3/18/2018 The Most Famous Models for How Cities Grow Are Wrong - CityLab

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Ernest Burgess

The Most Famous Models for How Cities

Grow Are Wrong
RICHARD FLORIDA AUG 9, 2013

In the last hundred years, one of the most enduring models of urban development has been the iconic
"concentric zones" map. Outlined by Chicago School sociologist Ernest Burgess, it was initially
published in the classic 1925 volume The City, by Burgess and his University of Chicago colleague
Robert Park.

This Chicago School model suggests that cities grow steadily outward from the urban core or central
business district. Surrounding this commercial core is a "zone in transition," with factories and
warehouses. Beyond this comes the tenements and apartments of the working class, next the middle-
class neighborhoods of larger homes, and ultimately the affluent commuter zones.
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How well has this model -- or, really, any model -- held up over the past century of urban growth?

It's a question that animated Andrew A. Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College.
Beveridge used detailed, census tract-level data on changing population density since 1910 to
determine whether our pa erns match up to existing theories. In addition to the Chicago School
model, he considered two others:

The Los Angeles model, based on the theories of urbanists from UCLA and USC, which argues
that growth does not follow an orderly concentric pa ern but, based on the experience of post-
war L.A., occurs in a sprawling fashion, as a multiplicity of commercial, industrial and
residential areas spread outward without noticeable pa ern.
The New York school, which Beveridge associates with Jane Jacobs and William Whyte,
suggests that most economically productive districts and the most desirable residential areas
are concentrated in and around the city’s dense center; growth in the periphery is less
pa erned.

Ultimately, Beveridge's interesting analysis found that the basic Chicago School pa ern held for the
early part of the 20th century and even into the heyday of American post-war suburbanization. But
more recently, the process and pa ern of urban development has diverged in ways that confound
this classic model.

The maps (below) from his study below contrast changes of density of these major metros for the
earliest decade available – in Chicago and New York from 1910 to 1920, and in Los Angeles from 1940
to 1950.

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The pa ern of urban growth and decline has become more complicated in the past couple of decades
as urban centers, including Chicago, have come back. "When one looks at the actual spatial pa erning
of growth," Beveridge notes, "one can find evidence that supports exponents of the Chicago, Los
Angeles and New York schools of urban studies in various ways." Many cities have vigorously
growing downtowns, as the New York model would suggest, but outlying areas that are developing
without any obvious pa ern, as in the Los Angeles model.

The second set of maps (below) get at this, comparing Chicago in the decades 1910-20 and 1990-2000.
In the first part of the twentieth century, decline was correlated with decline in adjacent downtown
areas, shown here in grey. Similarly, growth was correlated with growth in more outlying suburbs,
shown here in black. In the earlier period growth radiated outwards -- a close approximate of the
Chicago school concentric zone model. But in the more recent map, growth and decline followed less
clear pa erns. Some growth concentrated downtown, while other areas outside the city continued to
boom, in ways predicted more accurately by the New York and Los Angeles models. The islands of
grey and black--which indicate geographic correlations of decline and growth, respectively--are far
less systematic. As Beveridge writes, the 1990-2000 map shows very li le pa erning. There were
"areas of clustered high growth (both within the city and in the suburbs), as well as decline near
growth, growth near decline, and decline near decline."

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On the on hand, the ongoing "back to the city" is bringing middle class people back to the core, and
shifting poverty to the the suburbs, a process Alan Ehrenhalt dubs "the great inversion." But we are
also seeing increasingly divided cities, and inequality that has not existed before. This is something I
have explored in my series of posts on class-divided cities. Important studies by Robert
Sampson and Patrick Sharkey note that as inequality has grown, and once high-paying
manufacturing jobs have disappeared, our economy and labor market has divided. Those with more
high paying knowledge jobs have clustered in and around the core, and a much larger number of
low-wage service workers have been pushed to the outskirts of both urban and suburban knowledge
zones.

The post-industrial city and metropolis is evolving as a patchwork of concentrated and persistent
disadvantage alongside concentrated and increasingly self perpetuating advantage.

Top Image: Ernest Burgess's Concentric Zones, first published in The City in 1925.

About the Author

Richard Florida
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3/18/2018 The Most Famous Models for How Cities Grow Are Wrong - CityLab
@RICHARD_FLORIDA / FEED

Richard Florida is a co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The
Atlantic. He is a University Professor and Director of Cities at the University of Toronto’s
Martin Prosperity Institute, and a Distinguished Fellow at New York University’s Schack
Institute of Real Estate.

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world’s cities: how they work, the challenges they
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