A City Designed to Keep People In

Abstract

A City Designed to Keep People In GERRY A. HALE and LAY JAMES GIBSON" In 1962 Fielding published an article entitled "Dairying in Cities Designed to Keep People Out."1 He dealt with a number of cities in the Los Angeles area which came into being to protect dairy farmers from the threat of impending urban sprawl. Colma, California, also a specially incorporated area, was founded by and for the protection of several cemetery owners. It is truly a "city designed to keep people m. This paper is the result of field reconnaissance in the spring of 1968 for the purpose of acquiring first-hand information on a specialpurpose city as a part of a broader investigation into the general nature of such cities.2 The purpose of this paper is to provide (a) a sketch of Colma as a geographic unit having an identifiable, coherent pattern of land use and (b) some observations and speculations on the functional aspects of the city. Fielding's investigation of Cypress, Dairyland, and Dairy Valley and Nelson's earlier work on Vernon, California,3 are examples of * Dr. Hale is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles 90024. Dr. Gibson is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Arizona, Tucson 85721. This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association at Bellingham in June 1968. 1 Gordon J. Fielding, "Dairying in Cities Designed to Keep People Out," The Professional Geographer, Vol. 14, No. 1, January 1962, pp. 12-17. 2 In this paper the special-purpose city is an incorporated municipality having a special interest or function which is aided and protected by means of incorporation. Frequently, incorporation takes place to allow local interests to retain control over land use, land zoning, and tax rates, changes which may threaten already established property uses. In some instances, the city may acquire its special-purpose function sometime after incorporation, but the same advantages of local control accrues to the property owners and users. 3 Howard J. Nelson, "The Vernon Area, California: A Study of the Political Factor in Urban Geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers , Vol. 42, No. 2, June 1952, pp. 177-191. 161 162ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS geographical studies of special-purpose cities. At first it would seem that any study dealing with these cities or, for that matter, this study of Colma, would be an exercise in the taxonomy of the unique. Further consideration, however, suggests thatunits of space whichmight be legal entities such as Colma or zoned districts within multipurpose cities are common in American urbanized landscapes, indicating that administrative, legal, and political factors share with the forces of the economic marketplace in determining urban land use. The town of Colma, with 500 inhabitants,4 is located on the upper San Francisco peninsula just south of the San Francisco city limit (Figure 1). The communities of Broadmoor, Daly City, and South San Francisco fit snugly against Colma on the north, west, and south. The steep but open slopes of the San Bruno Mountains mark the boundary on the east. Colma centers on a northwest-southeast trending valley which is paralleled to the southwest by a gentle range of hills and to the northeast by the more rugged San Bruno Mountains . The town is drained by Colma Creek, which flows southeastwards to San Francisco Bay. The principal lines of transportation conform to the general orientation of the landforms. The northwest-southeast running highways may be used to divide the city into three segments. On the west the new Junípero Serra freeway serves as the city boundary; farther east, Colma's portion of the El Camino Real, or Mission Road as it is known locally, parallels Colma Creek for about one and onefourth miles, and still farther east is Hillside Boulevard, stretching across the alluvial piedmont of the San Bruno Mountains roughly midway between El Camino and the eastern city limit. Of the three highways, El Camino is clearly the most important, with Hillside serving as a poor second in terms of traffic volume and number of commercial establishments. Junípero Serra simply acts as a barrier between Colma and...