Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
As the community grows there is not merely a multiplication of houses
and roads but a process of differentiation and segregation takes place
as well. Residences and institutions spread out in centrifugal fashion
from the central point of the community, while business concentrates
more and more around the spot of highest land values. Each cyclic
increase of population is accompanied by greater differentiation in both
service and location. There is a struggle among utilities for the
vantage-points of position. This makes for increasing value of land and
increasing height of buildings at the geographic center of the
community. As competition for advantageous sites becomes keener with the
growth of population, the first and economically weaker types of
utilities are forced out to less accessible and lower-priced areas. By
the time the community has reached a population of about ten or twelve
thousand, a fairly well-differentiated structure is attained. The
central part is a clearly defined business area with the bank, the
drugstore, the department store, and the hotel holding the sites of
highest land value. Industries and factories usually comprise
independent formations within the city, grouping around railroad tracks
and routes of water traffic. Residence sections become established,
segregated into two or more types, depending upon the economic and
racial composition of the population.
The structural growth of community takes place in successional sequence
not unlike the successional stages in the development of the plant
formation. Certain specialized forms of utilities and uses do not appear
in the human community until a certain stage of development has been
attained, just as the beech or pine forest is preceded by successional
dominance of other plant species. And just as in plant communities
successions are the products of invasion, so also in the human community
the formations, segregations, and associations that appear constitute
the outcome of a series of invasions.[50]
There are many kinds of intra-community invasions, but in general they
may be grouped into two main classes: those resulting in change in use
of land, and those which introduce merely change in type of occupant. By
the former is meant change from one general use to another, such as of a
residential area into a business area or of a business into an
industrial district. The latter embraces all changes of type within a
particular use area, such as the changes which constantly take place in
the racial and economic complexion of residence neighborhoods, or of the
type of service utility within a business section. Invasions produce
successional stages of different qualitative significance, that is, the
economic character of the district may rise or fall as the result of
certain types of invasion. This qualitative aspect is reflected in the
fluctuations of land or rental values.
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