North America:
Four Spatial Economic Changes
Population Distribution [napopden]
North Americans are the world’s most mobile people and have continually expanded westward overcoming the physical liabilities of North America with each new technological breakthrough. Eigthteen percent (18%) of U.S. population change residence every year. Interregional (between regions) shift is towards the south and west. The geographic center of population is west of the Mississippi and is likely to continue to move in that direction.
A steady stream of immigrants have assimilated into the culture. People maximize their proximity to existing economic opportunities, showing little resistance to relocating as nation’s economic fortunes change favoring different places over time. This effects growth of cities. The population is moving from rural to urban. Black migration which was from south to north up to the 1940’s is currently reversing.
Overall migration is from north and east to south and west. International immigration is from Mexico, Asia and Central America. Affluent elderly retire in the sunbelt.
Spatial distribution of the U.S. population is rooted in the colonial era of the 17th and 18th centuries dominated by England and France. The French were located in the continental interior while the English were located along the Atlantic seaboard. The interior was closed to settlement due to hostilities between France and Britain.
Former Seaboard colonies had become separate culture hearths – primary source areas and innovation centers [na9nat2]. The New England Culture Hearth influenced southern and western margins of the Great Lakes westward to Oregon and Washington reflecting New England’s architecture and village patterns. The Middle Atlantic extended into the Ohio Valley and south into Tennessee while the Tidewater / Maryland / Virginia extend along the Atlantic Gulf Coast to Louisiana.
[The text of the above was written by Scott Girhard, San Antonio College from his online course GEOG 1301 World Geography. Used with permission.]
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In the United States, the Industrial Revolution occurred almost a century later than in Europe but when it finally crossed the Atlantic in the 1870’s, it took hold so successfully and advanced so robustly that only 50 years later the U.S. surpassed Europe as the world’s strongest industrial power. Social and economic changes that Europe’s industrializing countries experienced were accelerated in the U.S. heightened by the arrival of nearly 25 million European immigrants who headed for jobs in the major manufacturing centers [namanuf] between 1870 and 1914.
The impact of industrial urbanization occurred simultaneously at two levels of spatial generalization. Macroscale – A system of new cities [namegal] rapidly emerged. Specializing in the collection processing and distribution of raw materials and manufactured goods linked together by an efficient web of long-distance and local railroad lines. Microscale – Individual cities prospered in their new role as manufacturing centers generating a new internal structure that still forms the geographic framework of most of the central cities of America’s large metropolitan centers.
[The text of the above was written by Scott Girhard, San Antonio College from his online course GEOG 1301 World Geography. Used with permission.]
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The internal structure of the American metropolis reflected the same mixture of forces that shaped the national urban system. As an industrial city it represented a departure from its European parentage. European Cities are centers of political and military power, are densely populated, have mass transit, have high urban and energy costs and state controls rent, land and energy prices. U.S. cities are economic producers, primary profit-making centers, increasingly decentralized, have some public transportation, mostly private autos, have freeway systems and have relatively low land prices and energy prices. The arrival of the automobile after W.W.I turned America from compact cities to widely dispersed cities of the post W.W.II highway era.
Eras of Intraurban Structural Evolution
[The text of the above was written by Scott Girhard, San Antonio College from his online course GEOG 1301 World Geography. Used with permission.]
Microscale Urbanization
Some features of microscale urbanization include the following. Completion of intraurban expressway system destroys region wide centrality of central city central business district (CBD). Industrial and commercial employers relocate as previous advantages of CBD decline. By the 1970’s suburbs replaced CBD as centers of employment. The development of multiple purpose activity nodes commenced usually near freeway interchanges. These activity nodes then coalesced into suburban downtowns, resulting in a multicentered metropolis consisting of a traditional CBD plus a set of, co-equal suburban downtowns with each activity center serving a discrete and self-sufficient surrounding area. The position of the U.S. central city within this new multinodal metropolis is eroding. No longer the dominant metropolitan wide center for goals and services, the CBD increasingly serves the less affluent residents of the innermost realm and those working downtown.
As inner-city manufacturing employment declined, many cities adapted by shifting toward the growing service industry. Beginning in the 1970’s a trend opposite of suburbanization was observed as people began to return to the central city. This is known as gentrification which describe the movement of middle and upper class in to deteriorated areas of the central city. This usually begins in an inner-city residence with gentrifiers moving into an area that had been run down and more affordable than suburban housing. Infusion of new capital into the housing market usually, results in higher property values which in turn often displaces residents who cannot afford to stay in the area.
Some impacts of suburbanziation are as more jobs and people move to the suburbs the central city loses its former prestige and economic dominance. A common pattern is random development or checkerboard development where housing tracts "jump" over parcels of farmland resulting in a mixture of open lands with built up areas. This pattern results because developers buy cheaper land farther away from built up areas. As a result of this sprawl higher costs are incurred because of increased use of automobiles. Public transportation is often inefficient or nonexistent. Valuable agriculture land is also lost to suburbanization.
There is more air pollution, more energy consumed for fuel and more time spent commuting. Cities often tie the number of buildings permits to availability of existing services and development often focussing on filling up empty parcels near existing suburbanization (called in-filling). A new type of city has also emerged within sprawling metropolitan areas called simply an “edge city”.
[The text of the above was written by Scott Girhard, San Antonio College from his online course GEOG 1301 World Geography. Used with permission.]
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Economic geography is mainly concerned with the locational analysis of productive activities. The North American realm is a good example of the spatial economy, which is divided into five sectors; primary,secondary, tertiary, quaternary and quinary.
Primary is the extractive sector of the economy in which workers and the environment came into client contact – mining, agriculture.
Secondary activity is when raw materials are transformed into finished industrial products – manufacturing sector.
Tertiary is part of the post-industrial phase which includes transportation, communication and utility services. These developed originally in the period when manufacturing was dominant and the geographical distribution of transportation facilities still closely parallels the spatial patterns of primary and secondary industry. Modern industries require well-developed transport systems and every industrial district is served by a network of such facilities.
Quaternary are services required by producers, such as; trade, banking, wholesale, insurance, advertising, real estate, legal services and retail.
Quinary centers on various consumer or household related services, such as; education, administration, recreation/tourism and health/medicine. Post industrial society is organized around computerized knowledge and information including research, publishing, consulting and forecasting. Quinary industries depend on a highly skilled intelligent, creative and imaginative labor force often focused geographically in the old industrial core. Distribution of information-generating Quinary activity also coalesce around major universities and research centers.
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[The text of the above was written by Scott Girhard, San Antonio College from his online course GEOG 1301 World Geography. Used with permission.]