The Post-City Age

Author(s): Melvin M. Webber

Source: Daedalus , Fall, 1968, Vol. 97, No. 4, The Conscience of the City (Fall, 1968), pp.
1091-1110
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20013413

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MELVIN M. WEBBER

The Post-City Age

Tim PRAGMATIC traditions in American political life have led us to

attack the manifest problems of the moment with heavy commit
ment, but to avoid the longer-term confrontation of underlying
issues. The several governmental attempts to undertake long-range
problem analysis, forecasting, and planning have never succeeded.
We have yet to implant a counter-tradition in America that, by ex
ploring the future, would inform a national development policy.
This failing reflects, in part, the current status of the social sciences,
which have not developed adequate predictive theory in most fields
of national concern. It is sobering that no sociologist predicted the
magnitude of the Negro Revolt, that no prewar urbanist anticipated
the postwar development patterns in American cities, and that,
most troubling of all, no one has yet written systematic alternative
futures seeking to chart the possible course of events in these fields.
As one consequence of our political traditions and our inade
quate theory, we tend to overreact to events of the day. When a
curve turns upward, we expect that it will go off the top of the
chart; when it turns down, we despair that it will fall off the
bottom. A decade ago we were all assured that America was float
ing serenely in middle-class affluence and that things could only
get better. Then we suddenly changed our national self-image when
we discovered a large lower-class population and large-scale pov
erty. The demonstrations of the past five summers have alterna
tively been read as signs of a new egalitarianism in America or an
impending apartheid. We had thought our public school system
was unexcelled, until Sputnik shocked us into wholesale reform.
We believed that suburban development was going to provid
decent homes for all, and now we believe that nothing short of
immediate reconstruction of the old cities can save them from
disaster.
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DAiDALUS

There can be no doubt about the imperatives for confronting

the current crises that are associated with the contemporary city.
The outcries from the Negro ghetto must be, answered humbly,
humanely, and immediately; and that will call for huge invest
ments of intellectual capital and federal money. The scale of the
current building and rebuilding enterprise in the cities is unprece
dented. We shall have to double the size of our physical plant
during the next thirty-five years; and that, too, must command
full-scale commitment of our intellectual and financial resources.
It now appears as though these investments will be forthcoming.
largely because the current crisis has captured the nation's con
science and partly because it is our style to respond to emergencies
in force.
But it will be an unfortunate mistake, another repetition of our
traditional propensities, if we pour our resources into the manifest
problems without also dealing with the less visible underlying
issues. A deep-swell is shaping those curves on our month-to-month
charts-a large historical change that may reshape the character
of urban society in the developed world. This, too, must command
our attention, for the coming changes may so inhibit future social
mobility that our present short-run, ameliorative programs could
prove ineffective in retrospect. If so, we had better try to anticipate
those changes and then modify our action programs to conform.

Urbanization Beyond the City

We are passing through a revolution that is unhitching the

social processes of urbanization from the locationally fixed city
and region. Reflecting the current explosion in science and tech
nology, employment is shifting from the production of goods to
services; increasing ease of transportation and communication is
dissolving the spatial barriers to social intercourse; and Americans
are forming social communities comprised of spatially dispersed
members. A new kind of large-scale urban society is emerging
that is increasingly independent of the city. In turn, the problems
of the city place generated by early industrialization are being
supplanted by a new array different in kind. With but a few re
maining exceptions (the new air pollution is a notable one), the
recent difficulties are not place-type problems at all. Rather, they
are the transitional problems of a rapidly developing society
economy-and-polity whose turf is the nation. Paradoxically, just at
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 The Post-City Age
the time in history when policy-makers and the world press are
discovering the city, "the age of the city seems to be at an end."'
Our failure to draw the rather simple conceptual distinction
between the spatially defined city or metropolitan area and the
social systems that are localized there clouds current discussions
about the "crisis of our cities."2 The confusion stems largely from
the deficiencies of our language and from the anachronistic thought
ways we have carried over from the passing era. We still have no
adequate descriptive terms for the emerging social order, and so
we use, perforce, old labels that are no longer fitting. Because we
have named them so, we suppose that the problems manifested
inside cities are, therefore and somehow, "city problems." Because
societies in the past had been spatially and locally structured, and
because urban societies used to be exclusively city-based, we seem
still to assume that territoriality is a necessary attribute of social
systems.
The error has been a serious one, leading us to seek local solu
tions to problems whose causes are not of local origin and hence
are not susceptible to municipal treatment. We have been tempted
to apply city-building instruments to correct social disorders, and
we have then been surprised to find that they do not work. (Our
experience with therapeutic public housing, which was supposed
to cure "social pathologies," and urban renewal, which was sup
posed to improve the lives of the poor, may be our most spectacular
failures.) We have lavished large investments on public facilities,
but neglected the quality and the distribution of the social ser
vices. And we have defended and reinforced home-rule preroga
tives of local and state governments with elaborate rhetoric and
protective legislation.
Neither crime-in-the-streets, poverty, unemployment, broken
families, race riots, drug addiction, mental illness, juvenile delin
quency, nor any of the commonly noted "social pathologies" mark
ing the contemporary city can find its causes or its cure there. We
cannot hope to invent local treatments for conditions whose origins
are not local in character, nor can we expect territorially defined
governments to deal effectively with problems whose causes are
unrelated to territory or geography. The concepts and methods of
civil engineering and city planning suited to the design of unitary
physical facilities cannot be used to serve the design of social
change in a pluralistic and mobile society. In the novel society
now emerging-with its sophisticated and rapidly advancing sci
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D]AMDALUS

ence and technology, its complex social organization, and its in

ternally integrated societal processes-the influence and significance
of geographic distance and geographic place are declining rapidly.
This is, of course, a most remarkable change. Throughout vir
tually all of human history, social organization coincided with
spatial organization. In preindustrial society, men interacted almost
exclusively with geographic neighbors. Social communities, econ
omies, and polities were structured about the place in which in
teraction was least constrained by the frictions of space. With the
coming of large-scale industrialization during the latter half of the
nineteenth century, the strictures of space were rapidly eroded,
abetted by the new ease of travel and communication that the in
dustrialization itself brought.
The initial counterparts of industrialization in the United States
were, first, the concentration of the nation's population into large
settlements and, then, the cultural urbanization of the population.
Although these changes were causally linked, they had opposite
spatial effects. After coming together at a common place, people
entered larger societies tied to no specific place. Farming and vil
lage peoples from throughout the continent and the world migrated
to the expanding cities, where they learned urban ways, acquired
the occupational skills that industrialization demanded, and be
came integrated into the contemporary society.
In recent years, rising societal scale and improvements in trans
portation and communications systems have loosed a chain of effects
robbing the city of its once unique function as an urbanizing
instrument of society. Farmers and small-town residents, scattered
throughout the continent, were once effectively removed from the
cultural life of the nation. City folks visiting the rural areas used to
be treated as strangers, whose styles of living and thinking were
unfamiliar. News of the rest of the world was hard to get and then
had little meaning for those who lived the local life. Country folk
surely knew there was another world out there somewhere, but
little understood it and were affected by it only indirectly. The
powerful anti-urban traditions in early American thought and poli
tics made the immigrant city dweller a suspicious character whose
crude ways marked him as un-Christian (which he sometimes was)
and certainly un-American. The more sophisticated urban upper
classes-merchants, landowners, and professional men-were sim
ilarly suspect and hence rejected. In contrast, the small-town
merchant and the farmer who lived closer to nature were the
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 The Post-City Age

genuine Americans of pure heart who lived the simple, natural

life.3 Because the contrasts between the rural and the urban ways
of-life were indeed sharp, antagonisms were real, and the differ
ences became institutionalized in the conduct of politics. America
was marked by a diversity of regional and class cultures whose
followers interacted infrequently, if ever.
By now this is nearly gone. The vaudeville hick-town and hay
seed characters have left the scene with the vaudeville act. Today's
urbane farmer watches television documentaries, reads the national
news magazines, and manages his acres from an office (maybe
located in a downtown office building), as his hired hands ride
their tractors while listening to the current world news broadcast
from a transistor. Farming has long since ceased to be a handicraft
art; it is among the most highly technologized industries and is
tightly integrated into the international industrial complex.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first
third of the twentieth, the traditional territorial conception that
distinguished urbanites and ruralites was probably valid: The
typical rural folk lived outside the cities, and the typical urbanites
lived inside. By now this pattern is nearly reversed. Urbanites no
longer reside exclusively in metropolitan settlements, nor do rural
ites live exclusively in the hinterlands. Increasingly, those who are
least integrated into modern society-those who exhibit most of
the attributes of rural folk-are concentrating within the highest
density portions of the large metropolitan centers. This profoundly
important development is only now coming to our consciousness,
yet it points up one of the major policy issues of the next decades.

The Participants in the High-Scale Society

Cultural diffusion is integrating immigrants, city residents, and
hinterland peoples into a national urban society, but it has not
touched all Americans evenly. At one extreme are the intellectual
and business elites, whose habitat is the planet; at the other are
the lower-class residents of city and farm who live in spatially and
cognitively constrained worlds. Most of the rest of us, who comprise
the large middle class, lie somewhere in-between, but in some
facets of our lives we all seem to be moving from our ancestral
localism toward the unbounded realms of the cosmopolites.
High educational attainments and highly specialized occupa
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DADALUS

tions mark the new cosmopolites. As frequent patrons of the airlines

and the long-distance telephone lines, they are intimately involved
in the communications networks that tie them to their spatially dis
persed associates. They contribute to and consume the specialized
journals of science, government, and industry, thus maintaining
contact with information resources of relevance to their activities,
whatever the geographic sources or their own locations. Even
though some may be employed by corporations primarily engaged in
manufacturing physical products, these men trade in information
and ideas. They are the producers of the information and ideas that
fuel the engines of societal development. For those who are tuned
into the international communications circuits, cities have utility
precisely because they are rich in information. The way such men
use the city reveals its essential character most clearly, for to them
the city is essentially a massive communications switchboard
through which human interaction takes place.4
Indeed, cities exist only because spatial agglomeration permits
reduced costs of interaction. Men originally elected to locate in
high-density settlements precisely because space was so costly to
overcome. It is still cheaper to interact with persons who are near
by, and so men continue to locate in such settlements.5 Because
there are concentrations of associates in city places, the new cos
mopolites establish their offices there and then move about from
city to city conducting their affairs. The biggest settlements attract
the most long-distance telephone and airline traffic and have under
gone the most dramatic growth during this era of city-building.
The recent expansion of Washington, D. C. is the most spectao
ular evidence of the changing character of metropolitan develop
ment. Unlike the older settlements whose growth was generated
by expanding manufacturing activities during the nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries, Washington produces almost no goods
whatsoever. Its primary products are information and intelligence,
and its fantastic growth is a direct measure of the predominant
roles that information and the national government have come to
play in contemporary society.
This terribly important change has been subtly evolving for a
long time, so gradually that it seems to have gone unnoticed. The
preindustrial towns that served their adjacent farming hinterlands
were essentially alike. Each supplied a standardized array of goods
and services to its neighboring market area. The industrial cities
that grew after the Civil War and during the early decades of this

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 The Post-City Age
century were oriented to serving larger markets with the manu
facturing products they were created to produce. As their market
areas widened, as product specialization increased, and as the
information content of goods expanded, establishments located in
individual cities became integrated into the spatially extensive
economies. By now, the large metropolitan centers that used to be
primarily goods-producing loci have become interchange junctions
within the international communications networks. Only in the lim
ited geographical, physical sense is any modern metropolis a dis
crete, unitary, identifiable phenomenon. At most, it is a localized
node within the integrating international networks, finding its sig
nificant identity as contributor to the workings of that larger sys
tem. As a result, the new cosmopolites belong to none of the
world's metropolitan areas, although they use them. They be
long, rather, to the national and international communities that
merely maintain information exchanges at these metropolitan
junctions.
Their capacity to interact intimately with others who are spa
tially removed depends, of course, upon a level of wealth adequate
to cover the dollar costs of long-distance intercourse, as well as
upon the cognitive capacities associated with highly skilled pro
fessional occupations. The intellectual and business elites are able
to maintain continuing and close contact with their associates
throughout the world because they are rich not only in information,
but also in dollar income.
As the costs of long-distance interaction fall in proportion to
the rise in incomes, more and more people are able and willing
to pay the transportation and communication bills. As expense-ac
count privileges are expanded, those costs are being reduced to
zero for ever larger numbers of people. As levels of education
and skill rise, more and more people are being tied into the spa
tially extensive communities that used to engage only a few.
Thus, the glue that once held the spatial settlement together is
now dissolving, and the settlement is dispersing over ever widen
ing terrains. At the same time, the pattern of settlement upon the
continent is also shifting (moving toward long strips along the
coasts, the Gulf, and the Great Lakes). These trends are likely to
be accelerated dramatically by cost-reducing improvements in trans
portation and communications technologies now in the research
and-development stages. (The SST, COMSAT communications, high
speed ground transportation with speeds up to 50 m.p.h., TV and
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DAEDALUS

computer-aided educational systems, no-toll long-distance telephone

service, and real-time access to national computer-based informa
tion systems are likely to be powerful ones.) Technological im
provements in transport and communications reduce the frictions
of space and thereby ease long-distance intercourse. Our compact,
physical city layouts directly mirror the more primitive technologies
in use at the time these cities were built. In a similar way, the
locational pattern of cities upon the continent reflects the tech
nologies available at the time the settlements grew.6 If currently
anticipated technological improvements prove workable, each of
the metropolitan settlements will spread out in low-density patterns
over far more extensive areas than even the most frightened future
mongers have yet predicted. The new settlement-form will little
resemble the nineteenth-century city so firmly fixed in our images
and ideologies. We can also expect that the large junction points
will no longer have the communications advantage they now enjoy,
and smaller settlements will undergo a major spurt of growth in
all sorts of now-isolated places where the natural amenities are
attractive.
Moreover, as ever larger percentages of the nation's youth go to
college and thus enter the national and international cultures, at
tachments to places of residence will decline dramatically. This
prospect, rather than the spatial dispersion of metropolitan areas,
portends the functional demise of the city. The signs are already
patently clear among those groups whose worlds are widest and
least bounded by parochial constraints.
Consider the extreme cosmopolite, if only for purposes of illus
trative cartooning. He might be engaged in scientific research,
news reporting, or international business, professions exhibiting
critical common traits. The astronomer, for example, maintains
instantaneous contact with his colleagues around the world; indeed,
he is a day-to-day collaborator with astronomers in all countries.
His work demands that he share information and that he and his
colleagues monitor stellar events jointly, as the earth's rotation brings
men at different locales into prime-viewing position. Because he is
personally committed to their common enterprise, his social refer
ence group is the society of astronomers. He assigns his loyalties to
the community of astronomers, since their work and welfare matter
most to him.
To be sure, as he plays out other roles-say, as citizen, parent,
laboratory director, or grocery shopper-he is a member of many
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 The Post-City Age

other communities, both interest-based and place-defined ones. But

the striking thing about our astronomer, and the millions of people
like him engaged in other professions, is how little of his attention
and energy he devotes to the concerns of place-defined communi
ties. Surely, as compared to his grandfather, whose life was largely
bound up in the affairs of his locality, the astronomer, playwright,
newsman, steel broker, or wheat dealer lives in a life-space that is
not defined by territory and deals with problems that are not local
in nature. For him, the city is but a convenient setting for the con
duct of his professional work; it is not the basis for the social com
munities that he cares most about.
Indeed, we may not be far from the time when the vernacular
meaning of "community" will be archaic and disappear from com
mon usage. It has already lost much of its traditional meaning for
a great many of those on the leading edge of the society. If it is
retained, it may be restricted to the provisions of children and of
those adults who have not gained access to modem society.
The demise of the city is associated with far more subtle and
powerful changes than the expansion of market areas for firms and
the collaboration among scientists in distant nations. Behind these
developments lies the internationalization of society generated by
the knowledge explosion.
By its very nature, knowledge is specific to neither cities nor
nations. An overriding, largely unanticipated consequence of sci
ence is its internationalizing effect-its introduction of common
understandings, common libraries of information, common bases
for valuation and validation, and, indeed, a common culture for
men located in all parts of the world. The same consequences
emanate from developments in technology, commerce, the arts,
theater, literature, and virtually all areas of creative endeavor. Save
for those, like Lyzenko, who hold to certain specialized epistemol
ogies or ideologies, new discoveries and inventions are readily ac
cepted, irrespective of their geographic origins. By now there is
a large class of persons around the world who share in the world
culture, while simultaneously participating in the idiosyncratic
local cultures special to their regions of residence. Their range of
opportunity is far larger and far more diverse than the most power
ful and wealthy man of past eras could have imagined.
Knowledge is also cumulative; its store can only get larger, and
the effects it generates are one-directional. We now know that the
recent expansion of knowledge has triggered a rapid explosion of
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DADALUS

life-space-both geographically and cognitively. We can expect that

explosion to continue, further bursting the barriers of geography
and ignorance for larger proportions of the population. The coun
terpart of expanding life-space has been the contracting role of
the cities and the nations as the organizing frameworks of societies.
This is, of course, a revolutionary development. As Kenneth Bould
ing has synoptically put it, it portends the end of "civilization" as
the culture of the civitas.7 To be sure, the end of civilization has
been in sight for a long time; through a telling etymological trick
we have become accustomed to speaking of national citizenship,
and we even describe some people as "world citizens." This usage
is far more prophetic than we had realized.
Although the intellectual and business elites are undoubtedly
still a minority among us, the vast middle class is rapidly adopting
their styles and their capabilities, and lower-class persons are
aspiring to them. About 40 per cent of American youth are now
going to college, and the proportion will soon be over half. (In
California it is now about 80 per cent.) Television has already
supplied a window to a seamless world, a world that the present
generation is actively exploring firsthand. If we ever succeed in
using television creatively, it could become a more powerful edu
cational force than the public schools have been-extending the
classroom to every house and the spectrum of accessible knowledge
far beyond the present bounds. Americans may already be consum
ing more books per capita, more magazines per capita, more music,
more lectures, and more art than any population in the world
certainly far more than any peoples in the past. They are traveling
widely for recreational and educational purposes; and in the course
of their travels, they are absorbing information, ideas, and attitudes,
even as they are seeding their own along their paths.
The nationals of other countries are, of course, engaged in the
same set of activities. Western Europeans may be the next most
mobile people in the world, although the Japanese probably out
pace even them in the rate at which they have been scouting the
planet, absorbing and then exploiting the world's knowledge. The
signs of this internationalization are clear: the rise of the inter
national business firm, the near-instantaneous diffusion of fashion
in dress and the arts, the spectacular spread of the hippie culture,
the new international architecture, the Europeans' sense of per
sonal loss at the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther
King, and Robert F. Kennedy, the acceptance of the common market

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 The Post-City Age
idea, and the new-found racial pride among mutually supportive
colored peoples.
We have little reason to doubt that the accumulation and dis
persion of knowledge will continue, bringing further dissolution of
local differences. The economy is expanding in precisely those
service industries that demand high educational attainment and
sophistication: education, research and development, health, and
the information services. Concomitantly, the traditional loci of
growth that marked the industrial stage of national development
are already on the decline. During the past twenty years, there has
been almost no expansion in manufacturing employment in the
U.S.; we may soon be seeing an actual decline, despite the fan
tastic expansion of output. Unskilled jobs are fast disappearing, and
physically exhausting work may before long be completely con
signed to machines.
The processes have been mutually reinforcing. The service oc
cupations that require high skill have been able to expand because
a highly educated labor force has been developing. In turn, these
occupations, particularly those within the knowledge industries,
have been reproducing their own next-generations of better trained
persons and their own next-generations of new knowledge. Thus,
we have been riding a rising spiral that is turning the economy
upside down, converting it from one in which workers produce
physical products to one in which they produce services. Many of
the new services are concerned with the management of informa
tion, and the information content of most of the new physical
products is rising rapidly. (Compare, for example, the information
content of a transistor radio with that of a trainload of coal.) In the
process, the emphasis on knowledge and information has been
increasing dramatically. Already the number of Americans work
ing full time as teachers is over two million. We may now be fast
approaching the day, long heralded by the ancient Greek philos
ophers, when our major occupation will be learning for its own sake.

The Bypassed Preindustri Locals

As the scale of the society has been rising, carrying the bulk
of the national population into the dimly seen post-industrial era, a
large segment of the population is being left further and further
behind. A short time ago, many of these people were living in
rural areas, a high proportion in the southern and Appalachian
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DADALUS

states; the migration to the cities during the past twenty-five years
has by now relocated nearly all of them. Today, they are city
dwellers, residing in the most dense sections of the metropolitan
areas, but still living in the folk cultures their grandparents knew.
Here in the Harlems and South Sides of the nation are some of the
last viable remnants of preindustrial societies, where village styles
are most nearly intact. Here the turf is the city block, and teenage
gangs wage war in its defense. Here in the slum blocks of the
central cities may be the only pure place-based social neighbor
hoods we have left.
American cities have always been magnets for preindustrial
migrants searching for access into contemporary society. Like
those who preceded them from Europe, the recent migrants are
being both pushed by the hardships of their present life and pulled
by the promise of opportunities that the city has traditionally held
out. And yet the recent migrations occur in a very different setting.
Those who now come must bridge a cultural gap far wider than
the one their predecessors faced, one that is widening at an ex
ponential rate.
Despite the suffering that accompanied nineteenth-century mi
gration and acculturation, the stage was well set; the paths to social
mobility were short and easily traversed. The new manufacturing
industries called for large numbers of workers who could easily
be trained to perform the standardized tasks. In turn, jobs made for
income security that provided relief from the hazards of everyday
life, thus fostering a non-fatalistic world-view through which future
opportunities could be seen. The physical structure of the city per
mitted the various ethnic and national groups to settle in colonies
within the cities. The transplanted old-world life styles of the
ethnic ghettos eased the transition for the adult newcomers, while
their children gradually introduced them to the new urban ways.
The democratic institutions and the legal rules for acquiring
citizenship and voting rights permitted the newcomers to control
and then to use local governments instrumentally in accelerating
their own development. For some, politics and government pro
vided an important route to social mobility.
Free public schools served as an open doorway through which
immigrants' children found access to semiskilled and skilled occupa
tions and thus to higher social status than their parents enjoyed.
The public schools, the free public colleges, the free libraries, the
availability of free or cheap medical services, and the public life of
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 The Post-City Age
the street became the major acculturating media. By living the city
based life, the second- and third-generation Americans acquired the
social and cognitive skills and the internal psychic competencies
that modern urbanism demands. In the school, on the street, and
frequently in illicit enterprises, the immigrants' children learned to
use the money and credit economy, to defer gratification, to antici
pate future problems and opportunities, to cope with crises, and to
deal with multiple options. The city was, in effect, a school where
peasant migrants learned with incredible speed to be urbanized
Americans. Within single generations, groups that had followed the
four-hundred-year-old peasant styles of life and thought were cata
pulted into a society of a vastly different kind and scale. Most of
them landed on their feet; some of them shot to the forefront of
the society and then led it on to its next stages of development.
The setting for the massive European and Asian migrations to
the city was fortuitous. They arrived just when the national econ
omy was embarking upon unprecedented industrial development,
and they came into a social system constrained by few immovable
barriers of social class. In a time when small capitalization was
sufficient, some succeeded in establishing small, family-based busi
nesses; in the milieu of a rapidly expanding economy, some of
these soon became big businesses. Others entered the professions,
government, and the large corporations where they established
themselves as leaders among the intellectual elites.
The way out of the ghetto was fast and easy for a few groups
of immigrants. For many Eastern European Jews, the departure
from the immigrant ghetto areas in the slums occurred very quickly.
Many of the Jews were culturally urbanized when they came here-,
in Europe the legal prohibition against their owning land kept
them in towns where many were small merchants or traders. The
relatively unstructured and open-ended character of their religious
doctrines led them as a group to place high value on scholarship
and individual achievement, to adopt a typically critical intellectual
attitude, and to be concerned with the consequences of future
events. These characteristics, coupled with a solidly cohesive fam
ily structure, served them well when they reached the United States.
The Chinese and Japanese, with their cohesive, patriarchal family
structure and high cultural value on intellectual achievement, were
also among the most upwardly mobile groups.
In contrast, mobility has come slower to the Irish, southern
Italian, and Polish immigrants, whose peasant heritage had few of

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DA4DALUS

these urbanizing attributes. Only within the past generation or two

have their children been going to college in large numbers, leaving
the ethnic ghetto and the working-class world-view behind them.
The rigidity of traditional practices and beliefs and the emphasis
on discipline and conformity exerted by the Catholic Church had
previously discouraged exploration of wider conceptual worlds than
those of the ethnic neighborhoods.
Whatever innate and cultural attributes may have sped social
mobility for some of the early migrants to America's cities, their
success was just as surely a consequence of the nation's stage of
development at the time they arrived. Uneducated migrants to
cities were not very far behind those who had arrived long before
them. Those of quick mind could master the tasks required by the
new factories speedily and then move beyond into the managerial
and professional roles.

The Central Policy Issue

A far more difficult setting faces the migrants to the cities today.
The explosive progress in the arts, sciences, and technologies has
triggered an unprecedented rise in the scale of the national society,
one marked by ever finer division of labor, calling for ever higher
levels of education and training; by the shift from extractive and
manufacturing industries to service industries that require long
periods of preparation; by increasingly complex organization of
the economy and polity; and by the expansion of the spatial and
cognitive fields within which human interaction and economic
transaction take place. Specialization, interdependence, and inte
gration are the definitive traits of today's urbanism. This new scale
of complexity distinguishes modem urbanism from earlier forms
and is setting the policy agenda that the nation must now address.
Although it is still easy to migrate to the cities, the demands
of large-scale society are making it more and more difficult for
newcomers to gain entry into the new urban society. Those city
dwellers who are presently least integrated into modem society are
facing a series of hurdles far higher than the ones the earlier mi
grants found. The Appalachians, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexi
can Americans now concentrated within the central ghettos of
metropolitan areas are not just the most recent wave of newcomers
to those districts, as some scholars have suggested. The others were
able to pass through, but today's residents could fail to make it.
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 The Post-City Age

The editors of The Economist saw the situation more clearly

from London than did the American commentators who wrote in
the days right after the Watts riot. In a brilliant editorial, they ob
served that Los Angeles symbolizes the frontier of modern society,
with the technologically most advanced industries, the large num
bers of research-and-development establishments, high-quality pub
lic services, and the most widespread distribution of the affluent,
modern style of life. With no surprise that the first major riot
should occur in Southern California, rather than Chicago or New
York, they perceptively interpreted the outcry as a measure of the
perceived gap between two juxtaposed populations at widely dif
ferent stages of development. The Watts rioters were not striking
out at the city. After all, the quality of the physical environment in
south-central Los Angeles is far superior to that in the metropolitan
ghettos of the East. These people were striking out at their plight
at the widening social distance that separates them from their
visible neighbors and at the widening differentials in opportunity.
ITe immediate objects of hostility in Watts and in the subsequent
riots were whitey's policemen and the physical city. The police
and the city were, however, merely convenient symbols of the
rioters' frustrating sense of powerlessness and of the many handi
caps keeping them from bridging the social gap. They were surely
not the real objects of their anger.
By now the message of Watts, Newark, Memphis, and the other
violent outcries is beginning to be heard in critical circles, reinforc
ing the earlier underlying theme of the civil rights movement. Too
often the meanings are interpreted simplistically-as racial con
flicts between blacks and whites, as rebellion against discriminatory
practices, or as protests against the filth and depravity of the slum.
The rioters are saying all these things-and more. Their docket
of indictments is long and righteous; their dramatic moral censure
of American society has by now provoked a crisis of conscience
forcing the nation to confront the plight it had been silently ignor
ing for so long. The nation's response with the new civil rights
legislation, new housing programs, and new policing practices is
admirable and right; yet none of these is enough. The problems
of the poor Negro Americans are not unique to them in America.
To be sure, race has been an important exacerbating factor in re
tarding their progress, but preindustrial status is not a distinctive
condition of Negroes. Large Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and
domestic Caucasian populations are living in quite similar status,
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D&DALUS

and we should not be surprised when they, too, stage revolts like
those of the past three years. If disparities in stages of development
are behind the current urbanization crisis, that crisis is far more
deep-seated and touches far more people than the current debates
recognize. It would then require a much more encompassing
effort, one aimed at accelerating the urbanization of all groups
whose social mobility has been retarded.

Toward an Urbanization Policy

As the scale of the society has risen, our governmental system
has been slowly adapting to it. Almost without deliberate inten
tion, the federal system has been modified to conform to the rise
of the nation-state as successor to the city-state. Without an explicit
policy decision, the national government has assumed responsibility
for confronting the urbanization problems and opportunities, albeit
often in the language of localism and home-rule.
The shift in the locus of policy-making in education clearly
mirrors this important change. Education has traditionally been one
of the most jealously guarded provinces of local governments.
People care about their children's educational opportunities and
have willingly supported public education through local taxation
that permitted local control. And yet when accounted within a
larger-system framework, the investment strategies have not always
proved prudent. Unlike investments in roads, investments in
people are easily lost because, unlike roads, people are movable.
Thus, the northern and eastern cities become the beneficiaries of
the poor schooling accorded Negro children in the southern states.
Similarly they may attract graduates of southern colleges with few
direct returns to the southern culture and economy.
Population mobility has raised a difficult dilemma for govern
ments that were initially structured to serve geographically stable
peoples. Our adaptive response has been to redistribute revenues
and expenditures among geographic regions. Because only the least
territorially-bounded of our governments can perform the redis
tributive function, we have been creating new roles for the federal
government and a new set of functional relationships among our
various public governments.8
At the same time we have been building a vast network of
nonpublic organizations having a governmental character and
self-assigned responsibilities. Each is organized upon an interest
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 The Post-City Age

base, rather than a territorial one. Thus, trade associations effec

tively exert governmental constraints upon their corporation mem
bers, and professional associations govern the-conduct of physicians,
engineers, lawyers, and the rest. Trade unions, churches, and rec
reational groups have been similarly structured to serve the special
interests of their members. All these groups are governments in
the essential meanings of that term; they are regulative agencies
with power to exert sanctions and enforce control. Increasingly,
they have come to have nationwide realms for they have arisen as
manifestations of a society rapidly moving into the post-industrial,
post-city stage of its development. Combined with the thousands of
"public governments," they contribute to a complex network of
policy and decision centers.
With so complex a governing apparatus in this country, it is
not possible to formulate a unitary set of policies for national de
velopment or a unitary mutually reinforcing set of programs. Nor is
it possible to erect a unitary set of controls guided from a central
command post. Goals for the nation are surely as pluralistic and
competitive as the diverse groups that might formulate them. And
yet there may be a national consensus that would permit us to
pursue some common objectives in a directed and deliberate fash
ion. The complexity of contemporary society leaves no group in
dependent of the others, and the welfare of any one group is now
unavoidably bound up with the welfare of the others.
The United States has not until recently sensed the need for a
national strategy that would accelerate economic and human de
velopment, for we have prospered well without one. Moreover, such
a development policy has seemed to require far more centralization
of authority and control than is tolerable or possible in this nation.
Nevertheless, although the nation has prospered, all its members
have not. If the left-behinds are to find access to modern society,
we are going to have to launch as concerted a programmatic effort
as the Latin American attempts to accelerate the social mobility of
their marginalidad. We now have a considerable intellectual ca
pability for developmental planning that we have so far been ex
porting. By exploiting those capabilities, while operating within
the framework of our contemporary pluralistic governmental sys
tem, we should be able to increase the odds that the transition to
the post-industrial age can be eased. If we can but use our available
intelligence, we should be able to accelerate the social mobility of
those who might otherwise never catch up.
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DADALUS

-The city, can no longer serve as the central organizing idea

behind such a planning effort. The next stage of urbanization plan
ning will be guided by the concept of selective development-by
the formulation of tactical programs that conform to strategic plans
aimed at bringing the left-behind groups into contemporary urban
society.
Some of the programmatic imperatives can be read in the very
character of post-industrialism and suggest investment strategies
for that human-development effort. The nation is surely rich enough
to raise all incomes above the poverty line, and the means for doing
so are now being invented at a rising rate. Family allowances and
guaranteed minimum incomes appear to be economically feasible.
New jobs are needed in large volumes, particularly for those
who are presently the least skilled. The need is most likely to be
satisfied in the service occupations, and a wave of social invention
under way suggests possibilities for creating new subprofessional
careers that carry dignity and status-careers that might serve the
recent migrants to cities as the earlier industrial jobs served the
earlier arrivals. The poor quality of housing need no longer be the
norm for the metropolitan centers. Again some imaginative new
schemes are being devised that would merge public and private
enterprises in mutually profitable and potentially productive house
building ventures-inside the cities and elsewhere. There is no im
perative of the emerging new society so demanding as high-quality
educational services, from prekindergarten to postdoctoral levels.
Although the nation is now spending heavily in this sector of the
economy, large expansion is needed. In parallel, the spectrum of
public recreational services-ranging from parks and other outdoor
facilities to high-brow museums and low-brow pool halls-are be
coming near-necessary attributes of the new style of life. Medical
and health services have never been adequate to the standards of
health to which we have aspired, so a massive new effort is being
aimed at planned improvement of people's physical and mental
well-being, whether they live in cities or not.
The designs for such a strategy for national development can
never be fitted into coherent and mutually reinforcing wholes. The
pluralistic structure of American society would never permit that.
Moreover, the dangers are likely to exceed the advantages, and it
is wholly unlikely that we would ever know enough even to make
such an attempt anyway. Some general policy guides, however,
are both economically possible and politically feasible.

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 The Post-City Age
In this issue of Dxdals, a group of colleagues sets forth a series
of targets for the nation's development. It is our hope to encourage
a debate that, in turn, might lead to a national consensus on the
accomplishments we desire. Two hundred years after we declared
our capacity to achieve freedom for all Americans, we have the
capability of making that freedom real and operational. The nation
has developed through several historic stages during that brief
period. We passed through the vestiges of the agrarian-preindustrial
era, led the world through the industrial age of cities, and are now
emerging into a still uncharted era when few men will pursue
the manual occupations and most will devote their energies to serv
ing others and to learning. The next generation of middle-class
Americans is destined to enjoy the unprecedently rich life that the
post-industrial, national urban society will offer. Our central
domestic task now is deliberately to invent ways of extending those
opportunities to those groups that future history threatens to exclude.

REFERENcFs

1. The phrase is Don Martindale's; it closes his "Introduction" to Max Weber's

The City (New York, 1962), p. 67. The theme is being sounded in many
quarters nowadays. See especially, Scott Greer, The Emerging City (New
York, 1962); Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century
(New York, 1965); York Willburn, The Withering Away of the City
(Tuscaloosa, 1964); and Janet Abu-Lhughod, "The City Is Dead-Long
Live the City" (Center for Planning and Development Research, University
of California, Berkeley, 1966, mimeo.).
2. John Friedman presents a crisp clarification of the distinction in "Two
Concepts of Urbanization," Urban Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4 (June,
1966), pp. 78-84.
3. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955) and Anti
Intellectualism in America (New York, 1963). Morton and Lucia White,
The Intellectuals Against the City (Cambridge, 1964).

4. Richard L. Meier, A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (Cam

bridge, 1962).
5. I have elaborated this thesis in "Order in Diversity: Community Without
Propinquity," in Lowdon Wingo, Jr. (ed.), Cities and Space (Baltimore,
1963), pp. 23-54.
6. For example, the first-generation jet airplanes, like the first railroads, ac
celerated the growth of the largest settlements. The big jets could land at
only those airports with long runways and specialized facilities. The second

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DADALUS

and third-generation jets are fast equalizing accessibility among settlements,

recapitulating the accessibility effects of the railroads and then the high
ways.
7. Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century.

& See Morton Grodzin's classic essay "The Federal System," in Goals for
Americans: The Report of the President's Commission on National Goals
(Englewood Cliffs, 1960), pp. 265-84.

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