America has undergone a number of significant changes since the Colonial period. Over the course of a couple of hundred years, the country has seen its economy change, it has seen drastic changes in racial makeup, and perhaps most importantly, it has seen a change in where and how people live. Specifically, the country has seen people move from rural areas into a number of cities, with this urban migration have drastic economic and social effects on the nation at large. The growth of American cities has been both a positive and negative, with Americans being forced to trade some of their comforts for a city that life that offers both economic opportunity and disorienting disorder.
The growth and development of cities has taken place over the course of a number of periods. As Lewis Mumford writes in The City, American city history can be traced to three distinct periods, including the Provincial period, the Commercial period, and the Industrial period (Mumford 74). The Provincial period began shortly after people flocked to Manhattan, and it ended after the War of 1812, when individuals began to cut commerce routes through the sea. This period, it seems, sums up quite perfectly the exchange that individuals were forced to make when deciding to live in a city. They traded comfort and organization for economic opportunity. Mumford describes the ways in which, during the early days in New York City, streets were not organized. They led only to the businesses that they were designed for. This might seem like a little thing, but according to the author, it was not. Rather, it produced the sort of life where people lived in disorder. With the provincial city, people gave up the comfort and ease of their country life, opting instead for a city life that was more difficult to figure out and much more difficult to organize.
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The Commercial era brought new challenges. While disorganization was the norm in the Provincial period, the cities of the Commercial period started to bring about things like traffic and realty speculation. Cities, then, became something more than just places where people lived. Rather, cities became the heart of economic opportunity. There was money to be made in these cities, of course, but in order to make that money, one had to put up with a host of human inconveniences. People were put into close quarters, and expansion made it so that people in Commercial period cities could hardly trust that their particular space in a city would be the same in the coming months or years.
This, it seems, is one of the primary contrasts and trade-offs that people were required to make as cities became the norm in America during this time. On a plot of country, rural land, people could be basically sure of what would come in the next year or five years. They could plan their lives, and those lives generally revolved around the agriculture that made their land profitable. If things changed, people were in control of those changes, and in fact, they were the cause of those changes. This was not exactly true in Commercial period cities, however. People were, in essence, placed down into bustling space where their sense of control was usurped by outside forces. There were positives, of course. With the growth of Commercial period cities, more banking took place, and people were able to grow their money if they had the wherewithal to do so. Likewise, these cities provided economic opportunity that might be able to provide wages bigger and better than what an average rural citizen might earn. Cities allowed for a growing professional class, giving people with those sorts of skills the chance to operate in a non-rural manner. In essence, this was the period in which people began to truly recognize the realities of the trades they were being asked to make with their own lives.
Around the time of the Industrial period, many began to see city living in a different light. As Still writes, one of the advantages of city life was that people, for the first time, got to be close to one another and to experience the sort of happiness that can come when people are connected (Still 235). He referred to the “gregariousness” of cities in discussing how social benefits flowed in addition to commercial benefits. Cities, it seems, made political action more possible, giving people during the Industrial Revolution the ability to fight for better working conditions and wages. When political action demands numbers and a cohesive thought, a rural setting is a much more difficult launching ground. As the same time, this period showed some of the warts that continue to plague cities today. As Carnahan, Gove, and Galle write, overcrowding in cities tends to create problems like crime, and these factors tend to make life more difficult for developing children, who need both a safe environment and an environment where they can be active in order to properly develop (62).
With this in mind, people have been essentially forced to sacrifice some of the things that might make life easier on their children for other things – economic resources – that might make life easier on those same children. As Bhidé writes, cities provide tremendous opportunities for innovation, and in the twenty-first century, they provide people with the opportunity to create things that might not be possible without the sort of close connectedness that is bred by cities (9).
Overall, cities in the United States have developed tremendously over the centuries, and while these things have brought many positives, they have also brought negatives. People have been forced to surrender some of the order that they found so comforting. In exchange, they have received economic opportunity, political opportunity, and the chance to be a part of the technological revolution. Cities, it seems, have evolved over time, and in the process, they have forced human beings to evolve, too.
