The North American City

Abstract

The North American city is, then, a malleable creature. Its basic shape would be recognisable to an observer transported from the late 1970s, but a few additions and corrections would surprise, and perhaps please, the visitor from the recent past. One notable trend was the continuing flow of population to North American metropolitan areas. America's population was more widely dispersed among the nation's many metropolitan regions, but the urban areas comprised only a small portion of American territory. The shift in the metropolitan hierarchy was less dramatic in Canada, but Toronto's ongoing eclipse of Montreal was noteworthy. Suburbanisation was, then, alive and well in Canada as thousands of people migrated to Milton and other once-rural locales along the metropolitan fringe. Perhaps the most dramatic change in metropolitan North America was the shift in attitude towards the central cities. In the United States, the metropolitan population continued to move to the south and west.