M. M. Webber
Some thirty-odd years ago I wrote a series of essays proclaiming the demise of the traditional city. They were contending that, largely because modern transportation and communications systems were rapidly reducing the friction of space, communities of interest were congealing among person who were in close touch but geographically distant. They observed that social and economic activities that are the defining functions of urbanized society are no longer conducted in cities alone.
With most specialized organizations now freed from locational constraints and able to interact with others anywhere, the organized complexity that is urban society no longer resides in cities exclusively. In turn, the concept of "urbanism" and the concept of "city" are no longer coterminous. Built city and socio-economic processes are increasingly independent of each other. Further, just because certain social and economic problems are manifested in city settings, they are not necessarily caused by physical, spatial, or societal conditions there.. Their sources may lie within the larger national and international urban systems that are coming to dominate social and economic life.
Conceiving the city as essentially a massive communications switchboard, the essays argued that a city's spatial form matters primarily as it affects accessibility among partners to interaction and transaction. Hence, spatial dispersion of urban settlements is perfectly okay, they said, so long as there are ubiquitous road networks and plenty of cars and phones. Modern spread-city allows high levels of accessibility, high standards of living, and high industrial and commercial efficiency all at levels comparable to those of concentrated cities of an earlier day. The essays said that both trends -- the emergence of spread-city spatial patterns and the globalization of urban society and the -- suggest that the age of the traditional city is coming to an end.
Dispersing Urban Functions
It's now all too apparent that improvements in transportation and communications systems are indeed permitting intimate relations among distant persons and firms. We're all aware of the integration of the national economy and the further integration of the global economy. Urbanites around the world have been moving their residences and workplaces to the metropolitan edge and into what we used to call hinterlands. Spatial dispersion combined with functional integration is a hallmark of our age. Every major metropolitan area in the world is building low-density suburbs at its edge, rather in the style of Phoenix. Even those that were founded long before automobiles and telephones arrived -- even Paris, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Holland's Randstaad -- are being remodeled to resemble Los Angeles.
The signs of huge increases in long-distance intercourse are everywhere -- in ground and air travel; long-distance freight movements; telephone conversations; worldwide Internet connections; data transmissions; capital movements; worldwide distribution of books, television shows, and music; and the internationalization of virtually all manufactured products. Nearly everyone living in modern times is alert to the global connections that tie even the most local of institutions and activities into the worldwide urban system.
That degree of integration makes it difficult any longer to regard an individual settlement as a unitary phenomenon -- to see a city or metropolis as somehow separable from all those with which it's entangled. The importance of a territorially defined settlement is expressed, increasingly, in the roles its inhabitants play within the larger system of social and economic relationships, no longer only as it serves its residents. In turn, these extensive interconnections belie Census-type definitions of the metropolis as a territorially defined unit. They compel us to look to the larger socio-economic system in which local actors are integrally engaged.
And yet, despite growing ease of interaction over distance and the eroding requirements for propinquity -- despite John Doe's choice of an amiable exurban environment rather than short commuting time; despite the ability of business firms to distribute their offices and factories globally while maintaining real-time communication with their branches, suppliers, and customers worldwide; despite the spatial dispersion of participants in specialized communities-of-interest; despite the erosion of geography -- metropolitan areas have not disappeared. Indeed, they continue to grow. To be sure, they grow mostly at their farthest edges and virtually all within the metropolitan commuting shed. More notable still, old-style central business districts survive, and many of them prosper. Although they suffer traffic congestion and other associated costs of high density, they still attract new establishments, even establishments that might flourish in exurbia equally as well. Although a lot of new development is occurring in such unlikely places as Montana and Arizona, most growth continues to coagulate around established older settlements.
Why is this so? What's the magnet that continues to attract firms and families into high-density, old-style, urban settlements? Why do metropolitan areas continue to prosper? What is it that seems to make some people and some organizations immune to the space-lubricating effects of modern transportation and communication technologies? (Or, to put the question that concerns me most directly, what was wrong in those long-ago essays of mine?)
The Persisting Power of Propinquity
The metropolis is a massive communications switchboard, all right. It exists only because interdependent persons and groups have to be accessible to each other and because the cost of overcoming space has not yet reached zero. If location theorists have it right, and if time and dollar costs were zero, there'd be little reason for urban settlements to exist. People and firms would be in immediate contact with friends and associates even though they were in distant places. They could choose to locate in pleasant surrounds and without suffering the costs that attach to high density. With near-zero time and money costs of transport and communications, we could expect settlements to be scattered over the landscape or, more likely, clustered in environmentally attractive sites. But costs -- especially travel costs -- are not yet anywhere near zero, so people are still settling in large metropolitan areas.
That's partly because we still lack a magic wand that can bring us face-to-face in a flash. Moreover, information received in one's physical presence continues to be more highly valued, more credible than either printed or electronically transmitted data appears to be. And then, the informality of the conversational situation is likely to encourage exchange of more content than one might gain from a programmed transmission. Conversation after an hour in the bar or exchanged over a pillow is likely to be far richer than any exchanged over a fax line.
Face-to-face interaction typically calls for physical movement, for getting the two faces to the same place. A great many other transactions and interactions continue to require travel as well: tasks at workplaces that involve handling physical materials are merely the most obvious of activities immune to electronic media. Although telecommuting seems to work out for a small percentage of employed persons, the numbers remain small. Few employers are willing to release employees from supervision; and then, many information-based jobs require face-to-face exchange if they're to be conducted either efficiently or effectively.
More telling still, contemporary economic activities are increasingly specialized. The metropolis is the gathering place of growing arrays of business and consumer services that are ever-more narrowly focused . They're localized there because they're interdependent and because they need to be physically accessible to their suppliers, customers, and each other at tolerable travel and shipping costs. The complex interplay among specialized firms is encouraged by the access that proximity affords; overcoming distance inevitably involves some time and monetary cost.
Firms that process physical objects can never rely entirely on electronic information systems alone; and freight shipments always carry some level of time loss and monetary expense. Those whose work involves manipulating primarily words and numbers can and do employ the electronic media and are more footloose as a result, albeit constrained by some need for direct contact . The advantages of information received face-to-face and the added attractiveness of chance encounters continue to make urban centers and the resulting agglomeration economies enticing.
Surely the social dynamics of interpersonal relations must be contributing to the tenacity of the agglomerated urban pattern as well. It's no doubt true that many people enjoy the sheer psychological and cultural stimulation that accompanies urban life lived at rather high densities. Many habitual New Yorkers contend they'll never leave Manhattan with its crowds and visible vitality, no matter what the glories of the suburbs. So long as their numbers remain high, Manhattan will remain attractive to the many small consumer and business services that rely on proximate workers and buyers. So long as their numbers remain high, so too will Manhattan's land values. Besides, most people still live out their entire lives in the locales where they reside. For all of us, some portion of our lives is delimited to our local environs. Daily life is largely local, even as our vocational and avocational activities may engage us in affairs of the larger world.
Further, so long as workers must commute to work and until the allegedly universal law of the 30-minute commute is repealed, workers' homes will need to be physically accessible to workplaces. Despite extensive highways and widespread auto ownership, it looks as though most people must still live within the orbit of the metropolis where jobs still tend to cluster.
Automobiles and telephones made it possible for millions to live on the outskirts of the metropolis while remaining accessible to jobs, friends, and the many services they rely on-- including those that are spatially dispersed. The auto-highway system stands as the best transport mode yet invented; there are now more licensed drivers in America than there are cars; and impending improvements promise even greater ease and speed of movement and greater accessibility as well. Telephones and their new electronic recent descendants stand, of course, as the best communication systems ever, especially so in America where everyone has ready access to them. Both cars and phones reflect the culmination of an historically long series of cumulating technologic improvements, all of them one-directional in their effects -- all working to reduce the costs of overcoming geographic space and making for ever-greater locational freedom. The compounding effect of each invention has made for the recent exponential rate of improvement -- improvements marked by the arrival of the computer, the silicon chip, fiber optics, and the rest -- together promising to make long-distance communication ever easier and cheaper. Advances in new light-weight materials combined with modern electronics and new batteries portend greatly improved automobiles and, soon, automated highways. Advances in the Internet portend communications capabilities that even the most venturesome futurists are probably unable to foresee.
But, in an important sense, none of this is news. People have always been able to interact with others across geographic space. What's new is the speed and ease of interaction and transaction across extensive space for virtually everybody and, hence, the level of integration of activities at a local place into the worldwide economic and social systems.
Diversifying Settlements
I suppose no town has ever been an isolated island-economy. Even the mobile Pigmy village periodically comes in contact with neighboring tribes where some level of exchange occurs. It's probably true that inhabitants of every city throughout history have traded with others elsewhere. But it's probably also true that the relative degree of independence has been declining over time. As ease of intercourse has increased, external connections have as well. In turn, the proportion of activities in a local settlement that is aimed internally, that directly serves local participants, is constantly falling. The counterpart of that trend is the constantly rising degree of integration into what has become the worldwide urban system. That system has displaced the local city-based society and economy, making it difficult any longer to deal with the city or metropolis as the object of attention. City settlements continue to grow, but they grow because they are parts of the larger, the global, urban system.
Insofar as our concern is for the geometric shape of urban settlement patterns, the picture is pretty clear. Settlements can now be had in various forms -- high density, low density, mixed land uses, segregated land uses, highly centered, highly subcentered, highly noncentered, even with "neotraditional villages" in some places. Within any given metropolitan settlement many or all these variations might occur. Transportation and communication technologies are highly tolerant of diverse consumer preferences and of diverse land use patterns these days, and many forms are emerging. Similarly, diverse environmental aesthetics are now feasible, matching the preferences of different population groups and reflecting site planners' design capabilities. Beautiful and amiable built environments can be had in any of the varieties of potential land use patterns.
Insofar as our concern is for the large-scale, e.g., the national, pattern of urban settlements, that too is now flexible. Settlement size can be large or small, settlements can be concentrated or scattered, and establishments can choose among those options and yet enjoy comparably efficient operations. They can locate in Wall Street in New York, Main Street in Smalltown, Montana, or Orchard Road in Singapore, as they wish. That's so because, wherever they go, they can stay in touch with whomever they need to be in touch, for they will still be well-connected inside the worldwide urban system.
Insofar as our concern is for the economic vitality and the livability of urban settlements, the internal geometric shape and the national distribution pattern is important primarily as it affects accessibility among the people who live and work there. Individuals' lives are enriched to the degree that they have access to the array of opportunities that are open to them. What matters most to individuals is accessibility to jobs, schools, doctors's offices, recreational activities, friends, and kin. Manufacturers care most about their access to a labor force, suppliers, consumers, and to the many specialized business services they rely upon. To the degree that anything like a collective community remains within the metropolitan area, the commonly valued ingredient is not merely interaction among its members. The metropolitan community survives and thrives depending on the access of its many specialized activities to others elsewhere, to available capital, and to the world's cultural resources.
Despite the attention urban planners and geographers assign to spatial pattern, it should be clear that little, if any, value resides in spatial distribution per se. If there are desirable attributes associated with locational pattern, they are overwhelmingly the consequences for conducting social and economic activities. The attribute that matters most is accessibility -- the ease with which individuals and groups can reach and deal with each other. It continues to amaze me that so much attention is directed to describing and prescribing geographic pattern, rather than to its explaining and tracing its consequences. I was amazed by the planners' and geographers' preoccupation thirty-odd years ago. I continue to be amazed today.
References
"The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm" in Melvin M. Webber (Ed), Explorations into Urban Structure, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964) pp. 19-41;
"Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity," in Lowdon Wingo (Ed.), Cities and Space, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963) pp. 25-54;
"The Post-City Age, Daedalus, Journal of the Amerircan Acdemy of Arts and Sciences, Fall 1968, pp. 1091-1110, reprinted as Martin Meyerson (Ed.), The Conscience of the City (New York: George Braziller, 1970), pp. 1-20
Biographic Note
Melvin M. Webber is Professor Emeritus of Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the former director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development there and of the University of California Transportation Center. Some of his writing pertinent to the Baltimore Seminar is cited in an endnote to his preconference comment. He has also written extensively on the idea of planning, perhaps most notably in an essay with Horst Rittel titled, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, 1973, pp. 155-169.