8.7 - Location Patterns within Urban and Metropolitan Communities (pp.128-31)
Characteristic patterns of urban structure arise from the different requirements of the various land uses with respect to the transfer and processing advantages of sites. Cities develop, as already explained, at nodal points on the transfer network and owe a large part of their growth to the advantages of close contact between different kinds of producers and consumers. They have their own characteristic internal geography, shaped very largely by factors of contact and therefore subject to change in keeping with the evolution of the means of transport and communication. Because of the competition for space among highly intensive rival forms of land use, the selective locational role of rents is prominent.
Certain economic activities within cities involve the handling of large quantities of goods either coming in from elsewhere or being shipped out. For these activities, which include the heavier types of manufacturing, warehousing, and wholesaling and the maintenance and servicing of transfer terminal operations, the only possible locations are those in the transshipment zone. This zone includes the dockside area (in port cities) and sites along railroad lines in the terminal and switching district. In the relatively small area thus served directly by heavy freight transport services, all the heavier manufacturing, storage, and distribution facilities are concentrated. In large cities this “industrial zone” is neither compact nor particularly central but stretches out along water fronts, radial rail lines, and belt railroads. In rolling country especially, it is likely to be restricted to stream valleys.
In the more central parts of the city, where general transfer advantages attract other intensive uses and rents are high, the industrial belts along transport lines are generally quite narrow and are occupied by the smaller and the older plants. Farther out the land is in less general demand, rents are lower, and the belts are wider. In these outlying locations are found the larger and newer factories, warehouses, and wholesalers.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, and warehousers of the less bulky goods need not be located on railroads or water fronts at all, since they can be served by truck. They have a much greater choice of locations than the heavier industries. Except as barred by zoning ordinances, they are free to locate anywhere in response to the attractions of labor supply, cheap land, and nearness to local suppliers or customers. As a rule, they are found interspersed with commercial and inferior residence uses.
Passenger terminals exert some effect on the location of hotels, theaters, and dealers catering to transient out-of-town buyers, e.g., the garment-industry showrooms of New York. This attraction appears, however, not to be decisive. In many cities, such as Washington, the main passenger terminal has attracted only a minor cluster of hotels.
Businesses requiring frequent direct contacts with the local population are those most forcibly drawn to the main focus of intracity transit. This includes banks, offices, newspapers, and outlets for shopping goods at retail or wholesale. The important thing for these uses is to be accessible to the largest possible number of people during the daytime. They occupy the area referred to as “downtown” in the medium-sized city; in very large cities this area may split into a subdistrict specializing in finance (the Lower Broadway region in New York, LaSalle Street in Chicago, State Street in Boston) and another intensively developed district, with equally good transit facilities, devoted primarily to commerce, large hotels and theaters, and offices, e.g., the midtown district of Manhattan.
In the less specialized branches of trade and service, centripetal attraction is weaker and the individual store or motion-picture house, say, can get along outside the main shopping center on the basis of easier access for the buyers of one part of the city. We find, then, outside the areas of peak intensity a broad zone in which trade, services, light industry, and residence are intermingled. In the inner parts of this zone, residence merely fills in the back streets, while the main street frontages are solidly commercial. Farther out, this belt assumes a more and more residential aspect, with shops mainly confined to occasional neighborhood subcenters. Where good transportation and relatively attractive surroundings occur together, e.g., where an important transit artery approaches a park area, intensive residential occupance in the form of large apartment buildings is usually found, some riverside areas, the environs of Central Park in Manhattan, and near Rock Creek Park in Washington.
It is evident from above that the main components of city structure are:
а. Activities that must be located on rail or water terminal facilities and are therefore strung along the network of such facilities, with the larger establishments generally farther out.
b. Highly centripetal “downtown’’ establishments, which cluster near each other and in the area affording best access to the city as a whole.
c. Light industry, unspecialized commerce, and residence, which occupy those parts of the urban and suburban area not preempted by a and b.
d. Convenience-goods establishments (small nonspecialized stores, barber shops, motion-picture theaters, pool halls, eating and drinking places, newsstands, pressing and cleaning shops, and the like), which are distributed at important intersections and along principal streets in all parts of the city approximately in proportion to sidewalk traffic between home and work. They sell in too small quantities to entice the customer far off his beaten path.
The above discussion has run entirely in terms of transfer-cost factors. The distribution of various classes of residence use, however, involves an additional factor: the amenities of a neighborhood. In addition to wanting to live near their work, people like to live in quiet, spacious, clean, temperate surroundings. To this extent they are repelled from neighborhoods with dense traffic, noisy or dirty industry, or dense occupance of any sort. Likewise the local topography in certain directions from the center of the city usually provides much more pleasant residential sites than in other directions— areas of high ground, say, with breezes, preferably to windward of the industrial area, and perhaps with a view and near-by park space. Some of these same topographical features discourage the development of railroads, industrial zones, and cheap intensive housing. Consequently, the pattern of urban uses ordinarily is differentiated by sectors at least as much as by concentric zones, i.e., varying according to direction as well as according to distance from the center. The irregularities introduced by the transit pattern and topography of the particular city and by accidents of historical development and promotion make the actual pattern of urban land uses highly complex. [13]
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NOTA
[13] A good recent collection of ideas and factual materials on this subject is Building the Future City, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 242, November, 1945, especially the article by C. D. Harris and E. L. Ullman, The Nature of Cities, pp. 7-17. A good insight into the factors relevant to urban site selection for retail stores is given by H. G. Canoyer, “Selecting a Store Location,” Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Economic Series No. 56, Washington, 1946. For similar materials relating to specific kinds of enterprises, see other reports in the Industrial (Small Business) Series of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce.
2025-02-09
