Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000

Introduction

Much recent work in the social science arena has examined the growing “placelessness” of modern American society. Experts point to, variously, the Internet, satellite television, globalization of the consumer economy, the increase in long-distance moves, and the decline in measures of “social capital” as evidence that Americans are less attached than ever before to the particular places in which they live.1 True enough, few Americans today buy their groceries at the corner market . But the places in which people live—which are defined by both political and social boundaries—still reflect a lot about their inhabitants. In turn, those communities shape the views and experiences of those who inhabit them. In choosing where to live, Americans select not just their neighbors, but also their job opportunities, their children’s schools, their commute, their future home wealth, their health care, and their places of worship and congregation. In other words, place still matters, and where we live says a lot about how we live. This, the third volume of the Redefining Urban and Suburban America series, examines the contours and implications of the nation’s shifting residential landscape. It represents a confluence of the first two volumes, 1 Introduction A L A N B E R U B E , B R U C E K A T Z , A N D R O B E R T E . L A N G 1. See, for example, Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness(London: Pion, 1976); Ada Louise Huxtable,TheUnrealAmerica(NewYork:NewPress,1997);ManuelCastells, TheInformational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). For an alternative view, see Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1995). drawing on both short-form census questionnaire subjects such as population and ethnicity and detailed long-form subjects such as income and educational attainment. The analytical lens of this volume remains a geographic one, centered specifically on metropolitan areas, cities, and in some cases, neighborhoods. The volume seeks to provide a clearer view of what the results of Census 2000 have revealed about the changing shape of American places, and ultimately, how those results have changed the very idea of the city, the suburb, and the small town. The diversity of outcomes across places—on measures such as population growth, racial and ethnic diversity, employment, and income— reinforces the need to look beyond the national level to discern the impacts of demographic and economic change on a country as large as the United States. The first four chapters describe how centers of growth in the United States shifted over the 1990s and beyond. Immigration and migration and patterns of development and redevelopment have given rise to population and household growth in a distinct set of places, both new and old. The next four chapters examine the social consequences of the divergent growth patterns within and across cities, metropolitan areas, and larger regions. The forces of integration and segregation, by income and by race, have produced differing outcomes for different parts of the nation and their inhabitants. These chapters document the shifting arrangement of people and jobs in metropolitan areas and the possible consequences for the social and economic health of those places. The population dynamics explored in this volume and past volumes have contributed to a changed urban and suburban landscape in the United States. The last two chapters describe how the federal government has modi fied the very system used to classify U.S. cities and suburbs in response to those dynamics and the likely implications for political and popular views of where Americans live. SHIFTING GROWTH CENTERS SIGNAL NEW URBAN AND SUBURBAN DESTINATIONS The rise and fall—and rise again—of major American cities have commanded a great deal of attention among researchers and in the media. So, too, has the post–World War II suburban population boom, which continues in most metropolitan regions today. Yet these general patterns overlook the diverse gains made within cities and metropolitan areas. An emerging set of new growth centers, the subject of the first four chapters of this volume , has forced us to refine our mental map of which communities within metropolitan America drove population growth in the 1990s. 2 Alan Berube, Bruce Katz, and Robert E. Lang [3.133.87.156] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 15:19 GMT...