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Jon C. Teaford is professor of history at Purdue University, and author of, among others, The Twentieth Century American City (Johns Hopkins, 2nd ed., 1993) and The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Johns Hopkins, 1990).

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The Metropolitan Revolution

Columbia University Press

Chapter One

In 2003 urban scholar Robert Lang issued a new communique from the nation's little-understood metropolitan expanse. Challenging Joel Garreau's decade-old prediction that edge cities were reestablishing dense, mixed-use, identifiable centers in the metropolitan mass, Lang claimed that instead the prevailing pattern was the edgeless city, "a form of sprawling office development that does not have the density or cohesiveness of edge cities" but accounted "for the bulk of the office space found outside downtowns." According to Lang, "Sprawl is back-or, more accurately, it never went away." "Isolated office buildings or small clusters of buildings" were spread over "vast swaths of metropolitan space," and as a prime example Lang offered Edison's central New Jersey, where "edgeless cities stretch over a thousand square miles of metropolitan area." In other words, the multicentered metropolis was seemingly as passe as its single-centered ancestor. Metropolitan American was continuing its relentless advance across the countryside, eschewing concentration for sprawl.

Anyone driving the highways of New Jersey, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Texas, or California would have strongly seconded Lang's findings. Commercial outlets spread in all directions and small office buildings with large parking lots proliferated at a faster pace than suburban high-rises served by multilevel garages. Strip centers skirting highways and giant discount stores convenient to motorists proved more attractive to time-conscious shoppers than many of the older malls that had dominated retailing for the past four decades. For the many customers who did not want to linger or stroll, a dense concentration of businesses had little appeal. If commerce was spread out along the highways, motorists could move as rapidly as possible along these asphalt conveyor belts, collecting goods and services as they passed. After all, one did not go to the dentist, grocery, or video store to experience some city planner's notion of diverse urbanity or to partake of some uplifting ambience. The idea was to get in, do one's business, and get out as quickly and conveniently as possible. Taking advantage of drive-through windows at drugstores, banks, and fast-food restaurants, customers might not even need to leave the comfort of their cars but instead could experience to the fullest the automobility of the edgeless city.

Meanwhile, housing subdivisions sprouted in barren fields, and the rate of residential sprawl seemed to accelerate. Once quiet suburbs emerged among the ranks of the nation's most populous cities, leading urban commentators to dub them boomburbs. By 2000, Virginia Beach could boast of 425,000 residents, up from 5,000 in 1950 and almost twice the population of Norfolk, the historic hub of tidewater Virginia. The Phoenix area included seven "suburban" cities with populations over 100,000, led by Mesa, with almost 400,000 inhabitants. Moreover, the growth of the Arizona boomburbs was not abating; in the mid-1990s, houses were reportedly consuming the Arizona desert at the rate of an acre per hour. Both Virginia Beach and Mesa were already more populous than such traditional hubs as Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, and Cincinnati. In California, there were twenty-five boomburbs with populations of more than 100,000, and the Denver metropolitan area was the site of three of these outlying giants, the largest being Aurora, with 276,000 people. Dallas was ringed by seven boomburbs that topped the 100,000 mark, headed by Arlington, whose population grew from 8,000 in 1950 to 333,000 in 2000. In these cities, growth was a way of life during the late twentieth century. Between 1986 and 1989, a breakneck annexation campaign more than doubled Aurora's area to 140 square miles. A Denver newspaper accused Aurora of being "bent on annexing Kansas and beyond." "Arlington is a pro-growth town," observed a former planning official of the Texas city at the close of the 1980s. "Always has been, always will be." Many observers felt that the physical evidence of unthinking, sprawling growth was all too obvious in many of the boomtowns. An early-twenty-first-century visitor to Aurora wrote of the Colorado giant: "It has no discernible downtown, no town center, just mile after mile of strip malls, small mom-and-pops, ethnic restaurants, and ranch-style housing developments."

The boomburbs were not only large, and growing larger, but most were becoming more diverse, defying long-standing notions of ethnic and lifestyle homogeneity in suburbia. A University of Michigan study completed in 1999 judged Aurora "the most integrated city in the United States," and Aurora's school system claimed that sixty-eight languages were spoken in the city's households. In 2000, 20 percent of the population was Hispanic, and 12 percent was African American. The Aurora community services directory was printed in English, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian. "Everywhere you go, it's like you're in a different country, with all the cultures and people," observed an enthusiastic Aurora resident. "I feel sorry for people who live in all-black or all-white neighborhoods because they don't know what they're missing."

Not only were there booming young cities welcoming people from around the world, but small towns and unincorporated areas in outlying counties were exploding with newcomers who had few or no ties to the region's historic hub city. By 2000, three suburban counties in the Atlanta area had over 500,000 residents, with Gwinnett County's population having soared from 32,000 in 1950 to 588,000 fifty years later. In 2004 Gwinnett County's school system was the largest in Georgia, with a more diverse student population than that of the predominantly black city of Atlanta. Twenty-three percent of the students were African American, 17 percent were Hispanic, and 10 percent were Asian American. Moreover, at the turn of the century, there seemed no prospect that Gwinnett's growth or that of surrounding counties would soon cease. In 1999 Time magazine ran a picture of new houses in Gwinnett County with the caption "Spread Alert" and questioned whether this was "part of the fastest widening human settlement ever."

Many residents of the ever more populous political units of the edgeless city maintained a carefully controlled lifestyle and a sense of grassroots rule by resorting to the private governments of homeowner associations. Large, diverse counties or boomburbs could not provide government tailored to a single subdivision, but the associations could, thus preserving the local control traditionally valued in suburbia even while populations soared. In the crime-ridden, threatening metropolitan world of the late twentieth century, the proliferating homeowner associations also offered the sense of security associated with small towns and traditional residential suburbs. This was especially evident in the growing number of gated communities, walled subdivisions that were off-limits to nonresidents. Homeowner associations maintained the surrounding walls as well as the community's private streets and the recreation areas open only to subdivision residents and their guests. Many such communities hired guards to staff gatehouses or imposed a system of key cards or entry codes that ensured only authorized persons could enter the subdivision. Originally popular among Sun Belt retirees, gated...