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RECENT METROPOLITAN GROWTH IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES Clifton W. Pannell" Recent decades have witnessed a fundamental shift in the character of the southern United States. (1) From an agrarian, tradition-bound social and economic regional order focused on the small town and regional market/administrative center, the South has developed into a modern, service and highway oriented, urban-based economic region. (2) An objective of this paper is to examine the locational dimension of recent urban growth in the South and to identify causal factors that underlie this growth. Through an analysis of size, growth rates, and number of cities in the southern region, a case is presented that indicates that although southern urban growth is roughly proportional to city size, size alone is not sufficient to explain fully the patterns that have emerged. (3) More elusive factors are also sought and considered, and these are less susceptible to precise measurement and analysis. Growth, progress, and modernization within a national or regional economic system are likely to reflect a checkered pattern in which locales and regions of rapid progress and normal growth are scattered among areas of stagnation or actual decline. Such patterns are not new and may well reflect adjustments to changing economic and technological conditions and opportunities. Their arrangement on an economic landscape gives rise to what are called key growth centers, nuclei for the spread of economic benefits—ideas, innovations, and wealth—which are diffused throughout the national space economy. (4) There are also areas and points of little or no growth. In some cases, regions and places suffer net outmigrations of people with the accompanying severe economic stress. (5) One of the more cogent explanations of the relationship among city size, spacing, and growth rates of cities in developing economies has asserted that as a space economy associated with economic growth and development becomes more integrated, balanced regional diffusion and a spread of economic benefits will result. (6) This spread will be expressed through growth of regional and local urban centers. Over time, a number of nodes and centers will emerge. These centers will grow in a balanced, hierarchical manner, with random exceptions. As growth impulses and benefits spread throughout the state area, growth will occur in proportion to the size of each city. If graphed on two logarithmic scales (population on the vertical axis and rank on the horizontal axis), such a balanced urban hierarchy would appear as a linear, rank-size ordering of urban •Dr. Pannell is assistant professor of geography at the University of Georgia. This paper was accepted for publication in April 1974. Southeastern Geographer centers. (7) Where this benefit/diffusion process fails to occur and economic growth remains concentrated in one large, spatially-eccentric urban center, a condition of primacy results. (8) This implies that some new policy or strategy of regional development focused on smaller cities is needed. (9) SOUTHERN PATTERNS OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT. A rank-size pattern is suggested in the growth trends of southern Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) (Figure 1). As depicted in the graph, SIZE DISTRIBUTION OF SOUTHERN METRO AREAS, 1950-1970 1,000,000 '9So Z O i j D Q. 100,000 O Q. \ l0·000,0100 CITY RANK Source: Compiled from U S; Census Statistics. Cartographic Services, Univ. of Ga.CWP Figure 1 Vol. XIV, No. 1 9 there has been considerable growth at the upper level as the larger cities grow rapidly. Such a trend coincides with Berry's assertion that growth in a city system will tend toward entropy as economic benefits flow throughout the system. On the other hand, there appears to be a threshold among smaller sized cities below which cities grow at less than expected rates, and there appear to be fewer than the expected number of southern SMSAs at the lower end of the rank-size continuum (Figure 1). A cursory visual inspection of the size-distribution graph suggests threshold populations for self-sustaining growth in southern SMSAs. In 1950 this threshold was interpreted to be around 80,000; in 1960 between 125,000 and 150,000, and by 1970, roughly 300,000. (10) All of this seems to suggest a kind of "large-get-larger...

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