BiblioVault - Books about Urban Growth

Fighting Sprawl and City Hall

Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest

Michael F. Logan

University of Arizona Press, 1995

The line is drawn in cities of the American West: on one side, chambers of commerce, developers, and civic boosters advocating economic growth; on the other, environmentalists and concerned citizens who want to limit what they see as urban sprawl. While this conflict is usually considered to have its origins in the rise of environmental activism during the late 1960s, opposition to urban growth in the Southwest began as early as the economic boom that followed World War II. Evidence of this resistance abounds, but it has been largely ignored by both western and urban historians.

Fighting Sprawl and City Hall now sets the record straight, tracing the roots of antigrowth activism in two southwestern cities, Tucson and Albuquerque, where urbanization proceeded in the face of constant protest. Logan tells how each of these cities witnessed multifaceted opposition to post-war urbanization and a rise in political activism during the 1950s. For each city, he describes the efforts by civic boosters and local government to promote development, showing how these booster-government alliances differed in effectiveness; tells how middle-class Anglos first voiced opposition to annexations and zoning reforms through standard forms of political protest such as referendums and petitions; then documents the shift to ethnic resistance as Hispanics opposed urban renewal plans that targeted barrios. Environmentalism, he reveals, was a relative latecomer to the political arena and became a focal point for otherwise disparate forms of resistance.

Logan's study enables readers to understand not only these similarities in urban activism but also important differences; for example, Tucson provides the stronger example of resistance based on valuation of the physical environment, while Albuquerque better demonstrates anti-annexation politics. For each locale, it offers a testament to grass-roots activism that will be of interest to historians as well as to citizens of its subject cities.

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Habitat Conservation Planning

Endangered Species and Urban Growth

By Timothy Beatley

University of Texas Press, 1994

As environmental awareness grows around the world, people are learning that a diversity of species and the habitat to support them is necessary to maintain the ecological health of the earth. At the same time, however, the pressure to develop wildlife habitat for human settlement and economic gain also grows, causing frequent clashes between the forces of development and of conservation.

This pioneering study focuses on a new tool for resolving the land-use conflict—the creation of habitat conservation plans (HCPs). Timothy Beatley explores the development and early results of this provision of the United States' federal Endangered Species Act, which allows development of some habitat and a certain "take" of a protected species in return for the conservation of sufficient habitat to ensure its survival and long-term recovery.

Beatley looks specifically at nine HCPs in California, Nevada, Texas, and Florida, states where biological diversity and increasing populations have triggered many conflicts. Some of the HCPs include the San Bruno Mountain HCP near San Francisco, the North Key Largo HCP in the Florida Keys, the Clark County HCP near Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Balcones Canyonlands HCP near Austin, Texas. This first comprehensive overview of habitat conservation planning in the United States will be important reading for everyone involved in land-use debates.

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Urban Growth and City-Systems in the United States, 1840–1860

Allan R. Pred

Harvard University Press, 1980

In this major new work of urban geography, Allan Pred interprets the process by which major cities grew and the entire city-system of the United States developed during the antebellum decades. The book focuses on the availability and distribution of crucial economic information. For as cities developed, this information helped determine the new urban areas in which business opportunities could be exploited and productive innovations implemented.

Pred places this original approach to urbanization in the context of earlier, more conventional studies, and he supports his view by a wealth of evidence regarding the flow of commodities between major cities. He also draws on an analysis of newspaper circulation, postal services, business travel, and telegraph usage. Pred's book goes far beyond the usual “biographies” of individual cities or the specialized studies of urban life. It offers a large and fascinating view of the way an entire city-system was put together and made to function. Indeed, by providing the first full account of these two decades of American urbanization, Pred has supplied a vital and hitherto missing link in the history of the United States.

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Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information

The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840

Allan R. Pred

Harvard University Press, 1973

This book analyzes how information circulated before the telegraph. Using newspapers and their contents, postal services, the volume of commodity trade, and travel patterns to analyze information circulation, Allan Pred provides a cogent and complete description of interrelationships among the large cities during the period from 1790 to 1840. His principal concern, however, is with general urban-growth and locational processes. Developments between 1790 and 1840 are studied in order to understand the growth process of all systems of cities, both past and present.

Allan Pred has developed a multiple-loop feedback model to describe the process by which a few cities established their long-term dominance, or high rank, during the early growth of particular urban systems and subsystems. The model includes non-local multiplier effects generated by local urban growth, allows interurban trade and information flows mutually to reinforce one another, and permits “spatially biased” information circulation to influence where business opportunities are exploited and how economic innovations are diffused. Several interurban innovation diffusion processes are examined to confirm the validity of certain aspects of the model.

Examples of both hierarchical and non-hierarchical diffusion processes are given, including the spread of the Bank Panic of 1837, daily newspapers, and steam engines. Much information is presented in the form of clear and illuminating tables, figures, and maps. This study, by historical perspective on social change and deeper insight into the importance of information circulation in urban growth, should be immensely valuable to current regional and locational planning.

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