Industrialization, Initial Advantage, and American Metropolitan Growth

Abstract

T HE spatial, as well as the economic and social, processes of nineteenthand twentieth-century urbanization and industrialization are not independent. The phenomena that led to the concurrent emergence of the modern American metropolis and large-scale manufacturing are dynamically involuted and nearly always inseparable.' Urbanization, as in the case of Washington, D. C., is not inexorably associated with industrial growth;2 yet, conversely, the multiplication of factories, product output, and markets since 1860 is virtually synonymous with city development. That the largest urban concentrations have played a monumental role in American industrial expansion is underscored by the fact that, in 1961, 37.5 percent of the nation's value added by manufacture was accounted for by ten metropolises, which in turn contained 27.0 percent of the total 1960 population.3 The complex reciprocals of urbanization and industrialization are crucial girders in the superstructure of economic growth. Perhaps because capital formation and investment are viewed as this entity's most significant components, economists and others have logically and legitimately emphasized their part in the growth process, and have conducted only limited theoretical inquiries into the spatial interaction of urban and manufacturing growth.4 Within this context, the concentration of much of American manufacturing and population in ten metropolises leads one to pose at least two basic ques-