
Some Auguries and a Question, 56
4 The Governance of the Central City
Economics of Machine Government, 62
The Power Elite of the City Today, 64
Social Change and the Machine 65
Corporate Merger and Local Politics, 66
Population Change and the Machine, 68
Growth of the Giant Bureaucracies, 69
The Machine of the Incumbents
71
The Disaster of Total Victory, 73
One-Party Government and Control of the Machine, 74
The Weakening of Positive Government
77
5 The Suburbs: “Republics in Miniature”
Suburbs and Suburbs: Variations, 85
The Ideal Suburban Polity
Political Issues of Suburbia
87
90
Suburban Community Problems, 91
Problems into Political Issues, 93
59
Suburban Political Orders 96
Upward Ho!, 97
Valhalla, 99
83
CONTENTS
XI
Y
Part III The Future of the Metropolity
6 The Schizoid Polity and the Drive for Reunification 107
Consequences of the Dichotomy: I. The Political Process
108
Consequences of the Dichotomy: II. The Governmental
Process 110
The Problem of Providing Services, 112
The Problem of Equity, 114
The Problem of Consensus: What Kind of City?, 117
The Drive for Reintegration
119
7 The Metropolity and Its Future
The History of Metropolitan Government Plans, 121
The Barriers to Change, 124
Substitutes for Metropolitan Government, 129
Consequences of Using Substitutes, 132
The Future Course of the Metropolis
134
The Changing Tasks of the Central City, 136
The Developing Suburbs, 138
139
The Future Polity
Policy for the Central City, 141
Policy for Suburbia, 144
Index
129
151
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Part
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The Creation of a
Metropolitan World
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1
The City in Time
and Space
Most of human history has been made in cities. It is no
accident that the word "civilization” is derived from the
city, as the word "politics" is derived from the ancient
Greek word for the city state, the polis. The centers of
wealth and military power, of government and culture,
have always been cities, and the human societies complex
enough to have a history have been designated civilizations.
It is worth while to spell out the reasons for this, since
they go as deep as the city's reason for being.
The city is a settlement of human population which •
cannot support itself from its own soil. It can exist only
by exchange of goods and services with the farmers, herds-
men, miners, fishermen, and others who gather and ex-
tract materials from the earth. Thus it is completely de-
pendent for its livelihood upon those outside the city.
(Most estimates indicate that New York City could not
survive a week without imports from outside the city
limits.) How, then, can a unit so dependent for its exist-
ence be said to dominate the society, and through the
society, history?
3
4
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
The city has dominated through its crucial role in the
division of labor of society. For the dependence is not
one-way: city and countryside are interdependent, each
carrying out tasks which are uneconomical, difficult, or
impossible for the other. The city entered history with
the neolithic era-the point in human development when
man invented agriculture and the storage of grain. It was
only then that city folk could live from the produce of
others. They obtained this produce through plundering
the country men subdued in war (this became first tribute,
then taxes). They obtained it also through trade. The
city, by organization of military force, became the political
center and market for the total society.
To be sure, we find it difficult to see much "exchange"
in the surrender of loot to an invading army. If we stand
back a little, however, and look at the consequences of
urban conquest and dominance, we find that even the
earliest cities contributed materially to the welfare of the
peasant villagers. First, they provided protection against
other "outside" marauders. Second, they maintained a
degree of order within their boundaries. Third, and very
important, they established peaceable communication with-
in the territories they dominated. Thus the city established
-the state, and the state made possible the cooperation of
diverse people over space and through time. In return for
regularized tribute or taxes the city created order-the
famous Pax Romana is only one instance. Furthermore,
by creating a larger social system the city made it possible
for peasant villagers to avoid starvation. When crops failed
they could use the exchange system of the larger society,
importing grain from other regions where crops were better
that year.
THE CITY AS THE CENTER OF SOCIETAL ORDER
Thus one basic export of the city is order. We see this
today in the location of our governmental agencies; their
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
5
headquarters are not in the open country or the small
towns, but in metropolitan areas. This is equally true of
the business corporations, of the major labor unions, of
the churches and the universities and the communications
industries-television, radio, publishing. Vast segments of
human behavior throughout the United States are regu-
lated from the control centers of cities. The market price
changes in New York or Chicago, and farmers go bankrupt
in California; a decision is made by the Teamsters Union
and management officials, and the cost of freight goes up
in an Ozark hamlet; a speech is made and a vote is taken
in Washington, D.C., and all American men over the age
of eighteen report to their draft boards.
The major importance of order as a product of the city
is obscured for us. Our cities are not only centers of com-
munication and control but are also workshops of the
society. This task is, however, relatively new to the city.
Through most of human history two conditions have
limited the importance of the city as a workshop and
marketplace for the whole society. First, transport was so
costly and slow that all possible work was done at the
place where goods were released from the earth. Second,
the goods produced in the city did not differ radically from
those that could be produced in the peasant villages. Con-
sequently, the city tended to engage in “trinket trade,”
dealing in small objects of high value-rarities, jewels,
spices-which had both individuality and low shipping
costs, and could be widely traded. But the city needed tons
of raw materials for the human and animal population-
food, fabric, forest products and other building materials,
and these could be shipped easily only by water. Thus the
great cities of earlier societies were on the rivers or sea-
coasts. Here the heavy and vital goods from the hinterland
could be transported, floated downriver or carried along
the coasts. The journey upriver was slow and costly, and
it was made by empty boats.
The early cities lived off tribute and trinkets; they
returned little to the hinterland, except order. Their work-
6
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
shops produced goods for the urbanites, or goods to be
exchanged with those of other cities, or a few light and
costly items which became standard equipment for the
more prosperous peasantry. As one consequence, the peasant
villages were relatively self-sufficient; since their material
needs were largely supplied locally, they could watch with
equanimity the collapse of one city's empire and the rise
of another. For them it meant merely a change in police-
men and tax collectors. Locally self-sufficient, they pro-
duced little more than enough for local needs; they were
subsistence economies.
URBANIZATION IN THE PAST: THE CITY AS AN ISLAND
As a consequence of their economies, the great societies
of the past never became really urban. Though the city of
Rome may have reached a population of one million at
the height of the Empire, the great mass of the Empire's
population (probably 90 per cent or more) lived as it had
for thousands of years in peasant villages far from the
coasts. While a sophisticated culture developed in the
"world cities," most human beings through most of history
lived in what Turner calls the "daemonic universe of the
peasant village." Their thought and social behavior were
dominated by tradition, superstition, and fear of the
unknown.
With the collapse of the Roman society the city disap-
peared from western Europe for many centuries. To be
sure, there were small settlements-headquarters for the
Church, a few depots for goods exchanged with the east.
On the whole, however, the political fragmentation of the
•West led to such an extreme decentralization that the sub-
sistence economy of the feudal domain became the basic
1 Ralph Turner, The Great Cultural Traditions, New York: McGraw-
Hill Book Company, 1941, especially Chapter XX.
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
7
unit of both political and economic life. Then slowly, on.
the rivers and seacoasts, the city-states of Italy and the
communes of the North and West began to take form.
They represented a powerful split in the social order, a-
violent deviation from feudalism.
•
Within the city the hereditary fuedal obligations began
to lapse, and new organizations came about. The crafts
and trades became organized as self-regulating guilds,
corporate entities with great power, while the city itself
became a quasi-independent political unit. The Hanseatic
towns, the cities of north Italy, and others here and there
over Europe, fought and bribed their way free of feudal
obeisance. Their strength was due in part to the revival
of trade, and it helped lay the basis for the emergence of
the new nation-states. The city became a laboratory.
sheltered by walls of economic, military, and as a result,
political, power, within which new forms of social order
were developed. Constricting as that order may appear to
us now, it was freedom and dignity to the serf. The Ger-
mans coined a phrase, "Stadtluft makt frei" (City air makes
one free), which was literally true in many parts of Europe.
After a year and a day in the city, the serf was freed of his
hereditary estate: he was a free citizen of the urban com-
munity.
As a corporate entity the medieval European city re-,
sponded to the needs of its people. In it developed new
courts oriented to craft and commerce, which bypassed
the rigid feudal courts of Church and Baron. In it de-
veloped also a system of taxation, a mode of self-govern-
ment, a military system, and means of carrying out the
age-old community housekeeping tasks. This system, com-
pared with most of the cities of history, and certainly
compared with the surrounding feudal countryside, was
democratic and egalitarian. Membership in the city carried
privileges and duties; it required the participation of every-
body (if only in time of emergency), and it made possible
the representation of most people in the government. From
8
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
the corporate structure of the medieval commune many
of our present notions of political life have developed.
•The medieval cities became true centers of societies,
however, only with great shifts in political power. To put
it briefly, the rising monarchs who created nation-states
used the concentration of wealth in the cities, even as they
protected the cities against the surrounding and often
hostile society of feudal agrarianism. As strongholds with
organized manpower, wealth, and technologies, the cities
were very important allies of the monarchs. In a world as
poor, decentralized, and weak as western Europe in the
fourteenth century, a city-state like Venice was a para-
mount power.
• The continued consolidation of power in the new nation-
states, however, slowly destroyed the autonomy of the cities.
The invention of gunpowder, the growth of national sea-
power and standing armies, eroded forever the great forti-
fications which had protected them. Fortunately for urban
ways, this coincided with the erosion of the walls around
the feudal castles. The nation-state welded into one large
domain city and countryside, urbanite and peasant, lord
and commoner. The new nation-states were not, however,
particularly urban. Indeed, we may doubt if they were as
urban as Rome under the Caesars. One authority notes
that England as late as 1801 had less than 10 per cent of
her population in cities of a hundred thousand or more,
and England was far more urbanized than other European
countries. (None achieved a comparable urban population
before 1850.) 2 Our own society was overwhelmingly rural
at the time of the American Revolution. Less than 5 per
cent lived in cities, and only two cities (New York and
Philadelphia) had as many as thirty thousand inhabitants.
• In short, for most of history the city has been an island
in a sea of rural life. Today, however, the United States
2 See Kingsley Davis, "The Origin and Growth of Urbanization in
the World,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. LX, No. 5, pp. 433 ff.
•
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
9
is 70 per cent urban, and our national life centers in the
nineteen urban places with a population of a million or
more. Contemporary societies are urban in a sense new to
human history. How did this situation come about? What
sustains it? What are some of the consequences? To answer
these questions we will have to go beyond the dynamics
that created the classic cities discussed: we will have to
include forces that are transforming the very nature of
human society and the human community.
Increase in Scale and Societal Transformation
Most of us today fail to grasp the significance of what
has happened. We have an image of America which over-
emphasizes the importance of the small town and the open
country neighborhood. Our folk heroes are the Tom
Sawyers and Huckleberry Finns of a lost America; our
literature is replete with Thoreaus, Emersons, and Faulk-
ners, who write of another world. Political folklore em-
phasizes the friends and neighbors, the rural virtues. In-
deed, we are treated to the spectacle of city folk spending
billions of dollars to maintain the family farm which they
are persuaded is the backbone of the country, while most
state legislatures are greatly biased toward the rural voters,
thereby disfranchising many urbanites.
The reason for these rural survivals is simple: we have
not been an urban nation for very long. As late as the
1890's most people lived outside the cities, while a very
large proportion of urban dwellers today were born and
raised in open country neighborhoods or in small towns
permeated by the atmosphere of the countryside. Yet today
a picture of America which concentrated on the 212 metro-
politan areas and completely omitted the intervening land-
scape would be a fair enough map of the society. A majority
of the people, the wealth, the labor force, and the power
of the United States in the 1960's is concentrated in 1 per
?
10
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
cent of the land area. Those who note our rapidly increas-
ing population and speak of "standing room only" are the
victims of a biased perspective. Spending their days in the
city or its suburbs, driving its crowded throughways, they
forget the continental spaces where men are rarer than
wolves.
They also forget the dying small towns and depopulated
rural neighborhoods. While the total population increases
rapidly and the cities spread like tidal waves over their
surrounding hinterlands, the small towns in between shrink
and die or else become miniature metropolitan areas. The
isolated farmhouses are vacated and ploughed under, as
the total labor force employed in agriculture declines with
every decennial census. (Today it is not much larger than
the number of unemployed.) There is a great deal of space
in America, but it lies in the enormous interstices between
metropolitan regions. Within these regions we may feel
crowded, for we are becoming a highly concentrated people.
ENERGY, TRANSPORTATION, AND THE CITY
Rapid metropolitanization is due to an overall change
in the organization of our lives and work. Two major
factors have made this possible. Both are changes in man's
relationship with his enviroment, and together they have
altered man's relationships with his fellow men. The two
factors are (1) the discovery of new sources of energy,
and (2) the changing space-time ratio. Each deserves a
brief analysis.
Through most of human history the race has depended
upon one form of energy only: the direct energy of the
sun, stored in plants and transformed by the muscles of
men and beasts. Upon this foundation were raised not only
the society of the American Indians but that of Imperial
Rome and Elizabethan England. And the limits of these
societies are clear when we understand how little surplus
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
I I
energy, over and above the cost of gaining it, is available
from this source. Today we have access to energy through
new sources: the fossil fuels of the earth (coal and oil),
the electricity available from falling water, the energy
stored in radioactive matter. In short, the invention of the
steam engine, which first released the energy in coal, was
an event as momentous as the beginning of agriculture:
it produced a great stream of surplus energy for human use.
In the process of using it we have revolutionized the
earlier energy source, agriculture. We have increased pro-
ductivity per man so rapidly that today one farmer does
the work that two dozen did a few decades ago. At the
same time the farmer who does this is dependent upon the
products of the city: machines, fuel, fertilizer. These tools
both make his tremendous productivity possible and bind
him to the city in a way the peasant was never bound.
Meanwhile the mass of the labor force, no longer tied to
the cycle of plant and rain and sunlight, is free to use the
newer energy sources in a vast and complex round of fab-
rication. In the factories of the city they fabricate jet air-
planes, water skis, sun tan lotion, electric shoe-polishers,
and other exotic bargains, as well as the age-old staples,
food, clothing, and shelter.
At the same time, and closely related to the discovery of
new energy sources, came increasing control of space. Men
are today freer of spatial restraints than ever in the past.
The real meaning of space is in the cost of traversing it,
and space, which we think of as a barrier, may also be
viewed as a channel for integrating the actions of men.
The relation between space and cost we may dub the
"space-time ratio," and it has been shrinking for the past
several centuries. There is a hamlet about a half-hour's
drive from Chicago called Half-day. It marked the place
where our grandfathers, with buggy and team, stopped for
lunch and a rest as they drove northwards towards Milwau-
kee. Today the citizen of Los Angeles can fly to San
Francisco as quickly as he can drive from the airport to
I 2
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
downtown Los Angeles. Modern societies are rapidly shrink-
ing as the cost in time for traversing a given unit of miles
moves downward from weeks to days to hours, and the
/ communication of messages becomes almost instantaneous.
The consequences have been far-reaching. Let us em-
phasize one: the wider geographical areas over which
human behavior can be organized. Organization, the allo-
cation of tasks to different units and their integration in a
coordinated system, depends heavily upon the ability to
communicate and control. Today a network of human
actors may spread over a continent and, through rapid
transport and telecommunication, coordinate their actions
as closely as if they were all in one city. Such possibilities
of coordination were never present in the classic societies.
The Roman governor was proconsular indeed: since he
could not hear from Rome for a month or more, his actions
were in effect the actions of the Consuls. Today the Ameri-
can ambassador in Moscow is not left long in doubt about
the President's wish.
Taken together these two basic changes have allowed a
radical shift in human organization. The network of inter-
dependence which constitutes a human society can spread
wider and maintain a more continuous flow of communica-
tion and a more dependable ordering of behavior than has
ever been possible before. This widening of the network
of interdependence is called increase in societal scale. It is
the process which has radically transformed the small town
America of Mark Twain into the metropolitan giant of
today.
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF INCREASE IN SCALE
The increase in societal scale has meant rapid extension
of the organizations that do the world's work. Business
firms, oriented towards control of their resources, their
markets, and their internal affairs have expanded rapidly.
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
13
This process, called integration, results in giant chains of
corporations that control the automobile industry from the
mining of coal and iron to the sale of the second-hand
cars. Labor unions have developed in a parallel fashion:
there is little point in dealing with a branch plant manager
when the center of power is at the corporate headquarters,
in New York or Detroit. As this occurs, relations between
corporate and union giants lead to demands for govern-
mental regulation: Big Government joins Big Business and
Big Labor.
The process of organizational merger is too general to
be confined to these examples. Organizational merger is the
dynamic form of increase in scale. Through the growth of
one network, or through the merging of several, giant
systems develop which control the behavior of millions of
men over thousands of miles and for decades of time. The
competitive advantage of the larger enterprise, its greater
ability to control the conditions necessary for survival, tends
to abolish smaller competitors. Just as the small farmer
gives up before huge industrial farms, so the household
craft and industry give way to the factory. The "mommer
n'popper" grocery store survives only through the long
hours and low wages assigned to mama and poppa by
themselves. The locally owned newspaper is bought on its
deathbed by its competitor-part of a national enterprise.
At the headquarters and workshops of large-scale organi-
zation there is demand for the labor of those who leave
the small enterprises. Freed from commitment to a family
shop or farm, workers are drawn hither and thither across
the continental society, moving towards labor shortages and
economic booms. As this occurs a city is composed of a rich
mixture of people from various parts of the country or even
the world. Meanwhile, in the small town, the change in
the space-time ratio has shortened the distance from farmer
to city and the villages decline. The farmer flies from his
Kansas wheat farm into Wichita in a private plane for
shopping, medical care, or just golf and dinner and a
14
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
movie. On the other hand, cities with nationwide clienteles
arise: Miami Beach, Las Vegas, and other entertainment
centers, medical centers, university towns.
In short, increasing scale means an effective increase in
the size of our social world. Our lives become interdepend-
ent with those of millions of others; our horizons move
outward as we listen to messages from over the continent
or the world; our behavior is controlled by distant actors.
At the same time we have a greater freedom from our friends
and neighbors. If our basic necessities of life are provided
by membership in a giant corporation and union and
government, we have the freedom to withdraw from the
association. If pressed further we can move to a new neigh-
borhood, or even a new city (in 1950, 24 per cent of the
people in Los Angeles were living at a different address
from the one they gave in 1949.) 3
Thus urbanization, which in the past was largely the
same thing as the growth of cities, today means several
things. First, it means increase in scale, producing giant
organizations which attract large populations around their
headquarters and their workplaces. Second, it means the
growth of a new kind of culture, a way of life which is
based upon the national system and refers to that system.
This is urbanism in its broadest sense, the culture of urban
man. Finally, it means continued concentration in urban
areas. Increase in scale produces, in the words of Shevky
and Bell, both "an increase in the number and size of
cities,” and “an increase in the range of functions centered
in cities."4 Increase in scale makes cities possible and de-
mands them as convenient sites to carry on the organized
* "Residential Mobility, 1949-1950, in the Ten Largest Standard Metro-
politan Areas in the United States," Detroit Area Study, Survey
Research Center, University of Michigan, Project 843, No. 1211, May,
1957.
* Eshref Shevky and Wendell Bell, Social Area Analysis, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1955.
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
15
activities of the society: the allocation of tasks to different
people and their integration in a coordinated system.
This great transformation has taken place in a very short
time. Less than two hundred years ago the Constitution
of the United States was framed by men whose economic
and technological world was hardly different from that of
Pericles. They rode horseback, derived power from plants
and animal muscles, lived on farms scattered over the
countryside, and (unlike the Athenian) often considered
cities evil places. Today we try to apply their ideals of
government to a nation in which the horse is a rarity
known chiefly through western movies, power flows from
coal, oil, electricity and the atom, and the farmer is a tiny
minority of the population.
The Changing American Urban Community
Our cities today are the results and the expressions of
broad changes in the total society. The growth of America
might be described in these terms. First, the predominantly
rural and scattered settlements of the colonies grew into
dispersed and small-scale cities. Then an increasing flood
of immigration settled the inland valleys with a sparse
population. This immigration was followed by an increas-
ingly rapid development of markets and workshops in the
urban centers, leading to explosive growth with the harness-
ing of coal and steam. The growing network of railroads
over the nation forged a continental society, with the work-
shops in the cities while the farms, forests, and mines be-
came chiefly sources of raw materials. In this last phase
the scattered population concentrated more and more in
the great regional cities: Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago,
St. Louis, Houston. Scattered regional populations re-
grouped in local metropolitan areas.
We tend to think of American growth as the product of
16
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
frontier development. However, the pioneer glamour of
widespread farmers and ranchers who settled the interior
valleys and the west should not blind us to some other
considerations. The urban population of the United States
has, since the early nineteenth century, consistently in-
creased faster than the total population. While our popu-
lation grew through immigration to virgin lands, the pro-
portion of our people living in cities increased with each
decade. For the United States entered history at a point
when the scale of western society was already increasing
rapidly. The colonies were settled as part of a worldwide
empire, made possible by the increasingly effective use of
sail to move merchandise over the seas. Our agriculture
has always been oriented to a worldwide market. We have
never had a peasantry of any importance, a subsistence
economy of villages which could carry on independently
of the cities. Nor have we ever had a feudal society whose
remnants still survive in the contemporary politics and
economies of some nations.
INCREASE IN SCALE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
UNITED STATES
America was a new-found land at a new phase in the
development of western civilization. Because it lacked the
heritages of the past, it could take advantage of the many
new sources of power and organization which emerged.
Many traditions governing the use of people and land did
not exist; others had shallow roots. The transplantation
across the Atlantic weakened many traditional forms of
order, the later melding of populations from every society
in Europe further destroyed the hold of the older systems.
In the United States Americans were, so to speak, de-
civilized: their freedom from older restraint made possible
a new ordering of the human units in a new system. With
few taboos on the use of men, materials, and land Ameri-
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
17
cans took full advantage of new relations between hu-
manity and its environment brought about by the new
technology. In the process they created a new set of rela-
tions among men.
American cities are a prime example of this freedom.
They took shape on barren littorals, or at the place where
paths crossed the broad inland rivers-Chicago spread over
Saxon
empty prairie like grass fire. They were built on land which elérte
had no history and no hallowed memories; instead of re-
calling the cathedrals of the bishops, the strongholds of imperatisse
royal families, the Roman camps, their names bring to
mind only the campsites of wandering nomads, the meeting
places of traders and tribesmen, the mythology of a dead...
and buried preliterate culture.
Americans, then, typically regard land not as place but while en
"before
bad
as property. It is a site for human activitieś, a resource in w
economic enterprise. Thus the shape of American cities
has varied greatly, shifting radically with each new develop-
ment in the changing technology of transportation and nuncorre

THE HISTORY OF OUR CITIES IN THE LIGHT OF
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
we were
hea
building. We may, in fact, summarize the history of Ameri-
can cities in respect to their building layout by noting
three great transportation revolutions. Each of these, in
changing the mechanism for integrating various human
you
activities over space, radically altered the relationships be-
helled
tween the different localities within the city.
14.A
Most contemporary American cities grew to great size in
the Age of Steam. The railroads, pushing into all the
hinterlands of America, brought raw materials to the cities
for processing and marketing. They also made possible the
return to the farmer of ploughs, the McCormick reaper,
barbed wire, guns, windmills-items which made easier the
conquest of the prairies, and which the farmer could not
olle
Cople
Wake
tu
18
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
provide for himself. But steam as a medium of transport
has distinct limitations: the heavy engine requires rails,
and these limit the places the train can go, while the
motive force makes it impractical to stop and start very
often. Thus the steam engine is well suited to hauling
heavy goods for hundreds of miles, but it is poorly suited
to short-haul transportation. As a consequence the city of
the Age of Steam grew rapidly in size, for the space-time
ratio among cities and between them and the hinterlands
had decreased radically. But within the city the movement
of men and goods went on in the ancient ways. Men
walked, pulled, and hauled goods about, or used the horse-
drawn vehicle. Because of the difficulty of movement, and
the great and increasing amount of material to be moved,
space in the city was at a premium.
Near the place where the railroads met the river or the
sea, the heavy industry and warehouses clustered. Move-
ment of the heaviest loads was reduced to a minimum.
Near the workplace grew the row houses and tenement
buildings that housed the workers, so that they could reach
their jobs by walking. The shops and services that relied
upon these populations and activities for trade, as well as
those serving the entire city, were near the center. Other
shops supplying necessities to the households were scattered
through the city within walking distance of the various
neighborhoods. Farther away from the noise and the un-
sightly workplaces came the neighborhoods of average hous-
ing, tall structures built close together with little yard
space. Only the rich could afford so expensive a commodity
as free space. With the ability to pay for space or transport,
they built tall town houses in the center, or magniloquent
testimonials to their wealth in the outlying districts. For
the rich there was another possibility: railroad trains could
and did stop every five or ten miles on their way out of
the city. At these stops grew up the commuter towns,
homes for the prosperous who had time to spend in com-
muting and money to pay the fare. The North Shore in
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
19
Chicago, the Main Line in Philadelphia, Westchester
County in the New York area, are all monuments to the
limits and uses of the railroad train for short-haul transport.
Lewis Mumford has called the city built during the Age
of Steam the "paleotechnic city"-the city of older tech-
nologies." He speaks of its basic components as the factory
and the slums, and indeed the housing for workers was
dark and congested while their hours, pay, and working
conditions would appall contemporary Americans. They
were, like space, exploited by the new organizational com-
manders, who developed power and wealth upon the base
of the great technological break-throughs.
The City of Steam was developed during the nineteenth
century. From its beginnings, however, entrepreneurs had
seen the widespread need and the potential market for
short-haul transport. This developed also upon rails. First
the horse-cars drawn along rails set in streets, then the cable
cars attached to a continuous moving cable, finally the elec-
tric railway with power supplied by a third rail or an over-
head electric conductor, made it easier to get about within
the burgeoning structure of the city. By the second decade
of this century the great cities had complex spiderwebs of
electric railways crossing at the center, the downtown area.
These lines brought about a tremendous movement of trade
towards the center. At the same time they allowed the de-
velopment of vast new neighborhoods along the spokes of
the transportation grid. Between the spokes, however, still
lay large undeveloped areas, uneconomical for the electric
railway and therefore for residential building. Movement
was still tied to the rigid line of the rails, the "right of
way."
The City of the Streetcar was hardly complete before the
instrument of its destruction appeared. The automobile
was an oddity in the years before World War I; by the end
"In Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Company, 1934.
20
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
of the 1920's it was a commonplace mode of travel for those
of middle income or more; by the 1930's it was becoming
nearly universal; today it is almost a necessity. Freed of the
rails and of the requirement of collective movement, each
person derived a tremendous liberty from the automobile.
He could move at will, at any time, wherever the public
streets led. And the greater the number of auto owners,
the greater the demand for streets. As the streets were de-
veloped, the housing followed (though sometimes the se-
quence was reversed), and the interstices between the
spokes of the streetcar lines were rapidly filled. Settlement
moved far out beyond the boundaries of the old city, fol-
lowing highways into the country towns, and when this
occured the country towns became de facto parts of the
greater metropolis.
With the widespread adoption of the automobile, we
come to the third city: the centrifugal metropolis. The
increasing dependence on the automobile at first improved
the commercial position of downtown business, but it soon
became apparent that the ancient streets, developed for
foot and streetcar traffic, could hardly handle the floods
of cars, while space for parking became a serious problem
to the casual shopper. At the same time the automobile-
based settlements at the outer edge went further and further
from the center, increasing the driving time. As this oc-
cured, two series of efforts were launched. One was intended
to make the downtown more accessible by building giant
throughways from the peripheries to the center, with great
interchanges at the center allowing people to move out
to any part of the city. The other was the development of
circumferential highways around the outskirts of the city,
allowing much traffic to bypass the downtown altogether.
THE DISPERSION OF THE CITY
The new neighborhoods on the peripheries once more
presented a profitable market for the local enterprise. On
THE CITY IN TIME AND SPACE
21
the outskirts of the cities, in the new tract developments,
planned shopping centers began to appear after World
War II. Their clustered goods and services made available
to the suburbanite the same convenience neighborhood
centers had monopolized before the Age of the Streetcar.
Convenience shopping moved, voluminously, from down-
town out to the suburbs. Where the major arterials to the
downtown crossed the cuicumferentials, however, the shop-
ping centers which were developed approximated in range
of goods and services those of the downtown center itself.
The centrifugal metropolis spawned dozens of subcities on
its edges, while the downtown gradually ceased to be the
center of wealth and the show window of the complex.
This brings us to the city as we know it today, a changing
structure which still bears in outline the remnants of the
Age of Steam and the star-shaped City of the Streetcar.
Much of our present city is, in fact, caught in a conflict
between the cities of the past and the city of the future.
Though we do not have the historical commitments of
European nations to older social and political structures,
we have our own urban history: it is a history of rapidly
changing technology which destroys as it creates. The senti
ments and symbols of American urbanites are forever being
destroyed to make way for the new.
Suggested Readings
On the City in Time and Space:
The Great Cultural Traditions, Ralph Turner, New York: McGraw-
Hill Book Company, 1941. A brilliant comparative survey of the
early city-states and the classical empires, with analysis of the causes
and results of urbanization in the age of agricultural dominance.
Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, Henri
Pirenne, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, Anchor
Edition. A classic in the study of the revival of urban centers in
22
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
the feudal society which followed the decay of the Roman system.
The “island city" is portrayed as part of the societal order, yet
apart from it in certain crucial respects.
On Increase in Scale and Societal Transformation
Energy and Society, Fred Cottrell, New York, McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1955. A thorough analysis of the effects of technological
change upon social structure, with primary concern for transport,
communication, and energy transformation. (This is also available
in a paperback edition.)
The Emerging City: Myth and Reality, Scott Greer, New York: The
Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1962. A sociological study of the modern
city, a larger work expanding much of the author's present discussion.
On the Changing American Urban Community
The Exploding Metropolis, by the editors of Fortune, Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, Anchor Edition, 1958. A topical
and provocative discussion of the problems of the big city, from
a point of view friendly to the great cities of the nineteenth
century.
Social Organization, Scott Greer, New York: Random House, 1955.
A brief analytical theory of social organization. In the final chapter,
"The Changing Organizational Topography," recent history is seen
within the framework emphasizing the continual trend towards the
increase in scale of large, formal organizations. In sum, these lead
to the dominance of the national system over the local community
and the specialized group.
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The People of
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The dynamic forces producing the metropolis have cre-
ated great differences among urban people. Increase in
scale, the process which built the organizational network
in which the city is the "knot", has three major aspects,
each of which results in greater social differences among
the citizens. As scale increases, populations hitherto sep-
arated are united in one network of order; there is a vast
proliferation in the number and kinds of tasks within
the larger system; there is a consistent tendency for the
work of the world to be performed by larger organizations,
culminating in the world-spanning corporate giants. Each
of these changes profoundly affects the everyday life and
times of the citizen.

VARIATION OF URBAN LIVES: ETHNICITY, SOCIAL RANK,
AND LIFE STYLE
As the society expands, scattered and diverse groups are
brought within one network of control. This comes about
23
24
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
****
IDIST
through the melding of nearby populations in the growing
order (as occured with the country towns on the outskirts
of a city, or with the Sabines who lived near the city of
Rome). It also comes about through migration, the move-
ment of people from outside areas into the system. Both
processes have been important in America. Close integra-
tion of the regions has brought the problems of race rela-
tions in Alabama into the northern home and classroom,
while union-management relations in Chicago have become
a topic in the South. Furthermore, closer integration of the
national system has greatly encouraged the migration of
people from one region to another. Thus Southerners,
Negro and white, have moved in a steady stream from the
Southeast towards St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles. In
New York's Harlem and Chicago's South Side, Negroes
originally from the South have built massive cities within
cities.
Equally important has been the growth of the national
system and its cities through immigration. During the
floodtide, as many as one million immigrants a year entered
the United States. They came in stages. In the early days.
came the people from Great Britian, Ireland, Germany-in
short, northern and western Europe. Then came those
from Italy, Poland, Russia-southern and eastern Europe,
Finally, in the past three decades, we have experienced a
massive immigration of persons from Mexico and Puerto
Rico.
Thus the city of a large-scale society is a polyglot mosaic
of national and regional cultures. Every nationality of any
size on earth is represented in New York City. Every lan-
guage is spoken. These strangers, coming from the various
tundras, savannahs, steppes, and heaths of the earth, bring
with them distinct and unique histories, sacred symbols,
ways of life. Their gods are different from those of the host
society and from those of other newcomers. Furthermore,
many of them come from a biological stock that varies from
those who have already arrived and from fellow immi-
¦
1
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
25
:
*
*
grants. Though mankind varies less biologically than does
one subspecies of Spider Monkey, human beings in their
narcissism are extremely self-conscious about minor varia-
tions in looks. So the growing population of the large-scale
metropolis may seem as heterogeneous as the birds and
beasts of the jungle. This kind of social differentiation is
known as ethnicity.
The tremendous increase in the division of labor with
expanding scale creates a society where citizenship is based
upon "the job." In simple societies like that of the peasant
village, a dozen occupations exhausted the opportunities a
self-respecting man had to make a living. Even the America
of Jefferson's day was not much more varied. In our society,
estimates place the number of kinds of jobs at thirty-five
thousand and up, each of them a distinct part of the neces-
sary work in some social enterprise. Similarity of occupa-
tion and near-equality among a few broad classes of workers
have given way to wide distances between many occupa-
tional worlds. The research physicist who lives near the
advertising executive, the small business man, and the city
councilman, can share with them an evening in the swim-
ming pool; he cannot share his professional problems, or
his professional code and folkways. Nor do they all share
equal rewards. They are separated in these respects by
social distance.
Upon the basis of the job a person receives his share of
the social surplus, the economic goods and services avail-
able. In qualifying for his job, he reaches some level of
skill and general expertise; he must be educated to some
level. Furthermore, once he is within the world of the job
he shares a way of looking at things, of conceptualizing
and evaluating, which is unique to this kind of job and to
no other. In other words physicists, advertising executives,
small business men, politicians, develop little cultural
worlds of their own, or subcultures. When, therefore, we
say that the change in the nature of work affects the dif
ferences among men, we refer to three interconnected
26
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
variations which all relate to the job. Putting them in the
simplest everyday language, they are variations in occupa-
"tion, education, and income. As a general kind of social
differentiation, this is known as social rank.
The increasing importance of large-scale organizations
in doing the world's work results in another kind of variation.
With the rise of vast bureaucracies in the extraction, fab-
rication, and marketing of material goods, as well as in
government and other areas of our common life, there has
been a decline of the small enterprise. The latter was, in
the past, often a family enterprise. Family farm and shop
and store are disappearing today, leaving a labor force to
be reorganized as factories in the fields (the term for the
giant land companies of California), assembly-line manu-
facturing, or chain supermarkets. With the disappearance
of family enterprise, however, we are separating completely
two great organizational realms of human society: kinship
and work.
The separation of the worlds of kinship and work has
several major effects upon our lives. First, it means that
we are free to live completely outside the boundaries of a
kinship. In many small-scale societies membership in a
large network of kinship was a person's only claim on the
land and therefore on a living; to be outside the family was
to die. In large-scale society we can disregard the relatives
entirely, for we sell only our own actions to a large organiza-
tion which cares not at all for our relatives. Second, this sepa-
ration means that we need not even enter into conjugal
family relations; even if we marry, we need not have chil-
dren for there is no formal or informal constraint that
forces it. Thus Americans range from those with large
families to those without children and even without a
marriage partner. A third major result is the separation
of work place and residence; the sites for economic activity
and family activity may lie on opposite sides of the metrop-
olis. This means that the effects of one upon the other tend
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
27
:
to be minimized, for the two kinds of relationships are
insulated. A person works as an isolated, non-family indi-
vidual.
The separation of work from kinship allows a wide
latitude for individual choice. People at the same level of
social rank, with similar jobs and resources, may choose to
live in single bliss (or married without children, or with a
single child), spending their leisure and economic surplus
on the various avocations and amusements available in the
city. They will have little need for large space, and they
are likely to live near the center in the apartment house
complexes. Theirs is an urbane mode of life. On the other
hand, they may marry, cherish children, and therefore
require private space, indoors and out. In this case they
are likely to be found in single-family houses, and to care a
great deal about owning their homes. Theirs is a familistic
way of life. This kind of variation among a population has
been called life-style, or variation along the familism-ur-
banism continuum.
We have discussed these three kinds of variations at some
length because they are basic in understanding the urban
residents who must be governed. We have taken each di-
mension separately, and indeed they are not necessarily
connected. Ethnicity, social rank, and life style may each
vary independently of the remaining dimensions, just as
length can vary independently of height, and thickness
independently of either, in a sculpture, a building, or a
cloud. Historically, however, they have been connected. In
the period of most rapid proportional increase in the scale
of American society, around 1900, all three dimensions
tended to go together. This was because a great many peo-
ple were coming into the urban centers from the small
towns of the hinterlands and the small towns and villages
of European nations. They came in without much ex-
perience of urban life, without much education (many
foreign-born immigrants could not even speak English),
28
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
Bates,
and with ways of acting and life-styles developed in fam-
ilistic rural society. Thus ethnicity, social rank, and life-
style all went together among the newest migrants.
-
We might speak of two polar examples to clarify the
point. At one extreme were the newer migrants, the first
generation from southern and eastern Europe. They spoke
strange languages and broken English, their religions
(chiefly Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, or Catholicism),
were different from English faiths, their national traditions
were alien. With little formal education and few skills, they
had to take the lowest-level jobs, which demanded little and
paid little. And, tending to perpetuate their small town way
of life. they centered much of their surplus time, energy,
and money upon their family. In some cases this even in-
cluded the extended family, uncles and aunts and "cousins
by the dozens," for entire villages and clans moved intact
from the old country to certain American cities. At the
other extreme we might imagine the “Old American” fam-
ily, originally from Great Britain, Protestant in religion,
Anglo-Saxon in cultural background. Such families had
been here longer; they tended to have better educations
for the urban milieu, and consequently occupied the higher
level jobs and received the better rewards. In becoming
acculturated to the city they left behind much of the coun-
tryman's concern with kin and kinder; their way of life was
more urbane.
INCREASING SOCIAL CHOICE AND VARIATIONS IN URBAN
LIVES
Such a picture is greatly oversimplified. However, it
makes the important point that the three dimensions of
variation were highly intercorrelated. They tended to go
together. The more urban the population, the higher its V
social rank, the fewer its children; and the reverse was also
true. In such a society the various subarcas of the city were
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
29
indeed, as Park calls them, "a mosaic of words which
touch but do not interpenetrate." Moving from Little
Sicily to the Polish Corridor, from Germantown to the
Ghetto, from the Main Line or North Shore to the Bowery,
was to move from one incapsullated and bounded subworld
to another. Today, however, the three dimensions of urban
differentiation are no longer so closely related. The ana
lytical separateness, the logical distinctness between them
which we noted earlier, has become a real separation:
ethnicity, social rank, and life-style all vary in contemporary
American cities, and each varies independently of the
others.
The reasons are again implicit in the great processes of
change involved when scale increases. The continued dele-
gation of work to large-scale bureaucracies, utilizing new
energy sources and machines, requires a continual im-
provement in the average job of the labor force. It becomes
more demanding of thought and skill. The result is a
decline in the demand for unskilled labor. At the same
time free public education has greatly improved the average
man's chance for a high school education. The economy
has increased its productivity, and there are more rewards
for all. Education, occupation, and income have all in-
creased. The vast ethnic segments of the population have
benefited from these trends. At the same time, the closing
of immigration in the 1920's to most nationalities means
that today those bearing the signs of foreign birth are
about to disappear. Their children are not easily distin-
guishable from the other people of the city. In time new-
comers to the city, from American small towns or from
Italy and Poland, abandon their efforts to continue an
older, familistic way of life. Automatic conformity to the
old life-style gives way to a free choice along the continuum
from urbanism to familism as ways of life.
Thus the contemporary population of the metropolis is
less like a patchwork quilt, with sharp boundaries separat-
ing those who differ sinultaneously on all three counts,
30
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
and more like a single woven fabric. Though an indivi-
dual's nationality of origin still makes a difference in the
friends he has and the things he does, the differences are
muted and softer. The grandchild of the Sicilian does not
stand out, as his grandfather did, among his own age
groups.
With higher education and income levels, even the blue-
collar worker differs less from the professional or manager
than was the case a short while ago. Increasing social sur-
plus, resulting from increase in scale, allows (1) more
material goods and services, (2) more leisure time, and
(3) more access to the flow of communication in the society
through literacy and the mass media, for all of the occupa-
tional levels of the metropolis. In the process the more
dramatic differences disappear. Thirty-five years ago the
Lynd's describing a midwestern city, spoke of a six-day,
sixty-hour work week for factory hands, without a vacation.
Today the work week averages less than forty hours, and
the annual vacation of two or three weeks is nearly univer-
sal. Heavy, unskilled labor is rapidly disappearing with the
increase in mechanization. Off the job, it is frequently
difficult to distinguish between executive, accountant, and
machine operator. And during the summer, in the National
Park, they park their trailers side by side and seem to enjoy
similar experiences.
Such a blurring of class and nationality differences does
not mean they have disappeared. Nobody who drives the
length of a metropolitan area can fail to be impressed by
the great differences in size and quality of housing, as well
as style of dwelling unit. There remain substantial average
differences in income for different occupational levels (or
strata as they are called by analogy with geological layers),
and these differences are translated into a major reward
in our society, the family dwelling place. The family home,
however, rarely stands out from its background: rich man,
poor man, beggar man, and thief rarely live side by side.
Houses are like their neighborhoods, and neighborhoods
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
31
are, in turn, like the larger local communities within the
metropolis. How does this come about?
The Map of the Metropolis and the Division
Rewards
The map of the contemporary urban area is a dramatic
example of a geographical division of labor. A complex
and enormous network of activity is separated into com-
ponent parts and carried on at different spatial locations.
The results are all coordinated. At the same time the major
part of the space is allocated to the endless seas of houses,
the residential areas of the city. It is probably true that
no fact about a person will tell you as much about his
general place in the world and his behavior as the single
fact of his job. When Americans meet strangers, their first
question is typically "What do you do?" After the job,
however, the residential address is a strong candidate for
second place. Where you live tells those persons with in-
formation about a city such things as your general income
level, the kind of people you live among, your probable
prestige or social honor, and any number of less basic
matters.
38
Of course it does not tell with precision much about
your temperament or character. These are not social facts,
whereas the permanent residential address is a social fact
and highly correlated with other important social facts such
as those noted above. It is produced by the housing market,
the mechanism which allocates rewards in the shape of
homes, in the metropolis. The importance of those rewards
is evident in the sometimes violent struggles for different
and better housing carried on by the Negroes and other
ethnic groups. Their importance is also manifest in the
fierce resistance to "invasion" of a neighborhood by a dif-
ferent kind of people. The family home is, in most cases,
X
all that the average American ever achieves of private
32
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
property; his attachment to it may be the basis for the
popular sacredness of that concept. The home is both his
score in the game of success and his most precious asset.
Neighborhoods tend to be inhabited by families of
roughly similar social rank because they have the same
price for the same kind of housing. This comes about since
the site as a scene for human action lies a specific distance
from given structures—workplaces, markets, and the like,
including nuisances like heavy industry-and has a specific
kind of topography. These are translated by bids for the
ownership and use of the land (in other words, the market)
into a given price level per lot. The price level in turn sets
the limits within which housing is built.
We have already discussed briefly the building layout
in the City of Steam. It is a settlement where workplaces
lie near the rivers and the railroads, and near them are the
houses of the workers. Such residential areas are not very
attractive to most Americans for they tend to be in the
lowlands near water, while nearby are the noisy, dirty, and
odoriferous plants of heavy industry. They are, however,
admirably suited to reducing the amount of time the
worker spends in going to and from his job. As a person
moves away from these centers of activity the land's altitude
and prestige increase, and with these increases go larger
and more expensive houses with carriage circles and
gardened estates.
The ruins of this city still exist in the centers of our
older urban complexes, but the changes brought about by
increase in scale have greatly modified the values on which
it was based. The increasing economic surplus has allowed
millions of families more resources and greater choice for
housing: a person who buys a new structure has more
control over his residence than one who rents. At the same
time, as social choice with respect to life-style has increased,
a larger and larger proportion of urban dwellers have
chosen a familistic way of life. Committed to home and
children, they need private space indoors and out, and the
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
33
row houses and crowded three-flat structures of the central
city are obsolete. At the same time, the change in the space-
time ratio brought about by widespread distribution of
automobiles has meant that enormous new spaces on the
peripheries of the city can be developed as neighborhoods.
THE INHERITED CITY AND THE CHANGING NEIGHBORHOODS
Thus the contemporary metropolitan area differs greatly
from center to periphery. The grid of housing opportu-
nities shows decreasing density as we move outwards into
the areas of new building. The suburban rings are typically
dispersed, with neighborhoods composed entirely of de-
tached single-family houses surrounded by yard and patio.
Here live the grandchildren of the immigrants, the white-
collar workers and factory workers, professionals and entre-
preneurs, for the great expansion in available housing sites
meant that familistic neighborhoods could be built for
the different social ranks, from semiskilled workers on up.
Here live all those who have chosen a familistic life-style,
whatever their level of occupation, income, and education.
The suburbs, once homes of the wealthy commuters, are
today a broad slice of the middle and upper ranks of urban
society. They have in common only a commitment to
familism, to children, home, and neighborhood.
J
The older central city, however, is heavily committed
to structures and uses inherited from the past. It remains
the center of work. Most suburban residents still travel
inwards to work, and this is particularly true of those with
the highest social rank, the most skilled and honored jobs,
the greatest rewards. The city is also still a center of the
national organization and the metropolis-wide markets,
though certain types of commercial activity are decentral-
izing rapidly, with the neighborhood shopping centers tak-
ing over the rich suburban market in family consumables.
The central city also retains a monopoly of the older,
34
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
denser, residential neighborhoods. Because of the attraction
of newer alternatives, the bright ranch-style houses on the
peripheries, a wide band of urban population which once
lived near the center now lives in the suburbs. Vast seg-
ments of the central city are termed "grey areas," they
are not slums, either physically or socially, and they are
not apt to be razed by the demand for space to house new
developments. They are simply declining in market value.
In these areas, halfway between the center and the peri-
pheries, are found a large proportion of the manual
workers of the city's labor force. And here also are found
those ethnic minorities who, like the Mexican-Americans,
are new to the city and therefore poorly equipped to cope
in terms of social rank. Finally, in the grey areas and the
slums,-in the black belt of Chicago, the Hill of Pittsburgh,
Harlem in New York-are found the huge and growing
population of ethnics segregated on the basis of skin color.
Negroes and Puerto Ricans, whatever their social rank
and acculturation to the ways of the city, cannot choose
the familistic suburban neighborhood, for they are dis-
barred, legally and illegally, from the move outward. Con-
sequently land values in the city are still high for such
segregated groups.
On the outer edges of the old central city are many
neighborhoods indistinguishable from those of the suburbs.
They were the last to be built within the city's boundaries,
and they were usually of upper social rank from their
beginnings. Thus they have the qualities of private space
and distance from workplaces which give them a suburban
air. Here are populations of middle to high social rank,
low ethnicity, and familistic life-styles. In fact there is
little difference between the outlying city neighborhoods
and the suburbs nearest the urban border.
Indeed, we must not think of the central city and the
suburbs as absolute contrasts. To be sure, the central area
tends to have a monopoly of the very poor and the ethnic
populations, just as the suburbs have most of the wealthy
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
35
residents of a metropolis. But these two extremes account
for only a fraction of the total population in a giant
metropolitan complex; the other two-thirds are the middle-
ranges
of social rank, those who were once entirely within
the central city's boundaries. The familistic neighborhoods
are not all suburban, nor are most central city dwellers
highly urban in their style of life. While the central city
has a monopoly of the highly urban populations, the
majority of its people are still family-centered, home-cen-
tered, child-rearing populations.
The suburbs are today predominantly at the familistic
end of the life-style continuum. They are middle to upper
social rank. They are the home of the great middle range
of American society. Though many of their residents are
from families that were originally ethnic, the process of
acculturation has blurred these distinctions. Irish, Italian,
Hungarian, and German-the names linger on, but they
have a new meaning in the middle-rank, familistic neigh-
borhoods of the suburban community. The central city
may look radically different, but if we are careful to avoid
literary stereotypes we will find that most central city
people are just about the same as most suburbanites.
The Maintenance of Order in the Urban Community
Lately some have argued that the metropolitan complex
is in no meaningful sense a unity. They point out its loss
of autonomy: it has no military or foreign relations, it is
a creature of the State with little governmental freedom.
The growth of the larger system has merged it in a set
of relationships making it utterly dependent upon the
entire nation. That growth has also meant that most of
the important affairs of its citizens, most social tasks, are
carried out by giant, specialized, formal organizations.
These do not involve many citizens of one city, but they
span dozens of cities with organizational structures, and
L
36
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
"
those committed to them as members and publics give only
a subordinate loyalty to their local area. The organiza-
tions in turn have no reason to care about one specific
city: they are natives of many, so transients in all.
As a consequence, so the argument runs, the urban area
is simply a site. Upon this site, individuals with the most
heterogeneous and disparate loyalties and concerns go their
separate ways, with little concern for the common welfare
or the fate of the city. For this reason there can be no
community, no common order and common commitment
to the area as a social whole. Interdependence is no longer
a result of residence in any one place, nor is that structure
of rights and duties called a normative order based upon
living there. Consequently, the things that move and con-
strain men do not have their roots in any particular city;
they result from the giant bureaucracies of large-scale
society. Eighty per cent of our labor force works for such
bureaucracies, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.
This argument is so plausible, and at so many points
consistent with our argument from the nature of increasing
scale, that one tends to ignore some of the assumptions
involved. When the assumptions are questioned, however,
a new definition of the city emerges. To see it, we must
first consider what is meant by a social order, cease to take
for granted all of the routine, predictable behavior of men,
and all the efforts at accommodation and peaceful coopera-
tion. Instead we ask: how does this order come about, and
what keeps it alive?
THE CITY AS A PROBLEM OF SOCIAL ORDER
The city is a maze, a social zoo, a mass of heterogeneous
social types. They come from the four corners of the earth.
Much of their behavior is completely beyond the under-
standing of any one actor, and they are related in a
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
37
thousand different ways. Their city teems with conflict and
hums with tension: Negroes fight for housing and jobs,
landlords fight the housing inspectors and their tenants,
gangs of adolescents terrify entire neighborhoods, men of
violence terrify entire labor unions and industries.
To make the latent conflict sharp and clear, we have
only to travel the few miles from the Negro ghetto (Har-
lem, the Chicago South Side) to the enclaves of the upper
classes (Westchester County in New York, the North Shore
suburbs in Chicago), keeping our eyes open to differences
in social rank, honor, wealth, the accoutrements of life.
It is a journey that thousands of Negro servants make every
day. Or, from another perspective, look at the hundred
thousand automobiles travelling an arterial throughway
during the rush hour, or read statistics on the mountains
of food and materials which must be moved into New York
City every twenty-four hours. Here is a massive order
maintained among enormous variation. To account for this
order, we shall have to consider the urban complex as
far more than a convenient resting together of many people
in a small space.
SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM OF ORDER
Our impatience with the existing order, our hopes for
a better one, may blind us to the magnitude of our achieve-
ments. Let us look at the metropolis and ask one question:
how is this vast array of behavior among a heterogeneous
mass organized and made predictable, so that trains pull
into the city before dawn and the people are fed? First,
and most easily, we can say that within the boundaries of
clearly defined membership groups order is relatively ex-
plicable. Out of interdependence grows communication
through a role system and norms. Jobs, morals, and rules
of the road tell people what to do. This communication
38
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
leads to an ordering of behavior, one that perpetuates the
organization. Such an approach explains much about the
internal order of a group-public school, corporation,
household, or labor union. We have a growing theoretical
understanding of the single organization looked at as a
system.
Such understanding, however, is not enough. Order within
groups tells us little about order between them. It is even
possible that the greater the control within organizations the
greater the chaos in their relationships with each other.
(Look, for example, at the relationships between nation-
states.) And intergroup order is crucial in the urban area for
two reasons. First, some groups cannot perform their tasks at
all without predictable cooperation from others-workers
and managements, schools and families, businesses and
customers. Second, external groups may easily block the
activity crucial to the continuation of any one group's
enterprise: the tannery and slaughterhouse can move into
an area and destroy its value for the real estate firm, or the
organized gang of teen-age hoodlums can make a play-
ground unusable.
Order outside the bounds of the bureaucracies is required
at another point. Cities are filled with spaces between
groups. In places of public aggregation, in parks and play-
grounds, on the city sidewalks and streets, we are not mem-
bers of any known group. There is no prescribed communi-
cation system, and we have no way of sanctioning the
actions of others. The city population is various, and many
do not always agree with us about what is right and proper.
Yet millions of us spend minutes or hours each day in
such public places, outside the organizational walls of work
or home where automatic order can be expected. In short,
there is an inescapable area of social interaction with no
social group to order it.
Two radically different types of organization are involved
in that social order called the city. The first we have dis-
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
39
cussed: the large-scale, specialized, formal organizations
which control segments of our behavior and do much of
the world's work. They span cities, states, nations; they
are completely responsible for none of these. They are
exclusive, concerned with only some people in any city, and
only some aspects of their behavior. Yet they must be
established somewhere; they must have offices, plants, stores.
And wherever they go they have neighbors, they have
property to protect, and business contracts to enforce, and
paths to walk down city streets at night. In short, they are
dependent upon an order which they alone cannot main-
tain. That order is maintained by the second type of social
organization.
THE BASIS OF URBAN ORDER: THE LOCAL POLITICAL
COMMUNITY
The order of the local political community is the product
of an spatially inclusive organization. Such an organization
grows out of the interdependence among those persons
committed to a given scene for human action. It establishes
rights and duties in the areas crucial to the common life.
It develops a basis for punishment in that same interde-
pendence. And, on the basis of interdependence, such an
organization develops formal agencies, mechanisms for
maintaining the site. To the tasks of maintaining public
order and the safety of persons by policing the organiza-
tional interstices and by arbitrating conflict between organ-
ized groups, are added the basic housekeeping duties of
the city.
Some tasks growing out of the dense concentration of
highly interdependent populations are inescapable. The
transport system must have a certain speed, capacity, and
predictability in circulating men, goods, and messages.
(Without transport a city would be merely a scatteration
40
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
of villages, unable to combine and therefore unable to
achieve a division of labor.) The flow of water from its
sources to the population must be guaranteed, as must the
disposal of the collective waste, a massive problem in any
city. A minimal level of public health and protection
against fire are closely associated with these tasks: sanitation
is related to the first, water supply to the second. To these
are added, in various amounts, other public facilities—
parks, museums, theatres, and monuments-but the basic
necessities for continual operation of the enterprise are
those listed above.
Thus two sorts of tasks are carried out through the
inclusive territorial organization: the maintenance of order
beyond and outside the exclusive membership organization,
and the maintenance of the plant, the common site. Both
are chiefly the responsibility of local government in our
metropolitan areas today. Public order between interde-
pendent groups is maintained by the development of a role
system at a higher level. In this system, groups and social
categories are the actors. Their rights and duties are spelled
out and sanctions are applied through the police power
ordered by the courts. The safety of person and property
is maintained by that peculiarly urban role system, the
police force. In the anonymity of mass interaction in public
aggregates there is no social group whose members, through
punishments and rewards, or threats and promises, control
each other's behavior. Yet a rough system of rights and duties.
is defined in the law. The police officer is the general sub-
stitute for that group: our rights become his duties, and
our duties, his rights.
We have noted that the maintenance of the scene is not
as clearly defined in scope as the maintenance of order.
This is because many of the tasks traditionally assigned to
government could probably be carried out by some other
kind of organization if the market would permit. Early
highways in America were private enterprises in many cases,
THE PEOPLE OF THE METROPOLIS
41
paid for by users through a toll. Parks and playgrounds, as
we know, need not be public. In short, the government as
entrepreneur and developer, as an economic force main-
taining the plant of the metropolis, is much less inescap-
able than it is in its role as guarantor and enforcer of order.
We cannot escape the political nature of the order in its
latter role. The localized world of the metropolis could
conceivably be administered by a proconsul from Wash-
ington, D.C., or the state capitol. It could not be operated
by a private enterprise. Its function is the adjustment of
conflict among the corporate citizens and social categories
of the area. This conflict is real, the stakes may be very
high, and the final question is no less than this: Who is
a first class citizen, and whose interests, shall prevail in this
area? Such questions are not answered by simple adminis-
trative routine; they cannot be answered in a laboratory
or with an electronic computer. They can be answered
only through a political process which is accepted as legiti-
mate, and which can make binding decisions enforceable
by the police power and the public treasury of the society.
Suggested Readings
On the Variation of Urban Lives and Social Choice
Social Area Analysis, Eshref Shevky and Wendell Bell, Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1955. A technical discussion of the emergence
of three dimensions along which urban populations vary-ethnicity,
social rank, and life style—with a demonstration of one method for
identifying and measuring these dimensions. The theoretical essay
in the beginning is difficult but repays close study because of the
scope and penetration of analysis.
"Social Choice, Life Style, and Suburban Residence," Wendell Bell,
in W. A. Dobriner, editor, The Suburban Community, New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958. A discussion of the consequences of
42
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
increased choice of residence and way of life, based upon the study
of two Chicago suburban areas. The reader in which this piece is
included is also useful, since it includes a wide variety of essays
on suburban social structure.
On the Map of the Metropolis and the Division of
Rewards
Cities and Society, The Revised Reader in Urban Sociology, Paul K.
Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., editors, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of
Glencoe, Inc., 1957. This is an authoritative collection of empirical
studies of the city, with some attention to seminal essays which have
affected that research in the past. Much of the reader is devoted
to spatial distributions of activities and people.
Studies in Human Ecology, George A. Theodorson, editor, Evanston,
Ill.: Row, Peterson and Company, 1961. A more recent collection,
this reader carries a wide variety of articles detailing the relation-
ships between social activity and spatial location; these include an
important section of social area analysis.
On The Maintainance of Order in the Urban
Community
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, New York:
Random House, 1961. In this ingenious and original essay, the
social basis for order and growth at the level of the neighborhood
and local community within the metropolis is analysed in a lively
fashion. In the process the author attacks many current dogmas
which are used by professional planners as well as laymen (and
develops some of her own.)
The Community Press in an Urban Setting, Morris Janowitz, Glencoe,
Ill.: The Free Press, Inc., 1952. Janowitz describes the social structure
of several central city "local communities" within the Chicago
metropolitan complex. He discusses their boundaries, their per-
sistence, and their power to order the behavior of their residents.
Though the community paper is important as a transmitter of
communication, it depends for its value upon an existing social
community.

Part
II
The Governmental
Response to
Metropolitanization
!
►
*
".
?
3
The Governmental
Mosaic of the
Metropolis
:
↑

Late in the last century a distinguished commentator on
American life noted that municipal government was the
one conspicuous failure of our society. Coming from
Britain, where local government is administered by the
middle class in terms of its understanding of the general
welfare, Lord Bryce was shocked.¹ American cities, with
elaborate machinery for enforcing democracy, were run by
gangs. Tammany Hall shamelessly bribed, corrupted, and
sold out the policy of New York City to the highest bidder.
The men who ran our governments operated by a moral
code whose chief distinction was that between "honest
graft” and “dishonest graft." (The immortal phrase is from
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, whose self-designed epitaph
1
¹ James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, London and New York:
Macmillan and Company, 1889.
45
46
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
¡
was "He seen his opportunities and he took them.") 2
Enormous contracts were sold for private income; criminals
bought hunting licenses from the police; ordinary enter-
prise paid tribute to the condottieri of City Hall.
There is more to this picture, however. Seth Low, Mayor
of Brooklyn at the time of Lord Bryce's visit, appends a
rebuttal to the last edition of the Englishman's book.
Eloquently, he makes a major point. At whatever cost in
plunder and crime, the cities of America in the last half
of the nineteenth century grew tenfold. Urban population
increased from less than four million to more than thirty
million. A rapidly growing nation which was 15 per
cent urban in 1850 was 40 per cent urban by the turn
of the century. It was a true population explosion. And
as Low points out, these floods of people were housed,
order was maintained, streets were built, transport was
established, water was brought in, and wastes were carried
away. What wonder that many mistakes were made? More
impressive is the over-all achievement. The fantastic expan-
sion of the urban plant in nineteenth century America is
one of the most striking examples of collective achievement.
Lord Bryce, however, might still retort, "Yes, but at what
a cost." And most of the unnecessary cost of that develop-
ment was due to governmental structure inadequate to the
burdens of explosive urbanization. To understand this we
must look at American definitions of municipal govern-
ment. These were the rules, inherited from the past, codi-
fied in law and the state constitutions, which set the limits
within which our urban governments could develop. They
were quite inadequate to the floods of history.
THE NORMS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
American cities ceased to be administered by appointed
delegates of the state after the Revolutionary War. Instead,
2 George Washingeon Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (as re-
corded by William Riordan), New York: McClure-Philips and
Company, 1905.
THE GOVERNMENTAL MOSAIC OF THE METROPOLIS
47
an effort was made to combine dominance by the state
legislatures with Jacksonian democracy. At the price of
considerable simplification, let us say that Jacksonian ide-
ology was translated into these norms. (1) The city was
responsible to the ordinary citizen through universal man-
hood suffrage; (2) office was open to all and could be
managed successfully by any citizen; (3) the citizens had
a sacred right to local self-rule. The results were chiefly
visible in the incompetence and peculation common to
urban government. With massive public works, a flood of
culturally illiterate new citizens, and the exposure of all
key offices to the electorate, government became a key form
of private enterprise to its practitioners. And, because of
their interdependence within the urban area, many non-
political persons were drawn willy-nilly into the "ring" that
ran the city. The basic ambivalence between local self-
rule and the doctrine that the legal city was merely a
creature of the State led to frequent special and discrim-
inatory acts at the state capitol. The big, wicked city was
deemed incapable of governing itself. State legislatures
responded with "ripper legislation" aimed at destroying
powers of the city. Some major cities, such as Memphis
and Mobile, were actually abolished. The police force of
St. Louis is still partially controlled from Jefferson City,
the little capitol city of Missouri.³
At the same time, the state constitutions provided easy
means of incorporating new municipalities. Under the
“right to local self-rule," state constitutions also specified
extremely difficult processes for annexation or amalgama-
tion of existing cities. Furthermore, translation of this
right into political form meant that the city was required
to gain the consent of the citizens for any major change
in police power and fiscal capacity. Thus tax rates, bond
issues, structural changes, annexations and mergers, were
3
For an extensive discussion of the underlying political norms and
their translation into governmental rules, see Charles R. Adrian,
Governing Urban America, Second Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company, 1961.
48
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
submitted to the voters. Vox populi was indeed interpreted
as vox Dei-the voice of the people was considered to be
the only legitimate voice where major change was con-
cerned. Wherever a group of residents saw their common
interest demanding it, a municipality could be created. It
was extremely difficult to destroy the legal entity once it
was created without the consent of the citizens, while formal
change was almost impossible except by referendum.
This governmental response to social change was one
typical of social organizations. Every effort was made to
persist in the earlier patterns of behavior, for such patterns
represented commitments for many persons. In the face
of the astronomical increase in population, in social func-
tions, in the scale of the total society, every effort was made
to carry on local government business as usual. For upon
the existing scheme of things rested the plans and hopes
of political bosses, ward heelers, contractors, private busi-
nessmen, ethnic enclaves-all those concerned with the
city government as a major factor in their lives and busi-
ness.
The emphasis during the period of rapid urbanization
was upon getting the job done. If the city needed a street-
car grid, or a rapid transit, and the unwieldy city council
objected, bribe the council. If the electoral machinery with
its laundry list of elected officers made rational voting im-
possible, accept the organized machinery of the parties. If
a hundred thousand new citizens did not understand Anglo-
Saxon traditions of self rule let the "pols" teach them the
ropes. It was a strategy of opportunism and expediency.
In the process, the polity of the city was degraded; it
became a necessary tool for the achievement of ends by
private enterprise. The great capital investments of the
period were largely the creation of private capital, working
with franchises, contracts, and permits bought, stolen, or
forced from the elected officials of local governments. When,
in short, the burdens upon government became too much
THE GOVERNMENTAL MOSAIC OF THE METROPOLIS
49
for the legitimate system of government, ways were found
to circumvent the system.
HOW THE CITIES GREW UP
Needless to say, there was little concern for long-range
planning in such a system. Government followed private
enterprise: the labor force surged into a booming city,
bringing its families and problems and social costs with it.
Willy-nilly, government accepted the consequences—in the
maintenance of public safety, the provision of charity, the
extension of the city's physical plant, the policing of labor-
management relations, the struggle to control organized
criminal rings. Rather than planning for the future, urban
government was continually struggling with its debts to
the past, and it was always in arrears.
There was, after all, little to guide a planner. The fore-
casting of urban growth is still a primitive science, and
in the earlier days of urbanization when there was no
precedent for such growth, nobody really understood what
was happening. Thus the framework of local government
was not radically reexamined in the light of the vast social
transformation described earlier. Instead, reformers con-
centrated on the most obvious abuses in the existing system.
They struggled to take the policy away from the political
machines (those organizations interested primarily in the
monetary rewards of politics) through the institution of
nonpartisan government, civil service systems, and even-
tually the city manager form of government. The reformers
were, in short, chiefly concerned with civilizing a govern-
mental jungle where politics was simply a form of private
enterprise.
However, the city was already changing under their feet,
and with its change new problems emerged. The commuter
trains, and later the electric railways, opened many new
50
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
sites for settlement, some of them far beyond the city limits.
Those with the resources in money and time began to
move outward from the central city. The suburban dis-
persal had begun. As they moved outside city boundaries,
the resources of the central city were no longer at their
disposal. The suburban enclaves were faced with the house-
keeping problems of the spatial community; under the
permissive constitutional provisions, they solved them
through incorporating their residential neighborhoods as
villages or towns. Thus the central cities began to be sur-
rounded by a series of satellites, incorporated and pro-
tected by governmental walls.
For a time the satellites did not constitute a problem.
When the boundaries of the central city nudged those of
the suburb, the suburb was annexed with little difficulty.
However, such annexation came to a halt in the 1920's.
Since that period most metropolitan areas have presented
the same picture: a "land-locked" central city, increasingly
aged and obsolete, surrounded by a growing patchwork of
suburban municipalities. The key question is this: why
did the boundaries of the central city cease to expand,
following its dispersed population? We cannot answer with
certainty; however, a comparison of central city and subur-
ban population may be helpful.
Central City versus Suburbs
It was in the 1920's that the automobile revolution began
to make vast areas on the outskirts of the cities available
for residential sites. Country towns became nuclei for
white-collar commuter settlements: empty pastures and
cornfields became the sites for large scale housing develop-
ment. But the people who left the central city for the
suburbs were not a random assortment. As we have seen
they were distinguished from those who remained behind
by social rank, ethnicity, and life-style.
THE GOVERNMENTAL MOSAIC OF THE METROPOLIS
51
The automobile was at first used mostly by the upper
social ranks. Its costs were substantial. Those who could
bear these costs were also persons likely to want new resi-
dences, and new construction was largely on the periphery
of the city. The older central city, with its structures dating
back to the Age of Steam, had little space to offer those in
search of new sites, but on the outskirts the supply was
greater than the demand. There were, thus, powerful eco-
nomic arguments for the location of new middle-class
neighborhoods in the suburbs. With their construction,
however, the physical difference between the two parts of
the metropolis was augmented. The suburbs were new,
middle-class, residential neighborhoods: the inner city was
a mixture of workplace, markets and homes, surrounded
by mile upon mile of older neighborhoods.
The new suburbs were also apt to be “exclusive.” That
is, they exercised formal and informal controls to prevent
the "wrong kind of people" from moving in. Ethnic minori-
ties, the foreign-born, Jewish, Catholic, or nonwhite citizens
of the metropolis found the governmental walls of the
suburbs impossible to scale. They perforce remained behind
in the central city. Thus, with continuing in-migration of
Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, the central city
became ever darker in complexion, while the suburbs
looked ever more "lily white" in contrast. The suburbs are,
today, overwhelmingly populated by the white (or as Kip-
ling called them, the "pinko grey") urbanites, usually a
generation or more removed from the original immigrants.
Most identifiable minority groups still live in the older
central city.
We have noted earlier the increasing choice in life-style
available to urban Americans. That kind of life which we
have called familism, dedicated to children, home, and
neighborhood, is best carried on in areas populated by
similar people. In America, those who choose familism
have a strong prejudice for the single-family dwelling unit
secure in the middle of its fifty foot lot. Neighborhoods
52
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
made up of such dwellings demand a great deal of hori-
zontal space, space not to be found in the old central city
without expensive demolition and rebuilding. With the
automobile revolution, however, enormous new spaces be-
came available on the outskirts. The suburbs attracted
a population emphatically biased towards the familistic
life-style, rather than the more unbane existence of the
apartment houses in the densely developed center.
DIFFERENCE IN PEOPLE AND DIFFERENCE IN
GOVERNMENT
Suburban folk tend to be of higher social rank, of white
“old American" heritage, and committed to a familistic
way of life. Though much of the city population is similar,
much of it is different indeed. The older dwellings house
a working-class population. The ethnic minorities, par-
ticularly the nonwhite enclaves, populate broad expanses
of the city's housing grid. Those with a more urbane life-
style remain in the city (and sneer at suburbia), while
those committed to familism live in the outer wards of the
city, or wait for the day when they can afford a suburban
ranch house.
QUIN KATA 428%
G
Such variation produces a lurid ideology-"the city is old
and overrun by Negroes; the suburbs are shallow, jerry-
built, cheap.” This is reinforced by the governmental varia-
tion between the areas-"central city government is crooked;
suburban government is trivial." The central city is one
massive governmental unit, while the suburbs contain
hundreds of little municipalities, with over 1,400 local units
in the New York metropolitan area alone. Government in
the city is big government. It represents a great deal of
power, money, and technology, and it seems far away and
hard to understand. It is also partisan government. In the
suburbs the small municipalities are usually nonpartisan,
and the white middle class feels that it has solved the
THE GOVERNMENTAL MOSAIC OF THE METROPOLIS
53
problem of local government by taking politics out of
government. In short, there are weighty differences between
suburbs and central city with respect to physical plant,
population types, governmental structure, and the political
process. We will discuss the latter items in more detail; it
is sufficient for the moment to indicate the very real
differences between the two halves of the metropolitan
complex.
The suburban municipalities are going concerns. Though
they are small and weak, compared to the colossus at the
center, most of them provide basic governmental services,
collect taxes, and exercise the police power. Most important
of all, they exercise a monopoly on the powers of municipal
government as defined by the constitutional government of
the states. While they hold such powers no other govern-
ment can do so. And this is not unrelated to their reason
for being.
THE ORIGINS OF SUBURBAN MUNICIPALITIES
space a
Many of the early suburbs were collective responses to
the problems created by interdependence. Small residential
enclaves built their own power plants, sewers, water sys-
tems, because they could not share those of the central city
and could not interest private enterprise in the job. Many
of them were also incorporated to allow for a tighter con-
trol over land-use development and population than was
possible for unincorporated neighborhoods. But recently,
many suburban municipalities have one major purpose
for their citizens: incorporation protects the residential
community from annexation and governmental control by
a larger unit. They are, in effect, governmental game pre-
'serves whose citizens are relatively immune to municipal
law. Some suburban municipalities are simply industrial
sites, freed from municipal smoke control and other nui-
sances; some are tax-free preserves for industry; some pro-
54
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
tect their citizens from adequate taxes and from housing
codes, allowing them to build shanty towns, to keep
chickens and cows, or to carry on home crafts and the like
on rutty lanes without fire protection; some are govern-
mental shelters where gambling, prostitution and other
generally illicit activities are permitted.
In short, the Jacksonian ideology, appropriate enough to
an agrarian society, produces a paradoxical governmental
structure in the metropolis. It is free enterprise in the
founding of governments, and every municipality for itself.
The ease of incorporation allows for a multiplicity of
municipalities, created for the most diverse purposes.
(Many towns in Dade County, Florida, were incorporated
for the sole purpose of securing liquor licenses; a state
law allowed only two to a municipality.) All of these
municipalities, once in being, constitute the only legitimate
delegates of municipal powers. With respect to any larger
problem or purpose, they are "dog in the manger” govern-
ments; they will not act, nor allow other governments to
do so.
Any governmental entity, once in being, is difficult to
disband. This is particularly true of the suburban munici-
pality. The Jacksonian ideology supports rule by friends
and neighbors, nurturing suspicion of the Big City. What-
ever the truth, it flatters the citizens with an image of their
community as a semi-rural small town, a repository of the
rustic virtues. And, translated into the constitution of the
state, the Jacksonian ideology requires popular consent for
the extermination of any municipality. When campaigns
occur to abolish, annex, or amalgamate such governments,
however, all who think they benefit from the status quo
are vocally opposed. Any existing structure builds up some
differentially distributed advantages-somebody prefers it to
alternatives. When this is combined with the poetry of
*For a lively picture of the changing American picture of the city,
see Anselm Strauss, Images of the American City, New York: The
Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961
THE GOVERNMENTAL MOSAIC OF THE METROPOLIS
55
rusticity, the staying power of the municipality is clear.
Thus the Dade County suburb, originally incorporated for
the purpose of securing two liquor licenses, today stands
for home, mother, democracy, and virtue. The imaginary
boundary lines and the place name become symbols, made
to contain the diverse values of the residential neighbor-
hoods.
The Governmental Dichotomy and Some
Consequences
Today, a bird's eye view of the metropolitan govern-
mental structure would typically encompass the great circle
of the central city and the dozens or hundreds of small
units clustered side by side on the outskirts. More literally,
the central city would be marked by higher, denser struc-
tures, shelving downwards rapidly to the peripheries; the
suburbs would be horizontal, dispersed, with perhaps one-
fifth the population of the inner central city per square
mile. From a bird's eye view we would also note that the air
over suburbia is often filled with fumes and smoke from the
center. The whole urban complex lies across one or two
great watersheds, and streams flow across governmental
boundaries, bearing effluvia from here to there. The flow
of traffic also moves momentarily throughout the area, with-
out regard to municipal boundaries, knitting together the
scattered sites for human activity in a larger system of
action. In short, one would see the governmental division
as arbitrary with respect to many of the collective systems
of human action which constitute the being of the city.
Indeed, the entire urban complex is in many ways a
unity. The scattered thousands are interdependent in each
of the ways we have detailed; they man the complex, ex-
clusive work organization we have discussed earlier. The
wealthy suburbanites depend upon the unskilled ethnic
laborers and machine operatives of the central city for the
56
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
social product that feeds them. The central city banks
depend upon the suburban investors; the suburban depart-
ment stores depend on the central city banks. All of the
residents together are subject to the age-old kinds of in-
terdependence detailed earlier: they require order in inter-
group relations, protection of person and property, and the
maintenance of a transport system, water and sewage sys-
tems, fire protection and public health. In short, there is a
sense in which we can call the metropolitan area a unity.
This unity, however, is not reflected in government. The
problems created by contiguity and mutual dependence
are not allocated to any government which includes all of
those affected and affecting others. The central city govern-
ment does not work in close cooperation with those of
suburbia; how could it? Suburban governments are them-
selves uncoordinated, with no center of power and informa-
tion. Yet the cooperation of suburbia is frequently crucial
to the programs in the central city: traffic on a freeway
system which ends abruptly in the main street of a country
town is apt to back up halfway to City Hall, and smoke
abatement will be less than complete until the suburban
industrial park complies. There is, however, no normative
prescription in Jacksonian philosophy for the forced inte-
gration of local government. Nor is there a constitutional
formula that frees the governmental structure from the
heavy hand of the referendum voter. Thus many important
problems generated in the metropolitan complex are in-
soluble within the existing governmental structures. Our
political culture lags far behind the emerging problems of
the metropolitan world in which we live. It is embedded in
the folk thought of the citizen and the phrases of the law.
SOME AUGURIES AND A QUESTION
Meanwhile, massive changes continue. In two decades
our cities will grow by more than fifty million people. Most
THE GOVERNMENTAL MOSAIC OF THE METROPOLIS
57
of the net growth will be in suburbia.5 Even today, 49
per cent of our total metropolitan population lives in the
suburban fringe. Thus the one large-scale government in
the metropolis, that of the central city, will encompass a
dwindling proportion of the land in use and the people in
residence. There is little indication that the manufacture
of small municipalities in suburbia will cease. While the
scale of organization in the United States progressively in-
creases, while work, play, religion, and other major activi-
ties are carried out through very large-scale organizational
networks, local government moves doggedly in the opposite
direction. Our ability to plan and provide for the entire
metropolitan complex within the inherited framework of
local self-government is declining relative to our ability
to exercise over-all control in other segments of our lives.
Yet certain problems are inescapable. We refer, once
again, to the minimal needs of human collectives living in
cities. These problems are so basic that, should they not
be solved, the city would perish. But our cities do not
appear to be in such mortal danger, so we must ask: how
is the polity maintained so that the resources and order
requisite for these millions may indeed be predictably
there when they need them? In answering this question,
we shall consider first the government of the old central
cities. Then we shall turn to the congeries of municipalities
on the fringe, that dark and unknown governmental realm
called suburbia.
Suggested Readings
On The Governmental Mosaic of the Metropolis
Exploring the Metropolitan Gommunity, John C. Bollens, editor,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961.
5 See Philip Hauser, Population Perspectives, New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1960, Chapter 4, p. 101.
58
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
This is the report of a large-scale study of metropolitan govern-
ments as they relate to each other and to the socio-economic
structure of the urban settlement. Written in the context of a duty
to recommend needed changes in the governmental structure of
metropolitan St. Louis, it has the double aim of describing what
is and prescribing what might be. Sample surveys of the citizens
deal with their political participation and their opinions of their
governments.
"Local Government Organization in Metropolitan Areas," Victor Jones,
in Coleman Woodbury, editor, The Future of Cities and Urban
Redevelopment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. A
detailed descriptive survey of the metropolitan governmental struc-
tures, with a discussion of the origins and effects of a fragmented
local government. The collection in which this occurs is also a
valuable source of information on the problems involved in “rede-
veloping" our cities.
On the Governmental Dichotomy and Some
Consequences
"Metropolis in Ferment," Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences, 314 (November, 1957.) This entire
issue of the Annals is devoted to the problems and prospects of
the metropolis, and a great deal of attention is focused upon the
results of the dichotomy between central city and suburbs.

4
The Governance of the
Central City
The aged central city, its structure reflecting the paleo-
technic city of the nineteenth century, is the living past of
the metropolitan area. Here we find the monuments to
earlier technology, leaders, social circles, artistic achieve-
ment. Here the visitor feels that he has really discovered
the essence of the metropolis. At Times Square in New
York, the Loop in Chicago, Penn Center in Philadelphia, or
Market Street in San Francisco the metropolis seems to come
into focus. However, what was basic and definitive in an
earlier city may be very misleading in a metropolis with
half or two-thirds of its population living in the suburbs;
the focus is far off center. Still there was a time not long
ago when the central city did encompass the totality of
the urban complex, and its downtown was the hub of the
metropolis. Its governmental boundaries encircled the
densely built-up urban area, and its polity was the public
decision making process for the entire urban complex.
Before the automobile the central city included the entire
59
60
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
array and variety of the urban worlds. It took the brunt
of the rapid urbanization we have discussed; here was the
process of increasing scale in concrete form. The soaring
skyscrapers represented the "peak organizations" which
were melding continental networks of activity. Railroads,
banks, insurance companies, petroleum companies, all
built their headquarters at the center. One saw also the
other aspects of increasing scale-in the polyglot crowds of
Sicilians, Poles, Hungarians, and Jews who crowded the
streets of the lower East Side of Manhattan, the near North
or near South Side of Chicago. Areas of cheap, dense housing
lay close to the workplaces of the center and were the
typical ports of entry for the immigrants and country boys
drawn by economic opportunity and glamour to the city.
As we have noted, the government of the central city
faced a congeries of tremendous tasks. Increasing scale
produced new problems of intergroup relations. Expanding
economic enterprises, based on new energy sources and
machinery, were violent and radical departures from an
older organization of work. Labor agitation and labor
unions arose as a response to catastrophic change, from
a workforce still oriented to small-scale family enterprises,
shops and farms and crafts.¹ The relationships between
organizing labor and management were uneasy, unstable,
and frequently bloody from the Civil War to the 1940's
(and still are in regions of rapidly increasing scale, such
as the South). The government of the city was usually the
only agency responsible for maintaining public order
among these forces. At the same time, the sheer mixture
of populations produced endemic and violent conflict be-
tween ethnic enclaves. Negroes and Irish, Italians and
Jews, Poles and Negroes competed for homes, neighbor-
hoods, jobs-living space. Their competition frequently
descended into overt conflict, and many of them did not
understand the "rules of the road" in an urban place

P
¹ For an organizational analysis of the rise of the labor unions, see
Scott Greer, Social Organization, New York: Random House, 1955.
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
61
ordered by the inherited laws of the Anglo-Saxon people.
Small nuances of expression and tone of voice could turn
a policeman's friendly admonition to, for example, a newly
arrived Pole into a brawl or a murder.
The variation in cultural background alone produced
great areas of anarchy and danger in the organizational
interstices. The cities of America have old histories of riot-
ing, lynching, and pillaging. In the streets, alleys, parks,
lobbies, terminals, and public transport there were always
problems of policing. The need for police always outran
the supply, for the consequences of increase in scale to the
local community were typically disregarded or underes-
timated. Weakness of the law enforcement agencies led, in
turn, to the organization of effective criminal gangs. The
wide array of illegal behavior, the variety of cultural back-
grounds, and the poor control system meant that fortunes
could be made in gambling, prostitution, and the sale of
narcotics. The organizations that carried on such illegal
commerce were frequently of different ethnic origins; thus
gang warfare was both pecuniary and ethnic in its nature.
The development of the physical plant also lagged be-
hind demand. Only in the twentieth century did most
American cities assure themselves of a safe water supply.
Streets and streetlights, sidewalks and their maintenance,
continually demanded new outputs of societal wealth.
Sewage disposal was a continual problem. Only extreme
failure of the system made most citizens aware of its im-
portance, yet sewage disposal systems had to expand con-
tinually because of the mushrooming population. We have
not mentioned schools, parks, museums, libraries: all were
in short supply as the customers multiplied astronomically.
The solution of these problems had to be found, as we
have observed, within the framework of a democratic dog-
ma. Vast and difficult operations were to be commanded
by any "common man" who could be elected by the votes
of others; important operating decisions were to be made
by the voters in referendum elections. The moral and
technical control of the government depended in large part
62
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
upon the judgment of the ordinary citizen. But these citi-
zens were frequently unable to understand even the English
language, much less the complex system of American local
government. Those who did understand were not competent
to monitor the unprecedented process of city building and
organization forced upon them by large-scale society in
expansion.
ECONOMICS OF MACHINE GOVERNMENT
The impasse was resolved by the development of power-
ful party machines at the local level. The party machine
was an organization devoted to the control of the vote and,
through the vote, power and the profits of power. Without
a guiding ideology (or set of formulated ideals) it operated
as an exchange system, a business enterprise. At the lowest
level the precinct captains exchanged jobs, bonuses, turkeys
on Thanksgiving, coal in winter time, for the votes of
families, friendship cliques, ethnic enclaves. The machine
was a vast retail system for trade in votes. Frequently, of
course, the actual voting could be made irrelevant, for
fraud was another means of affecting the tally (which in
turn affected the supply of "Wholesale goods" or authority
to be exchanged). Plunkitt describes the hardship of his
early days, when his wife stayed up all night ironing out bal-
lots so that they might be inserted through the crack in the
bottom of the ballot box. Without extensive discussion of
the technology of fraud, let us note that the exchange of
favors for votes was the staple technique, with fraud a sup-
plementary device. Together, these allowed the machine to
count on a dependable plurality. Of course, there are usu-
ally two or more party machines in competition. This fact
introduced the note of uncertainty which heated up the
campaign and made politics a great spectator sport in the
nineteenth century cities.
The dominant machine was related to the rest of the
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
63
urban community through an exchange system. At the
higher level, the political Boss treated with the financial
and industrial interests of the city. His trading cards were
franchises for the rapidly expanding transportation system,
contracts for lucrative public works, permits to operate
various businesses, as well as waivers of the public law
for favored parties. His price was reciprocal favor or cash.
Money, in turn, was reinvested in the machine, trickling
down through district and ward to the precinct, where the
precinct officers in turn distributed favors. (Of course, the
Boss took substantial profits from the transaction.)
The importance of the cash nexus, and the relative public
irresponsibility of the political Boss, meant that money
could be translated into political power. Lincoln Steffens
described, in some detail, the things that rich and respect-
able entrepreneurs bought from local government in the
nineteenth century American city.2 They were worth
having. (A slightly fictionalized biography of Yerkes, the
"Robber Baron" who bought the right to monopolize
public transport in Chicago, is given in Theodore Dreiser's
novel, The Titan.) Aside from using money, the upper
class could also influence the local boss through the crusad-
ing daily newspapers (which might expose delicate and
secret operations) and through power at the state or na-
tional governmental levels. In summary, there were many
ways for business interests to determine policy in the city.
It was indeed a society oriented toward business. Busi-
nessmen were the first-class citizens, and the chief operations
of government were delegated through contracts to business
enterprise. The material tasks of local government, apart
from such unprofitable enterprises as police and fire
protection, were very small operations compared with the
developing corporations of nineteenth century America.
Though a majority of the citizens may have been ethnic
"The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1931.
64
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
and working class (in 1910 a majority of Americans were
from minority groups), their interests were not paramount.
Those of business were.
Such a system could be imagined as a pyramid, with a
power elite at the top. The power elite was made up of the
wealthy, whose control of men and money, whose ties with
the national and state governments, whose influence with
the newspapers, and whose "ownership" of the mayor and
council (through the Boss) gave them tremendous lever-
age for the control of both the public and private aspects
of the city's development. Such an interpretation was docu-
mented in dozens of novels; it was congruent with the
stories of the muckrakers, as well as the ideology of the
socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists. It was a conspiracy
as local government, with politicians seen as merely tools
of "the executive committee of the bourgeoisie."
THE POWER ELITE OF THE CITY TODAY
This image of urban government has persisted into our
own day. Floyd Hunter has spent a great deal of energy
identifying the "thirty men who run Atlanta." Other
scholars have studied a number of American cities. In each
case they move from expert informants, who know the
situation, to a set of nominated power figures. These in
turn nominate others until the circle is closed and new
persons do not get mentioned; from those most frequently
nominated they select the personnel for the power elite.
Their technique has recently been radically questioned.
Some have noted that, if there is only a myth about a power
elite and it is believed by the more informed citizens, then
the scholar is only documenting that myth when he asks
them how they think the city works. This would explain
• Community Power Structure, Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1953.
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY 65
why we could find a power elite whether it exists or not.
Others have more drastic criticisms. They note that when
the "Big Mules" of Cleveland or St. Louis try to help re-
organize the local government of the metropolis their
projects go down in defeat at the polls. When the civic
leaders of Chicago want to refurbish the near North Side,
or locate a new campus for the University of Illinois, their
efforts are frustrated and the final decision is made by the
Mayor-or no decision at all results. In short, the power
elite image of control in the central city has lately been
exposed to an extremely sceptical group of critics. This
leads us to ask: Was the political image of the city equally
fictitious in earlier days? Or do the critics of the power
elite theory today simply misunderstand the nature of or-
ganization in the contemporary central city? It seems more
likely that the discrepancy does not just reflect variation
in opinion but instead indicates differences among cities
and, more important, the continuing effects of increase in
scale which change cities over time. The big city machine,
a response to increase in scale, may also have become a
victim of the continuing process. Let us look at urban
government in this context.


Social Change and the Machine
Continual increase in scale has had four major conse-
quences for the problems of urban government and their
solution. It has produced an increasing bureaucratization
of governmental and other functions: it has led to rapid
organizational mergers-in private enterprise; it has radically
changed the general character of the urban population; and
it has resulted in a massive multiplication of the popula-

*For a careful study of the way major issues of Chicago were resolved
(or, more often, tabled) see Edward C. Banfield, Political Influence,
New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961.
66
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
tion and therefore of the size of the organizational tools of
urban government. Let us consider each of these in relation
to its implications for the classic big city machine.
The bureaucratization of governmental services affected
the machine in two separate ways. First, with the Great
Depression of the 1930's it became apparent that all Ameri-
cans were part of a nationwide economic system, and when
that system failed the problem of unemployment and pover-
ty was a nationwide problem. As a consequence, what had
been charity became the work of the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare, and vast programs were adminis-
tered through the nationwide bureaucracies of government.
Second, the management of local governmental enterprises
became increasingly professionalized; the reformers were
successful in convincing the people (and later the poli-
ticians) that such services as the city provided were better
handled by civil servants, selected and trained through non-
political methods to do their jobs without favoritism or polit-
ical counsel. These two changes struck deep at the roots of
politics as a simple exchange system. The goods which the
precinct captain once traded for votes were disbursed by
a federal agency staffed by civil servants. The decisions.
about street layouts, hospital construction, zoning, and
planning, once so profitably controlled by politicians, were
increasingly made by professional public personnel-plan-
ners, hospital administrators, traffic engineers. At the same.
time voting became better organized, and mechanized, with
a bureaucracy (subject to review) in charge of the tallies.
Quality control made fraud difficult and dangerous. Both
at the lowest and highest levels the exchange system of the
machine was mortally damaged.
LOGIN


CORPORATE MERGER AND LOCAL POLITICS
The rapid and continuous process of organizational merg-
er had other effects upon the urban polity. The drawing
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
67
of major enterprise into national organizations and the
further bureaucratization of the corporation, as it separated
ownership from management, resulted in a class of profes-
sional managers whose first duty was to the nationwide, or
international, corporate network. The most powerful eco-
nomic figure in town was no longer the owner of the major
industry; he was a manager. Consequently, the economic
dominants (as they are sometimes called in the literature
on the power elite) became increasingly withdrawn from
concern with the local community. Schulze has documented
the steps by which Ypsilanti, Michigan, moved from a
classical power elite structure to one in which the branch
plant managers were interested in the local community
only on rare occasions. Rather than wishing to run the
show, they only wanted a veto on certain kinds of govern-
mental act. Otherwise, they did not wish to be involved.5
The result of corporate merger has been the freeing of
economic organizations from dependence upon, and hence
interest in, particular cities. This has combined with the
increasing geographical mobility of the managerial elite;
as they move upward in the corporate hierarchy they move
around the country. They become identified with one com-
munity only when they have ceased to be occupationally
mobile. (One longitudinal study indicated that, even in
Red Wing, Minnesota, a town of ten thousand, the person-
nel change among those nominated as civic leaders was
more than 60 per cent in the relatively short period of six
years.) 6 Turnover of leadership makes effective organiza-
tion (the compromising of interests, the assignment of tasks,
the integrating of action) extremely difficult. Furthermore,
we must remember that the business leadership in a city of
5 Robert O. Schulze, "The Bifurcation of Power in a Satellite City,"
in Morris Janowitz, editor, Community Political Systems, Glencoe, Ill.:
The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961.
6
“Organizational Leadership and Social Structure in a Small City,”
Donald W. Olmsted, American Sociological Review, Vol. 19, pp. 273–
281.
68
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
any size is apt to be divisible on more issues than those
on which it is unitable. (A recent study by Scoble, for
example, shows a very low rate of consensus among the
dominant leaders in a New England town of less than
fifteen thousand persons.) 7 It requires more work to achieve
coordination when there is high turnover, yet there are
fewer people committed to achieving it. In short, the
changing nature of exclusive, membership organizations
has greatly weakened their machinery for controlling the
political decisions of the city. And such change is of partic-
ular importance in the metropolis, the headquarters city
of the corporation.
POPULATION CHANGE AND THE MACHINE
Meanwhile, the population of the metropolis has been
changing in the directions discussed earlier. Social rank has
on the average moved upwards; the illiterate, unskilled
workman of foreign birth is a vanishing breed. Even in
the central city education, occupation, and real income have
risen to once-unimaginable levels in the past sixty years.
At the same time, the children and grandchildren of the
foreign born are socialized from the beginning to the Ameri-
can urban milieu. As a result of these changes in combina-
tion the definition of the vote has changed; it is no longer
simply an expression of ethnic solidarity, but rather a more
complex decision, based on a variety of interests. The chil-
dren of the immigrants live in a different city from that of
their parents and have different techniques for managing
their urban environment. Their toleration for fraud shrinks
as they become more informed and committed to American
civic virtues. Their vote is not for sale.
7 "Leadership Hierarchies and Political Issues in a New England
Town," by Harry Scoble, in Community Political Systems, Morris
Janowitz, editor, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961.
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
69
An indirect effect of increasing size, but an important
one, is the suburban-central city dichotomy. With increas-
ing population and static boundary lines, the population
of the metropolis is almost equally divided between central
city and suburbs. But we have also noted the difference
between the population in the two areas: those who remain
in the central city are predominantly ethnic and working
class social types. In 1950, according to Philip Hauser, "Los
Angeles was the only city among the five largest in the
United States in which the native white population of na-
tive parentage was greater than half, and even there it was
only 55 per cent.8 These populations are the ones most
likely to prefer the Democratic party in national elections;
when there is a partisan organization of local elections (and
this is true of all but one of our very large cities) the work-
ing class and the ethnic voters go Democratic. A direct
consequence is the collapse of the Republican Party in
the political arena of the central city. One by one, Republi-
can strongholds are giving way to Democratic majorities,
as the nordic white Protestant middle class makes its way
to the suburbs. Today, in many of our great cities, two or
three Republican councilmen represent the "two party
system” among a host of Democratic officials. As the process
of segregation by polity continues, the central city will be-
come, in fact if not in theory, a one-party state.
GROWTH O
GROWTH OF THE GIANT BUREAUCRACIES
Finally, we have to consider the increase in the size of
urban concentrations. In 1900 two American metropolitan
areas had a population of a million or more; in 1960, there
were nineteen complexes this large. The sheer aggregation
of population had two major effects upon the control sys-
* Hauser, Population Perspectives, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1960, p. 125.
(
70
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
tem of the central city. First, and not to be overlooked,
was the sheer increase in the size of the problems that had
to be handled within the rounds of urban housekeeping,
and the consequent size of the organizations which handled
them. The City of New York, for example, employs 50,000
persons in its educational system, 26,000 in its police depart-
ment, and 13,000 in its fire department. The sheer aggre-
gation of numbers and budget results in the proliferation
of organizational centers with a degree of autonomy and,
hence, power. The number and strength of leadership
groups is multiplied with increasing population.
• The total effect of these changes has been the destruction
of the old-time political machine, and with it the power
elite. Increase in scale has destroyed the basis for the politi-
cal machine as an exchange system; in the urban wards of
Stackton it is as hard to recruit precinct workers as in the
small-town Republican strongholds of Illinois. Whyte re-
ports the visible attrition of the Democratic machine in
Boston during the 1930's, while Reichley discusses the
steady weakening of Republican power in Philadelphia dur-
ing the same period.10 The ability of the political boss to
control his "Hessians" and through them the vote of the
people, may have been over-rated in the past: it is very
easy to over-rate it today.
The collapse of the exchange system has, in turn, de-
stroyed the ability of the power elite to call the tune.
⁹ Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman, Governing New York, New
York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1960.
10 The political machine in Stackton is described and analyzed by
Peter H. Rossi and Phillips Cutright in "The Impact of Party Organ-
ization in an Industrial Setting," in Morris Janowitz, editor, Com-
munity Political Systems, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe,
Inc., 1961. For the Philadelphia case see James Reichley, The Art of
Government, New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1959. William
Foote Whyte presents a study, in depth, of the changing relations of
the machine to the ethnic neighborhood he studied in Boston, in
Streetcorner Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943.
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
71
Businessmen have never had a preponderant influence, at
the polls, on the city population as a whole. They have
relied upon the machine as a mechanism for translating
money into political power. By bribing the politicians and
by contributing to campaign chests, business interests
assured themselves a strong voice in the political decisions
of the central city. Even with the Republican Party's power
fading away they could still exert leverage upon the Demo-
cratic machine, for the machine was primarily a non-
ideological exchange system. With its weakening, however,
the business man had literally no way of reaching the voters.
The result is a drastic separation of numbers and wealth
in the contemporary metropolis. Businessmen, resident in
the suburbs, have great stakes in the central city polity.
That polity, however, is controlled by a set of politicians
who have a declining need for the businessman, and who
are elected by the votes of the ethnic and working class
constituencies of the center. Such a separation of numbers
and wealth is not, of course, contrary to the democratic
dogma. It is, however, an anomaly to those who still con-
sider the businessman as the first class citizen and his
interests as paramount for the community.
It is also anomalous to those who explain American
government through the theory of the two-party system,
with its assumptions of organized control and competition
for power. The anomaly leads us to ask: How, then, does
the government of today's central city operate? How is it
that order is maintained and essential tasks are performed?
The Machine of the Incumbents
The disappearance of party competition in the general
elections of the central city does not destroy party organiza-
tion. Instead it changes the basis of organization: the old-
style exchange system is replaced by a new order. Before
grace
72
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
:
discussing the new state of things, however, it is important
to note the cause and consequences of one-party govern-
ment for the dominant Democratic organization.
The central city electorate, with its predisposition to vote
Democratic, is (like the Southern Democrats) basically a
captive electorate. Whoever is designated Democrat on the
ballot will usually get a majority of the votes. One might
jump to the conclusion that such one-party government
could mean only a sort of totalitarianism. Instead, it seems
to result in a general loosening of the control mechanism;
as V. O. Key demonstrates for the one-party system in the
South, the very basis for much of the party's control is
weakened by the disappearance of the opposition party.11
The reduction of threat in the general election eliminates
the need for party discipline and ferocious esprit de corps
for, no matter what happens, the Democratic Party will
take most of the elective offices.
Under these circumstances, however, the Republican
minority is rapidly demoralized. Political organization is
postulated upon occasional victory; moral victories are
sustaining only when there is some eventual possibility of
non-moral, tangible victory. In the central city, however,
Republican votes continue to decline despite all efforts
made by the Republican Parties. As this occurs, the Repub-
lican Party's leadership and its elected local officials in
cities like St. Louis and Chicago begin to resemble Repub-
licans of the South. They are either lonely idealists, whose
words are purely symbolic since they lack power to imple-
ment them, or else a sort of auxiliary of the dominant
Democrats. (Chicago's delegation to the State legislature in
Springfield includes the "sanitary Republicans," Republi-
can legislators whose chief source of income is office in the
Democratic-controlled Chicago Sanitary District.) Such
officials may even vote with the Democrats and against their
fellow Republicans on crucial issues. Thus even if the
¹¹ V. O. Key, Southern Politics, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
1
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
73
Republicans had a powerful issue, it is doubtful that the
existing leadership could mobilize a campaign to exploit
it. They stand not so much for an alternative governance
as for the existing distribution of electoral strength in the
central city; in fact, they depend upon it for their working
conditions.
THE DISASTER OF TOTAL VICTORY
The Democratic monopoly of victory in the general
election, however, means that the primary election becomes
the major arena for gaining office. And at the primary level
the party organization is considerably weakened, for nomi-
nation to office (tantamount to election) becomes an apple
of discord thrown among the Democratic ranks. In some
cities the party cannot officially designate a slate in the
primary; even when it can, its decisions are basically divi-
sive. There are many deserving party men, and little to
prevent one from running from his district.. If he has been
an effective leader at the block and precinct level, he may
very well win, for the mobilization of friends and neighbors
can easily produce strong opposition to the organization's
designated candidate. Since the candidates do not need
actual logistic support in the general election (the simple
party designation will usually suffice), the field is clear
for "mavericks" to compete.
Yet the party organization can usually control most of
the offices in the primary election. The reason for this is
clear enough; the ordinary voter usually does not know
or care enough about the primary to vote. Thus the organi-
zation, though it may control only a small percentage of
the potential vote, can nevertheless swing the margin of
victory to its candidate. This organizational level is con-
siderably augmented in many cities by the organization's
control of the electoral machinery. Efforts range from
differential requirements for certification as a candidate, to
74
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
the ignoring of irregularities in the campaign and the vot-
ing (though the latter practices are becoming increasingly
dangerous for reasons noted earlier). We may surmise also
that much of the power of the organization results from
a simple misapprehension of its effective force by potential
dissidents. The machine was all-powerful for many years
in some of our cities; those interested in politics are
differentially exposed to the organization. They may fear
official disapproval, not just in the immediate election, but
in the future. Even if the party machine's power is now
a myth, myths may long outlive their factual base and
have consequences.
Thus the organization maintains a continuing control,
though not an ironclad one, over the distribution of offices.
However, with the disappearance of effective opposition
it no longer needs the money of the businessman to win
its campaigns. Being able to win the general election in
any event, the power relations between politician and
business leader have shifted radically. The politician is
clearly in the more advantageous position: he has the
trading cards.
ONE-PARTY GOVERNMENT AND CONTROL OF THE MACHINE
There have also been radical changes within the dom-
inant party's organization. With the weakening of the
machine, the power relation between the nonelective party
Boss and the elected officials reverses. First the elected
mayor develop a considerable autonomy from the machine;
standing above all other elected figures in the metropolis,
his role is visible and his words are news. From the rostrum
of office he tends to dominate the mass media, and through
the media develops a powerful electoral attraction of his
own. Then party ceases to be a differentiating label in the
one-party central city; the major differentiator becomes
incumbency. Those who are in office become de facto rulers
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
75
of the party, for the party needs them more than they
need its cohorts. They dispense the patronage and make
the decisions.
Thus the central city mayor assumes a major if not
dominating role in the dramatis personae of local politics.
Other stellar roles include the head of the county govern-
ment and perhaps the president of the council or board
of aldermen. They also are familiar figures in the news,
for they are elected officials with city-wide constituencies
in image if not in fact. Along with them rise the managers
of the great governmental bureaucracies, school superin-
tendents, engineers, police commissioners, and the like.
Such men, elected or appointed, stand for the expertise of
their office, the legitimacy of the tasks which their bureauc-
racy performs, and the logistics of money and men. The
dominant figures in central city politics tend to be the
dominant officials of government; they constitute a "ma-
chine of the incumbents." No matter how they reached
office in the first place, once there they are formidable
forces.
The central city mayor can, indeed, become an enemy
of his party's organization. Concerned with the entire city,
he is sensitive to opinion in the middle class, familistic,
outer wards of the city; his political score in the general
elections depends upon his ability to carry these "good
government" and "newspaper" wards. He responds to the
criticism of the daily press and the statements of public
leaders representing various interests: welfare, hospital,
education, and the like. Though these interests cannot
defeat him at the polls, he nevertheless engages in implicit
bargaining with them, anticipating the effects of his words
and actions on the newspapers, civic leaders, and hence,
the outer wards. At the same time the central city mayor
is the dominant public official for the entire metropolitan
area. Insofar as there is a metropolitan community, he is
its highest elected official. (In St. Louis, suburbanites and
central city voters alike accorded the Mayor of the City
76
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
more trust and confidence than all other leaders combined,
and their reasons rested upon his office, his expertise, and
his character as a civic notable.) As representative of more
than the laundry list of special interests in the area, he
stands for the general welfare. Businessmen, no longer his
employers, return as influentials insofar as they are virtual
representatives of many values and aspects of the metropolis.
In fact, the central city mayor tends to believe that good
government is good politics. But in the process of pursuing
good government he may destroy much of the effectiveness
of the Democratic organization.12 The separation of the
offices of precinct captain for the party and precinct captain
of police may be good governmental administration: it may
also be very demoralizing for the political actors who had
counted upon the promotion to police captain as a possible
reward. Nevertheless, the metropolitan mayor is free to
continue his swing towards good government, for the
machine cannot control him. And he may look beyond
the central city, to position in the state government, or the
federal government in Washington, where his "good govern-
ment" policies may count heavily. Furthermore, he is,
ironically, strengthened at home by his symbolic separation
from the machine. He can have his cake and eat it too.
Meanwhile the old-style political machine is further weak-
ened; the rewards of political work disappear right and
left. As one consequence, the persons who can be recruited
for the hard and tedious work at the block level change
in character; the ranks of party workers become dispro-
portionately composed of those who have few alternatives
for social distinction and mobility. The over-all picture is
one in which old-style machine politics fades away before
the new order, the machine of the incumbents.
To repeat the argument: The continual segregation of
12 Banfield discusses the destructive effect of the "good government
mayor” at some length in Political Influence, New York: The Free
Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961.
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
77
population by governmental boundaries means an increas-
ing domination of the central city vote by the poor, the
ethnics, and therefore the Democratic party label. This, in
turn, relaxes the tensions of conflict at a party level, leading
to a one-party state. To be sure, the process has gone further
in some cities than others; it is still possible for the Repub-
licans to win a battle occasionally if their wards are
numerous and the Democrats make a series of catastrophic
mistakes.
This will become rarer as the proportion of working
class ethnics increases. It is also true that, in West Coast
cities like Los Angeles, Republicans may rule under the
guise of nonpartisanship. It is likely, however, that such
cities, never having known a machine, have simply skipped
a stage and landed directly in the future-the one party
or non-party polity ruled by the machine of the incumbents.
The Weakening of Positive Government
One-party government, in fact, approaches very closely
the condition of non-partisan government. The weakening
of the party organization's hold on the incumbents softens
the impact of those who wish to translate wealth and
social power garnered in other fields into pressure on the
policy of the city. The incumbents are freed from many
pressures; however, it is a "freedom from," rather than a
freedom to accomplish new and radical enterprises. This
is because power becomes basically fractionated and dis-
persed. The elected officials, the heads of the great bureauc-
racies, state and federal levels of government, private
capital, and the party organization, each hold certain
resources necessary for massive action. To these must be
added the governmental divisions of the metropolis. Mul-
tiple municipalities, counties, and special districts are
vested with the legitimate power to perform certain tasks
and to refuse to cooperate in others.
78
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
Banfield's description of Chicago emphasizes the con-
tinual deadlocking of these forces. In Political Influence he
notes that the political head (usually the mayor) will ratify
almost any proposal on which principal parties can agree.
He thus escapes criticism from newspapers, civic leaders,
and the like. However, he hesitates to force compromise
because of the cost in goodwill, support, public image, or
other intangibles of influence. He can usually afford to wait
indefinitely for decisions to emerge: what usually emerges
is stalemate. Of the six major issues Banfield studied (all
of the major public issues for a two year period), two were
resolved, one was abandoned by its protagonists, and the
remainder were simply tabled. Thus half the major public
issues remained in limbo. This is hardly evidence of a
tightly knit ruling clique. Instead, Banfield sees the power
elite as essentially part of "The Mythology of Influence."
The notion that "top leaders" run the city is certainly not
supported by the facts of the controversies described in this book.
On the contrary, in these cases the richest men of Chicago are
conspicuous by their absence. Lesser business figures appear, but
they do not act concertedly: some of them are on every side of
every issue. The most influential people are the managers of large
organizations the maintenance of which is at stake, a few "civic
leaders" whose judgment, negotiating skill, and disinterestedness
are unusual and, above all, the chief elected officials. Businessmen
exert influence (to the extent that they exercise it at all) not so
much because they are rich or in a position to make threats and
promises as, in the words of one of them, "by main force of being
right.'
13
To be sure, Banfield thinks that if all the wealth were
organized in a permanent organization, it could exert great
influence on the polity. This is not likely to come about,
however, for three reasons: (1) there are fundamental con-
flicts of interest among private organizations, (2) the
required communication would be great enough to cut
seriously into the time necessary for private interest, and
13 Ibid., p. 288.
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
79
(3) any formal organization would rapidly become immo-
bilized by its own commitments and organizational structure.
The overriding power of the mayor is also a logical
possibility in Banfield's interpretation. He dismisses it in
these words.
To be sure, his power is great enough, thanks to the machine and
to his ability to make the trades the planners deplore, so that he
can exercise wide discretion in almost any matter. But being able
to exercise discretion in almost any matter does not mean that
he can exercise it in all matters. With respect to any one or two,
or any few, moves, he is free. But if he wishes to stay in the game
and to win, most of his moves, like most of the moves of the "civic
leaders" and the businessmen in their games, must be determined
by the exigencies of the game itself. Like them, he must act as
the game requires or else get out of it.
Thus Banfield's picture of Chicago is one that underlines
the stability of the order, its underlying resistance to change,
and the recalcitrant nature of government as a tool for
major control and planning.
Sayre and Kaufman come to similar conclusions with
respect to the greatest city in the country, New York City.
Much as they love it, they report that its government is
essentially static and conservative. The council is ham-
strung, the mayor has responsibilities far beyond his power,
and the Board of Estimate (made up of borough presidents
and some central city officials) has usurped effective power.
The result is a city government which has no legislative
process, no strong executive, no party division visible to the
public: one which is, in short, neither democratically re-
sponsible nor capable of a strong polity. Neither innova-
tion nor planning can come about except in piecemeal
response to the maintenance needs of the great city bureauc-
racies whose managers are as important in New York
as in Banfield's Chicago.15 For the Mayor of New York
to function as leader and responsible head of the govern-
14 Ibid., pp. 302-303.
15 Sayre and Kaufman, op. cit., Chapter XVII.
80
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
ment he must be a political genius. When any social role
requires such a rare person to operate it, we can judge it
poorly designed for a world dominated by the "fairly
bright."
The mayors of our great cities, symbols and symbolic
leaders of the metropolitan community, reign but do not
rule. They are brokers, conciliators, who reconcile the
people to what they get from their government. They
legitimatize the fait accompli on the rare occasions when
the necessary resources for action result from transitory
coalitions among the major contending organizations. For
the rest, they preside over routine caretaker governments.
And from one point of view, this is what the situation
may seem to demand. The pioneer work of building the
plant and establishing an order for the central city is long
since complete: the population explosion will not rock its
foundations, for a vast apparatus is in existence, and new
growth will largely settle outside the center, in suburbia.
The great bureaucracies which provide necessary govern-
mental goods and services are already in being: they pursue
the organizational destiny of expansion, increasing pro-
fessionalization and multiplying the career opportunities
for civil servants. All this they can do within the precedents
established in the past and legitimatized through use.
There is, however, no organization capable of mounting
a major offensive for innovation. The central city's polity
is passive and adaptive before the continuing results of
increase in scale; only catastrophe seems capable of creating
the opportunity for new development. Meanwhile, the
trends continue; the suburban move of industry is added
to the differentiation of central city and suburban popula-
tions, the increasingly obsolete neighborhoods, and the
increasing proportion of colored populations who suffer
most from economic depression and expect the most action
from their city government. Taken all together these trends
result in a rapid drift of the city away from its older status
of centrality and totality. Faced with such changes, most
THE GOVERNANCE OF THE CENTRAL CITY
81
people who consider the central city's destiny agree that
massive counteraction, planning and construction, and
governmental change are necessary. Such counteraction is
difficult to imagine within the governmental structure of
our great cities as they operate today.
Suggested Readings
On the Economics of the Machine and the Power
Elite
answer.
Streetcorner Society, William Foote Whyte, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1943. A detailed and fascinating study of the relations
between the political machine and the social structure of an Italian
slum. This volume is already a classic, although there have been
very few parallel efforts. This may be due to the decline of the
machine protrayed here.
Political Influence, Edward C. Banfield, New York: The Free Press
of Glencoe, Inc., 1961. A detailed study of the "power structure" of
Chicago as it responded to the six major issues which arose over
a two year period. Banfield's study is a test of the hierarchical image
of local government; it is also a valuable documentation of the
little wheels of decision-making which presumably make the bigger
wheels work. His discussion of "The Mythology of Influence,”
Chapter 10, is particularly useful, as is his formulation of the
political-economic problems to which machine government is one
On Social Change and the Machine
The two works above are both valuable for this subject. In addition,
The Art of Government, by James Reichley, New York: The Fund
For the Republic, 1959, is a useful description of the processes by
which the Republican machine in Philadelphia declined and was
finally overthrown. Reichley's piece includes an interesting discus-
82
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
sion of the likelihood that alternatives to machine government
will develop.
On The Weakening of Positive Government
In addition to Banfield's work cited above, see Wallace S. Sayre and
Herbert Kaufman, Governing New York, New York: The Russell
Sage Foundation, 1960. This is an encyclopedic description of our
largest urban government: the ossification of policy and dominance
of bureaucracy are clear.

5
The Suburbs:
"Republics in
Miniature"
The concept of suburbia is a hazy one. It is one that
changed through time, adding meaning indiscriminately,
until today it can mean simply the outer edges, the resi-
dential spillover of the city, the little "bedroom com-
munity," the home of the organization man, the upper-
class municipality, or the dead level of American middle-
class society. Through time it has gathered symbolic over-
tones; it is a fighting word. Those who are still ambivalent
about America's urbanization may value suburbs indis-
criminately as the representatives of small town and rural
values; those committed to an urban style of life may see
them as only a movement backward, a regression to the
“nuzzling herd society of the village." Obviously, a term
so mixed in its reference must be clarified before it has
any utility at all.
MANATA SAHİ
We can distinguish four kinds of meaning for the term.
83
84
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
First, and clearest, suburbs are urban areas outside the
governmental boundaries of the central city; they may or
may not be incorporated as municipalities. Second, any out-
lying district far from the center may be called suburban;
this is the ecological or spatial meaning. Third, suburban
population is frequently considered to have distinctive at-
tributes: it is more familistic, of higher social rank, and
less ethnic. Finally, many persons have imputed a particular
kind of social structure_to_the suburbs; they are regions
where the spatially based group, the community, is strong.
Neighborliness, friendship among fellow residents, a pro-
liferation of organizations in the area, are taken to be
attributes of suburbanism as a way of life.
-..


Because this is a book about government, we shall take
the first meaning as definitive and relate it to the others.
We are concerned with those urban populations that live
outside the boundaries of the central city but are part of
the urban whole through interdependence of the kinds
discussed earlier. Looking at such populations en masse,
we can make some generalizations. First, the central city's
boundaries usually include populations nearest the center;
suburban populations are apt to be more spatially isolated
from the center. Second, suburban buildings, reflecting
more recent construction, are apt to be suitable as new
residences for population types that are on the increase,
and to be inhabited by them. These are households of
middle to upper social rank, generally native-born and
white, and familistic in their life-style.
Their relative isolation from the ambit of the central
city means that their daily experience does not center in
the typical social groups of the center. Their lives, particu-
larly if they are women and children, are bounded by the
immediate residential community, the public schools, play-
grounds, streets, and business centers of the peripheral
settlement. Even men, though they work in the center,
spend a majority of their time, and their freest time, in
the home community. The assortment of similar people
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE"
85
into given residential areas by social rank, life-style, and
ethnicity means that the average suburban family lives.
among its own kind.
The homogeneous and familistic populations of subur-
bia produce a particular kind of associational structure.
Bound together by the interaction of children, the simi-
larity of family norms and family goals, and a common
commitment to the neighborhood as the site for home and
and family living, familistic populations develop inten-
sive neighboring patterns. Out of their common interests
in the school, the care of children, the maintenance of the
residential values in the area they develop organizations to
defend and promote those interests. The familistic neigh-
borhoods manifest a high density of formal voluntary
organizations-P.T.A., Boy Scouts, and other youth centered
groups, fraternal and service organizations, community-
oriented organizations, church-centered organizations. From
the familistic nature of the population, in contiguity and
interaction, results a powerful organizational structure.
Based upon interdependence, it leads to communication,
involvement, and the ordering of behavior. Suburban
neighborhoods are more apt to approach the conditions
of true “social community.” This is what some of their in-
coming residents seek.


SUBURBS AND SUBURBS: VARIATIONS
The populations outside the political bounds of the
central city, however, manifest considerable variation in all
these attributes. Although most suburban areas are farther
from the center than most neighborhoods of the center city,
there are anomalies. Some incorporated municipalities have
been enveloped by the central city, yet retain their inde-
pendence. They are governmental islands surrounded by
the sea of the central city. Here we find the industrial
"shelters," governments used only to protect industry from
86
GOVERNING THE METROFOLIS
regulation and taxation by the central city. Here also we
find such persisting municipalities as Hamtramck in Detroit
(a Polish neighborhood) and Culver City in Los Angeles.
On the other hand, some central cities have far-flung
boundaries and include in their limits residential areas
which are fifteen miles or more from the center. Such
neighborhoods are ecologically isolated, but integrated into
the central city's jurisdiction.
We have already noted the fact that the central city
contains many familistic neighborhoods. Suburbia also con-
tains areas where the population is more urban than much
of the central city, where ethnic populations are concen-
trated, and where social rank is very low. A result of
historical patterns in land development, these variations
indicate we must be careful of loose generalization. In the
St. Louis metropolitan area, for example, one suburb (Uni-
versity City), though of higher social rank, is predomi-
nantly Jewish and more urbane than the average in its
typical life-style. Another (Kinloch) is of extremely low
social rank, entirely Negro in its population, and more
familistic than the average for the central city Negro pop-
ulation. There are working-class suburbs in growing num-
bers as the automobile becomes a universal possession and
new land is opened to settlement. And the older suburban
populations nearest the central city boundary become in-
creasingly urban in life-style when apartment houses, mar-
ket centers, and manufacturing plants are located within
their boundaries. (Satellite manufacturing cities like Gary,
Indiana, are a somewhat different case; their population is
seldom of the sort discussed above.)
Thus the governmental definition of suburbia does not
exactly coincide with the ecological or the population-type
definitions. Nevertheless, the picture that holds true on
the average, the best possible summary, is this. Most sub-
urbs are far from the center, separately incorporated settle-
ments of familistic populations. Whether ethnic or not,
whether high or low in social rank, their familistic life-styles

THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE”
87
produce the kind of social order sketched above. They are
beehives of interaction at the neighborly level, and a large
proportion of their households are members of local or-
ganizations, are involved in a spatially defined local com-
munity.
THE IDEAL SUBURBAN POLITY
These attributes have led some of us, as Wood notes, to
see them as "the Republic in miniature," a site for the
revival of Jeffersonian democracy.¹ Though the sturdy yeo-
man has been replaced by the husband who brings home
the salary check from the central city, though the round
of country life has diminished to the problems of caring
for lawn and shrubbery and do-it-yourself construction in
the backyard, though the dominant actors in community
affairs may in fact be women, the suburban municipality
is still conceived of as a stronghold of democratic govern-
ment and society. What are the reasons for such beliefs?
First, the size of the suburban municipality approaches
that of the small town and village. (The median size in
St. Louis County is around one thousand; no suburban
municipality was over sixty thousand in population.) 2
With smaller size goes a smaller scale in the political and
governmental organization of the community. Giant
bureaucracies with unknown heads give way to city depart-
ments with acquaintances at their head and city councils
with friends among the incumbents. Second, the relative
similarity of all the residents (a result of segregation and
concentration by ethnicity, social rank, and life-style) re-
sults in
common interests and ease of communication.
Values in common and clearly understood norms allow a
1
¹ Robert Wood, Suburbia, Its People and Their Politics, Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin Company, 1959.
2
Exploring The Metropolitan Community, edited by John Bollens,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961.
་

88
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
form of interaction we have called communion. The dense
interactional system in the neighborhoods and the resi-
dential areas means that such values are communicated,
celebrated, and become social fact.
STA AL BL
At the same time, so the theory goes, government is
closer to the people. They can see its actions, understand
its operations, and monitor its consequences. It is accessible
to all. The citizen communicates with his government di-
rectly, in the hearings of the city council, or indirectly,
by his participation in local organizations which represent
his interest before the governing bodies. His government
is in turn exposed to the responses of the governed. These
arguments for small local governmental units, of course,
assume an entire theory of how government works today.
Let us examine the results of one study bearing on the
question.
Tam-Put % 2
In 1956-1957 a large-scale study of government in the St.
Louis metropolitan area was focused on precisely such
questions. From a large sample survey of the suburban
residents we can construct some tentative generalizations
about the "republic in miniature." We shall concentrate
upon the relationship between citizens and their govern-
ments, for this seems to be the crucial point.
The residents of suburban St. Louis County are not any
more interested in their local elections than are those of
the central city. In fact, they are slightly less likely to vote
in municipal or school board elections. Nor do they rush
to the stump and compete for office; in the municipal
elections of 1957, the smaller the municipality the less likely
were the prospects of competition for office. Among the
smallest municipalities, in fact, there tended to be only one
slate running, and in several villages nobody would run
for office. (In these cases the hapless incumbents were
A c 1 AZN

+40=10
³ Ibid. See the author's contribution, particularly Part III, “Citizen
Participation and Attitudes," on which the following discussion is
based.
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE”
89
forced, by law, to remain in office.) This political indiffer-
ence might be attributed to satisfaction with government.
However, it is important to note that a very large percent-
age of the suburban population did not even know that
they were part of an electorate that voted on local officials.
One-fifth of the suburbanites did not know that the people
in their area could vote for municipal officials; nearly one-
third did not know they voted for school board officers. (In
the central city the proportions were dramatically lower,
5 per cent and 20 per cent.) In short, the political system
of suburbia completely missed a large proportion of the
residents.
This brings us to an important point, however. There
is considerable variation among suburbanites in their
relationship to both the social structure of their community
and its political process. There are three distinct types of
participation in the local society of suburbia; (1) Com-
munity Actors, who are involved in the larger local com-
munity, (2) Neighbors, who participate only in the small-
scale world of the neighborhood, and (3) Isolates, who
have no role in either kind of social structure.4
Community Actors are the key personnel of the suburban
political community. They are consistently more informed
and aware of public personages and issues, and they are
very likely to vote in the local elections. Neighbors are
much less likely to be either informed or involved, while
Isolates are generally outside both the communication flow
and the action that takes place on the local scene. About

4
* The theoretical derivation of this typology is presented in the author's
article, "The Social Structure and Political Process of Suburbia" in
The American Sociological Review, Vol. 24, pp. 514-526. Evidence
supporting the importance of the types is presented in "The Social
Structure and Political Process of Suburbia: An Empirical Test," in
Rural Sociology (in press at this writing). An extensive discussion
of the social structure of suburbia is found in The Emerging City,
Myth and Reality, Scott Greer, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe,
Inc., 1962.
90
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
1
four out of ten residents of the St. Louis County suburbs
were Community Actors; nearly the same proportion were
Isolates; the remainder were Neighbors. However, the local
electorate is disproportionately composed of the Commu-
nity Actors; 70 per cent of them vote in local elections
(compared with about 30 per cent of the Isolates.) Thus
the suburban electorate is apt to mirror the concerns of
those most informed and involved.
With qualifications, then, we may accept some of the
assumptions of "the republic in miniature." Community
Actors are most common among the familistic populations
and, though they are as likely to be among such popula-
tions in the central city, they are most likely to translate
their community interest into political action in the sub-
urban towns. Furthermore, familistic populations are more
common in the suburbs, so there are many more Commu-
nity Actors to draw from. Manning the civic "table of
organization," very often constituting the decisive electoral
force, these self-selected citizens of suburbia are virtual
representatives for those who do not care enough to partici-
pate.
What kinds of public problems do these representatives
face in their diminutive polities? What are the issues of
suburban politics, and what are some mechanisms for their
solution? To answer such questions we must return, again,
to the broader problems of increase in scale and spatially
based organization.
Political Issues of Suburbia
The rapid spread of suburban settlement is first of all a
result of increase in societal scale. Many political issues of
suburbia grow out of the various concomitants of increase
in scale, developing out of the question: how can we organ-
ize to accommodate these changes? We emphasize two as-
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE"
91
pects of the former: (1) the sheer expansion of suburban
settlements in a short period of time, and (2) the broader
changes in the nature of the American population's way
of life.
SUBURBAN COMMUNITY PROBLEMS
Rapid increase in population, in suburb after suburb,
has automatically produced problems. First, there is the
question of controlling new growth. What kinds of enter-
prise and population are wanted, and where should they
be located? The commitments made in the present are
the limits within which the future must work. Furthermore,
simple increase in quantity inevitably means an expansion
of the services and goods provided by the government.
This brings up the entire question of equity: who shall
pay for the new plant and its operations, and who shall
benefit, and how shall these be related? Sheer expansion
of residential numbers thus creates serious issues: equally
serious are those created by change in way of life.
We have said that the entire population is experiencing
changes, with movement upwards in social rank, with in-
creasing familism, with rapid acculturation of many ethnics
to the "all-American way of life." In the suburbs each
may result in the creation of major public issues. Increasing
social rank means a general rise in the level of living of
the population; the streetcar rider as he grows older has
two cars in his garage, the tenement dweller's children
live in a ranch house with three bathrooms, and the grand-
children of the urban poor worry about their income taxes.
As these citizens come to expect more and better privately
purchased goods and services, they also expect more of their
government. Thus, even if the suburban government ap-
proximates the consumption norms of yesterday, the rising
aspiration of its residents may leave it continually in the
J
BLIN
92
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
red. Those once satisfied with gravel streets today object
to paved four-lane roads because they are inadequate to
the rush hour traffic. Septic tanks give way to costly sew-
erage disposal systems: the small schoolhouse becomes a
sprawling campus within an educational system, and the
pressure is on the superintendent to add classes for "excep-
tional children," to expand the school's medical program,
to add more cultural and community functions. In many
suburbs there is continual demand for increased park space,
public swimming pools, and playgrounds. All of these serv-
ices cost money, demand taxes, and raise the question: Can
we afford it? How shall we pay for it?
The increasing investment of Americans in home and
family also results in issues for suburban communities. With
increasing commitment to it as a home, the suburban resi-
dential area stands for the future of an investment in
property--its_image, environment, market value. It also
stands for the kind of life a person desires for his family.
The neighbors are the most important social environment
of the wife and children, and the public schools are in
many respects the most crucial environment and resource
for the children's later careers. The familistic populations
are deeply invested in their neighborhoods, and through
them_their__residential community; thus the political
structure, which may influence all of these, is of major
concern. for whom? Community actors orday?
Finally, with the increasing acculturation of many ethnic
minorities to the middle-class American way of life, some
interesting and important issues arise. For the second
generation Italian, Pole, or Jew a move into suburbia may
be the most striking signal of success. For those who have
arrived, however, it may be a signal that the neighborhood
is being "invaded," that cherished values are threatened.
And when the second generation has arrived in a suburb,
what is it to think about the middle-class Negro family
that wishes to move in? The still-swarthy second-genera-
tion Mexican-American clan? The acculturation of ethnics
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE"
93
raises as many problems as their original encapsullation in
the ghettos raised-and raises many of them in suburbia.
PROBLEMS INTO POLITICAL ISSUES
Translated into the political issues of suburbia, any of
these changes may produce fierce debate and electoral strug-
gle. First, and perhaps prior to any specific decision, is the
general question: how shall the political order be drawn,
so that it will satisfy the democratic dogma and at the
same time create and maintain the kind of community
desired? How shall the voters be organized, the key officials
chosen, and what kind of power shall they have? Who shall
be represented, and in what way? The range of solutions
here is wide. Some suburbs operate with a one-party system,
the "good government caucus." which hand-picks a slate
for office. They may further avoid politics by leaving the
day-to-day operation of government in the hands of a
manager. Other suburbs, however, tend to divide into po-
litical moities: the "ins" and the “outs," the older residents
and the newcomers. They may struggle for office, or may
even struggle over the basic constitution of the city. (This
may be a battle for a new city charter, or it may be focused
upon changing the municipality's "class" and therefore
governing forms according to the State constitution.) Such
issues typically arise in periods of rapid change, when the
municipality is new or when it has accepted a large number
of new residents.

A second and continuing type of issue is that of service
provision. What services and what levels of services should
the municipal government provide? The possibilities are
practically infinite, but the budget is always tight. When
the service level is decided, the next question is: How shall
we pay for them? How shall benefit and cost be related?
Who shall decide? These questions range from the proper
method of issuing bonds (what rate of discount, what
94
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
period of time, renegotiable or not) to the proper method
of assessing property for taxation. Such issues become
salient whenever the consumption norms of the population
have risen, or the existing level of services has declined
(due to a shrinking tax base, inflation, or a flood of new
residents).
A third congeries of issues is generated by commitment
to the community. When this is combined with rapid
growth in the suburban area, very serious conflict may
arise. Planning and zoning issues may become battlegrounds
for rival factions. Should Meadowlane become a partially
industrial municipality, with many of the characteristics
of the central city left behind? What of the increased
traffic in trucks, the commuters from elsewhere who work
in the plants and warehouses? Or, should the beaches of
Winonama be opened to the public? What of the transients
who will drop in, unknown and perhaps dangerous to the
play of local children? Or, should a bowling alley be
allowed on the corner of Elm and Aster? So near the school,
and selling beer? (Though this latter sounds ridiculous, it
was, in fact, taken seriously by the leaders of one suburban
municipality.) In short, what kind of a community are
we trying to build (or maintain) and how shall we go
about doing it?
Closely related to the last type of issue is any matter
having to do with schools. As we have stressed already,
the familistic population of suburbia, with its concern for
children and their future, is particularly conscious of the
school system. (In the St. Louis area the only widespread
concern for schools was among the higher rank, extremely
familistic suburbs.) For one thing, most people in familis-
tic neighborhoods have children in the public schools;
for another, the school tax is ordinarily between half and
three-fourths of the total local tax bill in suburbia. Thus a
decision on school policy may easily become a major public
issue. In one "blue ribbon" suburb, for example, increasing
population forced the construction of another high school.
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE”
95
However, the existing school was a very famous one, gen-
erally agreed to be one of the best in the United States.
The outcry over the new school was heart-rending, for as
many parents whose children would attend the new high
school said, "We moved here in the first place to give our
children the benefit of going to X High School."
Finally, and again connected with the previous issues, we
have the question of ethnicity. Who shall be accepted in
this community which contains our treasures, home, family,
children, and neighborhood? A recent and vivid example
of such an issue was the action of the Village Council in
Deerfield, Illinois. The council condemned a large plot of
ground for a public park, shortly after the real estate de-
velopment company that owned it announced that the
residential neighborhood it was building would be inte-
grated and one-fifth Negro. This case was lurid enough,
and was widely publicized. Many other struggles go on
"within the family" of the suburban town's population.
The Jewish child who is the only one in his school room
not invited to a birthday party; the Negro family which
quietly sells its house after vandals have broken the win-
dows, such incidents as these, while not overtly political
in nature, indicate something about school integration and
equal protection under the law in the suburban municipali-
ty. At the same time, we must remember that such issues
can have opposite resolutions: many of our most exclusive
residential suburbs have substantial Jewish and Catholic
populations, and even Negroes are eventually accepted in
some cases (and in small numbers).
In summary, most of the issues of suburban politics seem
to center around a few questions. What is the most com-
mon image of the desirable community? How can it be
created (or maintained)? What will be the price and who
shall pay that price? In the community image are summa-
rized the aspirations of middle-class, familistic, white citizens
of native birth. There is a paucity of information on the
political processes by which such decisions are made. In
96
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
the next section, however, we shall try to learn something
about suburban politics by examining some municipal sys-
tems.
Suburban Political Orders
A major characteristic of suburban politics is their non-
partisan nature. The national Democratic and Republican
Party organizations or labels are seldom important factors
in the elections of the suburbs. It is tacitly agreed that
"there is no Republican or Democratic way of collecting
garbage," that the general interests of the community are
the proper center of concern and are irrelevant to larger
political issues. The politics of suburbia is a friends-and-
neighbors politics, largely non-ideological in nature. Like
the machine, it is little concerned with the long-run charac-
ter and fate of the nation; its primary concern is with the
building of neighborhood communities and the housekeep-
ing tasks of the spatial area.

The disappearance of the party label, however, means
that elected officials are largely middle-class Republicans.
The basic dominance of business ideology, the businessman
as first-class citizen, is sharply evident in suburbia. Thus
in St. Louis County, in 1956, the largest single occupational
category represented in elected municipal offices was that
of manager and professional, employed by business firms
outside the suburban municipality where office was held.
The second most important category was that of local busi-
nessman or professional in the electing municipality. A
majority of elected officials were from these categories. This
reflected, of course, the general composition of the suburban
residents-but it was far more than a proportional repre-
sentation of these categories.
When the electorate is organized on a party basis, it is
typically a local, municipal party, concerned only with
local affairs. The independents, the Good Government
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE”
97
Party, the Progressive Party appear in many suburbs; they
nominate slates and campaign for their election on purely
local issues. The personnel of such parties reflects the
social structure of suburbia; Community Actors are their
basic cadres, and these actors are about equally made up
of men (usually`absentee-employed) and their wives. Thus
suburban local politics has a distinctly heterosexual flavor;
women are probably better represented in the political
process of suburbia than at any other level, anywhere else
in America.

As we have noted earlier, there is considerable variety
among suburban municipalities. Though most are familis-
tic, some are working-class and some are “blue ribbon"
suburbs of the wealthy; a small but growing proportion
are urban and hardly distinguishable from the middle
wards of the central city; a few are predominantly ethnic.
Such variations are important for the political process of
the community, but probably the most important variation
of all is simply that of stability. Rapid change is typically
the ground for the raising of serious questions which,
translated into political issues, are fought out in the local
arena. It sets clear and ineluctable tasks for the govern-
mental process. So important is this dimension that we
shall sketch in two suburban municipalities at the poles
of stability and change. They are both in Cook County,
Illinois; both are far above average in social rank; both
are extremely familistic in average life-style. We shall label
the changing community Upward Ho, and the stable one
Valhalla.
UPWARD HO!
This town was for many years a country village on the
outskirts of Chicago, the center of a market-gardening area.
It was largely controlled by a country-town political or-
ganization, Democratic by allegiance, and closely tied in
98
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
with the Cook County Democratic Party. Though a Repub-
lican organization also existed, it lost power steadily as
the area slowly grew in population. On the whole, it was
a rural version of typical Cook County politics.
After World War II, however, population flooded the
site. The increase between 1945 and 1960 was well over
1,000 per cent, and is was largely from the central city of
Chicago. It was also heavily Jewish. Upward Ho! became
a suburb inhabited by second and third generation ethnics
who were leaving the central city for the surburban neigh-
borhoods, though the jobs which sustained them were still
in the older areas. These new suburbanites were at first
content to accept the old political order which ran the
"village" (the village rapidly passed the ten, twenty, thirty,
forty, and fifty thousand population marks). However, the
newcomers began to define the older political order in
terms reminiscent of their central city backgrounds; a study
in 1958 indicated one hundred per cent agreement that
Upward Ho! had a power structure, made up of one man!
In other words, the head of the older organization was
defined as a Boss.
The newcomers began slowly to organize. They did so
because of a new and different image of the community
and its proper political process. The issues which recurred
with regularity centered around the land use of the munic-
ipality and the expansion of the school system. For them,
both kinds of development should be subordinated to their
own stake in a proper residential enclave; the location of
industry and commerce, of roads and public improvements,
should all be decided in terms of their effects upon existing
neighborhoods. The older political order, however, had
long been committed to mixed development, with large-
scale industrial growth as the most lucrative investment
of community land.
Thus, upon the concrete issues of land use and schools,
and upon the constitutional issues of Boss rule and village
government the newcomers organized to challenge the old
order. In response, the old order achieved a degree of
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE"
99
coherence; both Republican and Democratic organizations
opposed the reform party. They also invented a "do gooder"
name for their political front, and coopted a number of
newcomers into their organization. The battle has see-
sawed for a number of years, the superior organization and
commitment of the old heads balanced by the amateur,
good government appeal of their challengers. Without a
doubt, it will continue in one guise or another for some
time, as massive growth continues to create new public
issues with every election. The two-party system, once in
existence, is a useful mechanism for throwing up alterna-
tive styles and policies of government.
VALHALLA
On the wealthy Chicago North Shore, Valhalla is the
kind of community many Americans are aiming for and
others dream of when they think of lucky gambles and
"getting the breaks.” An older, but not an old suburb, it
is almost completely built up; its tree lined streets and
spacious lawns make clear its rank as one of the wealthiest
communities in America. (One of its census tracts showed
in 1950 an average education for adults of 15.9 years
schooling.) There is little ambivalence about the collective
image of Valhalla; it is largely achieved and appreciated
by its residents.
With its building complete and its land absorbed, there
is little question of Valhalla's future. It is decided. Further-
more, its wealth allows a highly evaluated school system
and an efficient and honest governmental administration.
Its technical head is a well paid city manager, and its
political process is carried on through a single party system:
the Good Government Party is the only party in Valhalla.
A group of several hundred people selected by invitation,
the Party writes the platform for each new council and
selects the slates of nominees for office. They win the ensu-
ing election.
100
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
3
The political style of Valhalla is conditioned by the
wealth and eminence of its citizens. Nobody seeks office in
this community; the office (through the agency of the Good
Government Party) seeks the man. It is a form of govern-
ment from which politics, the struggle to determine the
collective destiny, has been almost completely abolished.
There is such consensus on communal destiny that no issues
can arise. Consequently, the council is basically a watchdog
organization which occasionally makes key decisions on
questions of public finance; the machinery of government
is in the civic bureaucracies controlled by the appointed
city manager. He is the local expert, but his expertise does
not awe a council made up of corporate executives, attor-
neys, and highly successful businessmen. Instead, they
choose to trust him with the tedious details. It is a highly
personalized government, a friends and neighbors atmos-
phere in which strong political opposition would be con-
strued as a social insult, or a violation of the norms of
good citizenship and neighborliness. Conflict is assiduously
avoided, and most major decisions of the Council are
unanimous.
In general, the population is not terribly concerned one
way or the other with its governmental process. Although
a minority, at most, can name any given official (the city
manager is most widely known) and a very small minority
ordinarily votes, the majority is usually overwhelmingly
satisfied with their governance. Though they do not know
the details of their government, they assume they could
find out if they needed to; they are certain that any com-
plaints will be attended in City Hall. (Thus general edu-
cation does not translate directly into political competence:
instead, it seems to produce a high degree of self-confidence
with respect to the governing system.)
Issues are rare in such a political order. Usually the
council devotes a great deal of time to trivia, the slight
questions of equity which are a little out of the ordinary
and cannot be easily settled by the hired administrator.
Changes in zoning, waivers of regulations, and the like,
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE”
IOI
constitute the order of business. Of course major financing
is sometimes required; under these circumstances the col-
lective financial wisdom of the council is usually regarded
as an adequate substitute for the democratic process.
Though citizens may be heard in open hearings, the de-
cision is after all up to the council.
Such a system is poorly suited to handle basic conflict.
In recent years one such issue did arise and it divided
the community in half. The council decided to sell the
municipally owned utilities, a heritage from the days when
private enterprise would not gamble on the profitability of
investment in Valhalla. The issue was hardly one of social-
ism versus capitalism (though one wit suggested it all
started when the councilmen got fed up with being teased
as "municipal socialists" down at the Union League); in-
stead, it was a question of fidelity to the existing system,
for the councilmen had run on the Good Gevernment
Party platform, pledging continued municipal ownership
of the utilities.
The news of the council's plans became current a few
days before the municipal elections. In five days' time, a
write-in slate was organized and a campaign mounted. In
the resulting election, which drew an unprecedented half
of the registered voters, the difference between the two
slates was less than two percentage points. So close was
the election that the losers filed for a recount; this was
withdrawn when the council authorized a referendum on
the utility sale. Again, the turnout was spectacularly high,
and the sale was defeated by nearly two to one.
This battle was popularly considered to have created a
long-lasting schism in the body politic. However, in a study
of the community carried out two years later, the schism
was found to be largely myth. The residents of Valhalla
remembered it, to be sure; the astonishing proportion of
85 per cent volunteered it in answer to an open-ended
question about "public issues in the past few years." But
the vast majority considered it settled, and settled to its
satisfaction. Furthermore, the citizens as a whole were per-
102
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
fectly satisfied with their governmental system; they felt
well represented and bore no grudge. Thus the political
order of Valhalla would appear, by the sternest test, to be
a remarkably stable one. After extreme conflict, it had
returned to its previous state of balance. The polity ap-
parently rests upon a widespread comity, the political
system upon a well-knit social system.
Reports upon these two suburbs cannot, of course, be
generalized. There is a wide variation in suburbia. But
we can note the difference brought about by rapid change,
and the relative stability and placidity of the suburb whose
basic destiny is clear. A word is in order about two other
variations in the underlying population, however, social
rank and urbanism.
We have been discussing two high-rank social aggregates.
They are appreciably above the average for any metro-
politan area. With lower social rank, with less economic
surplus at the household level and therefore less at the
governmental level, we expect the problems of the polity
to change. We expect, for example, greater concern for
the level of taxes and for the cost-benefit relationship.
Public finance becomes a major issue, as Wood demon-
strates in his large-scale study of metropolitan New York. In
some working-class suburbs one finds a one-party system
of the "tax-panicked," led by demagogic small-business men
who are also painfully sensitive to the property tax.
In areas of lower social rank one also finds a growing
discrepancy between the prestige and rewards of office and
the position of the ordinary citizen. In Valhalla, nobody
in elected office would think of accepting a salary; in a
St. Louis County town of blue-collar and clerical workers,
the $50.00 a month paid a village official may mean a
second car for the family, or a new patio. The same is
true of the other rewards of office, prestige and power.
Men who are presidents of international corporations accept
public office as a duty in Valhalla; it is a local recognition
of accomplishment elsewhere. In working-class suburbia,
THE SUBURBS: "REPUBLICS IN MINIATURE”
103
the achievement of public office is itself a claim to fame.
Consequently, as the social rank of the population goes
down there is less likelihood of the office seeking the man.
The differential value of political rewards is a key to varia-
tions in the political process of municipal government.
We have noted the increasingly urban life-style of the
older suburbs, particularly those nearest the central city
boundary. Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, is one
such city; University City in St. Louis County is another.
Such cities, with many of the physical attributes of the
central city and with increasingly old structures, tend to
develop a permanent concern for the violation of housing
codes, the deterioration of neighborhoods, and the possi
bilities of redevelopment. As they are forced to provide
more of the typically urban services, as police forces and
welfare agencies expand, they also become interested in
raising the property tax base through industrial develop-
ment and the like. They become, in short, little incor-
porated fragments of the central city. And as their popu-
lation becomes more ethnic and urban, and eventually
lower in social rank, they are increasingly likely to develop
a partisan politics. Democratic and Republican clubs begin
to figure in local elections. Issues arise with change in the
underlying population, for such change causes a radical
reappraisal of the inherited images of the community.
In summary, suburban political issues result from the
questions posed to the community. These questions are
derived from the immediate locale, and their chief rele-
vance is usually seen as strictly local. The suburban develop-
ment is in most respects simply a continuation of the rapid
expansion of the urban plant which began in the middle
of the nineteenth century. Bands of home-seekers settled
the hinterland, in the housing created by large-scale devel-
opment firms. Commerce and eventually industry followed,
developing a texture of sites for human activity rather
different from that in the older central city, but of a piece
with the continuous results of increasing scale. The separate
incorporation of these suburban enclaves in thousands of
104
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
small municipalities rested upon the old democratic dogma
"the right to local self rule."
The results are, however, startling in the aggregate. The
development of order within each tiny community has no
necessary effect upon the development of order between
communities, or throughout the metropolitan area. In fact,
order within the sub-community contributes to a sum of
disorder, conflict, and inability to act for the metropolis
as a whole. These phenomena will now be examined in
detail.
Suggested Readings
Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics, Robert C. Wood, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1959. This is a provocative discussion of the
origins of suburban settlement and incorporation, the nature of
suburban political issues, and the type of government developed.
The ideology of the "republic in miniature" is a source of fascina-
tion to the author, as it seems to both obscure and explain suburban
political fragmentation.
The Suburban Community, W. A. Dobriner, editor, New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1958. This volume includes empirical studies and
theoretical essays dealing with the demographic, political, economic,
and other aspects of the suburban population. While it lacks any
integrated point of view, one may learn something about suburbia
from several points of view.
"The Social Structure and Political Process of Suburbia," Scott Greer,
American Sociological Review, 24: 514-526. This is an effort to
develop a systematic theory of the community of limited liability
in the suburbs. Neighborhood and local residential community are
related to the polity of the suburban municipality, and the partici-
pational types discussed in this chapter are derived from this
argument.
"The Suburban Dislocation," David Riesman, in "Metropolis in Fer-
ment," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 314 (November, 1957). A thoughtful discussion of the effects
suburbanization is likely to have upon participation, socialization,
and the culture of America. On the whole, Riesman takes a gloomy
view.

Part
III
The Future of
the Metropolity
..

6
The Schizoid Polity
and the Drive for
Reunification
The governmental dichotomy of the metropolis and frag-
mentation of suburbia have serious consequences for the
total urban complex. First of all, the political processes
are in no sense those of a unified metropolitan community.
They are limited by the forces in play in each of the
various subparts of the area, though the consequences of
these forces may be very general. Furthermore, this frag-
mented polity confronts problems that are areawide in their
origins, affecting all parts of the metropolitan area; they
are problems which seem, logically and technically, to
demand an areawide governmental response. Such a re-
sponse, however, is difficult to imagine in an urban com-
plex made up of a hundred or a thousand separate govern-
107
108
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
mental jurisdictions. Let us look at this aspect of the
metropolitan governmental structure in some detail.
Consequences of the Dichotomy: I. The Political
Process
We have already noted the most dramatic consequence
of the dichotomy for urban politics: the separation of
numbers and wealth. Those who live in the green neighbor-
hoods of suburbia have saved their families and homes
from the central city, at the price of valuable hostages left
behind. Their property (if they are wealthy) is most likely
to be located in the old center; banks and department
stores, utilities and factories and transport facilities, have
immense investments in the central city. The taxes they
pay, the governmental services they receive, their regulation
and protection by government, are all decided in a political
order of which they are not even citizens. Even if subur-
banites are salaried managers and professionals, or wage
workers, they still depend on the city for a workplace; but
from the point of view of the central-city resident the
suburbanites have abandoned the central city. They pay
their property taxes on homes in Valhalla, Elm Village,
Meadowlane. Meanwhile, they return to the city each day
in droves, using the streets and sidewalks, claiming police
and fire protection-demanding and getting a fair share of
the central city's public services without paying the tax bill
that the residents of the city must shoulder.
Thus the power of city government is in the hands of
the central-city electorate, while great investments affected
by government are owned, managed, and manned by subur-
banites. What wonder that many suburban residents are
concerned with central city government? Their concern
stems also from another kind of investment-the pious
dependence of suburbia upon the old central city as a clear-
inghouse, a symbol, a permanent center for the scattered
metropolitan region. Though he only returns occasionally
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
109
after work for the night life and the cultural events, the
Loop, Manhattan, and the City of San Francisco still repre-
sent to the metropolitan citizen the social unity of the
metropolis. If he sees it declining in looks, wealth, and
activity, he is disturbed. Yet he is no citizen there; he has
neither power nor responsibility for the center; he is a
commuter.
As we have seen already, the governmental boundary
lines between center and peripheries divide populations
which differ on other counts. The variations result in a
skewed distribution of both the central city and suburban
electorates. Those who seek office in the center must appeal
to the ethnics, the nonwhites and the foreign-born, the
Catholics and Jews. They must also appeal to the working
class, the blue-collar manual laborers, those who ordinarily
vote the Democratic Party's ticket. Thus the ethnic organiza-
tions, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, and the B'nai B'rith, are important in
central-city politics, along with the Catholic Church, the
A.F.L.-C.I.O. Central Labor Council, and the Democratic
Party's ward and precinct officials. Appeal to such organiza-
tions and the interests they represent is quite different from
an approach to the total range of urban voters. Somebody
is missing.
The missing persons are, of course, the middle-class
native white Protestants who moved to suburbia. Though
they are still weighty factors in the outer wards of the
city (they can, for example, change a Democratic mayor's
winning percentage from 60 to 75) they are preponderantly
in the suburbs and continue to move outwards. These
folks were once the electoral base of the Republican Party
in the city; they also provided the cadres for the party's
organization, the men who were willing to invest time and
energy and money in the party's fortunes. They are now in-
volved in the country's politics, or those of their diminutive
suburbs. Nobody takes their place in central-city politics.
The progressive withdrawal of the upper occupational,
educational, and income levels from the central city has

IIO
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
:
produced a governmental segregation by social class. Each
of the two great divisions in American society, the middle
class and the working class, has its own government in the
metropolis, and the existence of these structures means that
they are used for class interests. At the same time, the
separation of the two prevents the development of a govern-
mental process which would act as a clearinghouse, ad-
judicating the claims of different interests within the society,
producing definitive decisions on conflicting and uncertain
positions. The dichotomy makes it extremely difficult for
any group of men to act for the area as a whole. The
mutual suspicion between central city and suburb becomes
a political platform for aspirants to office in each part of
the metropolis, just as that between "downstate" and the
"city" provides political fuel for campaigns at the state
level. Even informal cooperation suffers in the process.
Yet the metropolitan area is in many respects an inter-
dependent whole. Suburbia could not exist for a week
without the continual transfer of value from the workplaces
of the central city to the suburban households. The op-
posite is also true: key posts in the economic organization
of the central city are manned by those who live in subur-
ban villas. And the whole will continue to experience rapid
and widespread change and major challenges. (The fan-
tastic prediction of fifty million new residents in the next
two decades, most of them suburban, the lion's share of
them in urban complexes already large and old, guarantees
a continuous series of challenges to the social and govern-
mental order.) But it is difficult to see any concerted re-
sponse from the scramble of governments we have described.
Each will pursue its own interests and problems within
its existing framework.
Consequences of the Dichotomy: II. The Govern-
mental Process
A useful way to approach the governmental process is
to ask: What kinds of problems is it supposed to solve for

THE SCHIZOID POLITY
III
the governed? We shall examine three types: (1) those
resulting from the inescapable housekeeping problems of
the city, (2) those produced in deciding the distribution
of costs and benefits (or problems of equity) and (3)
those deriving from the development of long-term control
aimed at deciding the future shape of the metropolis. Each
is radically affected by the dichotomy between central city
and suburbs.
Most of the housekeeping problems of our metropolitan
areas today are as old as cities. Julius Caesar struggled with
the problems of transport in a growing Rome; city streets
hardly wide enough for two carts to pass were forced to
handle the flow of people and goods for a population
rapidly approaching a million. Tenement dwellings were
forever collapsing or catching fire because building con-
tractors cheated, and because obsolete heating equipment
was used in the housing of the poor. The streets at night
were controlled by gangs of thieves and kidnappers, while
sugar was sanded and milk was watered. The householders
were apt to deposit their refuse in public places for others
to walk through and carry away for them, while the supply
of water was a perennial problem (leading to the construc-
tion of aqueducts which still stand and function in some
places). In short, the urban problems of circulation, of
energy input and waste disposal, and of public health and
order emerged in Rome, as in Pittsburgh, and continue to
appear wherever many live together in the interdependence
of contiguity and exchange.
The tasks are clear. Political decisions arise with respect
to such questions as these: How much service shall be pro-
vided, and how shall it be distributed among the citizens?
The preconditions for answering these questions are (1)
adequate technologies and (2) adequate resources of
money and power. Our society of large and increasing scale
has been fortunate in developing physical technologies; our
potential power to control our environment is far greater
than that of any previous society. However, the sheer
volume and the rate of growth are also greater than they
I 12
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
have been before. As for the resources needed to carry on
the tasks we are, in some ways, poorer. In short, many of
our metropolitan housekeeping problems exist because we
do not pay enough to do a good job. In some degree, this
results from dividing our public treasury (our "fisc") into
too many bits and pieces, but in a large degree it results
from parsimony. Our inadequate governmental powers,
on the other hand, are more largely due to fractionated
jurisdictions (though the Jacksonian dogma has kept a close
curb on all expansions of governmental power). The po-
litical process does not allocate enough money and power
to provide the kinds of services many urbanites expect
from government.
THE PROBLEMS OF PROVIDING SERVICES
The provision of an efficient transportation grid for the
metropolis requires a tremendous material investment. It
also requires a unification of control patterns, so that traf-
fic ordinances and police forces do not change every mile
or two. It requires an areawide power, for the components
of the problem situation are areawide in origin and effects.
Traffic generated in the suburbs flows to the central city,
while the central city's labor force pours back towards the
suburbs in the evening. For instance, a change in the
traffic ordinances of a suburban country town meant to
improve the main street as a shopping street for that com-
munity, may result in serious snarls on the freeways of the
central city. And the central city's express highway, ending
on a suburban road, may suddenly funnel two or three
times as much traffic through the village as had been ex-
pected by the village government. All efforts at control of
circulation in the metropolis must include suburbs and
central city, for the former usually provide the majority
of the automobiles in movement. Such efforts, to be effec-
tive, must also take into account other aspects of trans-
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
113
portation; terminals, public transport, parking arrange-
ments and the like. Only broad areawide power can be
effective.
The same holds true for water supply and waste disposal.
Because water tends to organize its flow in a given depres-
sion (called a drainage basin), and because such a depres-
sion usually includes more than one governmental unit,
the actions of one suburb affect another, and suburbs affect
the drainage system of the central city. The St. Louis
County municipality that empties its sewage into an open
creek that runs through a neighboring town is, like the
Roman burgher emptying his slops in the public square,
an indication that the control system does not "fit" the
interdependent populations. However, in the St. Louis
County case, the "bad actor" was a government, standing
for an entire municipal population. Solutions to such
bad actions must obviously affect governments in their
responses to housekeeping problems. The metropolitan
household is in many respects one; but its housekeeping is
organized in dozens or hundreds of families, each indiffer-
ent to (if not hostile to) the neighbors.
Thus the central city is perennially in need of close
coordination of its services with those of the suburbs.
Lying towards the waterways and the railroads (a heritage
of its past in the Age of Steam), it is the ultimate recipient
of many flowing waters. Including as it does the major
part of the workplaces for the area, it is also the recipient
of the densest traffic. Fanned out in the suburban fringes,
traffic comes to a dense focus at the center of the arterials.
Here, in the central city, the worst aspects of urban auto-
mobile traffic are continually on view. The central city
resident, for whom the center is a "convenience shopping"
area, must drive through the concentrated traffic of the
entire metropolis in order to do his weekly shopping.
The suburbs also run into augmented problems as a
result of their fragmentation. They suffer the consequences
of spatial contiguity and resulting interdependence. Stu-
114
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
dents of metropolitan government are fond of remarking
that polluted air and water, crime and fire and hydrogen
bombs, are no respecters of our divided jurisdictions. In-
deed, fragmentation may increase our vulnerability; the
juvenile gang which takes care never to be booked in the
home community cannot be identified if no central records
exist. It may with impunity commit depradations in other
suburbs and return home safely. As for such growing
governmental tasks as preventive public medicine or dis-
aster control (a standby organization to handle the results
of flood, tornadoes, and nuclear war), the governmental
patchwork makes them utterly impractical. The municipali-
ties in most cases simply cannot afford professional services
of these kinds. Their legal autonomy can, however, effec-
tively prevent the areawide organization essential to the
evacuation of populations or the rapid identification of
health menaces. In short, the housekeeping problems of the
individual governments, suburban as well as central city,
are greatly increased by the political fragmentation of
metropolitan areas.
THE PROBLEM OF EQUITY
A second kind of problem situation common in our
metropolitan areas is that of equity. Because we have no
areawide government, we have no areawide polity. As we
have noted, this means that Negroes and other ethnics,
union members, and wage workers tend to be represented
most heavily in the central city; white-collar workers are
concentrated in suburbia, where they are represented by
a plethora of tiny governments. But the problem arises
when a given area must pay for services to another-when
the taxing jurisdiction does not include those who benefit
from the taxes. In such cases, the result is literally taxation
without representation.
We have noted the central city's position, as workplace
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
115
for the area and as central point of assembly. Important as
its tasks are for the entire metropolis, it is not reimbursed
by the villages of the fringe. It houses the poor, the un-
skilled and semiskilled laborers essential to many industries
whose management lives in suburbia. These central-city
populations produce far more than their share of the wel-
fare and police problems of the area, just as they pay
less than their share of taxes. They are net losses to the
central-city government. At the same time the central city
houses more of the areawide facilities of the metropolis-
parks and museums and zoological gardens, convention
halls and concert halls and theatres, universities and hos-
pitals and trade schools. This land is ordinarily removed
from the tax rolls; services must be provided for such
sites, yet they cannot be taxed because they are nonprofit
public enterprises. A similar loss results from the increasing
network of superhighways which center in the older city;
such roadways usually are built at the cost of millions of
dollars in taxable property. They make the center accessible
to suburban residents and the city pays. In short, the cost
of services stays the same or increases in the central city,
while the sources of revenue are declining. The question
arises: What is fair in this kind of situation? Who should
pay, and how much should they pay? There is no polity
which includes all interested parties: those who own
property pay, those who choose to do so drive in and use
the facilities.
All is not clear sailing in suburbia, either. In Robert
Wood's felicitous phrase, the suburban fragmentation re-
sults in "the segregation of resources from needs." The
industrial plant which provides jobs for thousands of subur-
ban workers pays taxes only to the little village in which
it stands. Its work force, however, may double the school
enrollment in another municipality to which the plant
pays nothing. The suburban governmental wall provides
immunity to taxation which might represent the total
social cost of private enterprise, just as it provides immunity
116
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
to teen-age gangs. To be sure, the larger the municipality
the less likelihood there is of such obvious segregation.
As Wood remarks:
·
The larger a municipality . . . the more chance it may have to
encompass a balanced blend of expenditure-inducing factors.
Hence the less vulnerable it becomes to decisions made in the
private sector (i.e., the economy).¹
However, as we have noted, most suburbs are not very
large in either population or statute miles. Under such
conditions, “historical caprice, in the form of ancient
boundary lines, disrupts the pattern of regularity . . . the
location of a single industrial plant, the decision of a de-
veloper... insignificant elements in the total urban com-
plex of the region-drastically affect the public fortunes
of the jurisdiction."2
Such eccentricity in the location of boundaries and the
composition of suburbs results in statistics which many find
disturbing. In St. Louis County one school district has an
assessed valuation (the basis for all property taxes) which
is twenty-eight times the tax base per capita of another.
The first suburb pays one of the lowest tax rates in the
area, the second, one of the highest. But the school systems
are far apart in quality. The first is a superior school
system, the second is struggling to maintain its accredita-
tion. In fact, suburban municipalities vary so greatly in the
amount and quality of services provided that many pro-
tagonists of metropolitan government base their arguments
on the need for enforcing a mimimum standard of services
in the suburbs. While some municipalities are as rich as
Valhalla, many others are already paying higher taxes than
the central city and providing poorer services. They can
look forward to nothing but an astronomical increase in
costs as the child population grows, settlement grows dens-
¹ Robert Wood, 1400 Governments, The Political Economy of the New
York Metropolitan Region (with the assistance of Vladimir V. Almend-
inger) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961, p. 62.
2 Ibid., pp. 60-62.
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
117
er, and the school system, the street system, and police
and fire protection become more expensive. For such sub-
urbs, the question of equitable taxation is a pressing one
indeed. But within the existing governmental framework
they have no local resources beyond the taxes they can
levy upon themselves.
The creation of an acceptable equity is, of course, a
universal problem of government. It is usually solved
through the adjudication of the political process which,
within a framework of precedent (that is, a constitution),
allocates costs and benefits in view of probable political
repercussions. The peculiar nature of the problem in the
metropolitan complex results from the governmental segre-
gation caused by fixed boundary walls. The levying of
taxes and use of social capital for social purposes can apply
only to that segregated part of the population within the
boundaries. The governmental redistribution of wealth
which takes place wherever citizens pay unequal taxes and
receive equal benefits (or vice versa) is also constrained
by the boundaries. Instead of resulting from the political
process it is ground out by the unequal units brought
into being as the entrepreneurs incorporate municipalities
on the fringe.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSENSUS: WHAT KIND OF CITY?
These effects of governmental fragmentation on the
polity are clear. But in addition to the housekeeping prob-
lems and the moral problems of paying for them, we
should also remember that the entire destiny of the metro-
politan community is affected by its governance. Many
aspects of the city which are today considered problems
result from uncontrolled and unplanned development in
the past. The tremendous investment of the past remains,
as the layout of the community. Thus the question arises:
Are contemporary developments any less likely to create
future problems? Is the development in one part of the
118
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
area considered in its relation to another? Are both viewed
as generators of the future city? Is that city one that we
wish to create?
Those who raise such questions are sometimes social
idealists, Utopians who can imagine a city different from
and better than the historical facts among which we live.
Some are oriented to the past; for them the true nature
of the city lies in the highly centralized urban complex
whose people all live within one polity and one community.
Looking backwards to the days when the city was a whole,
they aspire to a new version in the future. Other Utopians
are committed to a version of the city as even more dis-
persed, one in which the density and indignity of crowded
streets and sidewalks would give way to dispersed concen-
trations of workplaces, residences, shopping malls, and
community centers, surrounded and separated from others
by miles of green countrysides.
Perhaps there is a little of this idealism in the thought
of anyone concerned with the future of his city. Many
persons also worry about future developments because
action is demanded at this very moment. Without knowing
what will happen in other parts of the metropolis and in
the following years it is not possible for them to make
very dependable plans, yet they must try to plan. The mas-
sive program of urban redevelopment, which aims at re-
building large segments of the central city, requires that
its managers be able to guess what will happen in other
parts of the metropolis: the suburban neighborhoods, the
giant shopping centers in the outer wards, the industrial
satellite cities. They need to know what the market will
be for their redeveloped sites. Equally important, those
who are pushing to the forefront of urban settlement in
the suburbs need to know what is going to occur in the
center. Both urban redevelopers and suburban housing
developers need to know where the important sites of work
will be tomorrow, where the commercial centers will be,
and how the transportation network will develop.
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
119
Such problems become extremely specific and tangible
to the decision makers. They know, for example, that the
planning of a new thoroughfare to relieve traffic congestion
is not an isolated act. The new thoroughfare will open
new neighborhoods to settlement (it will change the space-
time ratio from workplace to residence); the new neighbor-
hoods will provide for new populations which will use
the thoroughfare (and probably crowd it); they will also
require streets, sidewalks, parks, playgrounds, sewerage sys-
tems, and (most expensive) school systems. Thus the
building of an expressway is more than a means of solving
a traffic problem; after it is in being, it affects the very
structure of the city, and its consequences become the basis
for the future actions of the planner. Similar examples
could be given for the interdependence of other aspects
of urban development. Inescapable interdependence is not
limited to the population of one governmental unit; as
we have shown in detail, growth and development cut
across the mosaic of governments.
It is not possible to plan development in the present
metropolis. The simple collecting of information is a diffi-
cult if not impossible task for the hundreds of governmental
units. The exercise of control "across the board" is abso-
lutely impossible. Thus neither the Utopians nor the prac-
tical planner have much basis for predicting the effects of
their actions: but if they cannot do this, they cannot plan at
all. The metropolis continues to grow as in the past at
a rapid rate, and like Topsy, it "jest grows." The effects
of today's expansion of the urban plant will be tomorrow's
metropolitan problems.
The Drive for Reintegration
Many observers have noted the consequences of govern-
mental fragmentation in the metropolis. Whether they are
government officials facing serious problems in rising costs
120
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
•
and declining revenues, party leaders who see their cohorts
reduced to impotence, technicians who despair of achiev-
ing their missions, political scientists, or simply metropoli-
tan citizens, they come to similar conclusions. The obvious
solution is based upon the cause: the small-scale govern-
ments of suburbia. Most observers conclude that these must
be integrated in a larger structure and the governmental
dichotomy reduced to unity. In short, they prescribe a
metropolitan area government.
There are three kinds of formulas typically invoked.
First, there are those who imagine an urban county, with
most of the municipal powers exercised through the en-
compassing structure of the county while cities as such
disappear. Second, there are those who wish to keep as
many municipal structures in existence as seems practical.
They advise a metropolitan district government for the
solution of metropolitan problems, a large-scale structure
encompassing the area but leaving many tasks to the
smaller units of suburbia and to the central city's existing
government. Finally, there are those who take their stand
in the city and fight for “irredentism," the return of the
lost territories of suburbia to their rightful polity, the
central city.
In general, it appears that those who prescribe an urban
county focus their vision on the suburbs. The symbol of
the county is an all-encompassing one, bypassing the schism
between central city and suburbs. Those who recommend
a metropolitan district are "realists" who try to allow for
the suburban society already in being and incorporated,
while integrating the governmental response to the inescap-
able tasks of the area as a whole. Those who fight for
merger are, in general, patriots of the central city. For
them there is no metropolis except that which rightfully
centers in downtown St. Louis, Cleveland, San Francisco,
or Miami.
Technical evaluation of these three alternatives is fairly
consistent, from observer to observer and state to state.
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
121
Within the provisions of most state constitutions the
county is a very limited administrative arm; thus to create
an urban county government is essentially to invent a new
form of local government, and, having invented it, to insert
it in the constitution. This is a complex and politically
difficult task. The metropolitan "federal district" runs into
similar difficulties; the division of tasks between areawide
government and the municipalities is a mare's nest of legal
conundrums. How can traffic be divided between areawide
and local streets? They are interdependent. How can zon-
ing become areawide in its efficiency while leaving the
power to protect the neighborhoods to the municipality?
And so on. Such problems are not insoluble; they are
merely complex and, again, politically difficult. The out-
right merger of all the urban area in one big city usually
runs into only one purely technical difficulty—the spread of
metropolitan complexes across county, state, and in some
instances (such as El Paso-Juarez and Detroit-Windsor)
national boundary lines. Could we merge all urban popu-
lation in one municipality, however, it would then be
relatively simple to adapt the existing legal rights of cities
to the tasks created by the total metropolis.
THE HISTORY OF METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT PLANS
These are the most general recommendations of political
-scientists and other experts on metropolitan government.
They are by no means new ideas. Writing in 1933, R. D.
McKenzie noted the rapid growth of metropolitan areas
and the increasing spread of population across existing
political boundaries. He thought that "The larger cities
of the country are becoming what might be termed re-
gionally conscious." He observed that even then efforts to
3 "The Rise of Metropolitan Communities," in Recent Social Trends,
in The United States, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1933,
p. 451.
122
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
reintegrate suburbs and central city in one government
had been made in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland; he
thought that, despite the failure of these attempts, they
would be made again. He was right. The Governmental
Affairs Foundation recently published a digest which sum-
marized nearly a hundred surveys of metropolitan areas
made in the past twenty years. And efforts have been made
again and again in such cities as St. Louis, Cleveland and
Pittsburgh.
The results have been failure, in city after city, time
after time. This failure reflects the existing dichotomy of
the metropolis and the resulting political schizophrenia.
In 1959, St. Louis held a referendum on a Metropolitan
District Plan. It was a scheme developed by a Board of
Freeholders and based largely upon the recommendations
of the Metropolitan St. Louis Survey (a large-scale study
of local government by social scientists); it was sponsored
by many of the civic leaders of the community. It was
wel! publicized by campaigns in the daily newspapers and
was not vociferously opposed by the existing structures
of government. Nevertheless, it lost by two to one in the
central city, by three to one in the suburban county. The
compromise solution had very little appeal.
There has, however, been one successful campaign for
a metropolitan government. Perhaps we can learn some-
thing about resistance to such a government through
looking at the campaign which, in 1957, resulted in a
metropolitan Dade County government.
Dade County, the Greater Miami Metropolitan Area of
Florida, is a new metropolis. At the time of the campaign
for "Metro," half of the population had lived in the area for
less than ten years. A medium-sized city, it had been flooded
by migrants since World War II. As a result, the govern-
mental machinery was overburdened, the revenues were
inadequate to service the hundreds of thousands of new
migrants, and such crucial services as sewerage disposal
were nonexistent in many parts of the area. The political
order was also rocked to its foundations; hundreds of new
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
123
neighborhoods, dozens of communities, rose in a year or
two without becoming integrated in the existing system.
(The one-party regime also encouraged such looseness, for
party discipline is still practically unknown in Dade
County politics.) Under these circumstances there was little
commitment to existing governments; the City of Miami
came within eight hundred votes of being abolished as
recently as the 1950's. Nor was there much loyalty to a
discredited political order. The campaign for Metro was
thus supported by all of the civic leaders and symbols of
governmental virtue, while the opposition was practically
silent. Yet, under such circumstances, the Metro plan won
by only a few hundred votes.4
The campaign for Metro was, however, a costly one. In
devising “a package that would sell" to the voters, the
government that emerged was very weak. The Plan pro-
vided for little new revenue, though its backers promised
that it would create all the governmental facilities needed
in Dade County. It also failed to provide for any responsi-
ble governmental head: the Metro District was to be run
by a County Manager, who served at the pleasure of an
elected Council. The powers of the County were divided
again and again with the existing municipalities; this
created a potent source of centrifugal tendencies as each
neighborhood or community jealously fought for its iden-
tity and privileges, making its voice heard through its
elected representative. Then too, in the campaign for
Metro one of the major selling points of its protagonists
was economy: the Metro government was expected to do
many more tasks than had ever been performed before,
at a net saving in taxes. Needless to say, the price for
getting the approval of citizens in referendum elections is
now being paid by the Metro government. It appears that
it may have been too great a price to result in amelioration
*For a brief discussion of the campaign for Metro see Edward Sofen,
"Problems of Metropolitan Leadership: The Miami Experience,” Mid-
west Journal of Political Science, Vol. V, No. 1, pp. 18–38.
124
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
of the various metropolitan problems the plan set out to
solve.
THE BARRIERS TO CHANGE
The difficulties of changing metropolitan governmental
structure may be usefully divided into three levels. These
are (1) the underlying cultural norms of Americans con-
cerning local government, (2) the resulting legal-constitu-
tional structures, and (3) the political-governmental
system built upon them. The underlying norms are those
described earlier as the Jacksonian ideology, the dogma of
the right to local self-government and the direct exposure
of the governmental system to the veto of the voters. Shared
by citizen and political leader alike, these norms are im-
portant because they specify what is legitimate. Based
upon a deep distrust of governmental officials and a faith
in the competence of the ordinary voter, they also lead
to such corollaries as "that government is best which
governs least" (and more important, costs least).
Translated into the legal provisions of the constitution,
the norms set up the rules of the game. They validate the
incorporation of municipalities for many purposes, includ-
ing the trivial, spurious, and even socially injurious pursuit
of self-interest. They also provide the mechanisms for
changing the nature of local governments with the result
that basic structural change must be submitted to the voters
in referendum. In that referendum, the citizen does not
act as an isolated, free-floating intelligence: he is, after all,
an actor in an existing neighborhood, community, munici-
pality. His political leaders are those who were elected
through the present system, and are usually committed to it.
The existing political system is a major problem for any
reform movement. Those who are committed to change are
usually not the incumbents. Thus, reformers have to carry
their message through the mass media and lectures, for
they are disbarred from the political organizations. The
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
125
"machine of the incumbents," however, can easily and
quietly mobilize the existing system against change. Any
change is a danger to the going concern, and those who
benefit from existing arrangements see no gain in a radical
departure. The public servant fears for his job; the con-
tractor fears for his contract. Insofar as such persons are
important reference points for voters, they encourage suspi-
cion of anything new.
As for the ordinary voter, we can say something about
his responses. In St. Louis a sample survey was taken
immediately after the failure of the District Plan.5 In
general, it is clear that neither the protagonists nor the
antagonists of reform "got through to the voter" very
clearly. In the suburban sample, selected for past involve-
ment in local elections, only 10 per cent of the voters had
roughly correct notions of three most important provisions
of the plan: its methods of governance, the effects on exist-
ing communities, and the tax rate authorized. Only about
20 per cent could state any of these major provisions cor-
rectly. Thus the ordinary voters were not even voting on
the plan: nobody knows what they were voting on.
However, there is little evidence that the campaign
against the plan was effective. The voters questioned after-
ward had never heard of most individuals for or against the
plan (evidently civic leaders, the power elite, the economic
dominants, talk chiefly to each other-and to social scien-
tists studying the power structure). They were, if interested,
more likely to know how the major mass media stood: still,
only 49 per cent of them knew correctly the Post-Dispatch's
position, after that dominant newspaper had put on an
all-out three months' campaign for the plan.
The one major figure who seemed to have had an im-
pact, and in the intended direction, was the mayor of the
central city. Even in the suburbs a majority knew his posi-
* This research was carried out by the Center for Metropolitan Studies
of Northwestern University. It will be reported in detail in the volume
Metropolitics, A study of Political Culture, Scott Greer and Norton
Long.
126
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
tion, respected it, and in many cases said it helped them to
make up their minds. The dominant symbolic position of
the central city mayor in metropolitan affairs is thus
demonstrated again. However, most individuals and organi-
zations involved in the campaign were unknown to the
voters, and their position on the plan (if the voter ventured
a guess) was as likely to be reversed as correctly stated.
The political system simply does not function for this type
of campaign, not at least as its functioning is envisaged
in the democratic dogma.
The lack of interest, involvement, and information
among the voters should not lead us to ignore what did
occur in their political discourse. There are strong indica-
tions that the campaign, the talk back and forth, while
it did not increase competence, did produce a high degree
of confusion among the voters. Rhetorical tricks, the exer-
cise of the journalist's skills, and a certain amount of sharp
practice on both sides, left the voter some basis for guessing
that: "The District Plan would tax us fifty cents on the
dollar," or "The District Plan would abolish all govern-
ments and create one big city."
The confusion resulted, chiefly, in the evocation of the
basic political norms controlling local government. Govern-
mental merger and the loss of local control was a bad
business. On the other hand, increased coordination and
cooperation among the scattered local governments were
good; with increased size go efficiency and economy. The
improvement in governmental services was a fine thing.
But an increase in taxes was a dreadful prospect, and the
addition of “another layer of government" brought chills
to some people's spine. In short, confusion led to the evoca-
tion of norms. These norms are frequently contradictory.
The average citizen, hardly educated to the real nature of
the plan, evoked rules of thumb as old as government:
"Better the evil that is known . . ." and "When in doubt
do nothing." These phrases summarize the final response
of a great many among both leaders and led to the plan for
a metropolitan government.
THE SCHIZOID POLITY
127
The campaign attempted, in a few months' time, to
propagandize a complex scheme for applied social science.
It was further handicapped by dependence upon the mass
media. No wonder the status quo was victorious. The norms
evoked, however, are not transitory matters: the basic
conflict between the norms for local government and the
rising consumption norms for governmental services seems
to be a permanent part of our public discourse. Local
governing bodies are trusted with neither the powers nor
the material resources to provide increasingly expensive
services: at the same time, they are blamed for their failure
to provide them. Such a campaign as that for the District
Plan dramatizes this conflict in the normative structure of
the American political community. Its results also become
part of that structure, for the campaign resulted in a cer-
tain amount of social learning.
Many citizens learned something from both sides in the
conflict. They learned, certainly, that much better services
in the area of traffic facilities and transport could be pro-
vided for the metropolis. They also learned that efficiency,
coordination, cooperation, were good things (as long as
they cost nobody any taxes or local autonomy). In short,
they learned some of the campaign slogans. The leaders
of the campaign also learned. Some concluded that the
District Plan, a compromise between the interests of cen-
tral city and suburbs, satisfied nobody; it lacked "box
office appeal." They decided that only an all-out campaign
for one big city was capable of stirring the imaginations
of the voters. But others (and probably the majority)
decided that nothing could be done to create a metropoli-
tan government through referendum elections.
When such an acknowledgement of defeat is common,
the effort to restructure the government at the most general
level is abandoned, often for a decade or more. That which
exists, the snarl of polities, the multiplying suburbs, the
slowly changing central city, becomes the given nature of
things. It is a "traditional system" by default: it is impos-
sible to change. But what of the massive challenges which
128
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
confront the metropolitan governments? How are they
handled within the framework of a central city and hun-
dreds of suburbs? We turn now to the existing polity, the
bicycle with two warped wheels, which nevertheless man-
ages to carry its rider without too many falls.
Suggested Readings
On The Schizoid Polity:
1400 Governments: The Political Economy of the New York Metro-
politan Region, Robert C. Wood with the assistance of Vladimir V.
Almendinger, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Wood
examines carefully the effects of the government on the private
economy, and the return effects of economy on government. His
general conclusions greatly deemphasize the effects of any likely
governmental action on the over-all economy or social structure of
the New York region.
Government and Housing in Metropolitan Areas, Edward C. Banfield
and Morton Grodzins, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1958. In this study the authors attempt to decide exactly what
effect the fragmented government of the metropolitan area has
upon the housing distribution among the population, and what
difference metropolitan governmental integration would make. Their
general conclusions are that it would make relatively slight dif-
ferences.
On The Drive for Reintegration:
"The Future Metropolis," Daedelus, Winter, 1961. This issue of the
journal has a distinguished set of contributors whose general ap-
proach seems to reflect a growing conviction that the key elements
in the development of the city are social and economic, with
government and governmental planning relatively unimportant.
The skepticism concerning the possibility of large-scale planning
is a relatively recent development among such theorists.

7
The Metropolity and
Its Future
Galbraith has remarked that, according to the laws of
aerodynamics, it is impossible for the bumblebee to fly.
And according to the rules of some political theorists, it
is impossible for anything resembling a metropolitan polity
to function. Yet the bumblebee flies, and the metropolis
meets, in some fashion, the consequences of massive change.
The millions are housed, fed, transported, and policed,
and the metropolitan region still maintains its attraction
for the migrant. Smog and traffic and farcical contradictions
in land use are commonplace in Los Angeles, yet it moves
rapidly towards the status of second city in the nation.
None of the urban ills in St. Louis prevents its continued
growth and increasing prosperity.
SUBSTITUTES FOR METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT
The metropolis is in little danger of a breakdown. The
reason is partly that within the straitjacket of the demo-
129
130
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
cratic ideology and the constitutions, there is room to
maneuver. Coordination takes place at the municipality
level. There is a continuum, from voluntary consultation
and joint planning among suburbs to those contractual
arrangements which house the prisoners of many places in
one suburb's jail or draw upon the county government for
many basic services. Such consultation and cooperation is
in fact the alternative to metropolitan merger proposed
by the defenders of little governments. But voluntary co-
operation requires an obvious interdependence, a nearly
equal cost and benefit ratio, and a rational view of collec-
tive needs. It also depends upon an adequate public
treasury. It suffers all the political weakness of confedera-
tions, and many major services are not possible through
such arrangements. In these cases, two subterfuges have
been widely adopted: the special district and outside
subsidy.
The special district government emerged as an expedient
solution for the problems of jurisdictional fragmentation.
Created as a new governmental entity, the special district
government has access to taxes and borrowing powers out-
side those granted the municipality. Bypassing the munici-
pal government, it escapes both the jealous particularism
of the elected council and the niggardliness of the citizens.
Defined as outside the political process, it can apply the
rules of thumb appropriate to a business enterprise. At
the extreme, as in the case of the New York Port Authority,
it can commandeer the most profitable tasks of government
(toll bridges and tunnels and the like), pay its way, and
have money to invest.
If we compiled a rough check list of the special district
governments in the United States today, the total is stag-
gering. School districts, water districts, fire districts, port
districts, sanitation districts, park districts-the variety is
almost as great as the tasks that local government can per-
form. Created on an ad hoc basis, as needs arise and the
local fisc and powers prove inadequate, such districts are
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
131
frequently the basis for the only adequate services in many
suburbs. They are also, in many urban areas, the only
metropolitan governmental unit in being. Such metropoli-
tan giants as the New York Port Authority, the Metropoli-
tan St. Louis Sewer District, the Chicago Park District,
are partial solutions to some of the problems of metropoli-
tan growth.¹
However, there are narrow limits to their utility. The
services that are their basis must be in wide demand: many
needed services are not considered by the voters. Further-
more, only a few governmental services can be made profit-
able: most of them are "losers” and remain the prerogative
of existing municipal governments. And the losers, whether
organized in a special district or not, continue to demand
a share of the limited fiscal powers of the jurisdiction. As
the local resources (or those the voters will make available
within the limits of the state's constitutional provisions)
are exhausted in the existing functions of government, the
pressure mounts for subsidy from elsewhere. The State
government and the federal agencies are the chief sources
of outside funds.
Through these channels come supports for the expenses
of both central city and suburbs. The welfare burdens of
the central city, such as aid to dependent children, aid to
the handicapped, preventive medicine, clinics, hospitals,
school lunches, and the like are greatly lightened by funds
from elsewhere. The problems involved in rebuilding the
obsolescent plant at the center of the city are turned over
to the Urban Renewal Authority, a local recipient of
massive federal grants. In the suburbs also the cost of plant
expansion is lightened greatly by what Wood has called
"the new Federalism." The Federal Highway Program, in
building great new arterials and circumferential highways,
solves many fiscal problems of the surburbs, and any aid
1 Useful description and analysis of the New York area “metropolitan
giants" is found in Sayre and Kaufman, and in Wood, op. cit.
132
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
to schools (especially that earmarked for buildings) will
be disproportionately distributed in suburbia, for the cen-
tral city's educational plant is nearly complete. In suburbia,
too, welfare costs are passed upwards.
CONSEQUENCES OF USING SUBSTITUTES
These expedients have consequences for the situation
which brought them about. They are, for one thing, re-
moved from the surveillance and control of the local voters,
and may be largely inaccessible to the politician and gov-
ernmental official. Thus they violate the norm of local
self-rule and responsibility to the local voters. This is the
very reason for their creation: they bypass the local po-
Iitical process. Money and powers guarded jealously from
the central city and suburban municipalities are passed
upwards to Washington, from which they return free of
the political blame that local officials would have to bear.
Ironically, the net result of the system which keeps govern-
ment "close to the people" is its removal as far as possible
from the people-to the United States Congress, a State
agency, or a Federal agency. Or, as with special districts,
the power is handed to agencies whose decisions are rarely
ever known to their clients, much less controlled by them,
agencies which have been dubbed "ghost governments.”
Another important aspect of these expedients is their
segmental nature. Each task of government is handled with-
out reference to others, even though their interaction is
crucial for the developing shape of the city and its welfare.
(It is not, at present, even possible to learn the total
resources and powers of the federal government engaged
in any given metropolis. Apparently nobody knows.) But
the increasing network of speedy trafficways continues,
blindly, the change in space-time ratio which produces the
suburban dispersion. As the arterials multiply, as the cir-
cumferential highways tie suburb to suburb, as the center
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
133
hub becomes a five-level interchange, the result can only
be a continual stimulus to further centrifugal development.
At the same time, however, the urban redevelopment pro-
gram is investing billions of dollars in rebuilding the cen-
tral city for its old uses-commercial, industrial, residential.
Thus two massive programs are under way, each largely
financed outside the metropolis, each the raison d'être for
huge bureaucracies-and each directly contradicting the
purposes of the other. The central city is declining as a
useful site for activity precisely because of the land access-
ible in the suburbs; to renovate downtown sites while in-
creasing the ease of movement outwards is to give with one
hand and take away with the other.
In fact, the strongest argument for local determination
of the crucial decisions in public capital expansion is based
upon the effects of partial and unplanned action from
above. Those who are neighbors, committed to the same
metropolitan site and social system, must live with the
consequences of these decisions. The shape of the city, the
quality of services, the cost-benefit ratio, the nature of
the public order, all of these aspects of urban government
are peculiarly the burden of the population living in the
area. Frequently there is no technical rule for a decision:
when a freeway is located, some people will benefit at little
cost, others will lose. Somebody's ox is always gored, and
the democratic polity is in theory supposed to allow that
person his day in court. This is not possible when autono-
mous agencies, local or federal, move without the consent
of the governed.
To be sure, combining all functions and powers of
government in the metropolitan area would not guarantee
an integrated polity. There is ample evidence of lack of
planning among the agencies of any central city govern-
ment: the struggles of the great bureaucracies for survival
and growth frequently resemble those of giant lizards in
the jungles of the Jurassic Era. It is certain, however, that
little coordination can come about in the present ecology
134
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
A
of political orders: the power of legal autonomy is a strong
shield against forced confrontation. Thus the planning
agencies in a great city may live their lives in complete
ignorance of each other; traffic engineers and urban renewal
agency heads may be complete strangers. Nobody is ac-
countable beyond the narrow limits of his designated task.
The metropolitan polity is a net result: a continuous,
cumulative total of the decisions made in suburban munic-
ipality, fire districts, metropolitan district, central city
bureaucracy, county government, federal agency, and state
bureau.
The Future Course of the Metropolis
The metropolis in being is, in many respects, a museum
of the urban past. Because dense areas were built up for
the City of Steam, because they represent social value
derived from the funded energy of the past, we have today
the near-obsolescence of much of the downtown. Because
the suburbs developed outside the central city's jurisdiction
we have today the patchwork quilt of jurisdictions on the
outskirts. In short, we inherit our given conditions from
the past, and they are largely unforeseen results of ex-
pediential decisions. It is fairly certain that the people of
the metropolis are not concerned with governmental change
that would allow more foresight in the future. What, then,
can we expect to emerge from the present course of
development?
Returning to basic considerations, we must remember
that the process of increase in scale continues. History, the
unfolding of consequences through time, does not stand
still to be photographed. We may confidently predict a
further increase in the societal surplus, a further decline
in the time and money cost of movement, a further exten-
sion of the organizational networks. From these we cer-
tainly expect a continuing increase in the absolute and
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
135
relative size of the United States' population living in
metropolitan areas.
Increase in the societal surplus will result in a continu-t
ing upward movement in social rank for the entire popu-
lation. Mechanization and the use of nonhuman energy
sources will make unskilled labor obsolete; the increasing
demand for rationality will increase the workforce in the
areas of organizational control-those workers who manipu-
late symbols and persons. But mechanization will invade
these areas also: electronic computers can store and proc-
ess information much more rapidly and cheaply than
their present day substitutes, the white-collar girls. Thus
we will continue to experience a decline in routine jobs
and an increase in those demanding specialized skills. The
professional and semi-professional worker, the technician
and the manager will increase at the expense of unskilled
and semiskilled labor. To prepare for the former jobs,
however, individuals will be forced to increase their formal
education. Thus occupational and educational levels will
go upwards together. The net effect of such a workforce,
with its machines and sources of energy, will be a con-
tinuous increase in the social surplus: real income will rise
concomitantly.
As this occurs, the range of social choice will also in-
crease and will be available to more people. The choice
between an urban and a familistic way of life will become
a constant differentiator, as families at all levels of social
rank have enough "elbow room" to choose how and, with-
in limits, where they will live. With so many opportunities
for advancement open, we may expect acculturation to pro-
gress further: most ethnic minorities should become largely
invisible in a few decades. Thus the total population of
the metropolis should approximate more and more closely
the social class range of those now in suburbia.
The space-time ratio will continue to affect, drastically,
the layout and population distribution of the metropolitan
area. As highways reach further into the countryside, as
:
136 GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
the automobile-owning population becomes well-nigh uni-
versal, the spaces between arterials will fill in. Residential
expansion on the fringes will accommodate millions of new
urban residents in the immediate future. Urban redevelop-
ment programs may try to attract them to the central city,
but as Raymond Vernon has recently stated, "it is one of
the paradoxes of urban growth today that the increase in
the supply of urban land is probably outstripping the
demand."2 Automobile and roadway continually capture
new domains for the metropolitan complex.
Changes in the space-time ratio for transport and com-
munication will also allow continual decentralization of
work. The further dispersion of work sites requires no
decrease of effective centralized control, in the day of two-
way telecommunication and jet travel. The sites for work
and commerce will also move rapidly away from the center
insofar as truck transport can take the place of rail and
water. Leon Moses has recently documented the shift of
truck terminals outwards in Chicago. They follow either the
warehouses which follow the retail outlets, or the industrial
plants which follow the most desirable labor force.³ The
economic map of the metropolis moves from a city with
hinterland to a larger unit, in Vernon's terms a "region."
THE CHANGING TASKS OF THE CENTRAL CITY
Let us turn, then, to the consequences of these ongoing
changes for the social structure of the metropolis. The
central city's role, in a drama already different from one
in which it played the lead and most of the characters,
can be expected to alter further. As the nonsegregated and
familistic populations move outward the city becomes in-
2 "The Economics and Finances of the Large Metropolis," Daedelus,
Winter 1961, p. 46.
3 In a study carried out at the Transportation Center, Northwestern
University, to be published in 1962.
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
137
f
creasingly the municipality of the ethnic and the working
class. The remnants of the traditional urban working
class, familistic, and usually first or second generation
ethnic, will recede slowly from the neighborhoods that are
their urban home. The colored populations will continue
to increase at a steady rate. The continued upgrading of
social rank will have a differential effect for these, most
segregated and disprivileged segments of the society. Ne-
groes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, last in the urban labor het eind
cisely the kinds of jobs most likely to be abolished by e
force from the rural hinterlands, are concentrated in pre-
mechanization. They are also segregated within the wards
of the central city. Thus the population of the center will
shoulder a disproportionately heavy share of the social
burdens produced by automation.
wice
вестие
invisible
in a few
decades (?)
4.135
The center's residential function will be, then, more
consistently biased towards the lower half of the job dis-
tribution. Its other functions can be expected to change
slowly through time. As those activities that are more con-
veniently located in the suburbs depart, those that are best
suited to the center will stand out in sharper relief. One
obvious use for the center is the interchange, the crossroads
for superhighways knitting the metropolitan map together.
Another is that of exchange center for those items which
require an areawide market. Still another use is that of
a site for activities which require personal confrontation,
those negotiations between firms and consultations with
experts that must be conducted face to face. Nobody
knows just how large these uses will bulk, in the aggregate.
Nor does anybody know how large the demand will be
for the urbane living conditions of the center. We can
expect those whose life-style fits the apartment-house dis-
tricts to continue their residency; we do not know how
large a proportion of the total they will be. We can also
expect the wealthy to continue part-time residence in such
places as Beacon Hill, Nob Hill, and Executive House. As
many have pointed out, for the aged also a safe downtown

138
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
apartment-house neighborhood may be preferable to the
dispersed areas of suburbia. But factors of cost and budget,
as well as the rarity of safe neighborhoods in many parts
of the center, will probably limit the return of the "post-
child" family to the urban center.
THE DEVELOPING SUBURBS
The suburbs should be, increasingly, a world inhabited
by the lower-middle to upper social ranks of the metrop-
olis. The raw, new neighborhoods will slowly settle in,
with public facilities developed and horticulture softening
the angles of the tract development. Though some persons
have looked at the cheap neighborhoods built for crafts-
men and operatives and predicted the slums of the future,
this seems unlikely. Instead, the continuous input of time
and energy and money by the suburban home owner, the
do-it-yourself movement, can be expected to upgrade or
at least stabilize these neighborhoods for many years. The
decay of neighborhoods is a social phenomenon; as we have
seen, suburban neighborhoods develop very powerful com-
munication flows and a normative structure capable of
educating the new neighbors. This in turn results in that
regular input of energy which prevents age of structure
from being synonymous with decay of structure.
Since the suburbs will include the richest markets for
household consumables, the movement of convenience
shopping outward will continue in full force. From neigh-
borhood store to shopping center to the giant commercial
subnucleus with its shopping malls, meeting rooms, and
branches of downtown stores and banks, a regular system
of retail dominance will develop. In large segments of the
suburbs we can expect a partial reintegration of the lives
of suburbanites; the giant subnucleus can produce a con-
centration of work places and contain the essential folk
institutions of church, school, government, recreation, and
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
139
the like. Since they will also contain a large proportion of
friends and relatives, as well as the omnipresent neighbors,
they may become self-contained social worlds for many of
their inhabitants.
It is even possible that many activities now universally
conceived of as best located in the downtown area may
also move towards suburbia. The public arts, for example,
music and theatre, ballet and the museums might well be
decentralized. Their chief markets are, after all, the subur-
ban populations. And with the development of convenient
transport within the giant subnuclei, a touring company
or a traveling exhibit could easily move from one area to
another.
At the level of economic and social functions, the central
city will continue to recede as the overwhelming force of
the metropolis. Though for many it still maintains its
magic as hub and symbolic center of the metropolitan com-
munity, it is in many respects simply one differentiated
area of residence and work, equal among equals in the
cluster of great subnuclei which make up the metropolis.
Its proportionate size does not stand for a proportionate
representation of the total urban population, and its polity
is not that of the metropolitan region. Nor, given its biased
sample of urbanites, could it be. Let us turn then to the
probable developments of the polity in each half of the
urban region.
The Future Polity
For each half of the metropolis we will ask: how does
its nature condition the burdens of government, and what
are its resources for handling those tasks?
The central city is the inheritor of the aged neighbor-
hoods and the obsolete workplaces of a Paleotechnic city.
Two movements are afoot to change this social heritage:
the metropolitan government movement, and the urban
140
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
redevelopment program. The first aims to solve the prob-
lem by reincorporating the center with all its sprawling
suburbs into a new unity; we have already considered the
problems and prospects of such an enterprise. The urban
redevelopment program would appear almost equally hope-
less, if one accepts the enthusiastic plans of some of its
backers to remake the central city.
The central city of even a moderate-sized metropolis is
an enormous plant. There are mile upon mile of neighbor-
hoods built in another day, for other life-styles, and there-
fore depopulated by the kinds of people who once built
them and lived in them. There are street after street of tall
loft buildings, high rise elevator warehouses. These are now
hopelessly obsolete in competition with suburban ware-
houses, whose horizontal floors allow the use of new and
more efficient equipment (moving belts, fork lifts, and the
like). There are hundreds of acres of neighborhoods whose
street space, already far too narrow for contemporary
vehicular traffic, must also provide parking, for the auto-
mobile was not envisaged when they were built. Though
this plant has a social value (for the structures are often
sound) it is not attractive to enterprises that are better
situated in suburbia's new acres. It still has a market value,
because it has uses: and those who wish to rebuild the city
must confront these uses as reflected in market value. (The
American norms of local government do not easily permit
simple confiscation.) The price for purchase and demoli-
tion in most central cities has been estimated at $160,000,-
000 and up per square mile: at the end of these processes
one would have only a bare plot of ground. Such a site
might or might not be valuable to private enterprise; to
"write it down" to prices competitive with new land on
the outskirts, however, would result in monstrous public
costs.
Robert Wood has called the New York City Urban
Renewal Program probably the most vigorously developed
and certainly the largest in the United States. Yet if one
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
141
includes work completed, in progress, or definitely planned
for the future, only 1,000 acres will be affected.' His esti-
mate is that 5,000 acres of New York City are already so
far gone that they demand rebuilding-and by the time
the work on the 1,000 is complete, there is every likelihood
that the 5,000 total will remain approximately the same.
Furthermore, Vernon has called attention to what he calls
the grey areas, those far outside the central location (which
he believes does have use value) and far gone in their
obsolescence. For such areas he can foresee little demand,
either as commercial or residential building sites. One
might, in fact, wonder if urban redevelopment does not
require eventually rebuilding the entire older city. Against
such problems the present program, massive as it appears
in isolation, is a drop in the bucket.
POLICY FOR THE CENTRAL CITY
6. Contradict
p134-136
The central city is not apt to change radically in
composition. Its people will be working class, ethnic, resi-
dents of neighborhoods ranging from the slums to the
shabby genteel hand-me-downs of the past middle classes.
If this is so, it will probably call forth specific kinds of
governmental action. Instead of pouring public wealth into
new building, hoping that a neighborhood will attract
private investors, it will seem more relevant to spend
money on the conservation of existing neighborhoods,
working to protect existing homes through improvement,
better public services, and most of all support of the exist
ing communication and normative structures that lead to
reinvestment in their maintenance.
If the central city is to be the workingman's municipality,
its governors will eventually come to assess its programs
with this fact in mind, rather than evoking its lost role of
4 See Wood, op. cit.
142
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
center and symbol to a region. Thus its educational needs
will be defined as different from those of suburbia. Such
institutions as the University of Pennsylvania, the Uni-
versity of Chicago, or the University of Southern California,
private universities which service the suburbs and the
nation, will be considered less relevant to the sons of
workers and therefore to the city's polity than the "open
door colleges." These publicly supported institutions must
accommodate the increasingly large percentage of high
school graduates who can and must go to college if they
are to be useful members of the labor force. The educa-
tional system of the central city will also be forced to con-
cern itself with the problem of retraining the technologi-
cally displaced, for the central city will inherit a large share
of the social costs involved in such displacement.
The government of the central city can also be expected
to accept the responsibility of housing, policing, educating,
and servicing the neighborhoods of nonwhite minorities,
rapidly becoming its single largest voting bloc. Segregation
in housing and schools, and differential treatment by the
agencies of government (particularly the police) is be-
coming politically inexpedient in the short run, foolhardy
in the long run. While new land uses and new industry
are important for the declining fiscal prowess of the city
government, such new uses, as far as they further shorten
the supply of housing available to nonwhites, are gift
horses which will be subject to increasingly sharp inspec-
tion as nonwhites respond at the polls.
The resources available to the central city government
in responding to its status and problems as a working-class
municipality are changing rapidly. While the property tax
base is slowly declining, a result of changing population
and the increase in public facilities, new taxes are being
invented. The earnings tax which applies to all who work
in the city, suburbanite and city resident alike, amounts
to a radical readjustment of equity. Departing from prop-
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
143
erty as an index of use and ability to pay, the earnings
tax is based upon the chief source of wealth in our society,
income. The suburbanite, who uses the city for his liveli-
hood, pays a share of the maintenance.
The suburbanite also pays as the federal government
accepts more fiscal responsibility for the central city. The
suburban personal income tax far outweighs that of the
city. And we have already noted the present importance of
federal funds for the metropolis. With the increasingly
important role of urban affairs in the federal government,
we can expect more subsidy, for renewal, conservation, edu-
cation, and the like. Such funds can be used to adjust the
present limits upon the life space of the nonwhite popu-
lation: the conservation of neighborhoods and the broadened
base for higher education would do much to level the
present distinctions by color. As for the grey areas, as well
as the miles of shabby genteel housing outside them, they
may find their most suitable use as areas of open occupancy
for those now crowded into the Negro ghettoes. The de-
clining neighborhoods of the central city may be seen as
a major resource for increasing the housing available to
the segregated. Open occupancy combined with a sophis-
ticated and well-financed program of neighborhood organiz-
ing, rebuilding, and conservation may solve several prob-
lems at once.
In short, if the central city is viewed in its new role as
a specialized area in the metropolitan complex, a home
for the working class and the ethnics, its situation is not
so desperate. If it is viewed as still the major and most
valuable part of the metropolis, one which should be in-
clusive of the total population, the symbol and hub of
central tendencies in the entire urban complex, its future
is dark. The arterials move outward month by month, the
circumferentials circle the area in concentric rings, and
the automobile becomes standard equipment. The fifty
million new urbanites of the next few decades provide a
144
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
long-run and lucrative market for continuous new develop-
ment on the fringes. It is unlikely that the center can com-
pete as the site for much of this new growth.
POLICY FOR SUBURBIA
In the suburbs the limiting conditions are also a result
of past commitments. The dozens or hundreds of small
jurisdictions also result from the governmental "freeze."
Many of them have little or no space for industry, inade-
quate commercial districts, and no room for parks, play-
grounds, and educational facilities, and they are landlocked
by neighboring domains. Each enjoys a degree of autonomy,
and the price is that of the isolated peasant village-it is
alone with its fiscal and governmental problems. For the
fortunate few in Valhalla, this is no problem; for many
others it is a basic and continuing one.
The problems in the life-cycle of a suburb are as follows.
First, the determination of land use, then the provisions of
governmental facilities and resources, then the maintenance
of the area's character, and finally the adjustment to change
in the population. As the neighborhoods grow older they
lose their competitive attraction for the social rank which
built them, and are slowly invaded and eventually popu-
lated by a different class. Such change may be agonizing for
the older inhabitants, committed financially and emotion-
ally to their old image of the suburban country town with
a pretty name. It will not be so agonizing, however, for
most of those who might lead a fight to repulse the in-
vaders, for they will already have moved on outward.
The resources available to the suburbs have been de-
tailed. Massive and probably increasing federal aid for
schools, roads, sanitation, and the like, augmented by such
fiscal dodges as the special district, supplement the ad hoc
cooperation among municipalities. To be sure, as the bur-
dens of government press heavier on the fisc, there may
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
145
be efforts to solve the problem by changing land use,
attracting industry and other high tax-yield activities. How-
ever, such efforts are usually hamstrung by the very condi-
tions which stimulate them; awareness of serious fiscal prob-
lems typically follows the building up of available sites. The
time lag between public act and consequence (and the
magic phrase "a city of homes") limits the political appeal
of such efforts when they are still practical. But above
all, the location of activities tends to result from position
in the space-time grid of the city, not from the blandish-
ments of local councilmen. As Wood says:
With so many different constituencies, many options are open for
firms and households alike, and though the process of industrial and
population diffusion may occasionally be skewed, the forces are not,
in general, thwarted, turned aside, or guided."
As for the problems created by the slow change, the
movement of a suburb downhill in the scale of housing
values, there seems to be no real solution possible for any
given unit. What occurs instead is the dispersion of the
population to new areas now preferable to the old neigh-
borhood. The continual increase in land resulting from
the changing space-time ratio solves most of the problems
of invasion by the same mechanism which brings them
about in the first place, movement to new locales.
the
In summary, then, there is no polity which sees the
metropolitan complex as a whole, continuous in time and
interdependent in the present. The basic and pressing
needs of the metropolitan population, as they can be trans-
lated into political pressure, result in new burdens for
government. Thus the public sector of the economy, like
the private sector, responds to those who can and will pay.
The metropolitan citizen does not appear willing to pay
in money or loss of local self-rule for a metropolitan
government. He is willing to pay for special districts, area-
5 Ibid., p. 112.
146
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
wide in scope, to solve his most pressing problems. Sewage
disposal can be such a pressing problem. Traffic and trans-
port may well become another interest which causes the
electoral turnstiles to ring. If so, there will be metropolitan
transportation systems under coordinated management. But
transport, crucial as it is to many other public tasks and
basic to the emerging shape of the city, will then function
even more freely outside the pressures of other competing
and legitimate interests. As Wood puts it:
The highway transportation agencies, the mortgage programs of
the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration
proceed on the same philosophy of supply and demand that governs
the behavior of private firms. . . . The final result is that a public
sector committed to this ideology by financing and structure offers
no countervailing influence against the trends generated in the pri-
They underwrite and accelerate the process of
vate sector.
scatteration."
This scatteration is more than physical. It is also a scat-
teration in social and political space, a separation of
control and planning centers, and therefore a forswearing
of the possibility of politically or technically rational
policy. The conservative, steady state governments of the
central cities drift towards a polyarchy of great bureauc
racies largely moved and shaken by programs generated
elsewhere. The patchwork governments of suburbia fight
for their place in the sun of federal aid, hoping someone,
somewhere else, will solve the problems of their collective
destiny for them. Businessmen expect action from govern-
mental officials: the politicians wait to bless any decision
upon which interested parties can agree. As Morris Janowitz
has put it: "The issue is not the manipulation of the
citizenry by a small elite, but rather the inability of elites
to create the conditions required for making decisions.”7
6 Ibid., p. 172.
7 "Introduction," to Community Political Systems, edited by Morris
Janowitz, Glencoe, Ill: the Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961, p. 17.
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
147
The metropolitan area is the dominant form of spatial
community in the present society of large and increasing
scale. It is also a new form: the wide and variegated
pattern of settlement reflects the consequences of changes
in the space-time ratio, increase in the surplus, and the
extension of networks of interdependence, communication,
and control. The changes have far outrun the older models
of local government, and the specific form of the gener-
alized norms which provided their legitimation. We harvest
the results in a weak and passive governmental response
to ongoing change. As our world is transformed these older
forms change their meaning-become, in fact, caricatures
of themselves. In many cases defenses against any govern-
ment at all, the multiplying suburbs cause a drift of power
upwards to the highest level, the federal bureaucracies.
As problems press and action results, we do see a form
of social invention taking place in the metropolis. Special
district agencies, government by contract and subcontract,
earnings taxes and public corporate enterprise, are ingen-
ious and remarkable stopgaps. They allow us to retain
our pieties, while getting on somehow with the job at
hand. People get what they want to pay for, within the
limits of their inherited folklore and sacred constitutions.
Of course, they get many other things in the bargain,
some of which they do not want. But the development of
large-scale society has been in no respect planned from the
present into the future. Nor are we certain of our abilities
to do so: the sheer complexity of knowledge required is
staggering, while the choice points are really political
issues-basic, moral, and not to be solved through scientific
argument. For a choice point, in political life, is no simple
decision between right and wrong: it is a forced choice
between two mutually contradictory values, both of which
are sacred and precious to someone. Thus it is just as well
that the social scientist cannot assume the position of the
philosopher-king.
We cannot believe in a wide distribution of power, and
148
GOVERNING THE METROPOLIS
therefore of freedom, and at the same time insist upon a
rigorous control of the future. To be sure, this frequently
means that we all cooperate in producing something that
nobody wants. Such a result may not be simply due to
ignorance or clumsiness, however; it may mirror the plural
interests of a pluralistic society. The loose system allows
some room for variation and innovation (though inple-
menting them is difficult); while it greatly overweights the
experiences of the past, it allows for some continuity.
Change is accomplished; order is maintained. There are
even unique values in the present system. How else can
the polity of a village be reproduced in large-scale society,
save in residential municipalities? Furthermore, where else
in our society are the segregated, the insulted and injured,
as fairly represented as in their municipality, the central
city? Such results were not planned. "The metropolitan
community is continuously improvised; its evolution is or-
ganic, not rational; change is crescive, not revolutionary;
problems are solved by trial and error rather than by fiat."s
Suggested Readings
On the Future Course of the Metropolis
Metropolis 1985, Raymond Vernon, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1960. An economist details a broad forecast of the future
metropolitan region on the basis of present trends and their eco-
nomic meaning. He envisages a city which is an enormous connurba-
tion (urban sprawl) with thriving central business districts and
enormous areas of downgraded residential housing-"gray areas"
as he terms them. Should his projection be accurate, many current
policies are somewhat out of kilter with reality.
The Emerging City: Myth and Reality, Scott Greer, New York: Free
8 The Emerging City, Myth and Reality, Scott Greer, New York: The
Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1962.
THE METROPOLITY AND ITS FUTURE
149
Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1962. This approach is kin to that of Vernon
but emphasizes the importance of continued increases in social sur-
plus, education, and choice in life-style among metropolitan resi-
dents. The consequences for government are then spelled out.
On the Future Polity
The Quest for Community, A Study in the Ethics of Order and
Freedom, Robert A. Nisbet, New York: Oxford University Press,
1953. This is a serious and penetrating discussion of the effects of
changing social structure on the democratic ethos and the belief in
local self-determinism. The growth of the national system is analyzed
in relation to the breakdown of the subcommunity at every level.
“Individual Participation in Mass Society." Scott Greer, in Roland
Young, editor, Approaches to the Study of Politics, Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1957. An essay in which the present
patterns of social participation, in local community and organiza-
tion, are described and, on this ground, the assumptions of demo-
cratic self-government are examined.
Index
Author's Note: In view of the brevity of this book and the detailed
Table of Contents provided, an exhaustive subject index seems re-
dundant. Instead there follow indexes of (a) authors to whom refer-
ence is made, and (b) places named in the text.
a. AUTHORS
Adrian, C, R., 47
Almendinger, V. V., 116, 128
American Academy of Political
and Social Sciences, 58
Banfield, E., 65, 76, 78, 79, 81, 128
Bell, W., 14, 41
Bollens, J., 57, 87-88
Bryce, J., 45
Cottrell, F., 22
Cutright, P., 70
Daedelus, 128
Davis, K., 8
Detroit Area Study, 14
Dobriner, W. A., 41, 104
Dreiser, T., 63
Emerson, R. W., 9
Faulkner, W., 9
Fortune, editors of, 22
Galbraith, J. K., 129
Greer, S., 22, 60, 88, 89, 104,
125, 148, 149
Grodzins, M., 128
Hatt, P. K., 42
Hauser, P., 57, 69
Hunter, F., 64
Jacobs, J., 42
Janowitz, M., 42, 67, 68, 70, 146
Jones, V., 58
Kaufman, H., 70, 79, 82, 131
Key, V. O., 72
Kipling, R., 51
Long, N. E., 125
Low, Seth, 46
Lynd, R. and H., 30
Mark Twain, 12
McKenzie, R. D., 121
Moses, L., 136
Mumford, L., 19
Nisbet, R. A., 149
Olmstead, D. W.,
67
Park, R. E., 29
Pirenne, H., 21
Plunkitt, G. W., 46, 62
Reichley, J., 70, 81
Reiss, A. J., 42
151
152
INDEX
Riesman, D., 104
Rossi, P. H., 70
Sayre, W. S., 70, 79, 82, 131
Schulze, R. O., 67
Scoble, H., 68
Shevky, E., 14, 41
Sofen, E., 123
Steffens, L., 63
Strauss, A., 54
Theodorson, G. A., 42
Thoreau, H. D., 9
Turner, R., 6, 21
Vernon, R., 136, 141, 148, 149
Wood, R., 87, 102, 104, 115, 116,
128, 131, 140, 141, 145, 146
Woodbury, C., 58
Whyte, W. F., 70, 81
Young, R., 149
b. PLACES
Alabama, 24
Atlanta, 64
Baltimore, 24
Boston, 70
California, 5, 26
Chicago, 5, 11, 15, 17, 18, 24, 34,
37, 59, 60, 63, 65, 72, 81, 97–
102
Cleveland, 65, 120, 122
Cook County Suburbs, 97-102
Culver City (Los Angeles), 86
Dade County, Florida, 54-55
Deerfield (Chicago), 95
Detroit, 13, 86, 121
El Paso-Juarez, 121
England, 8, 10
Europe, 7, 16, 28
Evanston (Chicago), 103
Gary, Indiana, 70, 86
Germany, 24
Great Britain, 24
Hamtramck (Detroit), 86
Houston, 15
Ireland, 24
Italy, 7, 24, 29
Jefferson City, Missouri, 47
Kansas, 13
Kinloch (St. Louis), 86
Las Vegas, 14
Los Angeles, 11, 12, 14, 24, 69,
77, 86, 129
Memphis, 47
Miami, 120
Miami Beach, 14
Miami Metropolitan Area, 122 ff.
Milwaukee, 11
Minneapolis-St. Paul, 15
Mobile, 47
Moscow, 12
New England, 68
New York City, 3, 5, 8, 13, 19, 24,
34, 37, 45, 59, 60, 70, 79, 82
New York Metropolitan Area, 52,
102, 128
Philadelphia, 8, 19, 59, 81
Pittsburgh, 34, 111, 122
Poland, 24, 29
Red Wing, Minnesota, 67
Rome, 6, 8, 10, 12, 24, 111
Russia, 24
INDEX
153
San Francisco, 11, 59, 109, 120
Springfield, Illinois, 72
"Stackton" (Gary, Indiana), 70
St. Louis, 15, 24, 47, 58, 65, 72,
75, 86, 88-90, 94, 96, 120, 122,
125 ff., 129
St. Louis County, 87, 102, 113, 116
University City (St. Louis), 86,
103
•
Upward Ho! (Chicago), 97-99
Valhalla (Chicago), 99–102, 116,
144
Venice, 8
Washington, D.C., 5, 41
Wichita, Kansas, 13
Ypsilanti, Michigan, 67
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