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City Spaces: Urban Structure
Critical Thinking
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Our Critical Thinking
exercises are designed to reinforce key geographic concepts presented
in Chapter 11. Follow the instructions provided for each question.
Cite specific items from the reference material to support your
conclusions.
From: Urban America:
A History
No two cities are alike. Each
varies along an endless number of dimensions: rates of development,
terrain, population size and composition, problems, challenges,
and resources, to name a few. It is dangerous to think of cities
as slightly different forms of one phenomenon. If we know one
city, we do not know them all.
Cities also change over time,
sometimes with great rapidity. The distance between our lives
and the lives of the settlers who clustered in small bands in
the New World is not just measured by centuries but by an awesome
leap in social experience.
Cities do, however, share a number
of characteristics and develop in similar ways. We find that
certain patterns of urban growth and arrangement are more characteristic
of some periods than others, just as certain tools and processes
characterize particular technological epochs.
. . . The multicentered metropolis
is more fragmented than any earlier urban form. Greater distances
separate ethnic and economic groups. An inclusive public policy
can no longer address all the metropolis's needs. Federal government
policies and funds are still critically important to beleaguered
mayors and city councils, but such help is increasingly focused
on specific purposes—like encouraging business development
in inner-city neighborhoods—rather than the revivification
of the metropolitan area as a whole. Some cities have plunged
into bankruptcy; others are hovering at the brink. The split between
the wealthy and impoverished segments of urban life worsens by
degrees [pp. 6–9].
David R. Goldfield & Blaine
A. Brownell, Urban America: A History (2nd ed, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin,1990.
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